#julian talking about maenads being more like deer than human

[spinostarz]

why are deer mentioned so so many times throughout the secret history?

[mhevarujta]

Camilla Macaulay is such a fascinating female character

Some readers have claimed that she is a badly written female character; one-dimensional, weak, barely there and overshadowed by the male characters even though she could have been developed more as the only girl in the group.

Others see her as a wicked, deceptive woman who uses her sexuality to pull strings and to manipulate the male characters.

The unreliable manner in which the book is narrated and Richard’s obsessive and biased view of Camilla that is rooted in denial even when he glimpses the darkest parts of her does not allow the reader to have a full picture of the character.

This elusiveness makes this young woman a fictional character that cannot be ignored. Who is Camilla Macaulay? My answer always changed. I have theories that contradict each other and that constantly reshape. Each time I think I’ve settled a conclusive interpretation seems to slip away from me. So in this post I wanted to focus on how I think of Camilla today.

Camilla was raised by women with horsed and rivers; an image really reminiscent to the Amazons who were placed on the Thermodon river, riding horses and hunting. Hunting connects them to Artemis/Diana, the worship of whom the Amazons were connected. Apollo, Diana’s twin brother was named Amazonius and Charles, the only man around, is described in several occasions in a way that brings in mind the depictions of Apollo. Moreover, Bunny parallels Camilla to Diana. Artemis/Diana was the product of rape and as a newborn she helped her mother give birth to her brother. She is the goddess of hunting among other things and one of her requests from Zeus was her eternal innocence and the maintenance of her virginal status. And she is an unforgiving goddess. In fact, Tartt’s idea for Camilla’s name came from Virgil’s Aeneid. Camilla was the daughter of King Metabus who promised his daughter to Diana –to be a virgin warrior in service of the goddess- in order to save her.

Tartt’s Camilla lost her virginal status. She lost her innocence. In fact she was manipulated and abused by the only male she grew up with. What I find interesting is the way she is introduced in Julian’s lecture, by reciting a passage that is memorable to her (at which point Henry winks at her):

Thus he died, and all the life struggled out of him;

and as he died he spattered me with the dark red

and violent-driven rain of bitter-savored blood

to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers

of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.

 Camilla is undeniably tied to the image of Klytemnestra murdering Agamemnon. Another thing I’ve noticed is her deepest desire:

“And if beauty is terror,” said Julian, “then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?”

“To live,” said Camilla.

Unlike Bunny ‘s ‘to live forever’ Camilla’s answer can be interpreted as living in the sense of experiencing life freely and it makes sense in a way. She is a female character who has been trapped between all these male characters. She is formidable as any of them but she is being suffocated by Charles who is free to do as he pleases but does not allow her to have the life she chooses without getting out of control; who is passive-aggressive when he feels their ‘arrangement’ is threatened in any way. It is interesting how Bunny compares potentially being with Camilla to marrying Charles/a female version of him. It is a testament to how much his presence is affecting the façade that Camilla wears for the rest of the world. It’s also interesting that despite both of them growing up with women SHE is the one who’s dressed in a way that men do not relate to women.

The first lesson is also the first time that Richard glimpses the mind behind the lovely face:

I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining.

 And these glimpses of a sharp and darker mind allow us to make more sense of her more intimate connection to Henry. After the aforementioned wink, a really significant moment is when Henry helps her after she has cut her artery. Henry is the one who takes action to help and Camilla is concerned that she’ll bleed all over him and that she’s too heavy for him. He doesn’t mind. When Charles appears he is the one who’s asked to take the glass out, to release her from the pain, but he just can’t do it. It’s Henry who takes action yet again and he recognized her bravery. To me, the entire situation foreshadows Camilla moving on from Charles to Henry and it established the reason she got attached to him –his ability to accept her for who she is with no judgment, to carry her, to let her bleed on him and to remove what hurts her even if that hurts her in some ways- which is something that Tartt never shows us directly.

Do I believe that Camilla and Henry conspired to kill Charles? I think I do. I think Charles’ death might have even been planned for the Bacchanalia and gone wrong or that at the very least that that was when the idea of his murder really took root. Let’s see some facts: All the participants are high. Henry is the one who murdered the farmer in the frenzy of that night and yet Camilla had SO much blood on her:

“I suppose we’ll never know what really happened,” he said. “We didn’t find her until a good bit later. She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except for her hair. It was dark and clotted, completely soaked. As if she’d tried to dye it red.”

This image gives me the impression of Camilla trying to reclaim her lost innocence by going back to the river, to the sight where she grew up as a child, but her head, her mind, is still tainted and cannot be cleansed.

The way Charles appears is as fascinating:

Charles had a bloody bite-mark on his arm that he had no idea how he’d got, but it wasn’t a human bite. Too big. And strange puncture marks instead of teeth. Camilla said that during part of it, she’d believed she was a deer; and that was odd, too, because the rest of us remember chasing a deer through the woods, for miles it seemed.

[…]

Really, I do not know how that happened. There was a dreadful mess. I was drenched in blood and there was even blood on my glasses. Charles tells a different story. He remembers seeing me by the body. But he says he also has a memory of struggling with something, pulling as hard as he could, and all of a sudden becoming aware that what he was pulling at was a man’s arm, with his foot braced in the armpit. Francis—well, I can’t say. Every time you talk to him, he remembers something different.”

[…]

“And that bite.”

“You’ve never seen anything like it,” said Francis. “Four inches around and the teeth marks just gouged in. Remember what Bunny said?”

Henry laughed. “Yes,” he said. “Tell him.”

