Dark Academia, the “Western Canon,” and the Decline of the Humanities

In around mid-July, I found out that there is apparently a huge internet “aesthetic” movement called “dark academia” that centers around a highly romanticized impression of what humanities scholars and students—especially those in the fields of classics, English, history, and philosophy—dressed and lived like in the twentieth century. Aspects of the aesthetic include wearing old-fashioned, dark-colored, stereotypically “academic” clothing and appreciating “classic” literature, art, and music.

For those who aren’t already aware, I am currently about to enter my senior year at Indiana University Bloomington double-majoring in history and classical studies (i.e., Ancient Greek and Latin), with honors in history. My current plan is to apply to graduate programs in ancient history later this year. Even though I don’t deliberately dress in a dark academia style and I don’t identify with the aesthetic in any particular way, being a humanities student does make me feel like I have a connection to it.

I was so struck by my surprise discovery of dark academia’s apparent popularity that I’ve spent a good part of the past two weeks researching it and its history. Naturally, I have a lot of thoughts, especially about how the current popularity of the aesthetic seems to be at least in part a reaction to the slow ongoing decline of the academic humanities.

Three major inspirations of “dark academia”

Before I talk about what dark academia is, I think I should mention a few of the media sources that have inspired it. The aesthetic draws inspiration from a wide array of different works of literature, film, and television. You can read a long list of works of media that are associated with dark academia on the fandom page about it, but I think that three specific works of media have played especially influential roles in shaping the aesthetic as it exists online today.

The earliest of these is the 1989 teen drama film Dead Poets Society, which is set in the year 1959 and is about a group of students at the fictional elite, all-male boarding school Welton Academy who are inspired by a charismatic English literature teacher named John Keating (who is played by Robin Williams) to form a secret, illicit club known as the “Dead Poets Society.” The members of the club meet in a cave, where they read works of poetry together, including works by famous poets as well as their own original compositions.

Many of the most prominent themes of dark academia are already fully present in Dead Poets Society. First, there are the visual themes; the film is set at an elite boarding school during the mid-twentieth century, so, naturally, all the characters dress in boarding school uniforms. Most of the film was shot on location at St. Andrew’s School, a private Episcopal boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, which is built from gray brick, with colonnades and Gothic Revival elements.

The film also, however, captures a lot of the other themes of dark academia, including the value of “classic” literature and a humanistic education, forbidden activities, rebellion against authority, secret societies, existentialism, death, and emotional trauma.

ABOVE: Scene from the 1989 teen drama film Dead Poets Society of the boys meeting in the cave where they discuss poetry and literature together

The second earliest of the three works of media that seem to have played the most influential role in inspiring dark academia is the novel The Secret History by Donna Tartt, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992. This book has earned a reputation as the definitive dark academia novel because it so thoroughly encapsulates so many of the themes associated with the aesthetic. At 576 pages, it’s a rather thick volume, but the writing style is very engaging and I was able to speed through it fairly quickly.

The narrator of the novel is a classics student named Richard Papen who transfers to Hampden College, a fictional elite liberal arts college in Vermont. After moving to the college, Richard finds that he is not allowed to take any classes with the Ancient Greek professor Dr. Julian Morrow, because the only people Dr. Marrow allows to take his classes are a hand-picked clique of five students who have little interaction with anyone else at the college, all of whom but one are soon revealed to be extraordinarily wealthy. The first chapter of the novel describes the appearance and clothing of each of the five students in great detail.

Richard manages to ingratiate himself with Dr. Morrow’s favorites by helping a few of them with their Greek homework. The students give him tips for how to win the professor’s favor and Dr. Morrow allows him to start taking his classes. He spends more time with Dr. Morrow’s other students and, in time, he becomes the sixth member of the clique.

The plot thickens when the other students in the clique attempt to recreate a Dionysian Bacchanalia in the woods without inviting Richard and end up murdering a farmer. (At first, the murder is claimed to be accident, but this is later called into question.) The murder leads to a downward spiral that results in one member of the clique getting murdered by the others, another member of the clique committing suicide, and the clique itself disintegrating.

The Secret History is clearly intended as a biting critique of elite values and education and, by the end of the novel, all of the main characters are exposed as truly horrible people. Nonetheless, it portrays this world of erudition and decadence with such aesthetic richness that many readers have simply fallen in love with it. This novel is generally seen as having had a greater role in shaping the dark academia aesthetic than any other individual work.

