Compare and contrast the ways in which Plath and Tartt make use of the ancient world in

their work.

The ancient world is used by both writers as a corruptive ideal, who use it to explore
beauty and terror, suffering and the human condition. Tarrt depicts as a vividly potent force
to be treated with caution in fear of the suffering it can cause in the pursuit of idealism; Plath
ivokes its iconography as inert witnesses to her isolation within the modern world.

The dreadful beauty is established thematically and narratively, in the first epigram, ‘i.
A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are. ii. He does not know
whether he is suited for finding out about them.’ 1 Nietzsche establishes the novel as a
cautionary tale; the retrospective framing device of the novel constantly reminds us of this.
The textual fascination with beauty and terror is implicitly linked to the ancient world: Henry
avers that ‘death is the mother of beauty’2, citing the deaths of Agamemnon, and Dido. From
the outset, beauty is connected to death in the moral and visual context of the ancient world.
This is further established when Camilla cuts her foot whilst wading in a river; ‘A dark plume
of blood blossomed by her foot, a thin red tendril…undulating in the water like a crimson
thread’3. The blood has an alluring life of its own: the description is headily reminiscent of
ekphrasis4 of classical art, reienforced by Richard’s musings on Camilla directly before the
incident, ‘a living reverie…infinite range of fantasy, from Greek to Gothic. 5’. Richard is
'readily intoxicated with beauty: human, natural or poetic 6', he conflates the three in Camilla,
and idealizes the beauty of the ancient world through violence inflicted upon her.

In the bacchanal, beauty's success depends upon death. Described as ‘heart

shaking…changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible7’, the language itself is
Euripidean: the absolutes used emphasise the extremity of feeling, yet the darker side glares
beneath the surface. In a modern world, their ‘Greek-tragedy infused narrative of
themselves’8, will have a comeuppance. Their narrative pursues them like Orestes’ furies9. A
psychoanalytical approach might confirm the groups’ growing addiction the ideal of terrible
beauty as conducive to their burgeoning destruction; Bunny’s death itself seems to have a
consumptive affect, the beauty of nature marred by the horror of the act. ‘No wind, not a bird
1
The Secret History, first epigram
2
The Secret History pg. 41
3
The Secret History pg. 107
4
Description of art as a literary device
5
The Secret History pg. 107
6
John Mullan, The Guardian, Ten Reasons Why We Love Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, 2013
7
The Secret History pg. 187
8
Emily Temple, via lithub, ‘A Close Reading of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’’ 2020
9
Spirits who hound the tragic hero Orestes for his crimes, in Aeschylus’ play

1
sang…dogwood blossoms poised…10’; the woods bearing witness with a callousness.
Bunny’s appearance into the woods is deliberately at odds with the morbid serenity, ‘like
someone ducking into a doorway on a city street 11’, yet it fits horribly into the brutalist
tableau: clad in a ‘tremendous yellow rain slicker that came almost to his ankles 12’, he is
reminiscent of a wicker man13; his inebriated state is reminiscent of the induced delirium of
sacrifice victims.

Plath herself contemplated the imagery of sacrifice as a means of purification; in

Edge, she explores the sacrifice of herself and her children in order to reclaiming the
posthumous identity denied to her in life. ’The woman is perfected. Her dead/ Body wears a
smile of accomplishement14’. Plath’s dead subject is likened to a statue with, ‘flows in the
scrolls of her toga’15; either the final act of an obsessed artist, or a woman devoid of identity;
beauty becomes an ideal, the terror of which is not in its potency, but its hollowness. There
is a Medea-esque dimension: Plath imagines her children as ‘(each)…a white serpent/ One
at each little /Pitcher of milk 16’. There is biblical imagery beside the classical tableau: the
snake in the garden withered and robbed of its ability to corrupt, her children entirely hers in
death and severed from their affiliation to Ted Hughes. The enjambement between the
couplets generates a sense of thoughts with a staccato flow; individually disrupted, but part
of the same theme, the ‘discursive17’ modern mind Richard remarks on. The twisted maternal
imagery is conveyed in the milk glasses, ‘now empty 18’, implied to have poisoned the
children. Harrowingly, in her suicide six days after Edge was written, Plath would indeed
leave milk out for her children before asphyxiating herself. Like the group's self-wrought
classical narrative, Plath mythologised her own life; not with the ancient world coming alive
and consuming her, but with its abandoned symbols; ‘the moon…used to this sort of thing 19’;
agnostically uncaring, inferring her isolation.

