Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

A delightful study of an unreliable (probably queer) narrator, a weird college professor/cult leader, and entitled liberal arts students who commit a murder (or two)

Genre/Type of book: Novel, fiction, mystery, inverted detective story

Trigger warnings: Murder, homophobia, sexism, racism, n-word, anti-semitism, anti-Catholicism, r-slur, ableism, classism, alcoholism, drug use, abuse, incest, suicide

Murder. Betrayal. An annoying, unreliable, probably not-entirely-straight narrator. It’s time to review a Donna Tartt novel. No it’s not The Goldfinch. It’s the other one with the things I just described. 

The Secret History is a riveting, gritty, darkly humorous novel narrated by the fictional Richard Papen, a 28 year old graduate from Hampden College. Richard sets out to tell the story of the events which led up to the murder of one of his friends, Bunny, while studying for his degree in literature. 

The Secret History is set primarily in Vermont at the prestigious Hampden College, a fictional school based on the author, Donna Tartt’s, experiences studying at Bennington College (also in Vermont). Richard recounts his experiences with an eccentric and controlling Greek classics professor, Julian Morrow, who leads a cult-like group of students he has handpicked to study with him. This “Greek Classics Cult,” as I will refer to it throughout this review, includes twins Camilla and Charles Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, and Richard. Each of the students have their own odd mannerisms and distinctions but are bound together under Morrow and his influence, as well as Morrow’s favorite student, Henry Winter.

Our delightfully depressed narrator, Richard, is originally from a small California town called Plano, where his parents owned a gas station. His father was disgruntled when Richard wanted to go to college rather than work in the family business. Originally, Richard was a pre med student who studied at a community college in Plano, but was unable to continue due to his squeamishness and disgust with biology. 

However, he excelled in his Greek class, and even won an award for his work. He applied to the highly exclusive Hampden College in Vermont and miraculously got in on a financial aid offer (with no help from his father). He wanted to continue to study Greek, but found out the sole Greek teacher, Julian Morrow, only accepts five students each year. For better or worse, Richard still attempts to get into Morrow’s cohort and become his sixth pupil. He eventually succeeds after helping several of Morrow’s students with a difficult translation. All of this eventually leads to his involvement in one of the student’s, Bunny’s, murder, with the assistance of Morrow’s other eccentric students.

Summary: Spoilers Ahead!

At a surface level, The Secret History is about four elitist college students in a “Greek Classics Cult” headed by an eccentric professor (Julian Morrow) murdering an innocent farmer on his own property in rural Vermont and trying to cover it up. When their fifth friend, also in the Greek Classics Cult (Bunny Cocoran) finds out, he is more upset by being excluded by his friends on the night they killed the farmer during their bacchanal ritual than he is by them murdering a fellow human being. When the narrator, Richard, finds out about all of this, he is of a similar temperament and seems more concerned with the possibility of him and his friends facing criminal charges than he is with the dead farmer. 

Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, it’s not the farmer’s murder which dominates the whole storyline. No: it’s the murder of Bunny Cocoran by his pals in the Greek Classics Cult which serves as the unifying thread throughout the plot. 

Unable to control Bunny’s increasingly erratic behavior and fearing he will eventually reveal his friends murdered the farmer, the main characters, Henry, Camilla, Charles, Francis, and the narrator Richard scheme to silence him for good. They end up pushing him to his death down a ravine to make it appear as a hiking accident. Things slowly begin a downward spiral for the group, as each person deals with the aftermath of Bunny’s murder and their own feelings in various destructive ways. 

Charles descends into rageful alcoholism and abuses his twin sister Camilla (whom he also has an incestuous relationship with), Francis starts having panic attacks, and Richard grapples with back-and-forth feelings of guilt and of a sense of relief and freedom while he abuses prescription drugs. Henry appears to be unbothered by the farmers’s murder (which he directly caused), and while he does display some form of grief at Bunny’s funeral, he appears to Richard as alarmingly detached and cold. Camilla’s reaction is unclear to me, largely due to Richard’s narration which focuses more on his male friends than on Camilla, despite him claiming to love her (more on that later). 

