Dawson Pent
In Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, we follow the narrator Richard – a young, underprivileged college student – who goes to Hampden University and finds a new world he didn’t know existed. Richard proceeds to walk around in a haze of astonishment towards his new college town, relieved to be free of his insignificant old home of Plano. When Richard lays down to sleep his first night, he notices ominous changes to his environment which shine a melancholic tone upon his future and foreshadow a harrowing adventure into the deceptive corridors of Hampden. These instances push the reader to be far more sympathetic with Richard and perceive him as a more innocent, manipulated character than he actually is.
One passage from The Secret History exemplifies how Donna Tartt creates this sympathy by describing the unique and oddly specific transitions Richard’s dorm partakes during his first night at Hampden, insinuating that he has a growing anxiety about his future. At first, Tartt mentions three specific color transitions of “gray to gold to black” as the day was ending (Tartt 13). The particularity of these colors fit better as a vague representation of his future and a creative foretelling of The Secret History than as a description of color transitions. The color gray describes his past life in Plano well as he deemed himself insignificant and gray is a dull color choice for the sun reflecting off of a bright wall. Gold signifies his immediate future during his first semester because it was very enjoyable. Black suggests his life afterward as a dark catastrophe presumably because of Bunny’s murder. These color choices effectively portray the three portions of his life readers will notice throughout The Secret History to generate sympathetic emotions.
The passage also describes a Soprano’s voice which also defends this idea of hinting at Richard’s future, further altering the reader’s opinion him. This is shown by the Soprano’s voice “climb[ing] dizzily up and down… [and] spiral[ing] on and on in the darkness like some angel of death” (13). The Soprano’s voice – a typically beautiful voice with a positive connotation in literature – spirals up and down at first until it dips down into a demonic tone (OED). Stories tend to have a mixture of sections such as a climax, resolution, or rising action, and the Soprano’s spiraling voice suggests that Richard’s story will also have a high point, his first semester, followed by an eventual low point, Bunny’s murder. This melancholic atmosphere suggests to readers that what Richard will experience during his time at Hampden University will be dark. These experiences during his very first night at Hampden-town serve to establish a dark, exclusive, and despondent atmosphere and create sympathy from the readers to distort their immediate interpretation of Richard.
This bleak atmosphere is further strengthened through Donna Tartt’s peculiar word choices to display the hyper-specific imagery within the passage. For example, Tartt decided to make Richard’s room a “white room with big north-facing windows, monkish and bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret’s” (Tartt 13). She chose for the room to be white, simple, and pure like a monk with a roof like a garret’s – an old English-related word for a small room in an attic seen in Victorian homes – which is an archaic yet beautiful design (OED). All of these word choices not only provide further evidence for this being a foreshadowing of the future, but they also begin to build a certain dark aesthetic.
All over the internet today, there are many different aesthetics formed by online groups that feel that a certain aesthetic represents them very well. This group believes it is an effective way to represent who they are as a person. One aesthetic we are seeing rise is the dark and dreary, yet elegant and classic style of Dark Academia. This imagery of an old, nostalgic room combined with the gloomy and self-reflective feelings is the perfect atmosphere for the Dark Academia aesthetic as it is displayed online today. This brings the true meaning of the passage and the book as a whole to another perspective. Perhaps this book is a message that everyone within every section of their life has a difference between how they appear and who they realistically are.All of these emotions demonstrated throughout this passage serve to distort how readers perceive Richard and create a false sense of sympathy. The sympathy due to the dark presage of his future causes readers to view the events throughout The Secret History as Richard being manipulated by everyone in his Greek group to do specific actions. While this is true, he is not totally innocent and causes readers to overall misjudge his character. To further show the true meaning behind this passage of the text, I have created a drawing that portrays these colors and the segments of Richard’s life which they represent. The best way to accurately perceive the true meaning of a book is to remember who your narrator is and determine if they are reliable. Richard, with all of his lying tendencies, is certainly not a reliable narrator. When enjoying books such as The Secret History, it is important for readers to make sure to decide for themselves how innocent every character is by viewing it from multiple perspectives and eventually drawing their own inferences and making a unique observation that they agree with.
Works Cited:
- “garret, n.1.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/76861. Accessed 13 February 2023.
- Pliny. Letters of Pliny the Younger, ToposText, 1910, https://topostext.org/work/198. Accessed 13 February 2023.
- “soprano, n. (and adj.).” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2022, www.oed.com/view/Entry/184812. Accessed 13 February 2023.
- Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. Penguin, 2006.
The passage from the text: “It never occurred to me that my particular room… would be anything
but ugly and disappointing and it was with something of a shock that I saw it for the first time – a white room with big north-facing windows, monkish and bare, with scarred oak floors and a ceiling slanted like a garret’s. On my first night there, I sat on the bed during the twilight while the walls went slowly from gray to gold to black, listening to a soprano’s voice climb dizzily up and down somewhere at the other end of the hall until at last the light was completely gone, and the faraway soprano spiraled on and on in the darkness like some angel of death, and I can’t remember the air ever seeming as high and cold and rarefied as it was that night, or ever feeling farther away from the low-slung lines of dusty Plano” (13).