“Well, there we all were, and Charles was turning to get the soap— I didn’t even know Bunny was there, I suppose he was looking in the door—when all of a sudden I heard him say, in this weird businesslike way, ‘Looks like that deer took a plug out of your arm, Charles.’ ”

It seems that Camilla tried to get her innocence back, what was stolen from her, by hurting Charles. This also throws us back to the passage of Clytemnestra killing Agamemnon to avenge what was manipulatively stolen from her (her daughter). I also love how the boys see themselves as wolves but Camilla, who was ahead of them, saw them as ‘a pack of dogs’. The way they are painted differently depending on the perspective is genius.

There is also a connection between the deer, the Meanads and the kind of living –the freedom- which Camilla seeks that has been textually established:

And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?

Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown back, throat to the stars, ‘more like deer than human being.’ To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst.

 This is even more essential if one considers that the Maenads are tied to mythological events in which they tend to kill or tear apart men and animals in a state of frenzy. Moreover, some of the epithets that were traditionally attributed to them are connected to wool-spinning; the kind of imagery that can easily be connected to the Fate Clotho who span the thread of life and who decided in some occasions when mortals or gods should be saved or should die. If this theory is correct this is quite fitting for Camilla.

 Then there is Richard’s comparison of Henry and Camilla to Pluto and Persephone:

It was shocking to hear him speak of her with such intimacy. Pluto and Persephone. I looked at his back, prim as a parson’s, tried to imagine the two of them together. 

 This is a significant choice on Tartt’s part. In the different sources Pluto and Hades are both names used for the ruler of the underworld but Hades is portrayed as violent and his abduction of Persephone is usually equated to rape, while Pluto in the Eleusinian Mysteries is seen as a loving husband to her.

 Here’s my interpretation of Henry and Camilla possibly going after Charles. I see them as two people who have accepted each other but who can’t accept their own situation. Henry feels too detached from people and from the world. Out of the characters he only loves Julian all-consumingly and Camilla in a tamer way. When it comes to Richard, I think that his interest primarily lies with the fact that he sees him as someone who could finally be experiencing the same detachment. Henry is brought into the situation because his lack of empathy would make killing Charles easier in case Camilla had cold feet. The death of the farmer is an accident during the confusion that the drugs were causing. 

But that night changed a lot. I think that after that night Camilla started regretting her decision, which eventually led her to staying with Henry in her attempt to break out of her situation in a way that wouldn’t involve getting her brother out of the way.

On the other hand Henry does not see beauty in living; this is something that he only glimpses during that night of ecstasy and which he tried to find again ever since. Henry, pristine and controlled, saw in that moment of total freedom that came with killing as the consequence of being in a state that did not allow him to be burdened by consciousness and by thinking a possible meaning in life. And this fact along with his preexisting lack of empathy made murder all the more easy for him.

Camilla’s unwillingness to go through with killing Charles –like Persephone she’s not always tied to the darkness of the underworld and of death- certainly changed her and Henry’s relationship but they still danced around it. The point of not going back was when Camilla showed that she herself was afraid of Henry. Killing had become part of Henry’s definition of living and Camilla showed that despite herself she saw that as a threat; as something to be weary and fearful of.

 Henry bit his lip. He went to the window and looked out the corner of the shade. Then he turned around. He still had the pistol. 

“Come here,” he said to Camilla.

She looked at him in horror. So did Francis and I. He beckoned to her with his gun arm. “Come here,” he said. “Quick.”

[…]

Camilla took a step away from him. Her gaze was terrified. “No, Henry,” she said, “don’t …”

To my surprise, he smiled at her. “You think I’d hurt you?” he said. “Come here.”

She went to him. He kissed her between the eyes, then whispered something—what, I’ve always wondered—in her ear.

“I’ve got a key,” the innkeeper yelled, pounding away at the door. “I’ll use it.”

The room was swimming. Idiot, I thought wildly, just try the knob. Henry kissed Camilla again. “I love you,” he said. Then he said, out loud: “Come in.”

 I think that Camilla’s reaction sealed Henry’s fate. He had lost Julian, whom he loved more than anyone else, Richard did not understand him as he had hoped and Camilla, the one person who had at least fully accepted him showed that there was a part of her that could not fully embrace who he was. Henry ‘s predicament here comes down to this: Aristotle wrote that an individual who is naturally unsocial is either a beast or a god. Henry is conflicted between wanting to be accepted by few other human beings while being in this unsocial situation that tiptoes between the beastly and divine, unchallenged, power. Camilla was the last person left who might have accepted him as such and when he realizes that these are unrecognizable he ends his life, which ends up being a catalyst for Camilla’s character who has shattered her bond with Charles, whom she cares for despite herself, by investing in the understanding they had.

At the end of the book Camilla is partly hanging on the kind of living she could have had with Henry and partly mourning everything she’s lost.

“You should see the way I live now, Richard,” she said. “My Nana’s in bad shape. It’s all I can do to take care of her, and that big house, too. I don’t have a single friend my own age. I can’t even remember the last time I read a book.”

 Camilla is back at her grandmother’s, back at the service of Diana, at a place that will always keep reminding her her irrevocably lost innocence. It’s not the situation itself that is dreadful. What makes it so is that it is a distorted version of Camilla’s childhood; one that comes with responsibility, with loss and with sacrificing ‘living’ and by extent beauty in service of others.

Finally, the tell-tale hint that Camilla’s dismay with her life is genuine and not a lie she employs to keep Richard at bay is her confession about being unable to read anymore. Being unable to be free and to live even on a spiritual level is part of her punishment.