Rosemary Hoyt and her mother Elsie Speers are the first characters we meet in this story, when they check into the "rose-colored hotel," which matches Rosemary's outlook of the world (9). Rosemary is an actress who is about to turn eighteen years old. The narrator describes Rosemary as someone who walks like a "ballet dancer," all grand yet delicate (10). She comes off as lonely, spoiled, gullible, and vulnerable girl. Rosemary describes her own self as "simple" and has a "mature distrust of the trivial, facile, and the vulgar (20). She sounds like the typical teenager who believes they are better and smarter than they actually are.
Elsie Speers is the only parental and authority figure Rosemary has had. Elsie has been "twice married and twice widowed," but little is said about how Rosemary interacted with Elsie's two husbands (19). Elsie has spent her inheritances from both her husbands on furthering the education and the acting career of Rosemary (14). Elsie takes Rosemary on a trip to Europe because she wants to give Rosemary something to focus on beside herself (20). Rosemary claims Elsie has "no personal bitterness or resentments about life," even though Elsie comes off as bitter woman (19). Through Rosemary's eyes, Elsie is "perfect" (46). Rosemary describes her mother "as her best friend" (19). People seem flawless in Rosemary's eyes. Rosemary discloses that "her mother decides business matters," basically controlling every decision she makes (32). It's like Rosemary can't think or doesn't know how to act without her mother by her side, monitoring her.
Elsie and Rosemary seem like typical American tourists. When they first enter the lobby, Elsie says to Rosemary, "Something tells me we're not going to like this place" (10). At first, they are expecting "high excitement" but find the Riviera to be dull after months of traveling across Europe (10). They feel a "sudden flatness that comes over American travelers," when they get culture shock, with the French culture not catering to the American tourist way of life (20). Of course Elsie is proven both right and wrong in her statement, because Rosemary meets a group of people on the beach that changes her life for both the better and the worse.
Rosemary wants to leave her mother behind and ventures off on her own. Rosemary notices a group of Americans next to her on the beach and "something made them unlike Americans she had known of late" (13). It's interesting that Rosemary had to go all the way to France to find American friends. The group of friends on the beach consists of several married couples and a few single men. She tries to get their attention by sitting next to them, "lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body" (12). It seems like this is the first time Rosemary has been allowed to go somewhere on her own, without her mother close by and it excites her.
Rosemary just wants to fit in and she doesn't fit in with these people at first. When they recognize Rosemary as the star of the movie "Daddy's Girl," they mock her, referring to her as a delicate porcelain doll, telling Rosemary her "skin is important," and she shouldn't burn it (14). Rosemary feeling rejected, returns to her beach chair and pouts. Rosemary declares "she did not like these people," because they treated her like a child (14). She tells her mother on them, saying the people on the beach "weren't nice" (20). She is resistant to join the beach group again because of her first impression of them, but she can't seem to avoid them (23).
Rosemary is looking for a father figure. She admits the only men she has known are "actors and directors", so she finds people outside of Hollywood, fascinating (26). Rosemary is taken with the three men on the beach as being "personable in different ways," like she is overwhelmed to be spending time with men older than she is (26). Each of the people seem to have quirky and eccentric personalities. Tommy Barban is "less civilized, skeptical, scoffing" with formal manners (27). Abe North is "shy" with a "desperate humor" (27). Mary North describes her husband Abe as a "good swimmer, rotten musician" (16). It doesn't take long for Rosemary to change her mind about disliking them. She takes a mental picture of her interaction with the group, wanting to remember swimming with them for the rest of her life, as if this is the best thing that has ever happened to her (28).
Rosemary becomes captivated with the people who are nice to her. She tells her mother "I fell in love on the beach. First with a lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man" (19). She is referring to a man named Dick Diver, who has red hair, and is married with two children. Dick comes off as Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, because he is someone who people are enchanted by for mysterious reasons, when Rosemary first meets him. Rosemary describes Dick as seeming to be "kind and charming" (23). She compares him to Barban and North as being "completely there" and "the evolution of class", even though Barban is secretly in love with Nicole and is in the same predicament as Rosemary (27 & 28). She is really infatuated with someone she has just met and hardly knows. Dick tells Rosemary, she looks like "something blooming," a reference to her name and maturity level (29).
