The Secret History
Donna Tartt (1992)
“A novel that tells you the murder on the first page — and then makes you complicit in it.”
Characters in The Secret History
by Donna Tartt · 1992 · 6 characters analyzed
Cast: Richard Papen, Henry Winter, Edmund 'Bunny' Corcoran, Francis Abernathy, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, Julian Morrow.
Character Analysis
Working-class California student who reinvents himself at Hampden and is absorbed into the group through a combination of longing and moral pliability. He is neither the most guilty nor the least guilty party; he is the most human — the one who feels the pull between desire and conscience most visibly, and who fails both most completely. His narration is the novel's ethical problem: it is eloquent, sympathetic, and probably not entirely honest.
Literary, aspirational — his narration is more sophisticated than his dialogue, which occasionally reveals his California origins. He has learned the group's register without fully owning it.
The novel's most frightening character because he is the most coherent: his philosophy is consistent, his aesthetics are genuine, and his logic is impeccable. He is what Julian's pedagogy produces when applied without remainder. He loves beauty with complete sincerity and is completely indifferent to the human cost of that love. He is also, in his way, genuinely admirable — the most intelligent person in any room he occupies. The admiration is what makes him terrifying.
Precise, formal, uncontracted — his speech is almost legal in its exactness. He speaks as though every word has been considered and chosen. He rarely uses metaphor; he prefers the declarative statement.
The novel's most human character — flawed, funny, warm, prejudiced, financially reckless, and possessed of a social genius that makes him genuinely lovable. He is also the character most transparently in need of other people, which is what makes his murder so devastating. He did not deserve to die. This is not complicated. And yet Tartt makes you understand, completely, why Henry decided he had to.
Gay, wealthy, anxious, and possessed of a wit that functions as armor. Francis is the group's social lubricant and its most emotionally fragile member. His suicide attempt is the novel's first visible collapse, and his survival is depicted without triumph — he manages, which is the best that can be said.
Witty, nervous, prone to camp — he deploys wit as a defense mechanism and classical knowledge as a shield. His humor is his most human quality and the first thing that fails him.
Treated by Tartt as almost a single character bifurcated — their separateness is a loss rather than a natural state. The incestuous relationship is handled with more psychological precision than shock value: Tartt is interested in what intimacy without boundary produces over time, not in the taboo for its own sake. Camilla is perhaps the novel's greatest mystery — Richard loves her, the reader half-loves her, and she remains finally unknowable.
The most dangerous character in a novel full of dangerous people, because his danger is entirely through influence rather than action. He does not kill anyone. He simply teaches, brilliantly and sincerely, that beauty and transcendence are the highest values — and then leaves when his students act on that teaching. He is the novel's indictment of a certain kind of aesthetic education: genuinely valuable, genuinely beautiful, and profoundly irresponsible.
Formal, beautiful, slightly archaic — he sounds like a man who reads more Greek than English. His sentences are long and constructed, his compliments are classical, his criticism comes dressed as aesthetic observation.