Losing Control; An Analysis of The Terror in

Beauty in Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History.’

“ ‘We don’t like to admit it,’ said Julian, 'but the idea of losing control is one that
fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. It’s a very Greek
idea … Beauty is terror … and what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls
like the Greeks and to our own, than to lose control completely.’ ”

An Essay by Aliza Shahzad

     Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ has fascinated readers for years since its

publishing, and it continues to do so even now. A thrilling story about six students at an

elite college in Vermont. The book is famously a why-dun-it opposed to the classic who-

dun-it. 

     It’s widely credited for being the ‘staple’ novel for the ‘dark academia’ genre-which is

essentially a subculture dedicated to poetry or writing, the longing for knowledge,

anything dark and gothic and related to Greek tragedies-all of which are prevalent in The

Secret History.

     We know from the prologue of the book that 5 of the 6 close-knit group of students

have murdered Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran, but their reason to do this is what remains a

mystery. It is through this process of guilt, isolation and paranoia that Donna Tartt

explores the darker and more esoteric side of immersing yourself in something as toxic as

the morbid desire for the picturesque. 

     We follow our narrator, Richard Papen, as he explores his friendship with five

Classics students at Hampden College in Vermont. How he is so fascinated by them, to a

point where he nearly idolizes them. The lifestyles and how these five students-Henry

Winter, Francis Abernathy, Edmund Corcoran and Charles and Camilla Macaulay-are

portrayed is something Richard, and I as a reader, found perfectly fit to the aesthetic

putting aside however much unrealistic they might be. We find that he succumbs to peer

pressure in many ways, engaging in their ways of alcoholism and casual drug use. 

     But before all of them fall down the rabbit hole of madness and murder, we see the

group of friends through Richard’s eyes. He’s enthralled by them, longs to live like them

and only sees them through the eyes of an admirer. They are taught by a peculiar teacher,

Julian Morrow, whose influence can be clearly seen on his students. Henry seems to also

idolize their teacher to the point where he calls him a ‘divinity’. What made Richard

initially want to join Morrow and have him as his teacher was the fact that he limited

himself to just 5 students. Yet, after persisting, Richard lands a spot with the five other

students who would evidently shape his future.

     Where this all goes downhill is when Henry confides in Richard, admitting to the fact

that the group of friends, excluding Bunny, held a bacchanal-only to have it end by

drunkenly killing an innocent farmer. Said farmer whose purpose in the book has subtle

but important value if you pay attention to how little they were bothered by it, we never

even got the farmer’s name or what happened to his family or loved ones. It was as if

they murdered him purely for the aesthetic.

     When Bunny learns about this he’s irritated, even angered, at the fact that his friends

kept this from him. From this point on, he threatens to blackmail them. In this way,

Bunny was a walking liability by what he knew and what he chose to do with it. He held
Henry’s and the rest of the group’s fate in his hands, and the realization of it put them all

on edge. They were completely vulnerable to him to the point when Henry suggests that

they murder Bunny altogether. Hence, the group does so by pushing him off a ravine, not

completely thinking about the consequences.

     But everything catches up to them eventually. Though they never get caught, we see

how it all starts to affect them-like the muder of their friend was a drop of ink in the clear

water, ultimately it spread over everything. Charles succumbs to alcoholism and starts

assaulting his sister. Henry tries to help Camilla but then Charles blames the mess in their

lives entirely on him. This leads to Richard being shot and Henry killing himself.

     Now to the purpose of this essay; ‘Losing control.’ How does that go side by side with

beauty and terror in Tartt’s novel? There’s a very famous quote from the book which

goes as such, “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?” The idea of losing control of yourself is something seen here as

beautiful, as if it’s an ideal state of mind. It is beautifully described by Tartt as "to sing,

to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more

awareness of mortality than an animal!"

     We see these characters display how beauty and terror can be one. For example; the

group murder Bunny and push him off a ravine in the beginning of spring-we know that

through the descriptions of melting snow. The terror is the sinful act of murder itself, but

the beauty plays its part with the picturesque this action creates. Murder, the act of
deliberately taking a life and one that literature often associates with the cold winter, to

be performed in spring, the season of re-birth.

     It is the secret history of each of these students that leads them to the dangerous path

of isolation and alienation. The book could be described as a tragedy, but who exactly is

the tragic hero? Is it the narrator and outsider, Richard, or the perfectionist and erratic

Henry Winter? Perhaps even Bunny Corcoran, but we’ll never know. 

     Overall, it may definitely be said that the lifestyle of the students portrayed in The

Secret History is far from realistic, or even healthy in that matter. Nevertheless, the

disaster that was brought upon those who longed after the beauty in terror was inevitable.

[The End]