Plath invokes the ancient world as a font of imagery through which the
mythologisation of her misery can be communicated. Lady Lazarus references the
resurrection miracle20; Plath upturns this image, conceptualising her suffering as a

10
The Secret History, pg. 298
11
The Secret History, pg. 301
12
The Secret History, pg. 301
13
Effigy of Ancient Celtic (human) sacrifice
14
Sylvia Plath, Edge
15
Sylvia Plath, Edge
16
Sylvia Plath, Edge
17
The Secret History, pg. 30
18
Sylvia Plath, Edge
19
Sylvia Plath, Edge
20
Christ resurrecting Lazarus in the Bible

2
voyeuristic carnival in which her multiple suicide attempts are performed. The tercet stanzas
are in free verse, with only accidental rhymes; each decade may be different, but it follows
the same pattern. Plath imagines herself as in a sarcophagus about to be uncovered, ‘see/
Them unwrap me hand and foot, the big striptease 21’, the disquiet she feels at her forced
exposition emphasised as she refers to the aftermath of her second suicide attempt; ‘rocked
shut/ As a sea shell…pick the worms off me like sticky pearls 22’, the sea shell and pearl
imagery immediately reminiscent of Aphrodite; the Birth of Venus23 is transposed to the
Death of Sylvia. Bellot describes Lady Lazarus’ fate as ‘a failure at once triumphant, in that
she gets to live again, and tragic for the same reason 24’. Plath clearly views her prolonged
suffering as a tragic performance; ‘Dying/Is an art25’ she proclaims, and yet when a feminist
lens is applied, it seems that not all is lost: her survival allows for a chance at a rebirth
palatable to her. In the final stanza, Lady Lazarus is likened to a Phoenix, an ancient Greek
symbol of hope and renewal, this time with a twist: ‘I eat men like air26’. Revenge for Plath’s
stolen identity becomes the focaliser, and she expounds upon her anger through the method
of classical allegory.

This is also apparent in Daddy, wherein Plath presents an Elektra Complex 27

idealizing her dead father and indulging in her suffering. Plath puts forward the same
beatification through pain: her victimisation is made apparent in her identification with Jewish
holocaust victims. Highly controversial even in 1962, it creates a binary morality through
which the proof of moral quality is victimhood and subjugation. The repeated ‘oo’ sound
which marks out the meter and is present in every quatrain, emphasises how Plath felt
infantilised by her father and her husband. The poem is perversely elegiac; it echoes
Catullus’ ‘Odi et Amo28’, in her pathological send-off to her father, ‘Daddy, daddy, you
bastard, I’m through29’. The Elektral implication of their relationship can be further explored
earlier in the poem, when she fantasises, ‘Daddy, I have had to kill you/…/ a head in the
freakish Atlantic30’, making herself akin to Salōmé31; the ancient world and its imagery used
as a thematic lingua franca through which her inner turmoil can be explained, but neither the
cause, nor the conduit of it.
21
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
22
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
23
Botticelli’s painting, based off of the classical myth
24
Gabrielle Bellot, via lithub.com, ‘On Sylvia Plath and the Many Shades of Depression’, 2018
25
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
26
Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
27
The tragic heroine of Sophocles’ play, who mourns her dead father and idolises her brother in his place, as
she plots to kill her mother in revenge
28
Catullus 84 ‘I hate and I love’
29
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
30
Sylvia Plath, Daddy
31
A biblical figure, who dances for her step-father and is thus allowed to claim the head of John the Baptist

