We Must Cultivate Our Garden: Analysis of The Secret History
Throughout Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, the six students who study Greek—particular Henry, who is arguably the most dedicated to his studies—fall into practices and mindsets of this ancient culture. Isolated from contemporary society, they seek to liberate themselves from the constraints of societal norms through substance abuse and the elite belief that they are not just outside but above the rest of the population. However, these beliefs may not be wholly innocent, and they may not be representative of the six students as a whole; rather, they may be reflections of Henry’s ideals and philosophies manifested in the other students. The students wanted to escape reality, and Henry seemed to provide the way. But as the novel progresses, Henry becomes more controlling, and it becomes clearer that he is using people as pieces in his own personal game. In the end, Henry’s shadowed misguidance leads these characters to their ultimate punishment: the endless extension of the mundane and constrained lives they always feared they would live.
At the start of the novel, Henry is portrayed as a reserved person who may not have much desire for passion. Richard describes times Henry “walked stiffly...with the self-conscious formality of an old ballerina” and says that “he might have been handsome had his features not been less set, or his eyes, behind the glasses, less expressionless and blank” (18). From the beginning of the novel, Henry is depicted as uncomfortable in his body, less grounded, and in a sense, checked out from the current world and it’s events. However, he is soon noted to have higher aspirations. We learn that he idolizes his professor, Julien, and seeks to imitate him with simple acts such as purchasing the same fountain pen (34). This is the first we see Henry attempt to mimic someone or something he sees as a higher power. Soon after, he is also soon pointed out as a leader of the students. Not only do they turn to Henry for the final say in their Greek homework when Richard first meets them in the library. Henry also signifies himself as a mastermind when on the spot, for no real reason, he concocts a plan during class to take over Hampden “this afternoon, with six men” (37). He expresses here a desire to control something—in this case, Hampden—and easily creates a plot to do so. In this way, Henry is controlling from the start of the story, but he can be dismissed by the narrator until he is revealed as crucial. When Richard nearly freezes to death over his winter break in Hampden, Henry returns early and, in the words of the doctors, “saved my [Richard’s] life” (126). Henry becomes necessary to Richard’s survival and, in turn, exerts one of the earliest instances of his desire to control life and death by saving him not just from death, but from the cold. Henry gives Richard life as well as warmth in a physical and metaphorical sense, and it is from this point on that Henry becomes pivotal.
When the Dionysian ritual is revealed at the crux of the story, it is definitive proof that the Greek students (directed by Henry) are attempting to emulate an ancient spirituality. When Henry reveals to Richard that he, Francis, and the twins managed to hold the ritual, he explains that he was “obsessed with the idea” of losing himself and his cognitive predispositions (164). He does not say that anyone else involved had the same motivation and obsession, and he even explains how when Bunny was not as invested, he had no qualms about omitting him from the ritual. After Bunny’s death, he later expresses in his garden that he had this desire to lose himself in something extraordinary since he was younger—since he suffered his brain injury—and he sought this in the ritual. When the ritual is first discussed at the end of one of Julien’s lectures, he calls it the “fire of pure being” and explains how the Greeks desired to weave in and out of socially constructed norms, separate the two, and in turn “let God consume us...then spit us out reborn” (42). This concept or purity and or rebirth is what fascinates Henry and what causes him to lead his classmates (excluding Richard, the narrator, and later excluding Bunny) to seek this sort of rebirth. According to what Henry tells Richard in the garden, he felt that ecstacy of living without thinking when they killed the farmer during the ritual, and nothing in his eyes has mattered much since that experience. However, through killing a man in the Dionysian ritual, Henry experiences control over giving someone not just life, but death; it is this that allows him to experience a sense of purpose in the world.
