Besides Zurich and Beyond Europe: Decentering Euro-Centrism in Tender Is the Night

Abstract

Abstract:While the cosmopolitan gestures and racial markers in Tender Is the Night have generated thought-provoking readings in Fitzgerald scholarship, the novel's profound exploration of Eurocentrism has been overlooked. This article considers the novel within the frameworks of spatial theory and geo-criticism to uncover its interrogation of Eurocentrism. It argues that Fitzgerald's Europe is part of a relational geography activated by the novel's global network of geographical locales and that it is a made space. Set mainly in Europe, the novel insistently presents a global geography that rests upon the economic transactions that enable the characters' experience and crafting of Europe. It is not some essence of Europe, its historical heritage or cultural hegemony that warrants its position as central, but its function as an amorphous space that has become malleable through economic consumption. The places described are almost exclusively European, but minor characters, slips, and transformations trouble Europe's explicit centrality in the novel. Europe's places lose their singularity with Hollywood replicas superimposed onto existing monuments, but foreign currency is steadily directed at Europe, which means that it retains its status as a central locus. While the novel thus challenges the notion of Europe as center, it nonetheless reiterates much of the Eurocentric argument.