Characters / The Secret History

The Clique

The clique in general

• Awesome, but Impractical: A cynically comedic point is made a few times about how the classics clique spend thousands on shiny brand-name fountain pens and sleek designer clothes. While the evident glamour of these items is attractive to both Richard and the reader, the characters' attitudes toward these expensive items (along with their alternate scorn or bewilderment at cheaper substitutes) is also subtly mocked throughout the book.
• The Beautiful Elite: Richard thinks they're all so attractive, so enigmatic. They're also rich. Henry and Francis are so rich they'll never have to work. Charles and Camilla are less so, but nonetheless wealthy enough their family can send them to Hampden without any aid. Bunny and Richard pretend to be wealthy to fit in with them, even though they're not.
  …different as they were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks—sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated.
• Blonde, Brunette, Redhead: Charles, Henry, and Francis respectively.
• Culturally Religious: Henry, Francis, and the twins were all raised Catholic, while Bunny comes from a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant background, and Richard has no religious background at all. None of the clique are religious these days — they're irreverent college students for one, and also being tutored by a man who's trying to impress pagan sensibilities upon them. Nonetheless, the Catholics have enough allegiance to their childhood religion that Bunny's anti-Catholic tirades get under their skin. Where it really shows, though, is the aesthetics. They all have the aesthetics of their religious upbringings stamped into them. The dark academia aesthetic is very Catholic — old, decadent, dramatic — and the Catholic kids are the real core of the clique, the truly aesthetic ones. Bunny is aesthetically very Protestant, and that clashes with the group.
• Ditzy Genius: The classics clique are initially introduced as a Genius Book Club. Once Richard starts hanging out with them, we start to learn they're actually pretty impractical people outside of their studies. They are shown to be bizarrely technologically illiterate, eerily unaware of any history that has taken place since about 1940 (Henry has never heard of the moon landing!), and have trouble comprehending contemporary attitudes towards a variety of subjects.

Camilla ends up Comically Missing the Point of an anti-war film. Henry's plans to cover up the murder are bizarre and convoluted.

• Family of Choice: Charles at one point suggests that after graduation they could all live together in the country house (except for Bunny, who would just come up on weekends). It's an arrested development fantasy, imagining that things could continue exactly as they are now for the rest of their lives. Richard is absolutely enamored with the idea. Deconstructed — it doesn't work out. No matter how much you adore your friend group right now, without the obligations of kinship to hold you together when times get tough, it won't last. Their group falls apart under the weight of the blackmail, murder, various plots, general backstabbing and a Love Dodecahedron.

Richard Papen

John Richard Papen

The novel's narrator and a scholarship student at Hampden college.

