@NoLossForWords

I couldn’t find as many pics as I wanted of Kate with shorter hair but anyway! The way Richard always talked about Camilla’s boyish charm and unconventional beauty just immediately made me think of Kate Moss…not to mention, Kate has that perfect messy party girl look about her that I think is very appropriate to the disheveled dark academia aesthetic of the Greek class.

okay so when I read The Secret History for the first time, one of the images that stood out to me most was the wasp at Bunny's funeral. There's a wasp buzzing near Richard, Charles, and Camilla at the service, which Charles ends up smashing with a prayer book. Donna Tartt makes such a point of describing this moment, particular the buzzing sound of the wasp, that I felt it had to carry some significance but I was puzzled as to what. There's a line afterwards about Bunny being good at k*lling flies and bugs, but I didn't think that was just it. I had two initial theories...

This is just another moment that illustrates the characters' comfort with m*rder and violence, even with a small and relatively harmless creature (ie, the wasp poses a minute threat but not extreme and they k*ll it anyway, slightly disrupting the service).

This is a pun or a play on words with wasp/WASP - as in, wasp the insect vs the abbreviation of White Anglo Saxon Protestant, which all textual evidence seems to indicate Bunny is. They've k*lled a wasp...after just k*lling a WASP. (Hopefully it goes without saying that this observation is not an insult to anyone's religious or ethnic background - just going on the book.)

But neither of these felt as powerful as other symbols or recurring themes in the book. But then, recently, I was listening to TSH audio book, narrated by Tartt. During Richard's first few days at Hampden, he offers many lush descriptions of the college's scenery - the dorms, the students, the twilight. And suddenly I was struck by the line, "Trees creaking with apples, fallen apples red on the grass beneath, the heavy sweet smell of apples rotting on the ground and the steady thrumming of wasps around them." And then it clicked -

Richard and the Greek class are rotting. The wasp is there to show they're just like the fruit: once ripe and promising but now they're fallen, corrupted, and the consequences of their actions are destroying them like fruit rots. It's almost too fitting for the old saying about bad apples. The wasp is there as a callback and a symbol...but this time, it's moral decay to which it is drawn.