Originally published in print, September 2021.
Illustration by Linde Vergeylen.
Picture the scene: Oxford brogues on cobblestones, a brown leather satchel stuffed with classic European novels, turtlenecks and blazers underneath the melancholic gloom of autumnal skies. It is, in a word, picturesque – the “morbid longing” for which Richard Papen, narrator of Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History, considers his fatal flaw. This too is the fatal flaw of the subculture it spawned. The Secret History, set on a fictional New England campus and depicting a brutal murder that ruptures a tight-knit group of classics students, is the foundational text for the online trend of “dark academia”, which foregrounds books and learning in a highly stylised, vintage-inspired manner. While TikTok has ushered in a new era of popularity for the subculture of late, it has existed on Tumblr and Instagram for nearly a decade.
The central paradox of The Secret History’s entanglement with dark academia, however, is that dark academia is enamoured with all that which the novel attempts to criticise. None of the characters in the novel, while interesting and compelling, are anything to aspire to. The romanticisation of academic obsession, and the destructive nature of the friendships forged in the midst of this obsession, leads inevitably to tragedy. The narrator, Richard, spends much of the latter half of the novel ruminating on the nature of beauty and the banality of evil (all the while narrowly avoiding being arrested as an accessory to murder). None of the central characters that survive the events of the novel end it on a happy note. The warning delivered in The Secret History is deliciously melodramatic, and this earnest yet stylish engagement with melodrama is central to the novel’s enduring charm.
While Tartt’s lush, moody novel is the seminal text of dark academia, as a visual aesthetic it is informed primarily by films like Dead Poets Society (1989) and Kill Your Darlings (2013). None of these texts feature any main characters of colour, and the two films also lack meaningful representation of women. The canon that the characters so revere is composed almost entirely of white men. That being said, dark academia’s status as a primarily online subculture, propagated by individuals of all backgrounds, lends it an accessibility it would otherwise lack. Anyone, should they be in possession of a vintage typewriter, a checked blazer, or an iPhone photo app with a grainy filter, can engage with it.
Dark academia thrives on an attractively timeless quality, taking its style inspiration from menswear of the 1930s and 40s, conjuring up cobbled streets and the candlelit sills of frosted windows. Trinity’s own Long Room is a centrepiece of many dark academia moodboards. Shots abound of the wrought iron spiral staircase, the curving vault of the ceiling, and the stern marble casts of learned men standing vigil over the spines of countless leatherbound books, matching the dark academia aesthetic almost to the point of parody. It’s all very romantic — and ridiculous when one is aware that the majority of teaching in the Humanities takes place instead in the Arts Building, that concrete-clad behemoth of postmodernity squatting sullenly across the lawn.
The Secret History is aware of this exact paradox. The character of Judy Poovey, who has “wild clothes, frosted hair, a red Corvette with California plates bearing the legend JUDY P”, swoops into the narrative on occasion like a garish spectre of the eighties, offering Richard cocaine in a Burger King car park. She is a breath of fresh air amidst the drudgery of reckoning with terrible guilt and avoiding a murder charge. At the end of the novel, Richard informs us that she is working as an aerobics instructor on the cable TV programme “Power Moves!”.
Dark academia, therefore, is by necessity a highly curated aesthetic, a pastiche easily disrupted by foreign bodies, such as ugly canvas schoolbags and BIC highlighters. One might photograph a wilting bouquet of baby’s-breath next to a second-hand copy of Dostoevsky or a brown leather journal, all set carelessly on a battered, scuffed end-table — while a discarded pair of Nike leggings or a hot pink laptop case lurk, ghoulishly modern, just behind the camera. The mundane realities of student life always poses a threat; the sepia-filtered façade, however pleasing to create, can’t last.
Or, as another dead European man, Cicero (who was a dusty old fart in 50BC, never mind AD2021), coined: esse quam videri, “to be, rather than to seem”. Richard Papen’s fatal longing for the picturesque aside, dark academia, like all online aesthetics, has its own fatal flaw, its own “showy dark crack” that impedes critical self-reflection: it is, at its core, much more concerned with seeming, rather than with being.