• Abusive Parents: Richard's father is mentioned as being verbally and physically abusive to both him and his mother.
• Ambiguously Bi:
  • He has Suspiciously Specific Denial, constantly reminding the reader Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today? Not That There's Anything Wrong with That! The Greeks were gay, and Francis is gay, and this is fine. But Richard is straight, as he reminds the reader more often than necessary.
  • Richard claims he has good gaydar because he's so not gay. Yeah, sure Richard, that's a thing.
    ...that sort of tension, which I, being rather more disinclined that way than not, am quick to pick up on.
  • Richard is in awe of the whole clique, but Camilla and Henry in particular he describes in the romanticized manner of a crush. In interviews, Donna Tartt has said more than once that if Richard were Gender Flipped, this new rendition of the main character would seem too in love with Henry. (See YMMV's Ho Yay listing for details.)
  • Richard makes out with Francis once, and was on track to go further if they hadn't been interrupted.
• Contemplate Our Navels: As an observant outsider, Richard constantly analyzes his behavior and motives regarding what he did before he knew exactly what the other characters were up to.
• Chick Magnet: Richard attracts attention from Judy Poovy, Mona Beale, Sophie Dearbold, and a few unnamed female characters are implied or directly shown to be attracted to him. Francis also attempts to sleep with him on two separate occasions. We're told next to nothing about Richard's appearance, but the fact that he got into Julian's handpicked-all-beautiful class suggests he might be a Pretty Boy.
• The Faceless: Richard describes the appearances of all his friends, but not himself. We don't know much, just that he was tall as a kid and "prone to freckles." He has "dusty brown hair," which he cuts himself. "I never did a very good job; the finished product was always very thistly and childish, a la Arthur Rimbaud."
• Fatal Flaw: The opening lines of the book, which double as his Establishing Character Moment:
  Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
• First-Person Peripheral Narrator: The story is unquestionably about the other students in Professor Julian Morrow's clique, all of whom are far more sinister and have way more secrets, but Richard is our narrator.
  Donna Tartt interview: It was obvious to me from the outset that this book had to be told from the point of view of a first-person narrator. It was essential that one never know what the other characters are thinking. There couldn't be an omniscient viewpoint — you could never go into Henry's mind or into Julian — because this is a novel of how the narrator is sort of gradually drawn into this and gradually fooled, and the reader should be fooled along with him.
• Hated Hometown: His feelings toward Plano, California.
• Hypocrite: He looks down on Judy for being a cokehead, even though he mentions doing quite a bit of cocaine himself.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Richard wants nothing more than to be one of the elites and escape the aggressive normalcy of his childhood. Henry exploits this when telling Richard about the murder of the farmer, knowing that Richard will be so pleased about being let in on the secret that he won't tell anyone else.
• Loving a Shadow: Richard's crush on Camilla is… weird. He imagines her far more innocent than she is; in fact she's Henry's closest confidant in the group. In the very first Greek class, Richard says he doesn't stand a chance with her when she's constantly surrounded by these "clever rich boys in dark suits". If he were to attract her attentions, that would be the ultimate symbol that he's just as good as them.
• Middle Name Basis: He fills out his school application, "Name: John Richard Papen." This name is never mentioned again. The Rewatch Bonus implication is that John is probably his father's name, which he doesn't want to use.
• New Transfer Student: He does two years of community college—one of pre-med, one of English—in Plano before transferring to Hampden. The rest of the clique has been together since freshman year.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: While slowing freezing to death over the winter, Richard finally gets to a point where he's desperate enough that he calls his parents, who he only ever talks about with apathy and dislike.
• Pass Fail: Richard is from a very modest background and. Several of the others in the Greek class come from enough family money that they will never have to work for a living. Richard tries desperately to fit in with his wealthier peers. Initially he gets by on lies and thrift-store clothes, but his new friends start picking up the truth after a while. It's never openly discussed in the group, though, becoming an Open Secret.
• Perpetual Frowner: Richard has resting bitch face.
  All my life, people have taken my shyness for sullenness, snobbery, bad temper of one sort or another. "Stop looking so superior!" my father sometimes used to shout at me when I was eating, watching television, or otherwise minding my own business. But this facial cast of mine (that's what I think it is, really, a way my mouth has of turning down at the corners, it has little to do with my actual moods)
• Pseudo-Romantic Friendship: Richard basically has a crush on the clique as a whole. He's captivated by and in awe of the group — they're so beautiful, so smart, so enigmatic, so otherworldly. When Charles brings up the possibility of them living together as adults, Richard thinks it's the best thing he's ever heard. He thinks about the sexual potentiality in all of his friends — not with him, per se, but somewhere. He goes on for a page and a half about could there be something between Henry and Bunny; when he finds out the twins hook up sometimes he admits the idea had crossed his mind before, and he'd been turned on by it.
• Scholarship Student: This is one of the Author Avatar aspects of Richard. In real life, Donna Tartt's school, Hampton, had some of the highest tuition in the country, but also a larger-than-usual portion of students on financial aid — her among them. Richard is an exaggerated version of herself in that regard, going to great lengths to hide his lower-middle class upbringing from his rich friends.
  Georges Laforgue: Frankly, this is the first time I have ever heard of [Julian] accepting a pupil who is on such considerable financial aid. [...] I am willing to speculate that he isn't aware you are on assistance.
  Richard: Well, if he doesn't know, I'm not going to tell him.
• Sixth Ranger: The clique have all been classmates for a while before he joins. Even after he's incorporated into the group—invited to the twins' weekly dinner parties and weekends in the country at Francis's aunt's house—he's still the odd one out. Richard is not let in on the Bacchanal thing that everyone else—even Bunny initially—is invited to. And everyone else knows Charles and Camilla are a thing except him.
• Too Dumb to Live: Unaccustomed to Vermont's freezing temperatures and unaware of the existence of space heaters, Richard nearly dies of hypothermia during winter break trying to tough it out in a rented room he doesn't realize is unsafe (despite the hole in the roof).
• Unreliable Narrator: By his own admission. Richard's admiration and affection for Julian and the murder clique (though mostly Henry and Camilla) results in a picture of each of them that may not be entirely representative of who they truly are. He also frequently lies to his friends so that they'll have a better impression of him, which suggests he may be doing the same with the audience.

Henry Winter

Henry Marchbanks Winter

A tall stoic with hard features and a genius of linguistics, Henry is the mysterious character at the heart of the novel.

