Essays from a Verdant Study: “A Morbid Longing for the Picturesque”: Aestheticism, Complicity, and Tragedy in The Secret History
This is the first in a series of occasional academic-lite essays exploring literature and other cultural texts, aesthetics and the intricacies of storytelling. Here, I hope to create an accessible space people can enjoy musing over, while enjoying a cup of coffee.
Please note, this article will discuss murder, violence, and will briefly touch upon incest and alcoholism.
Donna Tartt’s The Secret History announces its literary ambitions before the narrative begins. In her acknowledgements, Tartt thanks her editor with the line “il miglior fabbro“- “the better craftsman”- a line T.S. Eliot borrowed from Dante Aligheri in his dedication of The Waste Land to fellow poet, Ezra Pound. This gesture situates The Secret History within a tapestry of literary allusion, signalling a novel preoccupied with tradition, influence, and the threads of storytelling.
But these allusions are not simply reverential. These knowing winks underline a wry humour, a sort of mockery of elitism and literary snobbery, especially as it manifests in academic spaces. Tartt’s novel venerates and interrogates the very texts it invokes. From this tension emerges what we now recognise as Dark Academia, a genre that revels in the aesthetics of scholarly life, while simultaneously exposing the colonial foundations, hierarchies, and exclusions that underpin it.
I have returned to The Secret History countless times, both as a reader and a scholar. I have written about it academically– including for my Research Master’s– and still, the book continues to draw me back in. Once, like our narrator, Richard Papen, I was enamoured by the characters and world Tartt has created. Now, the more I re-read, the more I see the “showy dark crack” running down its centre.
And that, I think, is the point. The Secret History is not a rose-tinted love letter to academia. It is a carefully constructed tragedy, one that exposes the dangers of wanting to belong so badly that everything else becomes collateral.
The protagonist and narrator of The Secret History, Richard Papen, enters the novel as an outsider twice over. Geographically, he arrives at Hampden College from California, trading the sprawling modernity of the West Coast for the austere, insular world of a small liberal arts college in Vermont. And socially, he is keenly aware that he lacks the wealth and cultural capital embodied by Julian Morrow’s circle of Classics students. However, from the moment Richard first encounters them, he reframes his marginality as an opportunity for reinvention, shedding his old self and past.
Richard describes his childhood as a “very great gift” because it is “as disposable as a plastic cup” (p. 5). His unremarkable upbringing in Plano, California allows him to discard this mundane history in favour of a romanticised and carefully curated fiction: swimming pools, orange groves, Hollywood glamour, and a father in the oil business. This act of self-mythologising recalls Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, a comparison Richard himself explicitly makes, though with a striking lack of irony. For while Richard imagines himself as Gatsby, a figure of glamour and mystery, his role within Tartt’s novel aligns far more closely with Nick Carraway: a peripheral observer who watches from the margins and never fully gains access to the world he longs to inhabit. Richard, like Nick, often mistakes proximity for inclusion.
Tartt subtly undermines Richard’s fantasy of belonging from his earliest interactions with the group. His invented past is received by the others with varying degrees of indifference, scepticism, and disdain. Julian appears to accept Richard’s story at face value, but this acceptance feels shallow rather than sincere. Julian, after all, is less interested in who his students have been than in what they might become under his influence. He collects people as much as he teaches them, and while he gravitates towards wealthy, cultured students to take under his wing, he is also interested in how he can shape them. The fragments of his own past that he selectively shares, such as his time tutoring royalty, and other illustrious former students, suggests that he, like Richard, has carefully cultivated a myth of himself.
If Julian’s response is permissive, Bunny’s is openly antagonistic. From the outset, Bunny delights in tormenting Richard, probing at inconsistencies in Richard’s stories with casual, performative cruelty. In one early interaction, Bunny mocks Richard’s use of ballpoint pens, framing his lack of refinement as charmingly provincial: “And you, what’s-your-name, Robert? What sort of pens did they teach you to use in California?” Bunny asks (p.36). When Richard replies that he uses ballpoints, he says: “An honest man, gentlemen. Simple tastes. Lays his cards on the table” (p.36). The praise is hollow. The deliberate misremembering of Richard’s name and reference to California, alongside his dig at Richard’s “simple tastes” all serve as reminders that Richard does not belong. Later in the novel, he becomes more direct, quizzing Richard on why he has no photos of his family in his dorm room, suggesting it is because Richard does not want the others to see his mom wearing a polyester pants suit. He also repeatedly highlights inaccuracies in Richard’s story when he asks where Richard went to school.
