The Not-so-Secret Literary History of Dark Academia

        

        Blood. Tweed. Marble.

In 2021, most teenagers can recognize the Dark Academia (DA) aesthetic. Its vintage, earth-toned fashions and morbid curiosities appear frequently on Tiktok and Tumblr. But unlike other aesthetic subcultures on those platforms, DA has deep literary roots. Since art and history inspire many works of Dark Academia, digging up the genre’s messy origins can answer a few of its most common questions and criticisms: why is everyone so rich, for example? And what’s with the murder?

The undisputed founder of the genre is Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History, which follows a working-class narrator at a fictional liberal arts college who gets swept up in the murderous machinations of an elite clique of classics students. Many modern Dark Academics admire the lifestyles of the novels characters: #TSH on tumblr turns up thousands of fanmixes and moodboards, as well as other DA content.

The Secret History exposes the underbelly of society—in this case, Tartt’s über-privileged alma mater. Elite settings are a staple of DA novels like M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains and Mona Awad's Bunny. In an article for Book Riot, Zoe Robertson claims that “privilege pushed to the extreme” forms the ethos of DA literature. “Going to university is a privilege, of course, but now actual murderers can escape and hide from their crimes due to financial privilege, too.” Like latter-day Leopolds and Loebs, characters in DA literature use money and intellect to “transcend” traditional morality.

Of course, the murderers in The Secret History—dubbed “the classics clique” by their fanbase—don’t escape unscathed. Their all-too-human flaws begin to show, and the group splinters in a climax that leaves the reader wondering if maybe they shouldn’t take that Latin elective after all (not that DA hasn’t inspired some people to try). 

So what is DA literature: escapist or critical, elitist or subversive?

It’s all that and more: it’s gothic.

While the word “gothic” has meant several things across history, in this case it refers to a literary style popular in Europe in the early 19th century. Gothic writers drew inspiration from history and the classics (so does DA), escaping from the industrial world to a “purer,” more feudal time. They wrote about medieval nobles and embraced the irrational beauty of the natural world. Science, meanwhile, was anathema.

Gothic literature was a reaction to the Enlightenment, a movement that emphasized intellect and rationality. The protagonist of Mary Shelley’s 1818 Gothic novel Frankenstein uses forbidden knowledge to break a societal taboo—in this case, unnatural creation—and begets a beautiful, Plutarch-reading monster. The triumph of reason, writes historian Richard Davenport-Hines in his book Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin, disquieted “those who believed that fear could be sublime” (3).

More than 150 years after Frankenstein’s publication, the protagonists of The Secret History are discussing aesthetics and philosophy. Henry Winter, a somber prodigy, declares that “Death is the mother of beauty” (37).

By the novel’s end, he will have killed three men. “And what is beauty?” his professor inquires.

“Terror.”