• Abusive Parents: Implied Trope. Henry is mostly estranged from his father for no reason that we ever learn. As a child, he suffered a serious injury that gave him permanent facial scarring, and Bunny says Henry gets uncomfortable talking about it. Bunny comes up with an explanation involving a car accident, but that's purely his own conjecture and doesn't seem to be true — Henry "drove fast and often recklessly," which is not the behavior you'd expect from a man who'd been in a serious car accident.
  Bunny: Henry had a bad accident when he was a little boy. Got hit by a car or something and nearly died. [...]
  Richard: Hit by a car?
  Bunny: I think that's what it was. Can't think what else it could've been. He doesn't like to talk about it.
• Affably Evil / Anti-Villain / Sociopathic Hero: Henry does several things in the story that are definitely very bad, but he has genuinely positive qualities as well — even saving Richard's life at one point.
• Ambiguously Bi: According to Richard's gaydar, Henry is the straightest of the group, and he clearly loves Camilla. Yet if any of them had an affair with Julian (as Laforgue alludes to) it undoubtedly would've been Henry. Richard saw Henry kiss Julian on the cheek when they thought they were alone. Henry's the only one who's been to Julian's house. They're both the sort of people who would be into Lover and Beloved just because it's an Ancient Greek thing.
  Henry: I loved him [Julian] more than anyone in the world.
• Born in the Wrong Century: This applies to the whole clique, but is especially pronounced with Henry. When researching poisons, his first strategy is to seek out ancient Persian texts on the subject. He had no idea human beings had landed on the moon until Richard tells him. Richard reports Henry occasionally asking "a perfectly serious question about humors".
  I had been told by the twins that Henry disliked electric lights, and here and there I saw kerosene lamps in the windowsills.
• Byronic Hero: Henry's large-scale character flaws are exactly what make him so interesting.
• Catchphrase: Downplayed Trope, used only occasionally but distinctive: "To my way of thinking."
• The Chessmaster: Over the course of the novel, Richard realizes that Henry leaves little to accident and that his plots are always more complex than they initially appear.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: By the end of the book, Henry has accidentally killed a farmer, murdered Bunny, tried to kill Charles, and was apparently planning something for Richard because You Have Outlived Your Usefulness.
• Cunning Linguist:
  Richard: How many languages does he know?
  Bunny: I lost count. Seven or eight. He can read hieroglyphics.
  Richard: Wow.
  Bunny: He's a genius, that boy. He could be a translator for the UN if he wanted to be.
• Ditzy Genius: He can be incredibly impractical (not that he'll see it that way), which is one of the reasons the Gambit Pileup ultimately topples.

• Four Eyes, Zero Soul / Stoic Spectacles: Henry wears glasses, generally comes off as pretty cold and emotionless, and does some reprehensible things through the story.
• Genius Bruiser: Henry does not have the physique typically associated with scholars. He's strong — really strong. Strong enough to suggest he must work out, at least a little, despite that not seeming like a very Henry-like activity. This may be related to his disabilities (subtly implied to be the result of a childhood beating from an abusive father) and not wanting to be physically vulnerable.
• Genius Cripple / Handicapped Badass: Henry walks with a slight limp, his eyes aren't very good, and he's prone to migraines.
  Bunny: Henry had a bad accident when he was a little boy. Got hit by a car or something and nearly died. He was out of school for a couple years, had tutors and stuff, but for a long time he couldn't do much but lie in bed and read. I guess he was one of those kids who can read at college level when they're about two years old. [...] [lowers his voice] Know the way he parts his hair, so it falls over the right eye? That's because there's a scar there. Almost lost the eye, can't see out of it too good. And the stiff way he walks, sort of a limp. Not that it matters, he's strong as an ox. I don't know what he did, lift weights or what, but he certainly built himself back up again. A regular Teddy Roosevelt, overcoming obstacles and all.
  [later]
  Julian: Henry's not as strong as he looks. His eyes bother him, he has terrible headaches, sometimes he has a difficult time...
• Graceful in Their Element: Henry is generally stoic, rather stilted and withdrawn, but in Greek he becomes more comfortable and demonstrative. This could also be considered the Inverted Trope of Eloquent in My Native Tongue.
  ...it makes me smile, even today, to think of Henry's calculated, formal English, the English of a well-educated foreigner, as compared with the marvelous fluency and self-assurance of his Greek — quick, eloquent, remarkably witty. It was always a wonder to me when I happened to hear him and Julian conversing in Greek, arguing and joking, as I never once heard either of them do in English; many times, I've seen Henry pick up the telephone with an irritable, cautious "Hello," and may I never forget the harsh and irresistible delight of his "Khairei!" when Julian happened to be at the other end.
• Hated Hometown: A little-discussed trait Henry shares with Richard. It could be because Henry comes from St Louis, Missouri, which the book frames as bland. This could also be another detail implying that Henry — like Richard — has an abusive father.
  Henry: [to Richard] You're not very happy where you come from, are you? [beat] Don't worry. You hide it very cleverly. [beat] The others really don't understand that sort of thing, you know.
• Hiding the Handicap: Downplayed, but Henry has a "long scar at his hairline, all dented and puckered, with ridges of white flesh cutting across it to the browbone". He parts his hair so that it covers the scar from view.
• Insufferable Genius: He doesn't see anyone as his equal, especially his peers, and this seeps into his daily interactions.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: Henry is the best at Greek in the group, is obviously very intelligent and knows many languages, and also doesn't really have any friends outside the Greek class nor any interest in making any.
• Lack of Empathy: By his own admission. He claims to notice the same trait in Richard.