The others, though less overt, participate in this distancing all the same. Henry dismisses Richard the moment he realises he lacks a firm grounding in classical texts. Francis briefly tests him with a flirtatious question in Latin: “Cubitum eamus?” which roughly translates to “shall we go lie down?” but quickly appears to lose interest when Richard cannot respond (p. 34). Even Camilla’s initial kindness carries an edge of impersonality: her “sweet, unfocused smile” leaves Richard feeling “like a waiter or a clerk in a store”, subservient and forgettable (p.22). Most tellingly, of course, Richard is entirely excluded from the Bacchanal attempts, and is only admitted into the group’s darkest secret when he stumbles upon the evidence of their crimes.
This exclusion impacts both how Richard frames the group and himself. His descriptions of his friends are conspicuously kind. Charles is “impulsive and generous” (p. 94), Francis “sympathetic” (p. 86), Henry is admired for his intellect and leadership. Even Bunny is described as “the sort of son every father secretly wants: big and good-natured and not awfully bright, fond of sports, gifted at backslapping and corny jokes” (p. 55). Camilla, is rendered almost ethereal in her beauty: “a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool” (p. 252).
Yet, as critics have noted, each of these supposedly admirable traits contains the potential for something far darker. Bunny’s sly teasing curdles into cruelty and extortion. Francis’ camp charm hardens into peevishness. Henry’s leadership becomes Machiavellian, cold manipulation. Charles’ impulsiveness devolves into violence and dependency, while Camilla’s softness reads as either passivity or a calculated seduction, depending on how you interpret it. That Richard fails- or refuses- to recognise these transformations until it is too late suggests a wilful blindness. He is invested in maintaining the beauty of his fantasy, even as it begins to rot.
If Richard begins The Secret History as an outsider, his obsession with belonging soon transforms into something far more treacherous: an unreliable narrator. Tartt’s confessional style draws comparison to another literary classic, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866). Like Raskolnikov, Richard tells his story retrospectively, after the crime has been committed, shaping our perspective of events through his own warped lens. The novel discloses Bunny’s death at the hands of the group on the very first page, creating what A.O. Scott famously referred to as a “murder mystery in reverse”. Consequently, what hooks the reader is not uncertainty over who killed Bunny, but rather why it happened at all. What drove this group of Classics students to murder one of their own?
Richard asserts the accuracy of his memories, insisting that “I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me” (p. 2). This claim to perfect recollection appears, at first glance, to lend authority to his narration. Yet, this confidence is exactly what invites suspicion. As critic John Mullan notes, Tartt creates a “gap between the ‘I’ who tells the story and the ‘I’ who is the past self”, a schism that destabilises Richard’s authority even as it lends it credence.
Confession, as we see throughout The Secret History, is not synonymous with truth. It is a carefully controlled performance, one which Richard gestures to in the opening pages. He recalls images of “the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cateract like ants in a sugar bowl” as he walks through the aftermath of the murder “without incurring a blink of suspicion” (pp. 1-2). Later, we learn how close the group came to exposure, a revelation that retroactively reframes this moment. Instead, this image evokes theatricality, positioning Richard almost as an actor on a stage. While Richard does not lie outright, we as readers must be conscious of how he chooses to frame his narrative, both through his attempts at moral evasion and through his desire to render his version of events as beautiful and tragic.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in Richard’s treatment of his own culpability. Although he acknowledges some degree of involvement, he repeatedly creates distance between himself and the act of the murder: “it is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible” (p.1). The murder itself plays out like a scene from a film, something that Richard watches rather than participates in. But Richard is an active participant in Bunny’s murder. Furthermore, it is not a moment of weakness or impulse, it is a thought-out and meticulously planned act. Instead of leaving, he assists by providing information about Bunny’s habits and movements, as well as warning the others when Bunny drunkenly tells him about the farmer’s death, serving as a canary in the coal mine. He stands beside Henry as he pushes Bunny over the cliff. In this moment, we perhaps get a true glimpse of Richard: “I watched it all happen quite calmly– without fear, without pity” (p.310). Here, he is just as much a killer as the others.