3
 Conversely, the group’s association with it gives them respite from the exigencies of
modern life, but their over-identification is what leads them down a path of suffering. Like
Plath idolising her father, the group seems to regard Julian as a spiritual leader; Richard’s
description of his office invokes the religious, comparing it to ‘those little Byzantine churches
that are so plain on the outside; inside, the most paradisal painted eggshell of gilt 32. When he
abandons the pedestal they have placed him on, it cuts with betrayal. Henry himself
confesses, ‘I loved him more than my own father…more than anyone in the world’33;
paralleling Plath’s feelings of betrayal over her own father’s death when she was a child. The
idealised mentor-student/parent-child relationship34 is deconstructed to reveal broken
children and absent adults. Charles becomes a volatile alcoholic, whose clash with Henry
results in the destabilisation of the group, whilst Camilla and Francis are stigmatized
because of their sexual relationships35, whilst Richard, the observer who did not take part in
the rituals, watches haplessly as everything falls apart. ‘Who is in control here…who is flying
this plane36.

As the group grow more disparate, the comforting ritual engagement with the ancient
world provided vanishes; they have become lost within Dionysus, but also lost to him. Such
is the cost of this ‘kind of personal legend37’, as termed by Emily Temple, referencing the
groups self-mythologising, which runs as a parallel to their actions throughout the novel: the
attempts at presentiment are particularly harrowing when considered in the context of the
retroactive framing device. In a Faustian way, their desires come true; Bunny wants to ‘live
forever38’, dying first but enduring as a revenant in the group’s collective memory, whilst
Henry decides to ‘do what is necessary’39, intending to enrich himself through bacchic ritual,
but ending up dying to save the group, assuming the role of a modern messiah.

Above all, both Tartt and Plath use to ancient world to narrate the human condition,
and the subsequent desire to escape it. Tartt idealises the ancient world as both spiritually
and intellectually elevated, and to be accessed through ritualistic communion that sheds the
bounds of modern conformity. ‘to escape…to transcend the accident of one’s moment of
being40’ is how Henry describes the ultimate goal of the bacchanal. The description of the
32
The Secret History, pg. 28
33
The Secret History, pg. 586
34
The mentor-student relationship was part of Ancient Athens’ idealised social structure
35
Francis is homosexual, whilst Camilla is in an incestuous relationship with her brother
36
The Secret History, pg. 588
37
Emily Temple, via lithub, ‘A Close Reading of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’’ 2020
38
The Secret History, pg. 42
39
The Secret History, pg. 78
40
The Secret History, pg. 182

4
ritual itself is the most vivid piece of prose in the novel, told through long passages of
dialogue, a rarity amid Tartt’s largely descriptive style, and it is brimming with verbs to create
an incredibly active sequence; the usual verbose adjectives dispensed with; the ancient
world is not to be longed for with painstaking imagination, it is here, present and freeing. The
experience itself is compared to ‘the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self 41’, a
sense of the self-becoming master over the world, contrary to Plath’s feeling of oppression,
when viewed through a psychoanalytic lens, it shows that the group’s ultimate desire for
escapism is one paradoxically linked to control; their abandonment is one wherein they gain
mastery over a different dimension; the ancient world, so long abandoned and now theirs for
the taking, not through scholarly ritual but in a palpable sense. Mills describes them as an
‘elite within an elite42’, and that is especially true here, where their escape from the human
condition of communicated in their becoming akin to demigods controlling their own self-
perception. Sophrosynē43 was a prized virtue in the ancient world, but the group take it to the
extreme, exerting it over the animal world too; they imagine ‘chasing a deer through the
woods, for miles it seemed44’, hunters in a spirit world, pursuing their destiny of their own
terms, and for perhaps the only time in the novel, truly empowered by the ancient world.

