Χαιρε deerslayers! I'm prmcafwh and this is where I yap about The Secret History by Donna Tartt.
I have opinions.
My blog is pretty straightforward:
By far most of my posts are about TSH in one way or another. Those will be tagged as #the secret history
Very few posts are about something else. Those will not be tagged as #the secret history
I don't tag spoilers specifically, I suggest staying away from my blog in general if you haven't finished the book yet
I also don't specifically tag content warnings, but my blog is safe for work with the occasional mundane dick joke
Tumblr has an excellent tag/content blocking system. If there's anything you don't want to see, I strongly recommend using it, or blocking me if my content is somehow triggering or you just don't like it, it's fine
Yes, this is my main blog
'Wow prmcafwh, your content is so awesome I want more!' Why, thank you. I spam about Francis on @francis-abernathy-official. That's more of a 'spam' blog and less curated than my main. Still SFW.
My inbox is always open, for inquiries or rambles unrelated to TSH too
About me:
I have a name & a gender but I won't be sharing either of those, so just call me by my user and use whatever pronouns you like
I promised an anon I'd keep being weird so that's what you'll find me doing
I have a basic (and I mean basic don't expect fucking Richmond Lattimore or anything) knowledge of Ancient Greek language and culture, and I'm more than happy to yap about that too
I love literature and languages in general
I've been told I'm extremely niche
You can pry Francis Abernathy out of my cold, dead hands
The TSH nation needs to get better acquainted with Bennington lore NOW
My posts are never an attack on anyone specific, they are merely personal observations. I will judge fictional characters but never actual people who like said characters. They are all awful and that's the point but that doesn't mean we can't like them. I'm just a random person on the Internet with no intention to offend anyone. Take eveything I say with a grain of salt especially since a lot of what I say is meant ironically.
Why did they kill Bunny ft Julian, (TL;DR version), Henry's sexuality also ft Julian, Francis and homophobia, Bunny did NOT have a normal diet, Henry got his Greek wrong, And also his STEM
Also you all get Camilla wrong (not mine but word for word what I think and everyone should read it)
Another link to the Bennington article because I will not cease my propaganda. Go read about Todd O'Neal and Claude Fredericks right now please.
Francis Abernathy cleaning out the country house after the year ended and finding a tie Henry mistakenly left behind that still smells like him. Francis going on a trip after it all to clear his mind and buying gifts for people almost as if on autopilot, accidentally starting to look for something old and perfect for Henry without even realizing he won’t have anyone to give it to at first. Francis cleaning and getting rid of old papers and finding an assignment with Henry’s writing on it correcting him at points. Francis packing up his apartment and having to toss out the deck of cards he kept on the side table to the left of his couch in the perfect spot for Henry to grab easily and play solitaire as he liked to on nights when he found himself staying over but couldn’t sleep. Francis being home and with family and wishing Henry was there because unlike his family the man could sit in a room and keep quiet and read, just staying for the company they gave each other. Francis getting a parking ticket years later and unexpectedly breaking down because it reminded him of Henry telling him again and again to pay them. Francis having been the only one of them to go to his funeral. He mocked the decor in his head by the way, critiqued everything based on what Henry would’ve thought, and dropped the roses Henry never got to see bloom into his grave. He had to pull over on the drive home because he started having a panic attack, and ended up vomiting on the side of the road.
funny af how richard pretends to be shocked by the incest while he says in the fist pages the twins looked like boyfriend and girlfriend 😭 like girl can you stick to a version
abercaulay is sosososososososo dysfunctional i love them
i don't think it's as clean cut as either how francis frames it in canon or the common fandom interpretation that francis intentionally gets charles drunk to lower his inhibitions enough that he'll sleep with him and is therefore unilaterally at fault. it's something where they're both taking advantage of each other in different ways. francis is willing to provide alcohol to an alcoholic and sleep with someone who's drunk enough that they (claim to) have forgotten by the next morning. and charles, despite this, is willing to repeatedly drink alone with francis and nothing's off between them, which we could extrapolate means he probably does remember their encounters and uses alcohol as a convenient reason to deny his sexuality and/or keep sleeping with francis without having to have a proper conversation (stringing him along, as francis says).
if either of them were good people, they wouldn't have fucked (or at least not more than once). francis is okay with dubcon, charles is okay with emotional manipulation. but fortunately for me (the only real person in this scenario), they both suck, and so i can imagine them in various Situations and Dynamics.
i tend to forget that richard is canonically good looking. he acts so miserable and desperate that i just imagine him as a completely average looking guy
The funny(and unfortunate) thing about this is that he canonically DOES pull. He’s just so emotionally detached from everyone and everything around him that he dances around that fact like crazy.
At some point I’ll make a list of every rendezvous he mentions having throughout the book, because he’s so vague about them.
Yes, he is! A major flaw of Richard’s is that he feels that he’s “tainted in some subtle, but essential way”, which most likely stems from his abusive home life (His mother ‘not caring for him’, his father who is ‘mean’. Near the end of the book he reveals to us that his father beat him and his mother both, and we can infer she let the abuse go on).
Richard hates who he is and where he comes from, so he assumes everyone will or already does too. In reality, he’s the most liked member of the Greek class by far. His peers are generally sympathetic towards him, and find him attractive. He’s very observant, and has a magnetic presence which is what ultimately got him into the Greek class (and even let in on the murders) despite his circumstances.
Richard has a strong desire to belong and be loved because it’s something he’s never had. He doesn’t know what healthy love looks like or even how to accept it. This is why he gravitates towards the Greek class instead of Judy, who was an objectively better friend to him.
