Rope And Donna Tartt's The Secret History

Compare the ways in which Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History explore the idea of the philosophy, crime and justice.
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Throughout Rope and The Secret History, Alfred Hitchcock and Donna Tartt explore the philosophy of crime and justice. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History opens in medias res with a chilling recount of a group of classics students pushing a classmate off a precipice to his death. Similarly, Rope opens with Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan strangling an old friend and hiding the body as they prepare a dinner party. Though Tartt recounts the events that lead to the murder of Bunny Corcoran as well as the unsettling aftermath of the incident, Hitchcock explores the aftermath of the murder of David Kentley

To the ancient Greeks, the ending of The Secret History shows natural justice through the miserable ends the group meets as Richard Papen narrates Charles’s alcoholism, Camilla being isolated with her elderly relations in Virginia, Henry’s suicide, Francis’s suicide attempt and arranged marriage, and his own ending – stuck back in a small Californian town with no money and no hope. In this, Tartt provides a different justice to Hitchcock, whose characters, Brandon Shaw and Phillip Morgan, are caught with the body of their murdered classmate by their professor and turned into the police as the film reaches its conclusion. Both Hitchcock and Tartt explore the guilt as a consequence of crime through the characterisation of Phillip Morgan and Charles Macaulay. The effects of the murder are immediately obvious when both Charles and Phillip, both take to alcohol to steady their nerves and mask the depth of their guilt. Though over a more extensive period to Rope, The Secret History’s Charles Macaulay spends the aftermath of the murder spiralling into alcoholism to deal with his guilt. His drinking causes him to become increasingly violent and even abusive towards his sister, Camilla, in the latter half of the novel. Tartt explores how, as the most empathetic

Tartt’s character of Julian Morrow holds a significant sway over the actions of the Greek class as all the pupils view him as a father figure - Henry Winter, the leader of the group, most especially. Similarly, Phillip Morgan and Brandon Shaw are influenced by their professor, Rupert Cadell, whose philosophy impacted heavily on their formative years. In both cases, it is not entirely the philosophy of their professors that leads to the murders but the influence of the characters Henry Winter and Brandon Shaw. Both Henry and Brandon revere their professors and take their word as gospel – a fault which leads them to extreme decisions and consequences. In the conclusion of each text, both professors discover the crimes of their students and are let down by the fact that their students, the ones they believed would be able to full grasp their philosophies, were unable to distinguish between a concept and