Getting back to Camilla Macaulay: what does happen to a female character when she suddenly has to become an unattainable object of desire? (continued from this post: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/view/estherdedlock/684356845933035520?source=share.)
I’d say Donna Tartt may not have changed Camilla too much. I doubt that Bret Easton Ellis’s criticism about Richard’s romantic disinterest had a major effect on who Tartt wanted Camilla to be. First, because Tartt doesn’t seem to be a writer who’s especially interested in romance—her writing is full of longing for all sorts of things, but explicit sexual desire rarely if ever drives the action, so Tartt probably felt no need to make Camilla more romantically appealing.
Second, I think there’s quite a bit of Donna in Camilla. Like Camilla, she was an outsider among her college’s all-male, inner circle of Classics students. Todd O’Neal, thought to be the inspiration for Henry Winter, remembers her this way:
Donna was not part of our Greek tutorials. Claude had a very, let’s say, classical aesthetic or hierarchy, which prizes maleness and male beauty.
Another classmate, Matt Jacobsen (on whom she based Bunny) recalls:
She was a Miss Buttinsky in our group. We all had girlfriends, and the girlfriends were like “Well, that’s his world and I’m not going to be part of that.” Normal in most relationships. But she made it clear she wanted in.
That’s brutal. And also, how very Bunny-ish! In fact, it reminds me of what Bunny said about Camilla’s inclusion in Julian’s class:
…he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship.
It makes sense that Tartt would create Camilla in part to be her surrogate—but unlike herself, Camilla is an essential element in this exclusive group, and one who gets to exact the ultimate revenge on the only member of it who thought she didn’t belong. It’s the sort of vicious adolescent fantasy you’d expect from a writer who started crafting the story when she herself was a teenager.
Of course, because this is fiction, Tartt takes aspects of herself and uses them to conjure up the dreamlike figure of a young woman who embodies the most picturesque qualities of both masculine and feminine allure. Not to justify Richard’s attraction to her, but because as the only girl, that’s the role Camilla has to play. If (to quote Richard) Henry is the “dark king” of the group, then Camilla—beautiful, enigmatic, and ghostly—is the white queen. She’s the gauzy, feminine counterbalance to Henry’s saturnine masculinity.
I’ve come to believe that Camilla isn’t a cliché, she’s an original invention of Donna Tartt’s. Certainly inspired by parts of other characters that came before, but none of them having all of the same attributes in themselves. If Camilla feels like a trope, it’s probably because The Secret History has been influencing other writers for 30 years.
So I suspect that Camilla’s character didn’t change too much when Tartt chose to make Richard infatuated with her, especially when Richard’s sentiments are so superficial. They feel like an afterthought, probably because they were. The term “male gaze” comes up a lot when readers talk about Camilla. We can feel frustrated that we aren’t getting a good picture of her because Richard’s male gaze is in the way, obscuring her with his fixation on her appearance. But look past that and you see how Richard’s real feelings about Camilla evolve over time and reveal more of who she is.
At first he sees her almost as an innocent; while Henry, Francis, and Charles are plotting Bunny’s murder, Richard runs into Camilla and thinks, “…just by looking at her I could tell she didn’t have the faintest idea of what what going on at Henry’s.”
That’s nonsense and we know it. Just a few pages before, we found out that Camilla and Henry have a telephone code, so that he’ll recognize her ring and pick up. I think at this point, the two of them have already been in collusion about what to do with Bunny—it’s the rest of the group that gets brought into the plan later.
After Bunny’s murder, this supposed innocent reveals a cool presence of mind that surpasses Henry’s—at times, only she knows what to do when the rest of them are flailing:
Julian glanced down at his book. “Perhaps, before we begin,” he said, “one of you should go call Edmund on the telephone and ask him to join us if he’s at all able…”
Henry stood up. But then Camilla said, quite unexpectedly, “I don’t think he’s at home.”
“Then where is he? Out of town?”
Julian lowered his reading glasses and looked at her over the tops of them. “What do you mean?”
“We haven’t seen him for a couple of days.”