ABOVE: Front cover of the novel The Secret History by Donna Tartt, which is widely seen as the definitive dark academia novel

The third major influence on the dark academia aesthetic are the Harry Potter series of children’s fantasy novels written by J. K. Rowling, which were originally published from 1997 through 2007, and the films based on them, which were released from 2001 through 2011. I imagine that most of my readers are well aware of the Harry Potter series, but, for those who are not, I will summarize.

The series is about a boy named Harry Potter who finds out that he is a wizard and goes to attend Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, a boarding school for the magical arts. The school is housed in a magnificent castle and all the students wear a set of black robes as their school uniform. Each book is centered around Harry and his friends trying to solve some sort of mystery and they often find clues in old books that they find in Hogwarts’ vast library.

Many of the people involved in dark academia today probably read the Harry Potter books and watched the movies when they were younger and have since been influenced by them. The series includes many major themes that have become part of dark academia, including mystery, secrecy, dangerous or forbidden knowledge that can be found in books, death, mental and emotional trauma, and forbidden activities.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Harry, Ron, and Hermione wearing their school uniforms while walking on Hogwarts grounds in the 2004 film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

What is dark academia?

According to the “dark academia” fandom page, the tag “dark academia” originated on Tumblr sometime around 2015. Most of the earliest posts that used the tag were about the novel The Secret History. In time, however, people began making posts about aesthetic subjects.

People associated with the dark academia aesthetic generally wear clothing associated with twentieth-century western humanities scholars, such as round eyeglasses, tweed jackets, turtlenecks, dress clothes, and Oxford shoes. They usually dress in dark or muted colors, such as blacks, browns, tans, forest greens, and burgundies. Women who are into the aesthetic often wear types of clothes that have traditionally been worn by men.

The foremost activities associated with the aesthetic include reading “classic” literature, admiring “classic” art,” and listening to “classic” music. Images shared on dark academia platforms usually include photos of people dressed in a dark academia fashion, photos of old books and manuscripts, photos of often heavily annotated pages from works “classic” literature, photos of classical, Gothic, Neoclassical, and Beaux-Arts architecture, and photos of “classic” white marble statues. With regard to architecture, dark academia tends to favor university buildings and libraries.

Additionally, many versions of dark academia draw on the romantic stereotype of the “tortured poet” and therefore romanticize depression, anxiety, sleepless nights, alcoholism, and other mental health issues. Dark academia sometimes incorporates elements of the Goth aesthetic, with skulls, graveyards, blood on clothing or statues, ornate daggers, and vials of poison being common images associated with it.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the interior of Harper Library at the University of Chicago, photos of which are often shared on dark academia platforms

The two main criticisms of dark academia

After I first found out about dark academia, I was left feeling a bit weird because aspects of the aesthetic seem to encapsulate a naïvely romantic attitude towards a humanistic education and “classic” literature that I myself held from roughly late elementary school all the way through roughly my first year of college.

There are already two major criticisms of the dark academia aesthetic that a lot of people on the internet are making. The first major criticism is that most versions of dark academia center around the specific canon of works of literature, art, and music that have long been venerated as “classics” in the western world. Nearly all these works were written by white men, while works by women and people of color are generally excluded from the canon.

The second major criticism of dark academia is that many forms of the aesthetic romanticize unhealthy behaviors and mental health issues, such as drinking large quantities of alcohol, not getting a healthy amount of sleep, feeling depressed or even suicidal, and so forth.

Some of the people who have already made these criticisms include:

• Alice Cappelle in a YouTube video titled “We need to talk about dark academia…” published on 25 November 2020

• The Take in a YouTube video titled “What Dark Academia Says about Elite Education” published on 8 June 2021

• Rowan Ellis in a YouTube video titled “The Problem with Dark Academia” published on 30 June 2021

All of the videos I have just mentioned are excellent and worth watching if you’re interested in criticism of dark academia. Nonetheless, I would like to illustrate in detail what others have merely pointed out.

ABOVE: Screenshots of Alice Cappelle (left) and Rowan Ellis (right), both of whom have already done YouTube videos critiquing dark academia

Veneration of an almost exclusively white male canon

To prove what I mean about the so-called “western canon” being almost entirely composed of works by white men, let’s look at an example of an attempt at a comprehensive list of all the authors in the traditional “western canon.”