Plath also imagines herself on a wild chase, but hers communicates her utter sense
of loss and a trajectory into oblivion. Ariel describes Plath’s morbid exhilaration as she rides
her horse, akin to the steeds of one of the four horsemen 45, further and further into the ‘red/
Eye, the cauldron of morning46’ the imagery primordial, and of creation as much as
destruction. The tercets has a rhythmic meter, reminiscent of horse hooves, and lending an
aural edge of inevitability. Plath compares herself to Godiva 47, whose public humiliation is
the deliverance of her people from unjust laws; re-establishing her good-evil paradigm
wherein her morality is determined by her victimhood. She wishes, however, to be more than
a victim; when viewed through a feminist lens, the repetitive ‘i/ei’ sounds throughout the
second half of the poem are an insistence at identity. Assured that she will find freedom in
48
death; Plath rephrases Ariel as ‘God’s lioness49’, perhaps viewing her death as an
apotheosis. The transcendental feeling present in the groups description of the bacchanal is

41
The Secret History, pg. 187
42
Sophie Mills, The American Classical League, via JSTOR, What does she think of us? Donna Tartt and the
image of classics, 2005
43
Greek virtue of self-control over one’s desires, emotions, and temporal conditions
44
The Secret History, pg. 188
45
Of the apocalypse
46
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
47
Lady Godiva, a figure of Old English folklore, who rides naked through Coventry so that her husband will
reduce the taxes he levies
48
Ariel is Hebrew for God’s Lion
49
Sylvia Plath, Ariel

5
still there, but whilst they master the world and seek to further explore it, she is hellbent on
leaving it. Robles states that ‘in the course of a few stanzas, Plath is like a god 50’, but whilst
her metaphorical shapeshifting from woman-to-horse-to-lioness-to-‘wheat, a glitter of seas 51’-
to-‘the arrow/The dew that flies52’, certainly has elements of the supernatural and reminds of
Thetis’53 multiple transformations to escape being raped by her husband, it seems to be
more Plath’s various attempts to finds a shape that suits both the world’s desires and her
own happiness, and ultimately finding peace in being ‘suicidal, at one with the drive 54’.
Written on her thirtieth birthday, roughly a year before her death, Plath by that point in her
life genuinely desired to die. The presence of the ancient world is communicated throughout
imagery that brings her closer and closer to death: in mythologising the psychological
process of her suicide, she places her end on a pedestal alongside the ancient world itself.

Ultimately, Tartt’s use of the ancient world is as a communion; it is all at once a

cautionary tale, a road to spiritual revelation, an implement of beauty and perception, a drug
and a road to ruin. Plath’s confessional poetry, with her binary morality and self-victimisation,
seems more like a hagiography, wherein her death is long projected, and the journey of her
suicidal ideation can be tracked through her words. Both writers employ fate, particularly in
the shape of a self-constructed narrative, as a key theme in their respective works, upheld
through the context of the ancient world.

The biggest similarity, as well as the biggest difference, is that whilst both writers use
the ancient world to idealised othe design for the immaculacy of beauty and terror, both
illustrate the human condition of suffering; Tartt’s is as part of a cautionary fictional narrative,
and Plath’s was very, very real.

Bibliography

50
Lilian G Robles, inquiriesjournal.com, Post-Structuralism of Female Identity in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, 2020
51
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
52
Sylvia Plath, Ariel
53
Sea nymph, and mother of Achilles
54
Sylvia Plath, Ariel

6
Primary Texts:
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel. US Version: Faber, 2001
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History: Penguin, 1992.

Secondary Texts:
Bellot, Gabrielle. ‘On Sylvia Plath and the Many Shades of Depression’: via lithub.com, 2018
Mills, Sophie. What does she think of us? Donna Tartt and the Image of Classics: The
American Classical League, via JSTOR, 2005
Mullan John., Ten Reasons Why We Love Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: The Guardian,
2013
Robles, Lilian G. Post-Structuralism of Female Identity in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel:
inquiriesjournal.com, 2020
Temple, Emily. A Close Reading of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History: via lithub, 2020

Wordcount:
1998 (without title, quotations from primary texts, footnotes, and bibliography)