• Neat Freak: Richard describes him as "clean as a cat" and mentions how he never takes his coat off without placing it on a hanger.
• Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions: Inverted Trope. Henry is very smart and the most skilled Classicist of the group. He is also uniquely superstitious. Charles calls Henry a ornithomantist (a bird-diviner). Henry "sometimes left a saucer of milk outside his door to appease any malevolent spirits who might happen to wander by." He thinks they may get caught by a Police Psychic. But then again, given that Henry is a Ditzy Genius, the trope may also be played pretty straight.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Henry saves Richard from freezing to death in the Vermont winter, taking him to the hospital and bringing him to his apartment to recuperate.
  • Henry is the only member of the Greek Class to intervene when Charles becomes abusive towards Camilla, giving her a place to stay and hide from him.
  • According to Camilla, the only reason Henry didn't suggest an animal-killing blood sacrifice after killing Bunny (as he had after the bacchanal incident) is that he thought it would upset Richard.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Henry and Bunny were roommates freshman year. According to the twins, they were pretty good friends before the events of the books.
  Camilla: Henry's so serious and Bun's so sort of—well, not serious—that they really get along quite well.
  Charles: Yes, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. A well-matched pair. I think Bunny's about the only person in the world who can make Henry laugh.
• Renaissance Man: Henry "can grow flowers, repair clocks like a jeweller, add tremendous sums in his head." He also speaks eight languages and can read hieroglyphics.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Julian's, and therefore Henry's, general attitude.
• The Stoic: Generally shows little emotion.
• Tall, Dark, and Snarky: He is tall, dark-haired and often a bit cold and rude to others.

Bunny Corcoran

Edmund "Bunny" Grayden Corcoran

Hailing from a banking family, Bunny is loud and extroverted and makes friends easily. Unfortunately for the people around him though, he tends to mooch off friends and has a special talent for finding their weak spots...

• Asshole Victim: He wasn't the most pleasant person even before catching wind of his friends' masquerade, but after learning about the murder they committed he becomes manic, unpredictable, downright cruel, and impossible to deal with.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family / Freudian Excuse: The Corcorans. Oh God, the Corcorans. Charles goes on a bit of a tirade about it, noting that Bunny was the best of them. The shallow (his father) and callous (his mother) parents are supremely concerned with appearances.
  Charles: I just never met such a bunch of greedy, shallow people. You look at them and think, oh, what a tasteful, attractive family but they're just a bunch of zeros, like something from an ad.
• Boisterous Bruiser
• Book Dumb: He's a terrible scholar but a gifted artist and an astute observer.
  Henry: If I were Mr. Corcoran, I would have set Bunny up in business or had him learn a trade after high school. Bunny has no business being in college. He couldn't even read until he was about ten years old.
  Richard: He draws well.
  Henry: I think so, too. He certainly has no gift for scholarship. They should've apprenticed him to a painter when he was young instead of sending him to all those expensive schools for learning disabilities.
• Establishing Character Moment: When Richard overhears Bunny and the twins working on their Greek homework, Bunny's suggestions are sloppy and somewhat random and he's eager to finish the translation without really making sure that it's correct.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The clique is aesthetic, scholarly, and insular. Bunny is gauche, not studious, and extroverted—with Marion and Cloke, he's the only one who has a social life that extends beyond the clique. Before the plot even gets going, Bunny is excluded from the bacchanal for not being committed enough. That is his original sin. Afterwards they decide they don't like Bunny because of his grating personality, his bigotry, and how he won't stop threatening to reveal their secret.
• Green-Eyed Monster: For all his apparent confidence, Bunny is jealous of not only Richard, as confirmed by Henry, but implicitly of all his friends for being wealthier and more intelligent and academically gifted.