Elsewhere, he frames the killing as self-defence: “the idea of murdering Bunny was horrific, impossible; nonetheless we dwelt on it incessantly, convinced ourselves there was no alternative” (p. 311). Yet, Richard’s exclusion from the Bacchanal ritual that results in the farmer’s death and Bunny’s extortion means he bears none of the immediate guilt that binds the rest of the group together. Of them all, Richard has the least tangible reason to want Bunny dead.
His involvement then, can be partially attributed to group mentality, which fosters an “us versus Bunny” dynamic. Richard is dimly aware that he could be considered guilty by association, having no solid alibi for the night of the farmer’s death. But more significantly, he understands that Bunny’s “metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine, which [he] carries around with him day and night”, threatens the survival of the group and Richard’s own fragile sense of inclusion (p.245). He cannot be part of the group if they are all charged with murder. He also cannot be part of the group if Bunny exposes Richard’s fictitious past and dismantles the identity he has carefully constructed.
Accordingly, Richard justifies his participation in the murder by casting Bunny as tormentor and aggressor. Bunny signs his own death warrant by extorting the group and constantly hinting at the farmer’s death in other peoples’ proximity. And Bunny repeatedly needles Richard’s identity, leading to Richard claiming he had little choice: “How could he have been so blind as to not see how dangerous it might be for him to alienate the one impartial party, his one potential ally? […] I would not have been nearly so quick to cast in my lot with the rest of them had he not turned on me so ferociously” (p. 245). This dynamic is explored best in the scene in which Bunny questions Richard about his schooling, posing leading questions before casually revealing that he knows several people who attended the same institution- none of whom remember Richard. When Richard claims it was a large school, Bunny corrects him, noting that it was small, with only around two hundred students. Richard is also not in the yearbook. Flustered, Richard invents an excuse and retreats for a drink.
What is most interesting about this encounter is not so much Bunny’s cruelty, but rather the reaction of the others. They see straight through Richard’s fabrications. “The twins looked stricken”, Tartt writes. “Henry had his back turned, pretending not to listen […] from the living room, Francis whispered something indistinct but angry” (p. 249). Even Richard recognises his performance has failed here. Yet by this point in the narrative, he knows about the farmer’s death. The group, in turn, recognises that Richard must be kept secure. Just as they once plied Bunny with money and expensive holidays to ensure his silence, they recognise the need to keep Richard flattered and included to buy his loyalty.
Henry’s manipulation of Richard further exposes the fragility of Richard’s narrative. Richard learns of the farmer’s death because he stumbles across documents that reveal the others are planning to flee the country without him. Henry has no choice but to confess to Richard, but chooses to frame it as praise– how clever of Richard to piece together the puzzle, how wise of him to understand it all! This calculated appeal target’s Richard’s desire for inclusion and his insecurities at a time when Henry needs assurance of his loyalty. Later, when the investigation into Bunny’s death begins to focus on the group, Henry reportedly attempts to redirect suspicion onto Richard, exposing just how conditional Richard’s belonging has always been.
Similarly, Richard’s portrayal of Camilla emphasises the unreliable nature of his narration. His love for her is aesthetic, he places her on a pedestal, even as the narrative offers moments that complicate this construction. Camilla admits she dated Cloke to extract information about the police investigation. She is also at the centre of the complicated and volatile dynamic between her brother Charles and Henry, yet Richard often frames Camilla as a victim who needs protecting, rarely questioning Camilla’s agency within it. The incestuous relationship with Charles is implied, at some point, to be consensual, but Richard refuses to fully reckon with this. His unwillingness to see Camilla clearly reflects his broader reluctance to disturb the fantasy he has crafted of the others. Indeed, he also romantices the group’s detachment from the modern world, their ignorance of contemporary politics, technological advances or culture, seeing these as evidence of refinement. Yet this isolation is precisely what George Leforgue warns Richard against when he cautions that becoming Julian’s student means severing his ties to the rest of the school: “You understand, don’t you, how limited will be your contact with the rest of the faculty and with the school?” (p. 33). What Richard perceives as purity in an increasingly modern world increasingly reads as stagnation. Tartt’s satire sharpens here: the group’s aesthetic does not elevate them, but rather makes them appear almost comically backwards and ignorant.