The straw that breaks the camel’s back, however, comes when their professor, Julian Morrow, accidentally discovers a letter Bunny typed before his death about the farmer’s murder and his friends’ involvement. There is a logo on the back of the letter from a hotel Bunny and Henry stayed at together which authenticates the letter’s contents. Julian does give the letter to Henry, but then flees, fearing for his own safety and worrying about the possibility of being criminally charged if the case is ever solved. Henry is devastated, being the closest to Julian. 

Meanwhile, Charles is enraged with Henry, blaming him for the entire string of events (understandably). He attempts to shoot him and accidentally shoots Richard instead. To cover for Charles, and possibly because of his own hidden feelings of guilt, and sadness over Julian leaving, Henry takes Charles’ gun and shoots himself in the head to make it look like a suicide when Richard, Charles, Camilla, and Francis struggled to get the gun away from him.

The novel’s epilogue ends in present-day, where Richard, Francis, Charles, and Camilla have drifted apart over the years after Henry’s death. Each surviving character is left to deal with their own personal miseries. Richard, Francis, and Camilla briefly reunite after Francis is hospitalized for a suicide attempt. Charles doesn’t speak with most of the group anymore and has run off to Texas with a married woman he met in a drug treatment facility. Francis’s grandfather found out that Francis is gay and is forcing him to marry a woman named Priscilla (hilariously nicknamed “the black hole,” based on her ability to end conversations the minute she enters a room). Camilla is tasked with caring for her aging grandmother on her own with little money. Richard married for approximately six months and moved back to California with his wife before they divorced over his “lack of communication,” though they remain friends. It’s a melancholy way to end a novel yet, when I finished it, I found I couldn’t picture the story ending any other way.

The Good: Amazing Characterization

Overall, I enjoyed the plot of this novel, but what really blew me away was Donna Tartt’s knack for character development and characterization. To me, it is a real display of skill when an author chooses to write solely from the perspective of their main character– who admits to being deceptive on multiple occasions–and still manages to flesh out characters that are visceral, relatable, horrifying, amusing, and fun to loathe and to love. 

Richard’s unreliability as a narrator actually enhances the novel, and makes it possible to still be surprised at the other characters’ actions and motivations. His back-and-forths with his own thoughts are also often amusing in a dark, twisted way. I remember thinking multiple times reading The Secret History “Really Richard? Is that really what happened?” 

Tartt’s ability to create characters that are so tangible and visceral through Richard’s admittedly less-than-honest persona is evident both in the main characters, the Greek Classics Cult, and in the characters who play much smaller roles in the story. 

Even the side character, Judy Poovey (yes, that is her actual name) had a vibrancy to her character that both irritated me and amused me. She is a theatre nerd, stoner, uncontrollable gossiper, and surprisingly good friend to Richard (who starts off belittling her at the beginning of the novel, in part because he thinks she has a crush on him, though this is not obvious from his descriptions of her behavior at all). I loved Tartt’s descriptions of her messy desk that she’s converted into a lighted vanity, and how she gave Richard a lovely green jacket to wear to lunch with Bunny at the beginning of the novel. 

Another one of my favorite characters is, of course, Francis Abernathy. I enjoyed his anxious disposition, snark, and relationship with Richard in particular. I also thought Donna Tartt did a decent job of portraying Francis’ generalized anxiety and/or panic disorder, especially considering this book came out in the 1990s when mental health topics weren’t nearly as widely discussed and understood. 

The thing about the characters in The Secret History is that Tartt doesn’t want you to forget they’re murderers. At the end of the day, they are a bunch of young, elitist, college kids who killed (or covered up the killing of) an innocent man while they were essentially out having an orgy on said innocent man’s private property (call it a “bacchanal ritual” all you want Henry, I said what I said), and then murdered one of their friends when they got scared he’d tell on them. 

There is one line later in the book where Tartt appears to be addressing the readers’ own reactions to these crimes directly. It’s when Richard and Francis are afraid Julian will realize the letter he received from Bunny is authentic and realize his students murdered both the farmer and Bunny: “I couldn’t conceive of his finding out, but as I tried to visualize myself explaining this catastrophe to someone, I realized that we would have an easier time explaining it to Julian than to anyone else. Perhaps, I thought, his reaction would be similar to my own. Perhaps he would see these murders as a sad, wild thing, haunted and picturesque (“I’ve done everything,” old Tolstoy used to boast, “I’ve even killed a man”) instead of the basically selfish, evil act which it was.” (pg 506) 

