I Am Currently Rereading The Secret History, And In Doing So I Remember The Confusion I First Felt When

i am currently rereading the secret history, and in doing so i remember the confusion i first felt when i saw how people interpreted the book.

the entire dark academia aesthetic doesn’t necessarily apply to the book, because to me donna tartt did a wonderful job at showing how almost performative it seemed. from henry and his constant umbrella carrying, to francis’ fake pince-nez, the characters themselves seem to be stuck in a persona. richard, too, finds himself wrapped up in this when he immediately jumps to buying clothes that similarly match their styles despite not having known them for very long at all.

their intelligence, as well, seems exaggerated or even romanticized by a lot of readers, especially when it comes to henry. bunny himself says that he believes francis is equal to henry when it comes to intellect yet henry is put on such a pedestal. so many readers treat the greek class like they have rare, unseen forms of genius. this in itself isn’t true. they are smart, you cannot ignore that, but we see judy poovey repeating what julian would say in lectures, just with less ancient references.

another commonly misinterpreted character is camilla. she is often infantilized. posed up, displayed as feminine, treated as innocent without flaw. so many ignore the fact she was often described as masculine, she was complicit in the murder of two men, and she was also a grown woman who had intercourse with her twin brother.

camilla is a victim, yes. she is a victim of her brothers later abuse as well as the unhealthy view the boys had on her— but camilla is still just as bad as the rest of them. the incest cannot be called consensual as it was not two healthy people making an informed choice, it is something both charles and camilla are both the perpetrators and the victims of. they are orphans, isolated, who latched onto each other, and it formed a toxic bond. charles did later become abusive, but it was a result of the trauma of bunny dying. this isn’t an excuse, simply a reason, but before bunny charles never hurt camilla.

donna tartt is a genius. richard, in his obsession, makes us view the group as he does. from the aestheticism to the romanticization, the book carries on by the reader’s themselves unintentionally writing in richards perspective.

unreliable narrators are not dangerous in what they don’t reveal, but how we interpret what they do.