In 1994, Harold Bloom, a conservative literary critic and professor at Yale University, wrote a book titled The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. The book includes three appendices listing all the authors whose works Bloom believed are—and deserve to be—included in the “western canon,” spanning from the second millennium BCE to the beginning of the twentieth century, and a fourth appendix listing all the authors of the twentieth century whose works he believed might be considered canonical in the future. The list is extremely long and includes well over a thousand authors.

Quite revealingly, however, nearly every every single author who is listed in the first three appendices is a white man who was socially and economically well-off and lived in Europe or North America. The list includes only a tiny handful of women and people of color. This is not because women and people of color did not write works that are worth including, but rather because critics like Bloom are determined to focus on works written by white men and keep works by women and people of color out of the canon as much as possible.

To prove my point, I will list every single woman and person of non-European ancestry I could find in Bloom’s first three appendices. Bloom’s first appendix lists authors from the entire period of antiquity and the Middle Ages, spanning 3,321 years from 2000 BCE to 1321 CE. The list only includes two women in total whose works Bloom thinks deserve to be considered canonical and studied:

• Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE), an ancient Greek woman who wrote poems, some of which are famously about women loving women, a number of which have survived to the present day and are widely admired

• Christine de Pizan (lived 1364 – c. 1430 CE), a woman of upper-class background who was born in Venice, worked at various French courts, and is best known for her works defending women The Book of the City of Ladies and The Treasure of the City of Ladies, both written in French

This is such a pitiful turnout that it is hard to escape the conclusion that Bloom is deliberately ignoring even very famous female authors. Here are just a few fairly obvious omissions from Bloom’s list that I was able to think of off the top of my head:

• Enheduanna (fl. c. twenty-third century BCE), the daughter of the Akkadian conqueror Sargon who served as the priestess of the god Nanna and the goddess Inanna in the Sumerian city of Ur in southern Iraq, who wrote numerous surviving poems praising the Sumerian deities including “Goddess of the Fearsome Divine Powers,” also known as “Inanna and Ebih,” and the Sumerian Temple Hymns, and who is the earliest poet whose name and writings have both survived

• Anna Komnene (lived 1083 – 1150s CE), a Byzantine Roman historian and the daughter of the emperor Alexios I Komnenos who is best known today for her Alexiad, an eminent work of history written in the Greek language describing the events of her father’s reign

• Héloïse d’Argenteuil (lived c. 1100 – c. 1163 CE), a French philosopher and abbess who is known for her erudite letters written in Latin, addressed to her former teacher, ex-lover, and fellow philosopher Peter Abelard

• Hildegard of Bingen (lived 1098 – 1179 CE), a German abbess who is known for her musical compositions, her sacred music drama Ordo Virtutum, which is the earliest surviving morality play, and her various writings in Latin on theology, mysticism, medicine and natural philosophy

I’m pretty sure I could think of more women who are worth including if I had the time, but I’ve already come up with twice as many as Bloom, in addition to the two he himself has already listed.

ABOVE: Attic red-figure kalathos dating to c. 470 BCE depicting the ancient Greek poet Sappho holding a kithara (left) and illustration from a manuscript (Harley 4431, f.259v.) dating to 1413 depicting the medieval French writer Christine de Pizan (right)

Bloom’s list of authors from antiquity and the Middle Ages fares slightly better when it comes to authors of non-European ancestry. Here are all the authors of non-European ancestry that I could find:

• The author of the standard Akkadian version of the Epic of Gilgamesh, who may have been the Babylonian scribe Sîn-lēqi-unninni, who lived sometime between c. 1300 and c. 1000 BCE in what is now Iraq

• The various ancient Egyptian authors of the Book of the Dead, a collection of spells from the second millennium BCE that are meant to guide the deceased in the afterlife

• The ancient Indian authors of the classical Sanskrit epic poems, the Rāmāyana, which is believed to have been composed between the seventh century BCE and the third century CE, and the Mahābhārata (which includes the Bhagavad Gītā), which was composed between the fourth century BCE and the fourth century CE