• Hyper-Awareness: He's very clever when it comes to noticing things and putting them together.
• Idiot Ball: Bunny picks it up when he realizes the truth about the farmer's death and refuses to put it down.
• Implausible Deniability: Noted by Richard as a habit of his, to the point where he once explained a hickey by saying that he fell down some stairs.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: Implied Trope. Bunny is dyslexic and may have other learning difficulties besides. His family is very concerned with keeping up appearances, so rather than instead of facing the fact that Bunny just isn't that bright academically, they sent him to expensive schools where he struggled to keep up with his peers. Due to being Held Back in School, Bunny is 24 while his friends are 20 and 21. He started studying Greek at age 12, younger than any of the others, but is still the worst at it. Additionally, his family did not provide him with enough money to live on, which drove Bunny to develop various mooching strategies. It seems like he feels inferior to his friends, both economically and academically. He makes up for it with a lot of bluster, and by sniffing out his friends' weaknesses and constantly poking and prodding at them.
• It's All About Me / Lack of Empathy: Bunny is supremely selfish. He plays John Philip Sousa at full volume in his dorm room late at night, steals food from everyone, uses his friends for money and entertainment, wakes them up in the middle of the night to rant or hide from his girlfriend, lies to them, is completely careless with their possessions, and becomes downright tyrannical when he discovers the bacchanalian murder. Throughout the book, he consistently acts as if he is the most important person in the world.
• Like an Old Married Couple: With Marion.
  She and Bunny had a relationship the likes of which I had seldom seen except in couples married for twenty years or more, a relationship which vacillated between the touching and the annoying.
• Mock Millionaire: Bunny pretends to be as rich as his friends, but never actually has any money on hand and is forever mooching off everyone. This is reportedly something he learned from his parents, who also live beyond their means.
  Henry: Frankly, no matter what Bunny tells you to the contrary, he hasn't a cent and neither does his father. [...] They may have had money once, but if so they spent it long ago. That terrible house of theirs must have cost a fortune, and they make a big show of yacht clubs and country clubs and sending their sons to expensive schools, but that's got them in debt to the eyebrows. They may look wealthy, but they haven't a dime. I expect Mr. Corcoran is about bankrupt. [...] Bunny's never had a cent of pocket money the entire time I've known him.
• Odd Friendship: Henry and Bunny were school-assigned roommates freshman year. They were reportedly best friends for a few years. By the time Richard joins the group, it's starting to crumble.
  Mr Corcoran: Why, I'll never forget, it was Bunny's first night at Hampden, he called me up on the telephone. "Dad," he said to me, "Dad, you ought to see this nut they gave me for a roommate." "Stick it out, son," I told him, "give it a chance" and before you could spit it was Henry this, Henry that, he's changing his major from whatever the hell it was to ancient Greek.
• Politically Incorrect Hero: While he may or may not be genuinely bigoted at heart, he does go out of his way to irritate his friends through loud, rude, politically incorrect comments (and, being every inch the New Englander, his offensive remarks are aimed at white Catholics and Jews rather than what Americans from other regions would consider more obvious targets, such as black Americans or Hispanics).
  • Boomerang Bigot: Hinted at. Bunny goes out of his way to show off what a WASP he is by complaining about Catholics. However, his last name is Irish and his family are often confused in public with the Kennedys, hinting that his ancestors may often not meet the qualifications for the "P" in WASP.
  • He-Man Woman Hater / Stay in the Kitchen: At one point he asks Camilla to iron his shirt, and then complains that she'll never get a husband with her apparently inadequate ironing skills.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Henry and Bunny were roommates freshman year. According to the twins, they were pretty good friends before the events of the books.
  Camilla: Henry's so serious and Bun's so sort of—well, not serious—that they really get along quite well.
  Charles: Yes, L'Allegro and Il Penseroso. A well-matched pair. I think Bunny's about the only person in the world who can make Henry laugh.

• White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: To the extent that Bunny is aesthetic at all, he's aesthetic in this direction — all-American boy, frat boy lite. This is in contrast with his brooding, intense, aesthetically-Catholic friends.

Francis Abernathy

Francis Abernathy

• Bath Suicide: Attempts one in the epilogue.
• The Beard: Marries Priscilla to placate his homophobic grandfather at the end of the book.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Judging from his iron-fisted grandfather, Absurdly Youthful Mother and even more absurdly youthful stepfather, Disappeared Dad, and assorted Crazy Cat Lady aunts.
• Brilliant, but Lazy / Idle Rich: Francis is gifted, but lacks the motivation to get himself out of trouble (or stand up to Henry). After his grandfather discovers that he's gay, Francis elects to get married to a ditzy woman rather than be disinherited and actually have to work for a living.
  Bunny: You ask me, he's as smart as Henry. Society boy, tons of money. He's had it too easy, though. He's lazy. Likes to play. Won't do a thing after school but drink like a fish and go to parties.
• The Cameo: In an another Donna Tartt novel, The Goldfinch.
  Other friends, like Mr. Abernathy—my dad's age, with some ill-articulated scandal or disgrace in his past—were so mercurial and articulate, so utterly dismissive of me
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Francis suffers from panic attacks and is also a very frequent smoker.
• The Dandy: The whole group wears Awesome Anachronistic Apparel, but Francis still stands out as the best-dressed one. He gives his hand-me-down suits to Charles and Richard.
  I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince and Jack the Ripper. Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez. (Later, I discovered that they weren't real pince-nez, but only had glass in them, and that his eyes were a good deal sharper than my own.)
• Depraved Homosexual: While he seems like a nice person and is the only one who seems to genuinely like Richard, he apparently often sleeps with men who are either too drunk or too high to say no or realize what's happening. He even keeps trying to sleep with Richard even after he repeatedly tells him no, and probably would have gone through with it if they weren't interrupted by Charles.
• Fiery Redhead: Subverted. Francis has a "fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen", but he's actually less extra than most of his friends.
• Hypochondria: It seems to be a way for him to express his anxiety and to elicit concern and care from others.
• Raised by Grandparents: His mother had him at 17, and Francis says of his childhood, "the grandparents brought them up like brother and sister, him and his mother, brought them up in such a magnanimous style that even the gossips were impressed." This results in largely Hands-Off Parenting from his mother, and his grandfather having excessive control of his life.
• Transparent Closet: Francis isn't "out" exactly, insofar as Bunny can shit-talk gay men right in front of Francis and there's enough Plausible Deniability that Bunny can pretend it's not a personal attack. But everyone knows. Like everyone. Before Richard even meets Francis for the first time, when he's watching the classics group from afar and asking other students at Hampton about them, "further inquiries [about Francis] elicited suspicion from male acquaintances, who wondered at my interest in such a person." There's not much stereotypically gay about Francis's personality, and he's fairly discrete about his hookups with men. But he looks gay, in a The Dandy sort of way—he's described as looking like Alfred Douglas (as in Oscar Wilde's boyfriend) or the Count of Montesquiou (both 19th century dandies, both gay poets).
• The Twink: He's slender and delicate, especially in contrast with Henry and Bunny who are both huge. Among his Ambiguously Bi friends, he is resoundingly homosexual.