Through Richard’s unreliable confession, Tartt exposes Richard’s need for moral evasion. He tells us everything, yet he still withholds the truth. He admits guilt, while reframing it as inevitable or worse, Bunny’s fault. He gestures towards culpability while stepping carefully around it. Since we know the ending from the start, we must turn our focus on interpreting the events, rather than to the suspense itself.
Richard frames his story as a tragedy, “the fatal flaw”, hamartia. He would like us, the reader, to believe in inevitability, in destiny, in the fatal flaw that carries him helplessly towards ruin. But in a classical sense, hamartia is not simply a character flaw. It is an error in judgement. Richard’s downfall is not dictated by fate. It is dictated by want.
Richard’s insistence on inevitability is clear throughout The Secret History. He repeatedly invokes his “fatal flaw” as the cause of his downfall, suggesting early on that his existence “was tainted in some subtle but essential way” (p. 6). Yet this belief in fate and determinism, and his attempts to redirect the readers’ sympathies, does not emerge in isolation. The language of tragedy Richard reaches for to justify his moral collapse is the same language cultivated and legitimised in Julian Morrow’s classroom.
Julian’s classroom is not merely a site of learning, it is also a stage, complete with elaborate dressing: “It was a beautiful room […] In the corner, near a low bookshelf, was a big round table littered with teapots and Greek books, and there were flowers everywhere, roses and carnations and anemones, on his desk, on the table, in the windowsills. The roses were especially fragrant; their smell hung rich and heavy in the air, mingled with the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint, inky scent of camphor. Breathing deep, I felt intoxicated. Everywhere I looked was something beautiful […] a dazzle of fractured color that struck me as if I had stepped into one of those little Byzantine churches that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt and tesserae.” (p. 28). Julian believes that “pupils learned better in a pleasant, non-scholastic environment”, Richard notes (p. 34). “That luxurious hothouse of a room, flowers everywhere in the dead of winter, was some sort of Platonic microcosm of what he thought s a schoolroom should be” (p. 34). Incidentally, the word Lyceum, the name of the building Julian teaches in, refers to both Aristotle’s school and to a space of performance: a lecture hall and a theatre. Julian’s classroom fills both roles. His teaching is theatrical, from the ritual of tea-making at the start of class to the carefully staged delivery of his sermons. His students, in turn, learn to perform their lives accordingly.
The student’s isolation, both in this strange non-scholastic classroom and in their ignorance of modern culture, is deliberate, creating an aesthetic enclave sealed off from the contemporary world. Even the novel’s title The Secret History, is a gesture towards this conceit. The name echoes Procopius’ sixth-century text of the same name, a work that exposes the corruption and moral decay concealed beneath the cultivated surface of the Byzantine court. Tartt’s novel performs a similar unmasking, revealing that beneath the polished veneer of elegance and culture, lies brutality and moral failings.
Julian’s pedagogy is rooted in an idealised version of antiquity; one that elevates beauty into moral principle. At the centre of this vision is the concept of kalos kagathos, meaning the unity of the beautiful (kalos) and the good (agathos). In theory, aesthetic beauty and moral virtue are bound together and inseparable. If something is beautiful, it must also be good. Tragedy, in this framework, becomes something both inevitable and admirable. Julian’s faith in his students rests on this belief. He has cultivated a small group of those he deems the brightest, the most cultured, the most aesthetically pleasing- and crucially, the most malleable. It is no coincidence that each of his students enters Hampden already isolated, unmoored, and seeking reinvention in some form. Later, in a rare flash of honesty, Richard admits that Julian “refused to see anything about any of us except our most engaging qualities, which he cultivated and magnified to the exclusion of all of our tedious and less desirable ones […] there was never any doubt that he did not wish to see us in our entirety, or see us, in fact, in anything other than the magnificent roles he had invented for us” (p. 365).