• Publius Terentius Afer (lived c. 185 – c. 159? BCE), an Amazigh man who was born in what is now Tunisia, captured and sold into slavery in Italy at a young age, eventually gained his freedom, and went on to write comedies in Latin, which are now some of the earliest surviving works of Latin literature

• Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE), a Syrian man who was born into a lower middle-class family in a town on the Euphrates River, somehow acquired an education in Greek rhetoric, and wrote satirical works in Greek, over eighty of which have survived to the present day, including the satirical novel A True Story, which contains elements that prefigure modern science fiction

• Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 CE), a man of Amazigh ancestry who lived in what is now Algeria and wrote in Latin, whose most famous work is the novel The Golden Ass, which is the only novel written in ancient times in the Latin language that has survived to the present day complete

• Augustine of Hippo (lived 354 – 430 CE), a man of Amazigh ancestry who was born in the city of Thagaste in what is now Algeria, became the Christian bishop of the city of Hippo Regius in Algeria, and is best known today for his spiritual autobiography Confessions and his apologetic treatise The City of God

• The author or authors of the Quran, the holy text of Islam, which is traditionally said to have been delivered by God to the Arabian prophet Muhammad between 610 and 632 CE and is originally in Arabic

• The author or authors of The One Thousand and One Nights, the oldest version of which was originally written in Persian and translated into Arabic sometime in around the ninth century CE

This is not too bad, although it is worth noting that over half the authors I’ve just listed from Bloom are anonymous and the others clearly only made it onto Bloom’s list because they lived in the Roman Empire and Bloom therefore probably assumed that they were white, which is not, in fact, a particularly reliable assumption.

ABOVE: Ninth-century CE illustration of Terence possibly based on a third-century CE original (left), fourth-century CE medallion depicting Apuleius (center), and sixth-century CE fresco from the Lateran in Rome believed to be the earliest surviving depiction of Augustine of Hippo (right)

Bloom’s second appendix lists canonical authors from 1321 to 1832. This appendix is much longer than the first appendix and is divided into subsections for authors from each “western” country. It includes over a hundred authors, all of whom are white and nearly all of whom are men. Bloom only includes four women in total from this entire five-hundred-year period:

• Marguerite de Navarre (lived 1492 – 1549), the princess of France, queen consort of Navarre, and duchess of Alençon and Berry, who is known for her short story collection the Heptaméron, which was published posthumously in 1558

• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (lived 1648 – 1695), a white Mexican woman and Hieronymite nun of Spanish ancestry who wrote a large number of works of poetry and prose in Spanish and Nahuatl in which she discusses topics such as religion and love and condemns the misogyny and hypocrisy of men, earning her a reputation among scholars today as a “proto-feminist”

• Madame de La Fayette (lived 1634 – 1693), an upper-class white French woman who is best known today for her novel La Princesse de Clèves, which is considered the earliest surviving historical novel written in the French language

• Frances Burney (lived 1752 – 1840), an upper-class white British woman who is best known today for her novels Evelina (published in 1778), Cecilia (published in 1782), Camilla (published in 1796), and The Wanderer (published in 1814)

The second appendix does far worse than the first when it comes to authors of non-European ancestry, because, as far as I can tell, it does not include a single author with any recorded ancestry from outside of Europe whatsoever—not even the bestselling Black author Olaudah Equiano (lived c. 1745 – 1797), whom I discuss in this article I wrote in June 2021.

ABOVE: Portrait of Marguerite de Navarre by François Clouet (left), portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Miguel Cabrera (center), and portrait of Frances Burney by Edward Francis Burney (right)

Bloom’s third appendix lists canonical authors from 1832 to 1900. Despite covering the shortest time period, this appendix is by far the longest of the three and it is roughly the same length as the first two appendices combined.

