Beauty In Donna Tartt's The Secret History

The Secret History: theme of beauty.

Donna Tartt’s novel, The Secret History, is a story about a small group of college students studying Greek. A major theme of this novel is beauty, illustrated by the students fascination with the concept, the lengths taken to achieve it, and the narrator, whose romanticised interpretation of the world around him was used to hide the harsh edges of everything that he considered to be beautiful. .

Early into the novel, the group’s teacher, Julian tells the class: “beauty is terror. Whatever is beautiful, we quiver before it”. This is the first direct exposure that the reader gets of the theme. In the epilogue, Richard recounts the first sentence he ever learnt in Greek, “beauty is harsh”. These two statements

The chapter opens with the following paragraph: “does such thing as ‘the fatal flaw’, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing of the picturesque at all costs”. This statement is Richard’s admittance into his strive to see or create a false sense of beauty in his surroundings.

Richard moved to Hampden College as an attempt at escaping his depressing home life, creating a new identity for himself and pretending to have had a wealthy typical Californian childhood, rather than the truth: that he grew up isolated in a small town with a low class and careless family.

As well as changing his own identity to come across as more appealing to his peers, he tended to idolise people, his idea of them making them seem ethereal and almost godlike. This occurred particularly with the Greek group. At first, Richard sees them from a distance, describing them as unapproachable and also as having “a variety of picturesque and fictive qualities”. He became fascinated by them, this fascination continuing throughout their