Tartt, here, is commenting on the nature of Richard’s narration, and how it would be easy to fall into step behind his eyes and see the entire events of the novel as a beautiful tragedy. It would be easy to lose oneself in the engageability of the characters, Francis’ odd quirks and Henry’s love for plants and gardening, and think, as Richard periodically does, that the murders were “unfortunate events” for whom nobody was entirely culpable. But the truth of it is that they are human beings: flawed, vicious, petty, selfish, and beautiful in their ways. And they’ve killed two other human beings, one of whom they called their friend. It is fitting that the opening to Richard’s first Greek class focuses on the nature of beauty, about which Henry himself states “Death is the mother of beauty…beauty is terror.” (pg 39) Tartt’s Greek Classics Cult is beautiful and terrible, and I finished this novel with the deeply unsettling feeling that we never really know what’s going on in the souls of our fellow humans, even, or perhaps especially, the ones we love the most.

The Stinky: Slurs for Shock Value

There were several things I deeply disliked in this novel. One of the things I found particularly abhorrent was the character William Hundy, a conservative Christian car repair shop owner, and his racism towards Middle Eastern people and immigrants. 

After Bunny is murdered, Hundy claims to have seen “3 Arabs” in a car with Bunny before his murder. When he is interviewed by a local newscaster, a Palestinian-American man named Adnan Nassar confronts Hundy about his racism, and Hundy screams several horrible racial slurs at him. I won’t describe all of the racist things he says, but it was deeply upsetting and I felt like it was done for shock value. This decision by Tartt to include Hundy and his racism served no narrative purpose. She could have easily left it out and the novel’s plot would remain the same. 

Another issue I had was Camilla and her characterization. Now, I know Richard is an unreliable narrator, but he claims to love Camilla and be interested in her sexually and romantically. Yet, his descriptions of her left me wanting. I know very little about Camilla’s hobbies, her intellect, her basic personality, and her motivations. 

This is particularly startling since Richard gives beautiful, eloquent speeches about his male counterparts, Francis, Charles, Henry, and Bunny and what they are like as people beyond the surface level. I don’t understand why there’s a wall of plexiglass between Richard and Camilla in his thinking about her and describing what she’s like to the reader. I almost wonder if this is deliberate on Donna Tartt’s part, and meant to indicate Richard is deliberately choosing to distance himself from his female counterpart out of discomfort (with what? With women in general? Or just with Camilla?). I hope that it is a deliberate choice because otherwise all I have to say is Camilla fails the “sexy lamp test:” I could replace her character with a sexy lamp and the plot would basically remain the same. 

I would like to think that maybe Richard distances himself from his purported female love interest and classmate subconsciously out of a mix of sexism and compulsory heterosexuality. I read Richard as being more fluid in sexuality than he is willing to admit to, and it is possible that he fixates on the “idea of Camilla” because he is trying to compensate for his same-sex attractions, possibly towards both Francis and Henry. But that’s just my Queer perspective on the matter. I am disappointed that Camilla is not developed more as a character, either way.

Finally, I hated the incest between Charles and Camilla. It’s gross, it serves no narrative purpose, and I again feel like it’s similar to the Hundy situation in that it’s done purely for shock value. I don’t have any more to say on it than that. Gross, and stinky, Donna Tartt.

The Craft: Symbolism and an Unreliable Narrator

Donna Tartt employs several literary techniques and devices throughout The Secret History, all of which work together to make the story more easy to fall into, as any good book does. 

Since the story is about a bunch of Greek Classics students, she infuses phrases in Greek, French, and Latin throughout the novel. One of my favorite humorous scenes involved Francis attempting to talk to Richard about the autopsy Bunny’s mother ordered after his murder in ancient Greek without some of Judy’s friends in the room understanding the conversation. One of the phrases in Latin Richard repeats to himself several times while he’s struggling with Bunny’s murder and the role he played in it is “Nihil sub sole novum,” which means “Nothing new under the sun.” This is when Richard is distraught over Bunny’s murder and feeling guilty about it but is trying to convince himself he’s not. 

