Throughout The Secret History, Richard Papen tries to create a new identity for himself. Richard grows up in a working-class family from California. Unlike the other Greek students, he has no wealthy or romantic background to speak of. Richard is embarrassed about this, so he lies about it, even though the others eventually see through his façade of wealth and experience. In an attempt to blend in with his milieu, Richard buys expensive clothes and assumes a condescending attitude toward contemporary art and culture. Eventually, Richard cannot even bring himself to talk to his parents, and he rarely communicates with anyone on campus who isn’t a Greek student. However, as the novel progresses, Richard’s newfound identity becomes too difficult to maintain. Because he isn’t actually wealthy, Richard is forced to live in dangerous conditions during winter break. In addition, his desire to be liked by the Greek students leads to morally dubious behavior and, ultimately, Bunny’s death. The cruel irony of Richard’s shift in identity is that it proves useless almost immediately. After Henry’s death, he rarely communicates with the other Greek students and finds it difficult to connect with others. Unfortunately for Richard, the events of the past make him feel as though a new change in identity is no longer possible. As such, the novel serves as a warning about the mutability of identity. Though we may be able to change who we are, it is important to realize that some of those changes might have lasting consequences and, as a result, be permanent. As such, we should be careful and thoughtful about who we decide to be.
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Class and Identity Quotes in The Secret History
Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.
If I threw myself off, I thought, who would find me in all that white silence? Might the river beat me downstream over the rocks until it spat me out in the quiet waters, down behind the dye factory, where some lady would catch me in the beam of her headlights when she pulled out of the parking lot at five in the afternoon?
“Well, they painted it with a dado, sort of, those awful Gucci stripes. It was in all kinds of magazines. House Beautiful had it in some ridiculous article they did on Whimsy in Decorating or some absurd idea—you know, where they tell you to paint a giant lobster or something on your bedroom celling and it’s supposed to be very witty and attractive.” He lit a cigarette. “I mean, that’s exactly the kind of people they are,” he said. “All surface. Bunny was the best of them by a long shot[. . .]”
It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.
