Six years after the publication of The Custom of the Country, Edith Wharton wrote in her First World War propagandist tract French Ways and Their Meaning: ‘The French woman is distinctly more grown up than her American sister; and she is so because she plays a much larger and more interesting part in men's lives’. She also explains that France's social cohesion, expressed in rich cultural values and a stable national character, stems from something that Puritan America feared: ‘frank and free social relations between men and women’. Because French Ways was aimed at two specific contemporary readerships – primarily US troops arriving to serve on the Western Front who would be keen for tips in cultural comportment from a distinguished expatriate author, as well as a more discrete audience of French readers eager to see how Wharton would depict them – the text both exaggerates French national traits and attempts to be fair in its overview. Thus, she acknowledges that ‘The French are not generous, and they are not trustful’ and are ‘indifferent to the rights of others’ they are also ‘enslaved by social conventions’ – features readily discernible in the de Chelles family in The Custom of the Country. The thrust of Wharton's analysis in French Ways, however, rests on comparisons between French and American gender relations; and they provide insights that can be applied to the novel.

After the publication of The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald's landmark text of American literary modernism, in April 1925, the reading public would wait nine years for the appearance of the writer's next novel, Tender Is the Night, published on 12 April 1934.

Such a laboured birth of his fourth novel had never been the writer's original intention. In May 1925, only two weeks after the issue of Gatsby, Fitzgerald had confidently outlined ambitious (if vague) plans for the new work to his editor at Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins: ‘The happiest thought I have is of my new novel – it is something really NEW in form, idea, structure – the model for the age that Joyce and Stien [sic] are searching for, that Conrad didn't find’ (Kuehl and Bryer 104). In December of that year, Fitzgerald assured Perkins: ‘My novel should be finished next fall’ (Kuehl and Bryer 127). In April 1926, the writer instructed his literary agent: ‘The novel is about one fourth done and will be delivered for possible serialization about January 1st. It will be about 75,000 words long, divided into 12 chapters, concerning tho this is absolutely confidential such a case as that girl who shot her mother on the Pacific coast last year. In other words, like Gatsby it is highly sensational’ (Life in Letters 140–41).

Increasingly, however, Fitzgerald's letters were peppered with anxious references to the slow progress of the ‘new’ novel and with optimistic estimates of the time required to complete future sections of the work.

Whatever its merits, Tender Is the Night is considered to be a novel that has never quite made the grade as a genuine 1930s' text. Whether dismissed as a tedious, fag-end Jazz Age tale or hailed as a beautifully written retrospective, the implication lingers that the novel is not truly contemporary, but essentially a belated, honorary 1920s' piece. The small matter of the novel's publication date – when not ignored – is a fact commonly regarded as accidental, particularly amidst the dazzle of biographical approaches to Fitzgerald's oeuvre. Accounts of a narrative begun in earnest in the mid-twenties but only finished nine years later are cited to add credence to the notion that Tender in its existing form would have been a published twenties' text had its completion not been thwarted by bouts of family illness, dissipation, alcoholism and financial strife. While this is a myth (the seventeen manuscript drafts resulted in a very different novel from that conceived in 1925), it has threatened to become overpowering, helping to fuel an assumption that, whatever its virtues, this 1934 work can be slotted into American literary chronology as a novel that essentially draws Fitzgerald's account of the twenties to a close.

My contention in this essay is that the role of psychiatry in Tender Is the Night is best understood as a critique of the profession as it evolved in the early twentieth century into an authoritative scientific method for treating and explaining psychic and social fragmentation. I hope to show that especially in the representation of Doctor Richard Diver a sometimes ambiguous but generally critical stance towards psychiatry's influence on Western civilization is presented by Fitzgerald, tempered by sympathy for Diver in his misguided faith in the profession's promise to control life's contingencies. Moreover, I want to argue – through cultural context, biographical evidence, and textual analysis – in favour of Malcolm Bradbury's more general view of the novel as a ‘great psycho-historical portrait of the age’, which he associates with earlier efforts by Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain (1925) and Ford Madox Ford in The Good Soldier (1915) (356). This reading differs from the early feminist approach of Judith Fetterley and the character study by Jeffrey Berman, mainly in the degree to which social and historical forces are shown to infuse the novel and add layered meanings to Fitzgerald's delineation of medical practice and its influence.

In an anonymous review of Tender published a year after the novel, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease declared that ‘[for] the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst the book is of special value as a probing story of some of the major dynamic interlockings in marriage […] conditioned by a set of economic and psychobiological situations’ (Bruccoli and Bryer 390–91). The ‘special value’ for the medical practitioner in better understanding the workings of cause and effect, of stress and disorder in the marriage of Dick and Nicole Diver went beyond therapeutic exegesis and training exemplar; for the article's confident explication of the novel, its insular language, and its underlying assumptions regarding the value of psychiatry itself are revealing about the status of the profession in the United States by the mid-1930s. The very existence of such a journal and the presence of a book review about a novel within it, just 26 years after Freud's only visit to the United States, speaks for the rapid institutionalization of psychiatry within American medical practice and the widespread public acceptance of Freudian psychotherapy in particular.