One thing that I noticed right away in reading The Secret History was the significance of the Greek teacher, Julian Morrow’s, last name. “Morrow” has several meanings, according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary. The archaic meaning is “morning,” and the more common meanings are “the next day,” or “the time immediately after a specified event.” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/morrow) In this context, Julian Morrow’s name could be a reference to the morrow after Bunny’s murder, which is the pretext for the entire novel. Richard is haunted by Bunny’s death and even goes so far as to open his story with “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.” (pg 4) 

This was the first instance of symbolism behind Tartt’s characters’ names I noticed, and the second was Henry Winter’s last name. Henry is the unofficial “leader” of the Greek Classics Cult, and Richard also notes he and Julian have a more intimate relationship than Julian does with his other students. Richard says Henry is Julian’s favorite student, and Henry reciprocates this affection, telling Richard that he loved Julian more than anyone else in the world, even his father, when Julian flees after realizing his students had killed Bunny and the farmer. Henry, in addition to the power he holds over his friends and with Julian, is also the one who directly murders both the farmer and Bunny. 

Winter is often associated with death, since it’s the time of year when food becomes harder to come by, trees and plants lose their leaves and many die back, and depending on the climate one lives in, the cold is inescapable and unforgiving. Given this association, it makes sense that Henry Winter is the murderer in this story. However, we also can’t forget that Henry Winter-the killer-is the same person who saved Richard from freezing to death in the middle of winter. In this way, Donna Tartt also challenges stereotypical associations of winter with death by having Henry save his friend from pneumonia and hypothermia in the middle of winter. 

This contradiction in Henry’s last name and its symbolism also reflects on the nature of his character. Henry is someone who is often quite cold and distant from other human beings and even goes so far as to claim the first time he felt anything was when he murdered an innocent man. Henry is monstrous in this admission, and yet, Henry is also the one who sat with Richard the entire time in the hospital, talked to him and got him magazines to read, took care of him, and brought him to live with him afterwards. He’s the same person who gave Richard a key to his house, despite his preference of being alone, because he trusted Richard, and maybe even came to love him. He’s the same person who loved to garden and planted roses, completely contradictory to his last name’s connotations. Henry Winter is a complex, disturbing character whose last name conveys these juxtapositions perfectly.

I also looked into the first names of the main cast of characters in The Secret History, and found more interesting meanings I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. “Camilla” is apparently a feminized form of “Camillus,” which refers to a young person who assists the celebrant in the ritual of ancient Roman religion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camilla_(given_name)). If you consider that Camilla is Henry’s primary love interest (unless you’re me and think he was definitely more into Richard), and Henry is the one who organized the bacchanal ritual, then her name definitely takes on this symbolism. 

Another interesting thing I found was Julian’s first name means “youthful,” and at the beginning of the novel when Richard first meets Julian he mentions him not being young in physical age but possessing a youthfulness and a mischievousness about him. Julian’s character actually reminds me of a humanized form of Dionysus, which could arguably be what Tartt is going for. Bunny’s full first name, Edmund, holds a sad irony in that it actually means “prosperity,” and his family was actually not wealthy. Plus, he was brutally murdered by his friends, so there is also that.

One of the most important things Donna Tartt incorporates into The Secret History is Richard’s unreliability as a narrator. Richard is a self-professed liar, and a good one at that. He admits to fabricating much of his past in California and making it sound more glamorous and exciting to impress his peers and Julian Morrow at Hampden College. This makes it possible to question his recollection of his friends’ personalities and the events leading to Bunny’s murder. 

Was Bunny as terrible as Richard claims, or is he subconsciously justifying playing a role in killing him? He narrates Bunny’s crimes and cruelties for an entire chapter, choosing to focus on how Bunny antagonizes each member of their group individually. He claims it’s because Bunny has a talent for knowing precisely where to attack people in their insecurities, but I question if his recollection of these events is 100% truthful. Bunny is a homophobe, sexist, anti-semitic, anti-Catholic, and classist pig who becomes inhuman and impossible to relate to or feel sorry for knowing that he’s going to be murdered, if one chooses to take Richard solely at his word. 

Yet, Richard also narrates how Henry, Charles, and Francis are self-absorbed and seem to care very little about the farmer they murdered during their bacchanal ritual. He notably doesn’t have much to say about Camilla’s reaction, except that she remembers the dead body of the farmer in hideous detail. The fact that Richard’s male comrades, according to his narration, are more concerned about the possibility of jail time and Bunny telling on them than they are about the life they’ve taken and yet Richard still loves them and speaks of them quite highly also calls into question his honesty as a narrator. 