The Macaulay twins in general

• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Charles and Camilla are blond and wholesome and angelic, at least in the first half of the book.
• Half-Identical Twins: Charles and Camilla initially appear to conform to this trope. As the plot unravels and their personality differences become more apparent they lose their united front (see Twin Desynch).
  Side by side, they were very much alike, in similarity less of lineament than of manner and bearing, a correspondence of gesture which bounced and echoed between them so that a blink seemed to reverberate, moments later, in a twitch of the other's eyelid.
• Light Is Not Good: Charles and Camilla wear a lot of white, in addition to looking like a pair of angels.
• Raised by Grandparents: After their parents were killed in a car accident, the twins are raised by their loving grandmother.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Camilla is the stoic Blue to Charles's hotheaded Red.
• Theme Twin Naming: They have Alliterative Family names.
• Twincest: It is, as Bunny says, "kinda classical", an allusion to the Divine Incest of Classical Mythology. This is one of multiple instances (the others being the bacchanal and the rumor of Lover and Beloved with Julian) where the Classics students engage in ancient-inspire sex that's not approved of in the modern day. It's never clear just how consensual it is on Camilla's part.]]
  Bunny: Kinda classical, too. Those Greeks carried on with their brothers and sisters like nobody's—
• Twin Desynch: Richard initially introduces Charles and Camilla as Half-Identical Twins. As the plot unravels and their personality differences emerge they lose their united front. In contrast to their earlier descriptions, someone remarks that for twins they don't look much alike at all. At the end, years after the resolution of the main plot, they barely speak to each other anymore.
  Sciola: Did you look more alike when you were little kids? I mean, there's a family resemblance, but your hair's not even quite the same color.

Charles Macaulay

Charles Macaulay

Camilla's handsome twin brother. A good-natured young man with a fondness for alcohol.

• Affectionate Nickname: Charles calls Camilla "Milly". Bilingual Bonus — in Greek, "méli" means "honey".
  Charles: Milly, my girl. Where are you, honey?
• Alcohol-Induced Bisexuality / Experimented in College: Charles is sleeping with both Camilla and Francis on an ongoing (if infrequent) basis. When he hooks up with Francis it's always when he's drunk, and he refuses to acknowledge it afterwards.
  Francis: As for Charles—well, basically, he likes girls. If he's drunk, I'll do.
• Animal Lover: Charles adopts an old greyhound at the beginning of the year and a stray cat at the end of the year. He didn't seek them out in either case, but when they needed a home, he jumped and took them in.
• Beware the Nice Ones: In the early parts of the book, Charles is probably the most sensitive of them all. Later, with the possible exception of Richard, Charles seems to feel the worst about Bunny's murder, which is one of the reasons he has the most pronounced Freak Out.
  Charles: [trying and failing to bring himself to pull the glass out of Camilla's foot] I can't do it. I'm afraid I'll hurt you.
  [later]
  Charles: [close to tears] But how, how could you possibly justify cold-blooded murder?
• Crazy Jealous Guy / My Sister Is Off-Limits: Charles is very possessive of his twin sister, thanks to their incestuous relationship.
• Descent into Addiction / Drowning My Sorrows: Charles—arguably hit hardest by the murder—drowns his sorrows in liquor to the point of alcohol poisoning. Although even before that, he drank rather more than the rest of them—and they all drank a lot.
• Domestic Abuse: To his sister Camilla. The horrific abuse is implied to stem out of his extreme jealousy over her relationship with Henry. Which is hypocritical, because he's hooking up with Francis periodically.
• I'll Tell You When I've Had Enough!: Charles really doesn't appreciate his friends pointing out his alcoholic tendencies.
• Sex for Solace: Implied to be a factor in Charles' repeated seduction of Francis.
• Southern Gentleman: Downplayed Trope. He's from Virginia, has a slight southern accent, and is the most socially graceful of the group — neither standoffish like Henry and Francis, nor overbearing like Bunny. His habit of dressing in white also has some associations to this trope.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Charles is made the group's unofficial CCO in the furor after Bunny's death. After he snaps under the pressure (among other things), Henry begins looking for a way to dispose of him.

Camilla Macaulay

Camilla Macaulay

The only female member of the Clique, and Charles' twin sister.

