Dark Academia, Riverdale, and the Real Bennington Aesthetic
Now that I’m finishing my college career over the internet, I’m beginning to understand how exhausting it was to grow up on social media. Older generations will invoke, with rightful smugness, that old epigram from Andy Warhol about how in the future, everyone was supposed to be famous for fifteen minutes. But Warhol couldn’t have predicted that, after clearing some basic technical hurdles, anyone could broadcast their most intimate thoughts to an audience for free, not out of a desire for fifteen minutes of fame, but out of a pathological need to be seen. He couldn’t have predicted that children raised online would use this digital intimacy as both a security blanket and a weapon, learning to don and doff and customize our identities like some kind of cyberpunk novel; that centralized, algorithm-driven social media would create a sort of Library of Babel Online in which everything under the sun gets thinkpieced and moodboarded and discussed to death.
Warhol also couldn’t predict how awkwardly the slow dopamine drip of online life would coexist with real life. Our phones beat beside us while we try to read or write, the infinite scroll of TikTok and Twitter and Instagram beckoning us, our neuroplasticity endlessly warping and adapting. Bubbles expand and burst overnight, and memes become overplayed within a few days of conception. The topical joke of the morning is exhausting by the time it hits the late night shows.
But a few things are eternal, I guess, like this one post on Tumblr:
I’ve seen this post about The Secret History hundreds of times since it first appeared in 2018. I saw it making the rounds on a couple of Bennington students’ Instagram stories last week. My favorite part of occasionally checking Tumblr now, after using it compulsively throughout my teens, is seeing the old posts that resurface -- you can scrub your Tumblr page, but if someone has reposted something from your account, it lives there forever. There are all kinds of jokes by long-gone users that still hold up a decade later.
But it’s strange, when something this personal and specific to you becomes so universal. How did a vaguely worded wish to somehow enter a popular, nerdy literary novel from 1992 get thirty thousand notes and instant-classic status on a site that prefers humor like “(to the tune of uptown girl) uptown rat / he wears a very silly pointy hat?”
One thing that might be hard to explain is that, very likely, not all thirty thousand people who liked and shared this post have actually read The Secret History, or even understood the reference. It’s just the sort of irreverent, highly specific thing that Tumblr users share because it is relatable in the abstract and therefore a “mood.” In the absence of a completely custom page, a user’s online identity can be cobbled together out of curated images, interests, and text, various shades and tones that make up a particular aesthetic. The actor Chris Evans wearing a sweater in the movie Knives Out is an aesthetic; an imagined experience is an aesthetic; pretending to live in a fictional book is definitely an aesthetic.
I deeply understand this compulsion. The ability to compartmentalize life into neat pinboards, to map my feelings onto contextless quotes and stanzas, was catnip to me as a teen. But I didn’t realize then what it would feel like to have work you thought you had a unique relationship with stripped down to retweetable sentiment; it’s exhilarating at first, then sad, then strange.
According to Google Trends, searches for “dark academia” first spiked around April 2018, just a few months before sothisispoetry’s post about The Secret History began circulating. Around this same period, I noticed a revival online of gothic imagery in reaction to the pseudo-futuristic vaporwave style that had been popular in the years before; and, in literary circles, a renewed interest in the work of authors like Donna Tartt, writing that was florid and layered as opposed to the violently minimalist alt-lit that dominated the early 2010s. Soon, the pockets of Secret History fandom that had been burgeoning in blogs and archives and other relics of Web 1.0 were swept away.
If you can, imagine attempting to exert control over your messy emotional life by posting well-edited PNGs of fruit bowls and decaying Greek Revival architecture and Oxford shoes walking through autumn leaves, curating and writing and experimenting the way kids did with zines twenty years ago. Remember the way teenage emotions and pheromones are ever so slightly heightened, creating that feeling that everything that happens to you is preternaturally significant, every friendship star-crossed and life-defining? This is the same sort of delusion that propels the characters of The Secret History -- it’s no surprise, then, that the book became a touchstone for young people in this particular moment.