Tying into Richard’s unreliability as a narrator are his numerous uncomfortable encounters with queer sexuality and how this relates to himself. He discusses being “uncomfortable” around Francis, who is openly gay, very early in the novel, even though he doesn’t consider himself homophobic. He also remains silent in the face of Bunny’s homophobia, first with the waiter at the restaurant they both attend in the beginning of the novel where Bunny even goes so far as to say he thinks gay people should be “rounded up and burned at the stake,” and later when Bunny bullies Francis. 

Yet, there are numerous times where Richard is preoccupied with same-sex ideas in the Greek Classics Cult. He seems to hold Henry in a very tender and high regard, especially after he saved Richard from pneumonia and hypothermia and they briefly lived together in Henry’s apartment. Henry, in turn, seems to be quite attached to Richard as well, despite his loner nature. He even leaves Richard his key, which is something he has not done for anyone else in their Greek Classics Cult circle (he leaves a spare key under the mat, which Richard mentions Bunny uses later on to get into Henry’s apartment. Then why, exactly, did Henry give Richard his own key, one has to wonder). One could view leaving Richard the key as a romantic gesture on Henry’s part, similar to the special phone code he invented to use with Camilla, a love interest of both his and of Richard’s. 

Interestingly, despite Richard claiming to love Camilla and be interested in her romantically and sexually, he spends very little time thinking about her beyond the most shallow of levels. He mentions her physical beauty, and, interestingly, how he enjoys her more “masculine” traits, like her clothing choices and mannerisms. He also frequently compares her to her twin brother Charles, and says they are both very beautiful and attractive people.

At one point, Richard becomes preoccupied with the idea Henry and Bunny might have had a failed sexual or romantic encounter in Italy, which caused Bunny to become out of sorts (of course, we learn the real reason later on is that Bunny just found out Henry and the group had murdered a farmer together during a bacchanal ritual he was angry at not being included in). It seems a strange possibility to ruminate on: Bunny has a very energetic and grating personality, and it seems entirely likely that he and Henry could have had a falling out in their friendship, which struck Richard as odd to begin with. 

During these speculations, we get a particularly amusing and incongruous quote from Richard where he claims to have incredibly accurate gaydar: “Perhaps Bunny had allowed his greed to get the better of him, and was angry to discover Henry’s largesse had strings attached. But did it? There were certainly strings somewhere, though-easy as it seemed on the face of it-I wasn’t sure this was where those particular strings led…I had lived with Henry for a month, and there hadn’t been the faintest hint of that sort of tension, which I, being rather more disinclined that way than not am quick to pick up on. I had caught a strong breath of it from Francis, a whiff of it at times from Julian; and even Charles, who I knew was interested in women, had a sort of naive, prepubescent shyness of them that a man like my father would have interpreted alarmingly-but with Henry, zero. Geiger counters dead.” (pg 141) Again, Richard’s word choice is telling: “more disinclined that way than not” is not the same as “I am not interested in men.” It’s just that he doesn’t want to admit to it.

Finally, there’s the same-sex encounter between Richard and Francis, during which Richard “instinctively” kisses Francis back before apparently coming to his senses and starting to tell Francis to “give him a break.” I particularly found Richard’s choice of words to Francis interesting: he didn’t get angry or disgusted with Francis, and he says at first, while laughing, “cut it out,” and later “give him a break.” He could have pushed Francis away, yelled at him, or said something much more direct like “Woah, what are you doing? Stop it,” but he didn’t. Richard is also exhausted at the time, as he has just been at a party and slept with a girl before heading back to his own apartment, which is something he also deliberately chooses not to share with Francis (for what reason, one has to wonder?) One might argue Richard has no interest in Francis whatsoever (which is what he claims later in the book), but his actions here and in multiple other encounters suggest otherwise. It is Richard, after all, whom Francis calls when he’s scared and having a panic attack in the middle of the night to drive him to the ER, despite Richard being bone-tired. Richard is the one who goes with Francis to multiple doctor’s appointments. And later in the book, it seems like Richard prefers to be around Francis above everyone else in the Greek Classics Cult, even more than Camilla, his purported love interest. 

Given all these things, I would argue Richard’s discomfort and perplexing mixed attitudes and actions towards same-sex relationships are a case of internalized homophobia. Understandably, this makes for some ambiguity in his narration of events, people, and internal monologue. 