Near the beginning of the book we’re told Richard became friends with a group of freshman (and based on their interactions, Judy) before meeting the Greek class. While he has no problem socializing, he definitely has trouble connecting. This is because he’s a liar who’s scared to be seen for who he truly is (Richard’s lies are a means he uses to protect himself. The further he is from the truth, the more he can shield himself from what happened back at home) . He’s afraid his peers will reject him and resent him as much as he does himself.
That’s why when Henry truly sees him, and doesn’t turn him away, he clings to him. Henry was already someone Richard looked up to (along with the rest of the Greek class for that matter), so for Richard to realize that Henry, who he was convinced didn’t care for him based on their first meeting, was just as fascinated if not more by Richard as Richard was him, that was cathartic to him. Suddenly he had value, belonging, and love (which makes the moment when he’s shot all the more bitter).
Breaking my silence to give a shoutout to my first follower ever, a Eurovision blog who started following me back when this was a misc blog and I'd made one (1) post about Eurovision during the finals, and who pretty much disappeared from the site after the contest ended but is still in my followers to this day.
I like thinking about them coming back for tonight and finding this blog completely metamorphosized ideally finding their dash full of posts about this serial killer named Henry and his loser boyfriend named Richard for no apparent reason
far be it for me to agree with richard papen but he really was onto something with the whole i am nothing in my soul if not obsessive thing like yeah. that’s exactly the kind of poetic, pretentious shit i’d say to romanticise the fact that i have never liked anything in a normal way either
“I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive”, said the guy who had been abusing substances since he was 14(at least). Huge fan of whatever’s wrong with him.
will i get jumped if i say that charles didnt “become an alcoholic” in the later events of the book
he was one throughout the entirety of narrative, just a functional one until he didn’t care enough to be, until he felt too guilty, scared, and hopeless to be anything but cruel
These words appear twice in TSH: when Henry took a shard of glass out of Camilla’s foot (chpt. 2), and when Richard recalled Bunny’s murder (chpt.6).
Someone on web already mentioned that this line belongs to the sayings of Jesus on the Cross. Here’s an excerpt from wiki about it:
In both cases in TSH 'consummatum est' was an expression of triumph, but there’s more meaning to that.
In scene with Henry and Camilla the phrase might have subtle sexual subtext, as in Catholic church a word ‘consummatum’ was applied, inter alia, to consummation of marriage.
It seems, with Bunny it’s more about the paid debt. However, from Richard’s perspective that murder was something different. And, after years, he finally managed to catch this feeling in full.
I’m quite positive, when Richard used words ‘Consummatum est’ while remembering the murder, he referred not to the Bible, but to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
Faustus said it when he signed the pact with devil:
For mature Richard the murder was a Faustian bargain, which meant that he made himself accomplice to evil, bound himself into lifelong guilt.
So, even if 'consummatum est' is a word of triumph, it wasn't a triumph for Richard, it was a triumph of evil over Richard. And he knew it, eventually.
There being no note of Francis being a gay man during the AIDs crisis in the U.S. is actually insane to me. The Secret History takes place roughly around 1984—I tried to figure out a rough date a bit ago and that’s what I got, though I don’t remember what made me decide on that year so that could be wrong, either way the 1980s—and the AIDs crisis began in the early 1980s. Maybe it wasn’t mentioned because Francis wasn’t screaming from the rooftops that he was gay, but even if he wasn’t extremely vocal about it, it was known. And it was also known that he was a hypochondriac. So there not being a mention about it is crazy to me.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that contributed to his paranoia about getting sick, too. If someone already so scared of sick saw what was happening to people like him (not only people like him, yes, but it was seen as ‘the gay disease’), I can’t imagine that wouldn’t instill much more fear in him. God knows he likely wouldn’t have gotten support from anyone if anything had happened either. Maybe the greek class would’ve, I do think they cared about him, they were friends after all, love is not restricted for purely good people, but his family? I couldn’t imagine it.
There is no way it wasn’t on his mind at all, they may have been a group less educated in current events but there’s no way. It makes me wonder why it wasn’t mentioned. Because yes sexuality is not everything to a person and HIV was/is not something that only affects gay people, but he was a sexually actively gay man and a hypochondriac! It makes me wonder if it wasn’t brought up because of Richard’s recollection of the events or if it might not have been brought up because Francis did not talk about that and felt like if he did it would be endangering himself or make others feel disgusted by him—my mind goes to him needing reassurance from Richard in certain scenes here. He’s very much the kind of person who’s worried about how people see him; there being no mention of it could have also been a result of that?
AND!! according to hiv.gov, it was only at the beginning of the semester richard joined* (9th september 1983) that they published that hiv/aids wasn't transmittable by food, casual touch, water, air, or surfaces. which means that until like 4 weeks max before richard met him, francis had no way of knowing how it spread, just that people like him tended to get it. also the virus wasn't found until around the time of bunny's death (23rd april 1984). it was so reasonable for him to be freaked out when it was so early on that basic information about it was barely known by the medical community, let alone a humanities undergrad. there would be no test for it until 1985, and no treatment until 1987, but of course francis wouldn't have known that, and once someone started showing symptoms they wouldn't have lived long enough to get treatment anyway.
btw, richard meets francis literally 12 months after the cdc stopped calling it gay related immune disease. the fact that richard didn't bring it up at all is a bit weird, considering by 1983 there were definitely at least rumours about a 'gay plague/cancer' no matter how isolated you were, and by 1990ish, when he's 28 and writing the story, there would've been a lot more coverage on it. one can only assume he left it out on purpose, but why? maybe to not seem homophobic? idk.
*assuming that tsh is set in the 1983-4 academic year
Okay whatever your thoughts are on TSH being adapted into a show or movie or whatever I feel like we would all have an incredible amount of fun if we could have access to a gif or picture of some sort of this ‘he’s behind me, isn’t he’ scene because I know I would