This aestheticisation of suffering is reinforced too, by Tartt’s likening of Julian to Gatsby. Like Richard, Julian invites comparison to this tragic figure, albeit more implicitly. Our first introduction to him is mired in intrigue, rumour, and contradiction:
“Nearly everyone had heard of him, and I was given all sorts of contradictory but fascinating information: that he was a brilliant man; that he was a fraud, that he had no college degree; that he had been a great intellectual in the forties, and a friend to Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot […] that he had dodged the draft in some war […]; that he had ties with the Vatican; a deposed royal family in the Middle East; Franco’s Spain. The degree of truth in any of this was of course unknowable, but the more I heard about him, the more interested I became”. (pp. 16-17).
This description closely mirror’s Fitzgerald’s introduction of Jay Gatbsy:
“Someone told me they thought he killed a man once”. A thrill passed over all of us. The three Mr. Mumbles bent forward and listened eagerly. “I don’t think it’s so much THAT”, argued Lucille skeptically; “it’s more that he was a German spy during the war.” One of the men nodded in confirmation. “I heard that from a man who knew all about him, grew up with him in Germany,” he assured us positively. “Oh no,” said the first girl, “it couldn’t be that, because he was in the American army during the war.” […] “You look at him sometimes when he thinks nobody’s looking at him. I’ll bet he killed a man.” […] It was testimony to the romantic speculation he inspired that there were whispers about him from those who found little that it was necessary to whisper about in this world.” (p. 44).
In both cases, identity is constructed through speculation and rumour. Gatsby courts this, appearing only briefly at his own parties, and he carefully cultivates his myth to draw Daisy back into his orbit. Julian too, curates his mystique, revealing only aspects which serve his narrative. Later again, Richard begins to question Julian’s myth: “I knew then, and know now, virtually nothing about Julian’s life outside of the classroom, which is perhaps what lent such a tantalizing breath of mystery to everything he said or did. No doubt his personal life was as flawed as anyone’s, but the only side of himself he ever allowed us to see was polished to such a high gloss of perfection that is seemed when he was away from us he must lead an existence too rarefied for me to even imagine” (p. 365). Whether or not his past is truly as extraordinary as it sounds is besides the point. What matters is that, like Richard and the other students, Julian believes in the power of self-mythologising, and he practices what he preaches.
Yet, when confronted by the real consequences of his philosophy, Julian flees. When Bunny is missing, he too, acts as though the tragedy is something to be romanticed. Henry remarks that the operatic sweep of the search parties reminds him of Tolstoy. Julian looks over his shoulder “real delight on his face” to agree with Henry (p.383). However, once he learns of his students’ involvement in Bunny’s murder, Julian disappears and his withdrawal is swift and absolute. The values he has instilled prove useless in the face of genuine human cost. When his illusion of kalos kagathos fractures, he abandons both his students and his responsibilities, returning evidence to Henry before vanishing.
At every turn, the illusion of aesthetics is challenges and undone by Tartt. The tragedy of The Secret History is not that its characters are doomed by fate. It is that they choose beauty over goodness, performance over responsibility. Tartt’s brilliance, and the reason this novel continues to attract new readers decades later, is the refusal to let beauty absolve harm. Richard’s story is not a warning about the dangers of knowledge, but the dangers of wanting- wanting to belong, to be chosen, to be special- without considering the cost.
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Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2013.
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Hargreaves, Tracy. The Secret History: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2001.
Kaplan, James. “Smart Tartt”. Vanity Fair. (September 1999) https://www.vanityfair.com/news/1992/09/donna-tartt-the-secret-history
Mullan, John. “I Want to Tell You a Story…” The Guardian. (25/01/2003). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/25/featuresreviews.guardianreview25
Pauw, Franςois. “If On a Winter’s Night a Reveller: The Classical Intertext in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History Part One.” Akroterion. 39.3-4 (1994): pp. 141-163.
Sabrinatheclassicist. “Classics Student Analyses The Secret History by Donna Tartt”. YouTube video, 21:26. August 26, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWMk7mnij2s
Scott, A.O. “Harriet the Spy.” The New York Times. (03/11/2002). https://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/03/books/harriet-the-spy.html
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