Little wonder she can be so frosty, when she’s able to appraise the most gruesome acts that she herself has committed with the calm reserve of someone contemplating a painting:
“I’ll tell you something I do remember,” she said abruptly…”That dead man. Lying on the ground. His stomach was torn open and steam was coming out of it.”
“It was a cold night. I’ll never forget the smell of it either. Like when my uncle used to cut up deer. Ask Francis. He remembers, too.”
I was too horrified to say anything. She reached for the teapot and poured a bit more into her cup. “Do you know,” she said, “why I think we’re having such bad luck this time around?”
“Because it’s terrible luck to leave a body unburied…I’m afraid that none of us are going to have a good night’s sleep until Bunny’s in the ground.”
(I think “she reached for the teapot” is my favorite part of this passage.)
Later, Camilla shows us that she knows how to create a necessary diversion, using her beauty and femininity to evoke a fog of sympathy that erases suspicion:
I heard a strange, choked noise from Camilla. I looked over at her in amazement. She was crying.
For a moment, no one seemed to know what to do. Davenport gave Henry and me a disgusted look and turned half away as if to say: this is all your fault.
Sciola, blinking in slow, somber consternation, twice reached to put his hand upon her arm, and on the third try his slow fingertips finally made contact with her elbow. “Dear,” he said to her, “dear, you want us to drop you off home on our way?”
This scene is immediately followed by Richard’s description of the New England fog, and we remember how often Camilla is associated with the color white:
White sky. Trees fading at the skyline, the mountains gone…I never got used to the way the horizon there could just erase itself and leave you marooned, adrift, in an incomprehensible dreamscape that was like a sketch for the world you knew…an amnesia-land, a kind of skewed Heaven where the old landmarks were…disarranged, and made terrible by the emptiness around them.
Then finally, at Bunny’s funeral, Richard reveals a wholly different opinion of Camilla from that of the unwitting innocent:
Her surprise seemed perfectly natural. The problem was that she was such an expert actress, it was impossible to know if it was genuine…It was impossible to outfox her at this game.
That declaration is followed a few pages later by one of the only full-blown flashbacks we get of Bunny’s murder…and Camilla takes center stage:
I fished around in my pocket, gave her my handkerchief. She shook it out and held it to her finger (flutter of white, blown hair, darkening sky) and as I watched time stopped and I was transfixed by a bright knife of memory: the sky was the same thundery gray as it had been then, new leaves, her hair had blown across her mouth just so…
(…at the ravine. She’d climbed down with Henry and was back at the top before him, the rest of us waiting at the edge, cold wind, jitters, springing to hoist her up; dead? is he…? She took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her muddy hands, not looking at any of us, really, her hair blowing back light against the sky and her face a blank for just about any emotion one might care to project….)
While the rest of them are at the top of the ravine (”breathless, watching”), only Camilla is at Henry’s side, the white queen and the dark king:
Camilla’s wristwatch had a second hand. We saw them silently conferring.
It’s no wonder Camilla and Henry become a couple—their attraction is as indispensable to the novel as Richard’s puppy love for Camilla is superfluous. Of course it’s the catalyst for Charles’s breakdown, which leads to the final, tragic events. But how could they ever not be together? Francis scornfully (and rather chauvinistically) accuses Camilla of leading Henry on, but she’s no flirt. She and Henry are two essential elements coming together. Darkness and light, in this case, both equally chilling…or perhaps Camilla is even more alarming. Henry at least seems to have some sort of code that he lives by, but I’m not sure that Camilla does. It’s easy to say that Henry is a sociopath, but the term might be more fitting for Camilla. Although then one begins to wonder: How much of her icy rationality is the result of family trauma? Did Camilla have to become this person to survive her brother? Oh, but is her brother actually abusive at all, or is that just Camilla playing “the game?” Playing us?
Questions, questions. Even after all this pondering, I cannot solve Camilla. She proves something I said a while ago: I don’t know how many times you’d have to read The Secret History before you could really say you’d read it. To be honest, I don’t think that number exists.
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