Like Rosemary, Dick's wife, Nicole has a superiority complex. She is twenty four years old, and refers to eighteen year old Rosemary as "a child" several times throughout the story. She has remnants of Daisy Buchanan's personality by explicating strange behavior and seeming fake at first. Nicole comes off as an elitist and critical to Rosemary, telling her, "I have felt there were too many people on the beach this summer, our beach that Dick made out of pebble pile," making us think she feels at liberty as an American to have the French Riviera all to herself (28).
Rosemary is afraid of Nicole. Nicole describes herself as a "mean, hard woman" which only seems to be factual on the outside (28). After hearing this, Rosemary decides she doesn't want Nicole as an enemy, despite the fact Rosemary is in love with her husband (28). Rosemary has the nerve to want to seduce Dick, but still be best friends with his wife Nicole, and have everything remain the way it is. When Rosemary tells her mother, "he's married and I like her too- it's just hopeless," Elsie finally gives her some good advice, telling her that love "ought to make you happy. You ought to laugh" (30). It seems silly that Rosemary is involving herself in the drama of a married couple's problems when she could find other friends who are single.
While looking for a father figure, Rosemary also connects with another guy around her own age. She spends time with an actor named Earl Brady. Earl Brady is described as "quick and strenuous" with a cockney accent (31). Brady keeps eyeing Rosemary, "looking her over completely" to let her know he is into her (32). Rosemary feels they clicked and feels foolish for "surrendering" her emotions, "yet she knew she would forget him like an actor kissed in a picture," because he isn't as special as Dick (32). Brady "can't stand" the Hollywood lifestyle, which is why he lives in Europe and he advises Rosemary, that "nobody wants to be thought of forever for just one picture," giving her advice that she should only focus on her career at her young age (32).
The Divers seem like total opposites, but are similar with their disposition. Dick and Nicole decide to have a party for their friends at their rented villa. Dick "wants to give a really bad party" and invites people who Nicole advised him to not to invite, because she saw Mr. Abrams being cruel to his wife (35). Nicole describes her husband's "characteristic moods" as excitement heading toward melancholy. She gives us the impression that both of them are never satisfied. She is also aware that Dick is charming and charismatic, with "the power of arousing a fascinated and uncritical love," which she doesn't seem threatened by (35). Nicole even comments, "To be included in Dick Diver's world for awhile was a remarkable experience," because he makes people feel they're the most important person in the room, and she is glad to be so close to someone like that (35).
Rosemary feels Dick is the perfect man and the only man worth her attention. When Rosemary arrives at the Diver's party, she is surprised to see Earl Brady. She quickly compares Dick to Brady as Brady "seemed faintly gross, ill bred" (37). No man will ever measure up to Dick in her book. Something about the Divers "made her want to stay near them forever" (39). Rosemary seems to want to be Dick's lover as well as the Diver's adopted daughter. She even asks herself, "How could anyone help it?," being fascinated by them as a couple (39).
Rosemary is unable to make up her own mind about her feelings for Dick. She looks to her mother for "permission to go as far as she could" (40). She wants her mother's approval to go after a married man and Elsie absurdly gives Rosemary the go ahead. When Rosemary and Dick are alone, she tells Dick she is falling for him and he replies, "New friends can often have a better time together than old friends," implying that she doesn't know him very well (40). Dick "refuses the fatherly office," because he realizes she needs a father figure instead of a lover, and rejects Rosemary in spite of him wanting her as well (40).
Rosemary feels that she is better for Dick than Nicole. After Dick rejects Rosemary at the party, she goes back inside sizing Nicole up, trying to find the reasoning as to why Dick would rather be with Nicole than with her. She views Nicole as "one of the most beautiful people she has ever known" and describes her as being "still as still" (42). She senses Nicole is going through the motions and is really unhappy, despite the facade of pretending to be happy.