• Birds of a Feather: Camilla and Henry are the more stoic, coolheaded members of the class, and are later revealed to be very close friends (if not more).
• Dissonant Serenity: She is surprisingly calm sometimes, such as when she receives an impromptu passionate kiss from a very drunk Charles in front of Richard, or when she tells Richard that Charles tried to kill her. She is as "calm as a Madonna" when she witnesses Bunny's murder.
• Dude Magnet: She attracts the attention of three men in the classics group — though it's at least in part just by virtue of being the only girl present in an insular group that resists socializing with outsiders. Over the course of the novel, Camilla is an object of lust for Richard himself, Henry, and even her own brother Charles. At one point in the novel it's implied that she may have rejected Bunny's advances. If we do count Bunny, this means that her entire friend group has a crush on her, except for the gay boy.
• Informed Flaw: Francis alleges that Charles and Camilla are both possessive over each other. The only evidence we see of this, though, is a single vague example. At at the end of Bunny's funeral, the twins have a fight which is implied to be about Charles hooking up with Francis a couple hours earlier. She shows no animosity toward Francis.
• The Lost Lenore: Henry is this for her. Years after his death, she continues to love him and cannot get over him.
• Meaningful Name:
  Donna Tartt: I can't remember how Charles got his name, but Camilla got hers from Camilla the warrior maiden in The Aeneid — Virgil calls her "a sacred falcon" and there is a beautiful passage where the mothers of Italy gather to watch Camilla heading off to battle. I was reading the Aeneid for a class right around the time I started writing The Secret History. Camilla is as strong and heroic as any soldier in the poem, and her name stuck with me.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Bunny's harassment and japes bounce off of Camilla with ease, but when Bunny implies that she's sleeping with her brother, she gives him an uncharacteristically icy retort. It clues the reader in that Bunny has touched a nerve, and it's later confirmed to be true.
  • When a drunken Charles gives her a decidedly sensual kiss in front of Richard, Camilla seemingly doesn't react — but Richard notices that she put sugar in her coffee afterwards. Camilla always drank her coffee black, so her going for the sugar underlined that she was shaken after all.
• Pretty in Mink: Camilla seems to own a few fur coats.
• The Smurfette Principle: Camilla is the only girl in Classics class. Richard emphasizes that despite hanging out with all guys, she is nonetheless feminine.
  Being the only female in what was basically a boys' club must have been difficult for her. […] Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.
• The One That Got Away: She is this for Richard. Almost a decade after the events of the story, he is still pining after her.
• Unkempt Beauty: Bunny calls Camilla a "bramble rose." Richard and Bunny both agree that 1) Camilla looks a lot like Charles and 2) she's really pretty. She has a "boyish haircut" and sometimes wears her brother's clothes, but is also mentioned wearing dresses, jewelry, and lipstick. Richard emphasizes that despite hanging out with all guys, Camilla nonetheless caries an innate femininity.

Professors

Julian Morrow

The eccentric, but captivating Classics professor of the clique, Julian is very selective about his students and his way of teaching them.

• Broken Pedestal: After Julian finds out about Bunny's murder, he flees the school (and possibly the country), never to be heard from again.
• Cool Teacher: With his long list of famous acquaintances, captivating personality and teaching philosophy, Julian is fascinating to his students.
• Expy: Julian looks very much like an expy from almost every single movie made about an inspirational teacher. From the start, however, we can see that this is going to be quite heavily deconstructed.
• Fair-Weather Mentor: When Julian is forced to acknowledge what his students have done, he leaves the country without a word.

• Overt Operative: Some of the rumors about Julian suggest that he does diplomatic and/or intelligence work, possibly involving the Isrami Government in Exile as The Handler.
• Parental Substitute: Implied to be an Invoked Trope. Not a one of Julian's group of handpicked students has much parental guidance in their life. Julian then isolates them in his own little academy, with no other faculty involved, where they're also to some extent socially isolated from other students. This allows him to step in as a Parental Substitute very easily.
• Politically Motivated Teacher: Laforgue suggests that Julian is this for pushing elitism and segregating the more posh students from their more common peers.
  Julian: Even Plato knew that class and conditioning and so forth have an inalterable effect on the individual.
• Renowned Selective Mentor: Julian only teaches a very small group of people, and it is notoriously difficult to become his student.
  Laforgue: He accepts only a limited number of students. A very limited number. [...] I don't know why they continue to list his courses in the general catalogue—it's misleading, every year there is confusion about it—because, practically speaking, the classes are closed. I am told that to study with him one must have read the right things, hold similar views. It has happened repeatedly that he has turned away students such as yourself who have done prior work in classics.
• Selective Obliviousness: Julian wants to believe the best of everyone, until confronted with irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
  ...a particularly shrewd remark once made by, of all people, Bunny. "Y'know," he said, "Julian is like one of those people that'll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest." This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian's personality. It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies. "Julian," he said curtly, "will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis."
• Shrouded in Myth: Many strange stories abound about Julian;s past, the vast majority of which really don't check out. Henry has old pictures of him with Vivien Leigh, the Sitwells, T. S. Eliot, and Marilyn Monroe.
  Nearly everyone had heard of him, and I was given all sorts of contradictory but fascinating information: that he was a brilliant man; that he was a fraud; that he had no college degree; that he had been a great intellectual in the forties, and a friend to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; that his family money had come from a partnership in a white-shoe banking firm or, conversely, from the purchase of foreclosed property during the Depression; that he had dodged the draft in some war (though chronologically this was difficult to compute); that he had ties with the Vatican; a deposed royal family in the Middle East; Franco's Spain. The degree of truth in any of this was, of course, unknowable but the more I heard about him, the more interested I became...
• Teacher/Student Romance: Never confirmed, but two Implied cases:
  • Works as a super tutor to the young princess of the Isrami royal family. One of the many rumors about him implies that he is carrying on an affair with her.
  • His relationship with Henry is questionable. Henry clearly has an obsession with him, and—according to Richard's gaydar—Julian is possibly gay. Once, early on, Richard oversees them interacting while they think they're alone, and Henry gives Julian "a quick little businesslike kiss on the cheek." Henry is the only one of Julian's students who has ever been to his house. They would both definitely be into the idea of Lover and Beloved for Greek reasons. For what it's worth, Claude Fredericks—the real-life enigmatic Classics professor at Bennington during Donna Tartt's time—was openly gay and did have an affair with a student.
• Thinks Like a Romance Novel: Perhaps the most striking instance of this is when Julian is aiding in the search for Bunny, and stops for a moment to bask in the dramatism of the situation. He is pleased that he is part of something so dramatic, as if he gets to collect another scene for the novel that he thinks life is.

