"A Morbid Longing for the Picturesque" : The Pursuit of Beauty in Donna Tartt's The Secret History

Sammanfattning: This essay analyzes the theme of the pursuit of beauty in The Secret History. It analyzes the main characters’ concept of beauty, their manner of seeking beauty, as well as the result of this search. For this analysis, I use Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories of the Apollonian and the Dionysian as outlined in The Birth of Tragedy and in scholarly texts that analyze TBT— which describe the Apollonian/Dionysian dichotomy as the opposed worlds of order and madness— to define the main characters’ concept of beauty. The narrator of the novel once says that “beauty is terror” (Tartt 45), a statement which paints beauty as harsh and shocking, and potentially destructive. Likewise, in this essay I argue that for these characters beauty is created through the interplay between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and that its pursuit leads to destruction. I analyze this through the characters of Richard Papen, Henry Winter, and Bunny Corcoran. Richard and Henry pursue beauty in that the actions they take are aimed at embodying an aesthetic ideal. In Richard’s case, it is his longing for beauty which leads him to imitate and join the classicists— particularly by mimicking their socio-economic class— and which eventually places him in a disordered Dionysian world of madness and murder. Henry, on the other hand, is the embodiment of Apollonian order, and it is his search for beauty through a bacchanal which leads him to commit murder twice and, eventually, to take his own life. Lastly, Bunny is different in that he is neither beautiful nor interested in beauty as his peers define it. It is because of this that he is excluded from the others’ pursuit of beauty, that he is murdered, and that his murder is justifiable in the eyes of his murderers. This study finds that, in The Secret History, where beauty is defined as the dance between Apollonian order and Dionysian madness, the Dionysian ends up as the victorious half of the dichotomy, causing the loss of reason and the triumph of destruction and disaster. This portrayal of beauty as destruction and vice versa, rather than serving as the vehicle for a moral indictment, is instead the very purpose of the novel.