Recurring Themes

One of the overarching themes of The Secret History is the nature of beauty and its relationship to desire. The first class Richard takes with Julian and his fellow students contains a particularly poignant exchange in which Julian, Henry, and the other students discuss how things that many people find grotesque in everyday life-such as corpses, and death in general-become beautiful in works of art such as Greek Classics. We even get the following quote from Henry, in response to Julian asking what the nature of beauty is:

 “Death is the mother of beauty…beauty is terror.” (pg 39)

When Julian follows up with asking what desire is, it is Camilla who responds: “To live,” and then Bunny adds on “To live forever.” (pg 39) This exchange reflects Tartt’s repeated theme of beauty not only coexisting with that which is terrifying, horrible, abhorrent, and repulsive, but thriving off of it, just as plants flourish from decay and death. Thus, beauty and desire, Tartt argues, are always at war because of their inherent incompatibility. We don’t generally desire to be terrified, and yet, we find beauty in the terrible.

This message of the incompatibility of beauty and desire is conveyed in Bunny’s murder, which goes against the very definition of desire he gave to Julian in the beginning: eternal life. Yet Richard himself describes Bunny’s death through his eyes as “…a sad, wild thing, haunted and picturesque…” (pg 506) The fact that Richard is such an unreliable narrator who alternates between guilt over murdering his companion and detached, artful ruminations such as this also encapsulates the broader conflict between beauty and desire throughout the novel. 

Another theme throughout The Secret History is the desire to escape oneself. Arguably, all of the characters in the Greek Classics Cult are trying to escape themselves in one way or another. Richard lies about his childhood, uses drugs, and immerses himself in his life at Hampden College to escape his own unhappiness at his past, his abusive father and apathetic mother, and his own nature. Henry throws himself into his studies with arduous abandon to avoid the fact that he is numb and feels disconnected from everyone and everything around him. Bunny parties, drinks, and makes horrible and offensive jokes and jabs at people to avoid his own insecurities about being secretly poor and, possibly, insecure about his disabilities. Francis smokes and suffers from hypochondria and a panic disorder, and later on attempts suicide years after the murders and Henry’s own suicide. Charles eventually struggles with alcoholism in an attempt to escape the pressure he faced from police during questioning over Bunny’s murder, his own guilt, and his anger at Henry. Unfortunately, as I have previously lamented, Camilla’s own actions aren’t discussed in nearly as much detail as her male companions, due to Richard’s narrative choices (conscious and subconscious). However, I think it is reasonable to assume she struggled in her own way after becoming complicit in both the murder of the farmer and Bunny. 

The bacchanal ritual itself that Henry was so eager to attempt with his friends serves as the most obvious-and most deadly-example of self-escapism in the novel. In the first class Richard takes with Julian and the Greek Classics Cult, they discuss the different forms of madness inflicted by the gods, which includes poetic, prophetic, and Dionysian madness. This last form of madness, Dionysian madness, ties into the Dionysian rituals performed in Euripedes’ play, Bacchae, and it is the form of self-escapism the group attempts to achieve by recreating their own bacchanal ritual. The desire to experience this form of self-escapism and of it being something desirable is described by Julian in that first class: “We don’t like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people-the ancients no less than us-have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self…And it’s a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive appetive self. But that is a mistake…Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational…” (pg 40-41) 

He goes on to say “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripedes speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free!…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…And that, to me, is the terrible seduction of the Dionysiac ritual. Hard for us to imagine. That fire of pure being.” (Pg 42)

In these passages, it is clear that Julian’s words had a profound influence on Henry and the other members of the class. The desire described by Julian isn’t simply the desire to no longer be in one’s own body. It is the desire to be uninhibited, unconscious, and free from all forms of self-awareness and the consequences that come with it. 

It is self-escapism at its highest form, but Julian and his Greek Classics Cult believe that through these forms of Dionysian madness, there is a truer world, and a truer self, to be unleashed. They refer to it as the “primitive,” the “animal,” the “emotive” self. So there is an apparent contradiction of ideas here, as is often the case throughout the novel, and which I discussed with beauty and desire being incompatible earlier. There is the desire to be completely free from one’s self and, at the same time, the desire to no longer repress the “animal self” which supposedly gets unleashed during the Dionysian madnesses. 

