GENDER AND AGENCY IN TENDER IS THE NIGHT, SAVE ME THE WALTZ, AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN By BECKY ANN WAGENBLAST A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of English AUGUST 2015 © Copyright by BECKY ANN WAGENBLAST, 2015 All Rights Reserved © Copyright by BECKY ANN WAGENBLAST, 2015 All Rights Reserved To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of BECKY ANN WAGENBLAST find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Donna M. Campbell, Ph.D., Chair ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Debbie Lee, Ph.D. ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Donna Potts, Ph.D. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I deeply appreciate the guidance, support, and insight of my Chair, Dr. Donna Campbell. I will always be very grateful for the help she has given to me over the years. To Dr. Debbie Lee and Dr. Donna Potts, I have immense gratitude as well. Dr. Alexander Hammond and Jana Argersinger are also sincerely thanked for their encouragement, lessons, and insights over the course of my graduate years. The friendship of Dr. Shelly Richardson and Leslie Sena made my time at graduate school one of warmth and fun that I will always remember fondly. Thank you, dear friends. My family has made my education possible and supported me throughout. To them, I am deeply thankful. My mother, Vicki, has been a wellspring of encouragement. Many thanks to David, Sara, Amy, Ray, Jocelyn, Gretchen, Gabrielle, Kort, Genevieve, Paul, Bardie, Daisy, and Lexi as well. My late father, Steve, would have been proud of me, I know. My curiosity to learn, my memory, and sense of humor, I owe to my grandmother, Lee Ellen McLeod Wagenblast. In another time, she would have been the first woman in the family to earn a doctorate. And of course, I could never have done it without Dot and Margot, my own little darlings. iii GENDER AND AGENCY IN TENDER IS THE NIGHT, SAVE ME THE WALTZ, AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN Abstract by Becky Ann Wagenblast, Ph.D. Washington State University August 2015 Chair: Donna M. Campbell This dissertation centers its readings of Tender Is the Night, Save Me the Waltz, and The Garden of Eden through the women protagonists’ voices, a radical critical shift. By considering the evolutionary attempts of Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine, regardless of their ultimate level of success, their autonomy as individuals capable and worthy of development themselves is reified. Examining their use of language, emotions, and actions reasserts their voices as creators of their own narratives, recentering the texts as important explorations of Modern women through their constructions of selfhood on the Riviera. This important work of conceptualizing the self as other, outside the normative behaviors and conditions expected of American women of the time, is figured in these stories (as in American culture at large) as mentally unstable or diseased in some way; the characters make poor decisions and commit regrettable actions; they destroy as much as they create. But by courageously giving voice to their own sense of selves in a world which prizes muteness in its women, their attempts at creation and agency are continually inspiring nonetheless. iv Chapter One examines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night and the ways in which Nicole is able to move from the oppression of dehumanizing silence to a powerful and self- affirming fluency of language and selfhood. Chapter Two looks as Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz and Alabama’s struggles toward, and, sadly, denials of, individualization and agency. Chapter Three investigates how Catherine, the transitioning protagonist of Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden, is both a subversive factor against authority and is ultimately scripted as doomed because of it. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS………………………………………………………………………iii ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………………iv-v INTRODUCTION………..………………………….……………………………………………1 CHAPTERS 1. The Reclamation of Agency: Rereading Tender Is the Night as Nicole’s Assertion of Self ..................................................................................................................9 2. Alabama’s “Equivocal Universe” in Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz .....................45 3. Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: Incantations of Betrayal ...............................78 WORKS CITED………………….……………………………………………………………121 vi Dedication To Mother vii INTRODUCTION The Riviera of the mid-1920s, poised at the moment before its refashioning into a summer playground for the stylish elite, was for a short time home to three of the defining members of the Lost Generation, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. In later years, all three would turn the light of the sun-drenched Rivieran sky onto this personally and culturally significant time, exploring issues of change, language, and agency in their works. Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Zelda’s Save Me the Waltz, and Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden all pivot around young and stylish couples seeking to create homes, relationships, and art here on the coast’s liminal space. How the wives in these stories attempt to change, both themselves and their interactions with the world, frame important issues of gender, language, and selfhood. The authors, young expatriates seeking artistic inspiration and cultural freedom from puritanical American restraints in post-Great War France, start from similar premises in these novels–not entirely surprising, given their (somewhat contentious) friendships and shared autobiographical histories–but their novels, and the outcomes for their (at times, anti-hero) heroines, play out in important and differing ways. The Edenic space of the Riviera witnesses the fall, and the hope of resurrection, of the novel’s women protagonists–Nicole Diver in Tender Is the Night, Alabama Knight in Save Me the Waltz, and Catherine Bourne in The Garden of Eden. They use the garden space of the Riviera to create for themselves, against the patriarchally inscribed boundaries they are suppressed by in colder, northern climates. By doing so, they threaten the inherent dominance of white, heterosexual, American men and their authority as creators of their lives’ narratives. Here in the warm, nurturing liminal landscape, with its fluid disintegration of hierarchal order as the 1 threshold between the interior of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, the women can be healthy, vibrant, and productive. Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine all attempt to transition from roles of dependency to agency in these garden-like Latin climes. The Riviera provides a place of possibility outside of the frenetic urban environments of New York and Paris, where warmth and acceptance seem as unnatural as their gilded skylines. An even bigger threat to the women’s freedom, the oppressive surveillance of the sanitariums of Switzerland, is left behind as well upon their immersion into the Riviera. The cyclical nature of gardens, the filtering of experiences through their husbands’ ever-watchful eyes, and the suppression of voice are present throughout their lives, but here on the Riviera, the assertion of individual agency and the choices Nicole, Alabama, and Catherine determine and enact create disruption and change. The transformations the women put themselves through, using their outsider status as the key to exploring new versions of themselves, becomes an art in itself. To change becomes a holy act in this place that is neither the land nor the sea. To be near the sea and expatriated is to be doubly alien, and the fear of being misunderstood is a powerful catalyst for production and change. When the old oppressive ways of being return to their lives through patriarchal transgressions, the women undergo traumatic shifts, a splintering of the individual between that which is expected and their own sense of agency. This important work of conceptualizing the self as other, outside the normative behaviors and conditions expected of American women of the time, is figured in these stories (as in American culture at large) as mentally unstable, diseased in some way; they make poor decisions and commit regrettable actions; they destroy as much as they create. But by courageously giving voice to their own sense of selves in a world which prizes muteness in its women, their attempts at creation are inspiring nonetheless. 2 All the women take considerable risks to create both a sense of self and to ground it in Home. As wealthy, white expatriated women, they share the freedom, monetary and time-wise, that class and money give them to explore the boundaries of identity and selfhood. And as wives of successful and artistic men, their lives of travel and exploration afford them insights into various ways of being and how they may wish to incorporate these into versions of themselves. But as expatriated women, they do not have stable homes; instead, they must take their sense of what “home” means with them and attempt to create it anew in transitional spaces. Movement is a key factor in all of their lives. Whether driving, flying, or traveling by train, they move rapidly, shifting between landscapes and necessitating skills of adaptation and integration. For them, home is about relationships forged through a strong sense of self and connection to others. But they do not preside over traditional spaces of domesticity; these are not angels of the house, precariously perching atop their pedestals. Instead, they are active agents of change, attempting to spin outward their evolving senses of inward growth. Using their own personal heritages, for better or worse, to shape their sense of selves, they attempt to create the stability found in home in shifting, temporary spaces. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934) has long been celebrated for its depiction of the brilliant young psychologist, Dick Diver, who sacrifices his life’s work and personal vitality toward healing his schizophrenic wife and patient, Nicole. Even a brief familiarity with the Fitzgeralds' own lives makes evident how greatly Fitzgerald culled their experiences to fashion what is considered his masterpiece.