Compelling as it is, the novel is teenage escapism balanced out with an adult’s fantasy version of college. Other than a few passages of Richard slogging through his readings, no one in the book complains about their midterms or annoying hallmates or Julian Morrow assigning too much work. The “normal,” somewhat quirky students of Hampden are the source of Richard’s alienation and the target of his disgust. His dysfunctional parents exist only peripherally. There are no worries about financial aid or grades or flavorless dining hall vegetables. Instead, we have pages brimming with the stark and terrifying beauty of southern Vermont, and a story about a boy who, for the first time in his life, finds people he understands, for better or worse.
Readers are seduced, much like Richard, by the romantic setting and Tartt’s clever, tightly-spooled writing; by the unresolved tension--if not outright horniness--between the central characters; by the fantasy of being accepted by (and accomplice to) an extremely cool and tight-knit friend group; by a story, despite the deep ambiguity present in all of its characters, concludes as tidily as an Agatha Christie novel. It is a book so thoroughly committed to style and tablesetting and tension that it is ideal for a young person on Tumblr to devour -- it is an explosion of images and moods, perfect to mine for quotes, perfect to imagine yourself within.
Of course, the New England academy as a fetishized place of scandal and mystery is not a new concept -- look at The Children’s Hour, or Dead Poets Society, or any production of a Shakespearean tragedy set at a boarding school, or even the gloomy color palette of the middle installments of the Harry Potter movies. But the phrase “dark academia” hasn’t even peaked in Google searches yet, and it’s already found its way to network TV. The latest season of Riverdale, the campy teen soap based on the Archie comics, is a Secret History pastiche featuring a character subtly named Donna Sweett. A movie based on Shirley Jackson and her life starring Elisabeth Moss is slated for release this summer, meaning everyone outside of our circle is just now learning that Bennington inspired The Haunting of Hill House and The Lottery and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. (How could a place make so many people so miserable it compelled them to literature?)
So now there are strangers discovering this place, pinning photos of the campus I used to live on. There’s one photo in particular of Jennings, the ivy-covered hill house that seemed to inspire the Lyceum, where Julian Morrow’s office is located, that I see over and over with a twinge of homesickness that verges on the territorial. These people don’t understand, I always think; they don’t have that same love-hate-love relationship with the book that Bennington students do. But there they are, posting about wishing they were toasting “live forever” online, or writing fan fiction about the boys in The Secret History (and occasionally the Goldfinch), or making TikToks of themselves drinking tea and putting on tweed blazers and reading Tolstoy.
“No one here acts like that,” a friend pointed out, after watching an assortment of dark academia YouTubers and TikToks with me. They were right. These kids weren’t nearly as weird as Bennington students, or even Donna Tartt’s characters; they were, to quote the comedian Chris Fleming, merely “attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncracies.” It was the equivalent of being a mall goth, an identity you could take off with a few swipes of makeup remover.
Maybe I’m a little jaded about all this because I read The Secret History while I was touring colleges and finished it right before I arrived at Bennington, and so the two have always been psychically linked. There is a bitter nostalgia to the book that I did not notice on first reads, and only understood after I left Bennington and many of the people in it behind. Tartt borrowed blatantly from her real life for her characters, burning all her bridges and stoking campus gossip for years to come. But on a campus that self-mythologizes itself and everything that moves, can you really blame her?
There was a boy I knew here who was a true dark academic, always wandering around with his cigarette in hand, wanting to be looked at but terrified of letting anyone in. We were very Bret and Donna, him and I, at a garden party hosted by a teacher at her home up in Dorset, which had a beautiful sunroom and pool and a croquet set and was very, very Julian Morrow. The boy was lingering at the edge of the party with his cigarette and we wanted him to join us. We called his name. “Stop Secret Historying around,” I said, and everyone laughed. “I say that with love,” I added, but I could tell I had hurt him.
In the end, it’s just a book. Even the Henry Winters of the world that I’ve met still go to parties in the freezing cold and practically frolic outside on the first warm green day. That part of Bennington belongs to everybody.
Christiane Swenson ‘20