Once again, nearly all the authors on the list are white men, but, because the list includes so many authors, there are naturally more women on this list than on the ones before it. This appendix includes fourteen women in total. All of them are white. They are also exclusively British, French, or American. The women are:

• Maria Edgeworth (lived 1768 – 1849), a white Anglo-Irish woman who is best known for her novels Castle Rackrent (published in 1800) and Harrington (published in 1817)

• Dorothy Wordsworth (lived 1771 – 1855) a white British woman and sister of the more famous Romantic poet William Wordsworth who is known today for her letters, diaries, and poems

• Jane Austen (lived 1775 – 1817), an upper-class white British woman who is best known for her novels Sense and Sensibility (published in 1811), Pride and Prejudice (published in 1814), Mansfield Park (published in 1814), and Emma (published in 1816)

• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (lived 1797 – 1851), an upper-class white British woman—the daughter of the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (lived 1759 – 1797), known for her feminist philosophical treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (published 1792), who is curiously absent from Bloom’s list—who is best known for her novel Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (published in 1818)

• Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin (lived 1804 – 1876), a white French woman who wrote many novels and plays in French under the male pseudonym “George Sand,” was more popular in her own time than Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, and was known for her gender nonconformity, since she usually dressed in men’s clothing and often smoked tobacco in public, an activity that was not socially acceptable for women at the time

• Elizabeth Gaskall (lived 1810 – 1865), a white British woman who is best known today for her novels Mary Barton (published in 1848), Cranford (published 1851 – 1853), North and South (published 1854 – 1855), and Wives and Daughters (published in 1865)

• Charlotte Brontë (lived 1816 – 1855), a white British woman known for her novel Jane Eyre (published in 1847)

• Emily Brontë (lived 1818 – 1848), a white British woman and younger sister of Charlotte Brontë, known for her novel Wuthering Heights (published in 1847)

• Mary Ann Evans (lived 1819 – 1880), a white British woman who wrote novels under the male pseudonym “George Eliot” and is best known for her novels Adam Bede (published in 1859), The Mill on the Floss (published in 1860), Silas Marner (published in 1861), Romola (published 1862 – 1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (published in 1866), Middlemarch (published 1871 – 1872), and Daniel Deronda (published 1876)

• Emily Dickinson (lived 1830 – 1886), a white American woman who wrote poems that are known for their idiosyncratic use of punctuation and capitalization and who has, on an interesting side note, long been suspected of having been sexually attracted to women

• Christina Rossetti (lived 1830 – 1894), a white British woman and sister of the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, known today for her many poems, including “Goblin Market,” “Remember,” “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and “Love Came Down at Christmas”

• Louisa May Alcott (lived 1832 – 1888), a white American woman known for her novel Little Women (published in 1868) and its sequels

• Kate Chopin (lived 1850 – 1904), a white American woman and feminist author known for her novel The Awakening (published in 1899)

• Sarah Orne Jewett (lived 1849 – 1909), a white American woman known for her novels and short stories set near the southern coast of Maine

This seems like a lot, but, when you consider that this is from a list with literally hundreds of men on it, it’s really not.

ABOVE: Sketch of Jane Austen from c. 1810 (left), portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley painted by Richard Rothwell in 1840 (center), and daguerreotype of Emily Dickinson taken in late 1846 or early 1847 (right)

Once again, Bloom does much worse at including authors of non-European ancestry. This time, he manages to include exactly two authors with known ancestry from outside of Europe, both of whom are men:

• Aleksandr Pushkin (lived 1799 – 1837), a revered Russian poet, playwright, and novelist. Pushkin was white-passing and of mostly white ancestry. His great-grandfather, however, was Abram Petrovich Gannibal, a Black African man who is believed to have been born in the region of what is now Cameroon. Gannibal was captured and enslaved at a young age and given as a gift to Sultan Ahmed III of the Ottoman Empire, who gave him in turn as a gift to Tsar Pyotr I, or “Peter the Great,” of Russia, who eventually granted him his freedom.

• Frederick Douglass (lived 1817 – 1895), a Black American man who was born into slavery, escaped, and became a renowned author, orator, and abolitionist, who is perhaps best known today for his memoir Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (published in 1845)

Again, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Bloom is deliberately trying to keep authors of color out of the canon as much as he possibly can and just sprinkling a tiny handful of the most famous authors of color onto his list so that he won’t seem overtly racist.

