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 “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 say nowadays “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 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, I would say, is one of the first big online aesthetic movements. It’s related to a love for classical literature, the search for self-discovery, and a widespread passion for knowledge and learning. The visual aspect of the Dark Academia stems from European cultures, particularly classical tradition and romantic sensibilities, and is characterized by a dark romanticism that is neither gothic nor macabre, but rather dreamlike and tragic.
The thematics tend to focus around morality, mortality and philosophy. Dark Academia feels like a rainy afternoon in a boarding school, it’s old books on a wooden desk, it’s wire-rimmed glasses and dark overcoats. 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 for aesthetics 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: the outdoors, enjoying the company of others, and the comfort of the ones around you. There’s also “Grey Academia”, and while it’s not an aesthetic in and of itself it’s a movement and community aiming to highlight and dismantle oppressive structures such as ableism, racism, antisemitism, islamophobia, and misogyny, within higher education 'by utilizing discussion and aesthetics, as well as promoting diversity within literature and art'. 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 and Grey Academia seeks to highlight these problems.
Interestingly, this comes across in The Secret History as well, especially with Richard feeling ostracized sometimes 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. 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.
To me, The Secret History by Donna Tart is 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 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 liberal-arts college in 1980s Vermont, who study ancient Greek under the tutelage of 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 enthralled by the sophisticated and mysterious air of his classmates, fabricating a more glamorous past for himself in order to fit into their clique. The rest of the gang studying ancient Greek are Henry Winter, an aloof genius who translates Paradise Lost into Latin for fun and 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 good ol’ boy who likes borrowing a lot of money from his friends and who is also particularly annoying.
Not only Richard, but his friends as well, share his longing for the picturesque; they live in a little bubble, in a little fantasy where anything can happen. Particularly, they become obsessed with Julian’s recounting of the Dionysian bacchanal, a ritual Greeks used to participate in that results in the dissolution of the ego. Julian mentions: “if we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones, then spit us out reborn.” If it sounds a little ridiculous it’s because it is, but the book is great in building an atmosphere where it seems completely plausible.
From the very beginning, Richard’s frustration and discontent with his upbringing is palpable and it’s clear he longs for a greater life, a life defined by culture and beauty and sophistication. Exactly what Julian’s little gang represents. “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.” From the first time Richard sees them on campus, he’s obsessed with them and he’ll do anything to belong. He devotes so much energy to cultivating an image of Julian’s clique as a perfect haven of beauty and intellectualism, that even long after the image has shattered and he has left Campden, it remains an integral part of his life, saying: “I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”
Behind the Pinterest boards and Spotify playlists, this is what Dark Academia represents really, it’s a longing for a better, more refined life, filled with knowledge and beauty and intellectualism and people who understand you. We want to be 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.
Commentaires