The Secret History

From the first chapter of The Secret History, the concept of beauty casts an ominous shadow. The narrator, Richard Papen, opens the novel with the reflection that his “fatal flaw” is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” (7). He thus suggests that he has done something terrible—or, at very least, something costly—to fulfill his “longing for the picturesque.” Richard highlights Julian’s classics lessons wherein the “morbid” commingles with “the picturesque.” Julian expounds that “[d]eath is the mother of beauty” (39) and that “beauty [is] terror” (39), and Richard begins to notice signs of these philosophies in all aspects of his environment: from the dark decay of red autumn leaves to the cold beauty of Camilla’s voice as she recites a speech from the murderous Clytemnestra in Agamemnon.

The ultimately murderous bacchanals thrown by Henry, Camilla, Charles, and Francis likewise attempt to make meaning by commingling of beauty and terror, for their debauches are designed to allow them to throw off the boundaries of social rules and embrace an altered state of frenzy in which any action becomes possible. Thus, this radical activity based upon Julian’s teachings ultimately causes the students to create a macabre marriage of death and beauty, for their frenzied bacchanals eventually result in the accidental death of an innocent bystander, a Vermont farmer. Although Julian is not directly involved in the students’ practices, he actively encourages Henry to lead the students in these bacchanals, and the ideas they enact arise from Julian’s teachings. Therefore, the professor is himself indirectly responsible for the results of their activities, and because they base their actions upon his teachings, the students attempt to imbue even their accidental killing of the farmer with a sense of beauty and fate, illustrating just how far they have immersed themselves in the radical ideals of Julian’s views on classical beauty. As Henry says in his attempt to rationalize his murderous actions, “[Vermont is] a primitive place” where “people die violent natural deaths all the time” (170). His sentiments are an attempt to mirror Julian’s earlier comments in class, for the professor himself states, “The country people who live around me are fascinating because their lives are so closely bound to fate that they really are predestined” (29).

Ultimately, however, the classics students find that it is more difficult to extract pure beauty or meaning from their calculated and cold-blooded murder of Bunny, for no matter what affectations they may have of melding death and beauty, the fact remains that Bunny’s death is a result of their attempts to escape culpability for the murder of the farmer. Furthermore, unlike the unknown farmer, Bunny occupies a complex position in their imaginations, for he is both a friend and an enemy, both a close companion and a problematic presence with which they had to contend in order to escape justice for their own crimes.

Despite the high-sounding ideals that Julian’s classes promote, the professor’s cowardly abandonment of his students, his position, and his program upon learning of Bunny’s murder leaves the group with a profound sense of loss and disillusionment, as his cowardice demystifies and invalidates the very essence of his teachings. By extension, Richard believes that Henry shoots himself in order to reclaim some semblance of beauty and meaning. As his narration explains, “I think he felt the need to make a noble gesture, something to prove to us and to himself that it was in fact possible to put those high cold principles Julian had taught us to use” (544).