Rosemary is disappointed that both Dick and Nicole disappear upstairs from the party, leaving her with Mr. McKisco telling her his views on Socialism and Barban telling his war stories when he was a soldier (44). Rosemary also describes Mary North as having infectious happiness while having a face "so merry that is impossible not to smile back into the white mirrors of her teeth" (43). We ought to think Rosemary is hanging around with this group of friends only because of the Divers.
Rosemary also gets her first glimpse into the Diver's secrets at this party. Her conversation with the other guests is interrupted by Mrs. Violet McKisco coming outside in a hurry, startled. She starts to tell them what she saw in the upstairs bathroom, going on with Dick and Nicole, which Barban interrupts her, telling her "It's inadvisable to comment on what goes on in this house" (45). Like Rosemary, we are lead to believe that not all is well in the Diver's house and are lead to wonder what Violet could have possibly seen.
Even though she knows the Divers have a secret, all Rosemary thinks about is Dick. When Dick returns from the house, Rosemary decides to try to seduce him again. She tells him she loves him and he tells to her to "go and ask your mother what you want," implying that Rosemary shouldn't want him (47). Rosemary leaves the party with her mother and Brady, wanting to stay with the Divers, and wanting to know what Violet had seen (48).
Rosemary ponders the advice she has been given in the past. She is haunted in her sleep of the events of the party and remembering what her mother said, when she first auditioned for a producer of her film. Elsie gave her bad advice on how she needed to seduce the producer to get the film role: "You were brought up to work- not especially to marry. Now you've found your first nut to crack and it's a good nut- go ahead and put whatever happens down experience. Wound yourself or him- whatever happens it can't spoil you because economically you're a boy, not a girl." (49) Rosemary views this as a "final severance of the umbilical cord," and her mother's advice taught her to think for herself (49). We ought to think of her mother as not a good influence and a bad source for advice about men or work. This is why Rosemary feels she needs other parental figures.
Rosemary cannot let go of her obsession with the Divers and continues to get bad advice from the people surrounding her. She awakens and decides to return to the Diver's house. She finds the party still going on and it seems to be in shambles, with the guests tense. Luis Campion advises her that she doesn't want to know what is going on and tells Rosemary "It's better to be cold and young than to love," sensing her love for Dick (50). She learns a fight broke out over people pressuring Violet to reveal what happened in the bathroom and the others not wanting her to reveal the Diver's secrets. We ought to think Rosemary likes to be involved with dramatic events on screen and off.
Most of the other characters use Rosemary as a confidante for their secrets, simply because she is the newest member of the group. McKisco confides in Rosemary he "never finished" his great American novel and he it makes him "so sore." (55) He tells Rosemary, "You don't like me, but that can't be helped. I'm primarily a literary man"(55). He regrets challenging the other guys to fight, but thinks his wife Violet won't respect him if he walks away (55). He describes Violet as being "very hard when she get advantage over you," and she became bitter after the death of their seven year old daughter (56). Rosemary learns and understands more by listening to their stories.
Rosemary tries to fit in with the girls of the group who have been her toughest critics. Rosemary goes on a shopping trip to Paris with Nicole and Mary North. The narrator reveals to us that Nicole is a granddaughter of a count, Mary is a descendant of President Tyler, and Rosemary herself, is middle class (63). Nicole buys Rosemary clothes and Rosemary is jealous that Nicole makes a date with Dick at four in the afternoon, and seems to be stalling to not want to go. Rosemary asks silently, "Why don't you go? or let me go if you don't to." (66). Rosemary can't figure out why someone like Nicole wouldn't want to spend time with someone like Dick.
By this time, Rosemary is desperate in trying to seduce Dick. She succeeds in capturing his attention by seeming to be mysterious and distant like an imitation of Nicole, and telling him "I don't know, you know everything" when he asks her opinion of something (68). Dick confides in Rosemary that he is a "doctor of medicine" (74). She tells him, "I've decided to give you up," after he kisses for the first time, proving she doesn't know what she wants (76). Dick looks at her as an impressionable pet project, telling Rosemary, "there'd be so much to teach you" (76).