This conflict centers on the idea that the “animal self” Julian describes is different from one’s “mortal self,” which I argue is nonsense. To be alive is to be a self, with all of the parts that entails, the rational and the irrational are one and the same. The question is who gets to decide what is and isn’t rational, which is the “mortal” self and which is the “animal” self? We have what we tell ourselves and then we have what society and our peers tell us, and that’s based on many social and cultural factors. Often there is a level of privilege involved in what typically gets defined as “rational” (whiteness, maleness, abledness, cisgendered and heterosexualness, for instance). It is therefore interesting to me that Julian apparently views the “animal” and “irrational” self as something to be embraced, but not all the time. He seems to suggest it is best to release the “animal self” in the form of ritual, because if you don’t, your “animal self” will take over and you will go insane. He brings up Tiberius and Caligula and Nero as examples of people who repressed their animal selves too much and ended up going insane because of it. His argument, as I see it, is that the Dionsian and bacchanal rituals allow one to put their “animal self” on as a costume for the purpose of cutting loose and acting in ways one would normally never act consciously. So to me, what Julian, Henry, and the Greek Classics Cult fiends who perform the bacchanal ritual are searching for isn’t a release of their “animal selves” or “irrational selves”  at all. They are searching for an escape from the consequences of being human beings who make conscious choices, sometimes horrific ones. They want an escape from feeling shame, guilt, and other painful emotions that come from being a self. 

And they achieve it, according to Henry. He talks about the group seeing Dionysus, seasons passing in the blink of an eye, Camilla believing she was a deer and the rest of them chasing her through the woods, and of Camilla not being able to speak for several days after the bacchanal ritual. He says “Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no “I,” and yet it’s not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It’s more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy. It was like being a baby. I couldn’t remember my name. The souls of my feet were cut to pieces and I couldn’t even feel it.” (Pg 167-168) Firstly, Henry’s prejudice towards what he called “Eastern religions” is unacceptable, bigoted, and reductive, and it’s important to acknowledge that. Secondly, in this quote, he describes how the bacchanal ritual-during which he murdered an innocent man, lest we forget-allowed him to escape himself entirely, which is what his and the group’s desire ultimately was. They wanted to not feel, think, hurt, or face any consequences of being a self, and Henry claims they did it by performing the bacchanal ritual. 

And this ultimate metaphor for self-escapism contains within it the farmer’s murder, the choice which eventually leads to Bunny’s murder. It could be read as a critique of self-escapism on Tartt’s part, or it could simply be a commentary on the sheer privilege and sense of entitlement the Greek Classics Cult have that they decide to go out onto a Vermont farmer’s private property after fasting for several days as part of their “bacchanal ritual,” have an orgy together, murder the farmer on his own private property, and have their main concern be if they’re going to get caught and if their friend whom they deliberately excluded from this delightful party is going to be the one to rat them out (so then they kill him too). “Oh, I wasn’t really myself because I, a twentyish year old Greek Classics major, decided to recreate this ancient ritual where people lose their minds for a little bit and so I might have accidentally killed a man during that time. But also it wasn’t really me, and I shouldn’t be punished for it” is actually pretty close to what Henry and Francis say to Richard about it. Perhaps both interpretations are true at once, which is what I personally think Tartt was going for.

Concluding Thoughts and Recommendation

I really liked The Secret History. My first Donna Tartt book was The Goldfinch, and it was very interesting to read her first novel after that one and see how her style of writing, methods of characterization, and other writing quirks have evolved and carried over with time. 

Similar to Theodore Decker in The Goldfinch, Richard Papen is our depressed, melancholy, unreliable, probably Queer narrator guiding us through the story which divided his life into “before” and “after.” I couldn’t help but find myself comparing the two narrators in each book, and it is amusing to me to imagine them sharing a fictional table in a coffee shop together. I can’t decide if they’d hit it off or hate each other at first sight.

I recommend The Secret History whether you’ve read any of Donna Tartt’s other books or not. If you enjoy dark humor, philosophical explorations of ideas of self, beauty, desire, and terror, and frustratingly obtuse narrators, you’ll probably like it. If you’re a rural farmer in Vermont who values private property and detests elitist, liberal arts, college educated youths…you should probably pass this one up, buddy. 

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