Dark academia enthralled readers almost 30 years ago through the 1992 publication of Donna Tartt‘s rich coming-of-age novel The Secret History. With its blend of academic intrigue, elitist indulgence in high art, and a murder among eccentric Classics students, the book sparked an aesthetic that continues influencing literature and fashion today.
In many ways, The Secret History represents dark academia‘s origin story – glamorizing rarefied education while exposing its capacity for corrupting impressionable minds. However, more contemporary works like Babel critique privilege and power structures inherent in such insulated academic spheres. This article compares both seminal texts to analyze evolution in how the genre handles intellectualism‘s moral quandaries.
The Secret History: Defining Fundamentals of Dark Academia Fiction
As a bildungsroman centered on students immersed in their eccentric professor‘s Classics tutorial, The Secret History accentuates academia‘s magnetism by rendering intellectual pursuits intoxicatingly exclusive. Tartt romanticizes fierce academic devotion, framing protagonist Richard Papen and his peers as led by an obsession deeper than career prep or grades.
Their self-imposed isolation from regular college life becomes a bubble of Botticelli discussions, Greek grammar lessons, and Dionysian rituals. However, through this lens of exclusivity, the novel also explores classism – how such spaces remain dominated by the overwhelmingly rich, white, and privileged.
Beyond atmospherics though, The Secret History employs masterfully subtle storytelling in handling moral issues arising from characters‘ academic intensity. When Richard helps cover up a murder committed during a supposed bacchanal, culpability blurs amidst students‘ shared complicity. Tartt avoids clear villains, instead forcing readers to parse complex group and individual motivations around self-preservation, denial of justice, academia‘s corrupting influence, and so on.
Despite such ambiguity, the book still centers unquestionable wrongdoing while denying overt preaching. Ultimately, The Secret History frames dark academia‘s allure through tension between intellectualism‘s richness and the moral pitfalls such single-minded devotion risks.
Babel: Critiquing Colonialism, Racism, and Elitism in Dark Academia
Published in 2022, Babel directly tackles issues of injustice only implicitly contained in The Secret History. Centering colonial linguistics student Robin Ballantyne, the novel links language mastery to structures enabling imperial domination across history. Ballantyne‘s university not only houses political schemes but literal magic derived from ancestor systems of oppression.
Here, intellectual intensity proves inextricable from pre-existing hierarchies that people of color must navigate. Unlike The Secret History‘s rather homogenous student body, Babel also introduces diverse protagonists of Chinese and West Indian descent besides the white Ballantyne.
Through these perspectives, themes emerge around intergenerational inheritance of colonial harms, intersectionality in academia, bastardization of non-Western knowledge, and more. Babel certainly encapsulates dark academia foundations – esoteric texts, ancient languages, mannered student dialogues, atmospheric gothic settings.
However, its narrative arc explicitly distinguishes between unjust actions, accrued power, and notions of morality throughout academia and society. In centering racial injustice thematically, Babel also diversifies representation – thereby expanding rigid constructions of intellectual spaces.
Comparing Storytelling Approaches and Lessons
Both novels feature characters who justify questionable acts through intellectual priorities, but their narrative framings differ. The Secret History uses subtlety – readers realize in hindsight how professor Julian manipulates vulnerable minds or witness rhetorical gymnastics used to rationalize murder. Babel more directly labels harms as such – no excuses made for ongoing racism or belittling marginalized voices.
However, The Secret History avoids obvious hero-villain dichotomies, instead attracting through intricately rendered characters. We alternately empathize and revile most individuals at some point. Such nuance around motivation and context resists easy judgments, bringing readers closer towards implicating themselves somehow in moral failures.
Meanwhile, Babel clearly distinguishes right from wrong in its plot progressions but loses some potential profundity. By firmly labeling certain mindsets or acts as problematic, the novel struggles conveying why intelligent people drift towards them anyway. We develop less intimacy with descendants of colonizers who intentionally sustain oppression.
Ultimately both books effectively tackle dark academia‘s capaicty for insidiously nurturing feelings of superiority, entitlement, and isolation from ethics guiding society at large. The Secret History just problematizes morality further by suggesting such failings arise naturally even in complex, relatable people.
Conclusion: Evolution Within the Genre
As pioneering dark academia fiction, The Secret History sublimely transports readers into rarified scholastic spheres it simultaneously indicts. However, later works like Babel shine harsh light onto real-world implications of cloistered academic mindsets – their connections to broader societal oppressions.
While such overt critiques lose some profundity compared to Tartt‘s masterpiece, they help progress the genre. No longer can dark academia exist purely as atmospheric indulgence in esoteric texts. Works like Babel demand reckoning with injustice that often incubates unquestioned within privileged intellectual bubbles.
So The Secret History stunningly distills dark academia‘s roots – how heady academic devotion risks clouding individual morality and judgment. Yet evolving creative bounds now require transparent examinations of resulting structural harms enacted upon marginalized groups. Through this broadened lens, dark academia‘s fantasy risks dissipation, but society inches closer towards reality.