Even though she has Dick's heart, Rosemary still isn't satisfied. Even after Rosemary succeeds in seducing Dick, Rosemary is still jealous of Nicole's beauty and Dick's relationship with her (78). She overhears a group of young women at a hotel that the Divers "give a good show," to which she becomes intrigued as to what the women know and she doesn't (84). She doesn't ask Dick about the rumors, because "they were still in the happier stage of love" (86). Rosemary seems like she wants to stay oblivious to who Dick and Nicole really are.
Although he is also in love with Rosemary, Dick is also in love with Nicole and wants to protect her feelings. Dick tells Rosemary that Nicole mustn't find out about their affair, because he doesn't want Nicole to "suffer" (87). He confides in Rosemary, Nicole is "not very strong- she looks strong but she isn't," hinting to Rosemary that Nicole has a few secrets (88). Rosemary is also having such a great time with Dick, she "doesn't miss her mother at all," because she finally has a male role model (88).
Dick seems torn between Nicole and Rosemary. He ponders his relationships with both of them, while having dinner with Nicole. Dick admits to himself that he has "worked over" several people during his marriage to Nicole, because it amuses him to help and change people's lives (100). He reveals to us readers, "It was a tradition between them that they should never be too tired for anything," in their marriage (109). It is like all the characters in the story are constantly playing charades and never revealing their true selves.
Rosemary figures out that she and Dick are only playing pretend. Rosemary says to Dick, "Oh, we're such actors- you and I," as if they are playing pretend, before coming upon a scene in which Nicole unintentionally divulges her secret and Rosemary discovers what Violet McKisco saw in the bathroom (120). After discovering Nicole's secret, Rosemary leaves Dick, reminding us readers of the way Jane Eyre left Mr. Rochester. Rosemary is taught by these events to not trust the first impressions someone gives her.
Dick has a history with women, that has been repeated a lot. Book two of the novel, flashes back to when Dick met Nicole and his marriage to Nicole after his affair with Rosemary. The narrator divulges how Dick met Nicole, how he became involved in her secret, and how he rejected Nicole's advances at first, just like he did with Rosemary (174). We are left to wonder why women, like Rosemary and Nicole throw themselves at a man like Dick, who appears to be a user and a cheater.
Nicole is clued in to what actually is going on with Dick. During the five years after Rosemary left, another woman sends a letter to Nicole, accusing Dick of kissing her daughter (210). Dick blows it off, commenting to Nicole, that is just a letter from disgruntled patient, to which Nicole replies, reminding him, she herself was his patient when they met (210). It begs the question as whether or not people with certain flaws or disadvantages should settle for less than they would deserve if they were normal.
After the letter is sent, Nicole figures out what a slime ball Dick is. Dick seems to have a track record with hurting Nicole by having affairs, and decides "It's possible that I was the wrong person for Nicole" (240). Dick finally realizes he is responsible for hurting both Nicole and Rosemary. He also says "I guess I'm the black death. I don't seem to bring people happiness anymore," after running into Rosemary and learning she is engaged to someone else (245).
Rosemary still seems to be curious about the Divers after five years of being away from them. She runs into a one of their mutual friends named Kaethe, who also knows Nicole's secret and divulges to Rosemary she thinks Nicole only uses her secret as a way to hold power over Dick (268). Nicole confides in Dick, that she thinks she "ruined" him, by making him keep her secret. Dick is reaching out for something to feel, like Nicole. That is why she blames herself for Dick's actions.
It is the character interactions within this story and trying to figure out the character's secrets that make this novel worth reading. Most of the characters seem lonely and lost, looking for something to make them feel a little bit more real. The moral of this story is to not trust your first impressions when meeting someone, because you may not know what they are hiding.
Works Cited
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Tender is the Night. New York City: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1933.
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