What better way is there to start off the new school year than with the book that started the dark academia genre? Donna Tartt’s debut novel, The Secret History, is that very book. It details the story of six students under the tutelage of a Greek teacher at a bucolic college in Hampden, Vermont. The catch? This is no normal learning environment, and the experiences that ensue are far from normal.
The story, excluding the prologue, starts with our protagonist, Richard Papen. He arrives at Hampden College, on his second admission attempt, drops all of his other classes and joins Julian Morrow’s Greek class. This thrusts him into the fully-formed cohort of students already in Morrow’s class—Bunny, Henry, Francis, Camilla, and Charles. Unsurprisingly, strange and terrifying things immediately start ensuing around Richard. As the outsider, the little that he’s privy to is only made more terrifying.
The prologue starts on a seemingly contrasting note, creating an ominous feeling for the reader. “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation,” reads the very first line of the book. The rest of the prologue reads equally pessimistic and dreary, concluding with Richard’s dreadful remark that, “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.”
The prologue changes the entire mood of the story. It makes us ask the obvious question and, as such, see all the curious going-ons of the story in a morbid light. Tartt, by making us ask why from the very beginning makes the story feel focused on the complex, interlinked motivations of the characters. It brings every interaction under further scrutiny by the reader, which, at least to me, made the read all the more introspective. This was helped by the overall atmosphere of the book, which is what made the book the cornerstone of the dark academia genre. Although “dark academia” is a nascent and oft-criticized genre, The Secret History is a pretty good example of it. Donna Tartt’s brilliant prose is able to weave extraordinary notions and events into the ordinary setting of an East Coast college, essentially romanticizing the life of academia by aggrandizing it.
However, the book comes under controversy for the elitism, classism, sexism and racism that it presents. It’s the typical question: does showing these issues as they would have existed, in the form of such decorous prose, condemn or sanction them? This question applies equally to the morality of the characters’ actions, and I think they have the same answer: it’s up to the reader to not be fooled by the romance of it all and see the story for what it is: a condemnation of greed.
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