The Secret History by Donna Tart and the pull of dark academia
Updated: Sep 29
While reading 1992’s The Secret History by Donna Tart I couldn’t shake one thought out of my mind: Dark Academia. If you’ve spent some time on social media you might have come across the idea od “aesthetics” and “cores”, a movement that has emerged from communities on Tumblr and Pinterest and most recently Tik-Tok. It’s all about the appearance of a person or a thing within a set of specific values, like the kids nowadays say “it’s about the vibes”. All these aesthetics have a very strong visual language and a sense of escapism and daydream to them that is hard to ignore, especially relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic where many people seek change and diversion. While there are “cores” of almost anything, the most popular ones recently include very nature-oriented and earthy ideas like cottagecore, fairycore and plantcore.
Dark Academia is related to a love for classical literature, the search for self-discovery, and a widespread passion for knowledge and learning. The visual aspect of this movement comes from classical tradition and romantic sensibilities, so for the internet that means: statues with longing stares, long coats from Zara, random gothic buildings and fake skulls.
The thematics tend to focus around morality, mortality and philosophy. Dark Academia wants to feel like a rainy afternoon in a boarding school, old books on a wooden desk, and tea left too long to simmer. It usually has a lot of antique and old-school influences, where technology doesn’t really play a role - looking at it now it’s almost nostalgic of an older, simpler time. It's mostly focused on fashion, literature and film.
There are variations of this movement of course, sometimes, it’s more about romance and friendship, sometimes the focus is on a thriller or even a horror story. There isn’t a set of rules and there’s different variations like “Light Academia” that’s supposed to be the emotional opposite of Dark Academia. This means it consists of brighter and lighthearted themes and visuals, the color palette includes white, pastels and beige and its thematic centers around enjoying the little things in life.
This may all sound very well and nice but the cracks start to show when taking a closer look at what the "aesthetic" itself represents. Dark Academia has been criticized for being too pretentious and elitist for its own good. It’s very male-oriented, very privileged and very white. Interestingly, this comes across in The Secret History as well, especially with Richard feeling ostracized for being lower class while his fellow classmates are filthy rich, as well as with Bunny’s comments raging from classist, to homophobic and even racist. You could argue that this aspect of Dark Academia is intrinsic to it, due to the lack of accessibility of women, people with disabilities and people of color in this kind of spaces (especially elite upper-class universities). However, as an aesthetic basically created online there’s room to include all kinds of things and people.
The most important thing to note is that aesthetics as a whole aren’t a clear category, there isn't a set of rules in who can and can not belong. Tik-Tok specially has shown a new wave of Dark Academia that’s more open and inclusive, appreciating its fashion style and reveling in the idea of seeking knowledge but it does tend to remain only that, an idea. Recent books that are considered Dark Academia include all types of characters like If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio, Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo and Catherine House by Elizabeth Thomas.
The Secret History by Donna Tart has been considered by many the epitome of this movement, it’s everything you would want from a book that is considered Dark Academia. It has pretentious college students, it has an obsession with the classics and greek literature, and a weird teacher with unconventional methods and an air of superiority. Dark Academia also tends to have a tragic and melancholic twist, something, well, dark. This book also has a murder. Not one, but two.
The Secret History follows a group of wealthy students at a college in 1980s Vermont, who study ancient Greek under a classics professor named Julian Morrow, an enigmatic man who begins his classes with lines like, “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime.”
The narrator is Richard Papen, a working-class 20 year old from California afflicted by a tragic flaw: “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” Richard arrives at the school on a scholarship, and immediately becomes enamored by the sophisticated and mysterious air of his classmates, lying about his life in order to fit into their clique. The rest of the gang studying ancient Greek are Henry Winter, an aloof genius type who didn’t know about the moon landing; Francis Abernathy, a scarf-wearing redhead (I wish I knew how else to describe him), Camilla and Charles MacCauley, beautiful blonde orphan twins with a dark secret ; and Bunny Corcoran, a guy who likes borrowing a lot of money from his friends and who is also particularly annoying.
"As different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world,” Richard mentions. “They were magnificent creatures.” For me, the characters in this novel were its highlight, immoral and insufferable and yet somehow sympathetic and charming. Their complexity and richness of development drew me in and made me care, even while hating them (which I did, entirely and at every moment of the 500+ pages of this novel). The writing is beautiful and often lyrical, the pacing is quick and engaging, and the story itself plays out like a piece of classic tragic theatre, leaving your heart aching as you observe the mess and unimaginable choices that were also, somehow, inevitable. Simply the culmination of a fatal flaw. This book is deeply pretentious but in a self-aware campy way that pokes fun at itself and revels in the ridiculousness of it all.
Because at the heart of it Dark Academia is about pretending, behind the Pinterest boards and Spotify playlists, are people who want to be seen as mysterious and smart and cool. We identify with Richard not only because he is our main character, but because he has the same wishes and dreams as most of us. We want to belong. We want to be magninficent creatures.
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