Georges Laforgue

• Boomerang Bigot: Implied Trope. He believes Julian might be gay and having an affair with his male students, but his consciously described similarities to the gay intellectual Michel Foucault suggest he may be speaking from a very particular sort of place.
• The Cassandra: At the very beginning, Laforgue tells Richard in no unceratin terms that Julian is an elitist, that having only one teacher puts him in a precarious position, that being so isolated from the rest of the school is a loss, and that this is overall a bad idea. Richard goes full steam ahead anyways.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He looks a lot like Michel Foucault and has a similar distrust of traditionally-minded academics.
• Politically Motivated Teacher: Genuinely believes his more modern, inclusive approach to pedagogy is better for students, and distrusts Julian (as well as members of his own department) for pushing what he sees as a more traditional or even reactionary agenda.

Dr Roland

• The Cuckoolander Was Right: During the winter, Dr Roland twice mentions a friend of Richard's he's seen around. Richard dismisses this, saying his friends are all out of town and assuming that Dr Roland just has no idea who his friends are. Dr Roland is referring to legitimate sightings of Henry, who's returned early without Richard knowing.
• Obfuscating Stupidity:
  Dr Roland's senile manner was said to be a facade; to me it seemed quite genuine but sometimes, when you were off your guard, he would display an unexpected flash of lucidity, which—though it frequently did not relate to the topic at hand—was evidence that rational processes rumbled somewhere in the muddied depths of his consciousness.
• Old Windbag: Richard has a job working for Dr Roland, "an old, dazed, disordered-looking fellow" who is happy to talk all about cars when Richard brings them up.
  It was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet.

Other students

Judy Poovey

One of Richard's neighbors in the dorm, a major in Costume Design.

• Friendship Denial: Judy is really nice to Richard — she gives him a silk jacket, drugs, and a ride to town when he asks. Nonetheless, Richard frames her as his annoying neighbor rather than his friend.
• Hard-Drinking Party Girl: Almost every time Judy appears, she's either at a party or getting ready for one.
• Only Sane Woman: Judy is pretty sharp for a "senseless cokehead". She's a stark Foil to Richard's Ditzy Genius classics friends.
• Out-of-Genre Experience: Every scene with Judy is in sharp contrast with the dark academia rest of the book.
• Rhyming Name: Judy Poovey
• Valley Girl: She's from Los Angeles and thinks that she and Richard have a lot in common because they're both California kids.
• Vanity License Plate: She drives a red Corvette with a California license plate that reads JUDY P.

Marion Barnbridge

Bunny's girlfriend.

• Acceptable Feminine Goals and Traits: Bunny likes how Marion is traditionally feminine. It's simultaneously inverted into Real Women Don't Wear Dresses as Richard and the book's framing look down on her for the same traits that Bunny praises.
  Bunny: And she's an elementary education major, too, don't you love it? I mean, she's a real girl. Long hair, got a little meat on her bones, isn't afraid to wear a dress. I like that. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't care much for the brainy ones.
• Age-Inappropriate Dress: Richard describes her dress as "at once girlish and shockingly matronly".
• Dead Guy Junior: An odd case; her daughter in the epilogue is named after her late boyfriend.
• Inelegant Blubbering: Pretty much constantly after Bunny's death.
• Like an Old Married Couple: With Bunny.
  She and Bunny had a relationship the likes of which I had seldom seen except in couples married for twenty years or more, a relationship which vacillated between the touching and the annoying.
• Noodle Incident:
  Between her and Francis there had been some catastrophic incident which was so frightful that no one would even talk about it.
• Settle for Sibling: In the epilogue she's married to Bunny's brother Brady.
• Tsundere

Cloke Rayburn

• Not Helping Your Case / Suspiciously Specific Denial: Becomes frantically worried that Bunny's disappearance has something to do with his own dealing activities, leading to this quote when he's interviewed for a paper:
  Cloke Rayburn, a school friend of Corcoran's and one of those who first notified police, said that Corcoran "is a real straight guy—definitely not mixed up in drugs or anything like that."
• The Stoner: Cloke does (and deals) a lot of drugs.