Henry’s reactions to death are telling throughout the story. While at the beginning of the novel, he is deeply shaken by killing something as simple as a duck, this shifts once he kills the farmer. During the ritual, he experiences not just the power of giving life, but the power of giving death, and he is able to use it as a means to an end. He poisons dogs when plotting to kill Bunny and, for that matter, kills Bunny. He glorifies it; even when Richard finds him in the garden, he is killing spiders on his roses bushes and ridding the beautiful, idealized things of natural pests (491). The image of Henry as the gardener, the dictator in that small world over what lives in it and what dies, further portrays him as someone who relishes in control over life and death. Moments later, he even projects this glorification of death onto Richard who he says, like himself, doesn’t “feel a great deal of emotion for other people,” but experienced the ecstacy of living without thinking when the group killed Bunny at the ravine (493). Henry sees killing, an unconventional and morally wrong act in the eyes of most all civilized people, as a tool he can use for his benefit whether that benefit be covering up the original murder or simply the lively rush of control over life and death. He is willing to kill if he thinks it is necessary for the things he sees as worthy and beautiful to live. Within his garden, he appears at a sense of peace, and it is this sense of order which he is attempting to bring to the rest of the world.
Henry’s faith and fanaticism for his sole control over life and death complicates at the end of the novel when Charles appears in Camilla’s hotel room to kill Henry. Since Charles, in the ritual, came to his mind trying to dismember the farmer and also later killed the wasp at Bunny’s funeral, he may be seen in Henry’s eyes as a rival in his quest for control over the living and the dead. In the hotel, Henry takes the gun from Charles, protecting himself, and tells him that killing Henry will be “the stupidest thing you ever did in your life” (534). However, Henry takes the gun moments later and, to avoid facing the police knocking at the door, takes his own life. One may question; does Henry believe that the stupidest thing Charles could do is take a life that Henry, who has controlled most all death until this point, does not want to be lost? If this is true, then when Henry takes his own life, he does so to retain control; he would rather be dead at his own hand than beg for his life from the hand of another. This sort of thought is seen even when he is calm enough to take a moment to say goodbye to Camilla, who he says he loved. The goodbye romanticizes his death, seals himself to Camilla as if with a dying word, and marks her as his own—not property of Charles, whom Henry has fought with over Camilla since after Bunny’s funeral. Finally, when the bullets sink into Henry’s head, Richard describes Henry’s open mouth and last breath paralleled with the curtains suctioned by a draft to the screen of the open window (537). Even this creates the image of a soul escaping the world they created within the hotel room and, perhaps, escaping to a new birth that Henry has desired since he sought rebirth in the Dionysian ritual.
At the end of the novel, after Henry’s death, his memory still controls the lives of his peers. After his death, Henry reappears to other characters, in flashes, almost as a tortured ghost. Richard believes he sees Henry when Henry’s mother visits him in the hospital. Not only does he notice that the woman has Henry’s eyes—typically known to be a symbol of the soul—but he describes Henry standing in the corner of the room, dressed in his gardening clothes just as he was in one of the last conversations they had about life, and death, and fascination with those concepts. When Richard makes the connection between Henry’s eyes and his mother’s, he chooses to see it; he is, to an extent, still looking for Henry and perhaps his guidance. However, what is telling further is the image of Henry himself. Assuming that the ghostly image of Henry in the hospital was either a hallucination of some kind or an actual spector, Richard (or his subconscious) is haunted by Henry’s spirit. Likewise, Francis admits that when he bled in the bathtub upon attempting suicide, he believes he saw Henry saying, “Well, Francis, I hope you’re happy now” (553). One can assume that the reader is intended to accept this as Henry’s dialogue; after Francis tells Richard he believed he saw Henry chastising him as he bled, they discuss how “we believe in them [ghosts] every bit as much as Homer did. Only now we call them by a different name. Memory. The unconscious” (553). To these two who admit to seeing Henry after his death, the concoction of the unconscious and a literal ghost may as well be the same thing. In addition, the Homeric reference ties back to Henry’s first scene in the novel when he expresses a love for Homer; if the reader is told that Henry admires this writer and thinker, perhaps he is supposed to be read as a Homeric ghost (23). Therefore, Henry’s words to Francis are able to authentically portray Henry as bitter towards others who attempt to control life and death. This, perhaps, is because when Francis attempts to escape life, he is doing so because it is mundane and he has not tried to make it spectacular as Henry did. In this way, Henry sees death not as an escape from life but as a tool with which he can continue to exert control over his own life and that of others while, perhaps, continuing his journey in a different sort of existence.
