"Non-Combatant's Shell-Shock": Trauma and Gender in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night

This paper examines how the era between the world wars also produced conditions for a traumatization of gender. Judith Butler's concept of performative gender and Cathy Caruth's work on trauma provide the concepts needed to interrogate the psychological connections between gender and trauma. This connection also manifests itself physically, written on the body itself through illness or decline; the psychological becomes physical, negating any notion of a mind-body split. These relationships between gender and trauma, trauma and performative gender, and trauma and the body, are teased out through an examination of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night, Fitzgerald's most conspicuously modernist work. Frequently read as a parable of moral decline, Tender Is the Night shows how trauma disrupts gender performance and arises from it, exposing the artifice of gender in the postwar world.