Henry may not be able to control whether his peers are physically alive or dead from his ghostly position, but he may be able to control whether or not his living companions feel that they live in a richer, more metaphorical sense of the word. Within the epilogue, the students involved in Bunny’s murder fall into painful normalcy—in part because of Henry’s presence in their lives at one point, and in part because of his current absence. Without the purpose of Henry’s Dionysian ritual or some other religious attempt to lose himself, Charles becomes a typical drunk (552). Camilla tells Richard she cannot marry him because she is stuck looking after her grandmother, but when he presses her, she reveals that she cannot really love Richard because she still loves Henry (554). When Francis, a homosexual man, plans to wed a woman he dislikes because he doesn’t want to be cut off from his family’s wealth, he feels he has lost control, and he sees Henry’s logic; Francis attempts suicide, following Henry’s steps as if he, too, can at least gain control over whether he lives or dies (549). Like in the hospital, Richard is haunted by Henry’s ghost, but he also believes he sees an image of “Bunny, indifferent, clipping his fingernails” (545). If the reader is to believe that, like Henry’s spector, that this is really Bunny’s ghost, it proves that he did not even find rest or divinity once he was dead and buried. He is preserved in death as he was when alive—oblivious and indifferent to certain truths of life as he is to his own death. Even Richard, in graduate school like he always wanted, focuses on Jacobean literature and describes his fascination for it and for “sin unpunished...innocence destroyed” (547). He studies the very concepts he lived through Bunny’s murder, his destroyed innocence, and his lack of explicit punishment for his committed sins. That which Henry roped Richard into haunts him, and the occasional spectral image or dream of Henry only furthers it. In this way, Henry prevents his living partners in crime from doing the things that he believes would make them feel alive. He felt that after the Dionysian ritual, “it enabled me to do what I’ve always wanted most...to live without thinking” (493). The things his peers seek—love, oblivion by drink, an escape from social norms—compose aspects of the ritual, but they are also things that allow them to escape the mundane. However, without Henry to tell them they are accepted, to tell them how to reach this sort of divinity, they lose direction, and everything in the story falls out of technicolor. It’s no longer as mystical and ancient; the action of the story falls with Henry the instigator gone, and there is no more to cover up or to hide. Charles’ substance abuse seems pointless and loses it’s life and mind altering glory. None of Camilla, Francis, or Richard will love as they wished to love. They confine to social norms in one way or another, are locked down to secular ideals, and do not escape as they used to when Henry was alive and their influencer.
All the same, there remains the last puzzle of Richard’s dream at the end of the novel. In this dream, Richard wanders aimlessly through streets that are “dark, abandoned, bombed-out” (558). This mirrors a lifeless, worthless existence. As he walks, however, he sees newer buildings that hold promise, and when he enters one, he finds none other than Henry, his image imprinted with the bullet hole still in his temple. Like Bunny, he is mirrored in death as he was in life. In this mysterious place, Henry asserts that he isn’t dead, that his “movements are restricted” (559). From this other plane, Henry is not really dead because those alive carry his memory and his ghost, and in this way, he is able to influence them to a partial, but not a full extent. He is simply restricted. Even in death, he holds more information than others as he refuses to tell Richard where they are, saying that the information is “classified” (559). All the while, images of “an Inca temple… the Parthenon… the Colosseum… Hagia Sophia… St. Basil’s” flicker by on a revolving turntable; these are images of various religious places from various major religions, and Henry has surveillance over them all (559). As religion is commonly believed to be the source of control over life and death, Henry is explicitly in a place where he can witness and perhaps, somewhere off the page, partake in it. Although he says he is “not particularly” happy in this place, he does not believe that Richard is happy with the living, either—and perhaps Richard is not satisfied because he is haunted by an unsatisfied Henry (559). However, like always, Henry is still preoccupied with something Richard cannot see nor understand. Henry checks his watch as if he exists someplace like the land of the living where time is important and worthwhile. He says he is late for an appointment, and he doesn’t specify the nature of it, leaving Richard and the reader to believe that it is still far above their heads. He then leaves Richard without explanation just as he left his own life. Even in death, Henry remains aloof and apart, a figure of something ambiguous. By presenting himself as such, Henry retains the power of something divine. He retains the power to haunt, guide, and be a mystery through which those who knew him seek orientation and meaning. And in being such even in death, Henry retains the power to control how those he left alive can live pure, raw, fiery existences—or how are unable to live them.
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