ABOVE: Portrait of the Russian poet, playwright, and novelist Aleksandr Pushkin whose great-grandfather was an enslaved Black man captured from the region of Cameroon (left) and Frederick Douglass a Black American orator and abolitionist who escaped from slavery himself (right)

You’ll notice that Bloom’s entire list, including all three appendices, does not include a single woman with any known ancestry from outside of Europe. Bloom’s list even excludes some fairly obvious examples of early modern Black female writers, such as:

• Phillis Wheatley (lived c. 1753 – 1784), a Black American woman who lived much of her life in enslavement, who is best known for her poetry collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (published in 1773), and whose poems were seen as so impressive at the time they were published that even George Washington, who held deeply racist sentiments towards Black people and enslaved Black people on his plantation for his entire adult life, praised them in a letter as “striking proof of [Wheatley’s] great poetical Talents”

• Harriet Jacobs (lived 1813 or 1815 – 1897), a Black American woman who escaped from slavery in the American South and is best known today for her autobiography Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (published in 1861), which is now widely regarded as a classic work of Black American feminist literature

• Anna J. Cooper (lived 1858 – 1964), a Black American woman who was born into slavery before gaining her freedom at a young age as a result of the Civil War; fought to acquire an education; earned an MA in mathematics from Oberlin College in 1888, making her one of the two first Black American women to earn a master’s degree; wrote numerous works that laid the foundations for formal Black feminist thought, including her most famous work A Voice from the South: By a Black Woman of the South (published in 1892), earning her the moniker “the Mother of Black Feminism”; earned a PhD in medieval French literature from the University of Paris in 1924 at the age of sixty-five, making her the fourth Black American woman in history to earn a PhD; served for many years as the president of Frelinghuysen University in Washington D.C.; and eventually died at the astounding old age of 105 years, shortly after the House of Representatives passed the bill that would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Unfortunately, Bloom’s list of authors in the “western canon” is very, very typical. In fact, his list is actually more inclusive than a lot of other lists I’ve seen, because his list actually has a few women and people of color; many of the lists I’ve seen include no women or people or color whatsoever.

Humanities scholars in recent years have been trying to revise or move away from the traditional, white male “western canon” by teaching more works by women and people of color. Generally speaking, however, most of the people associated with the dark academia aesthetic are going in exactly the opposite direction; they are, for the most part, going back to the traditional “western canon” and to white male exclusivity.

Dead Poets Society, The Secret History, and other works of media that have inspired dark academia are extremely fixated on the figures of the traditional “western canon” and people who are involved in the aesthetic have, by and large, followed the models set out for them in these works.

The dark academia aesthetic, however, is quite malleable. Having a love for knowledge and literature does not have to mean idolizing white maleness and it is not especially difficult to find excellent female authors and authors of color who lived before the twentieth century. People in dark academia simply need to put forth a conscious effort to seek such authors out.

ABOVE: Portrait of Phillis Wheatley from the frontispiece of her poetry collection published in 1773 (left), photograph of Harriet Jacobs taken in 1894 (center), and portrait of Anna J. Cooper taken in around 1902 (right)

Romanticizing mental illness and self-harming behaviors

The second major criticism that people are making of dark academia is that many forms of the aesthetic, especially the darker forms, romanticize mental illness and self-harming behaviors, including alcoholism, sleep deprivation, depression, and contemplation of suicide. Obviously, these are all things that we should not be romanticizing.

Unfortunately, this romanticizing of mental illness and self-harming behaviors has some roots in the works of the very canonical authors whom people in the dark academia aesthetic so greatly admire. William Shakespeare’s most famous passage by far is the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy delivered by Hamlet in Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, in which he contemplates suicide.

I don’t blame Shakespeare for dark academia’s romanticizing of suicide, but it’s easy to see how a young person could read Hamlet or watch a production of it and come away with the naïve impression that contemplating suicide is something “profound” that poets and artists are supposed to do—perhaps without realizing that part of what makes Hamlet’s speech so famous is actually the reason he decides not to kill himself.

ABOVE: Screenshot of Laurence Olivier performing the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy in the 1948 screen adaptation of Hamlet

The tragic history of famous artists, poets, and novelists who have struggled with depression and, in some cases, actually committed suicide—including the painter Vincent van Gogh (lived 1853 – 1890), the English novelist Virginia Woolf (lived 1882 – 1941), the American novelist Ernest Hemingway (lived 1899 – 1961), and the American poet Sylvia Plath (lived 1932 – 1963)—may unfortunately give rise to the misimpression in some that these are signs of a “tortured genius” and are therefore qualities to be admired.

Mental illness and the self-harming behaviors often associated with it should not be stigmatized, since this would only discourage or prevent people who need help from seeking it. Nonetheless, self-harming behaviors and mental illness should not be romanticized or seen as admirable. Suffering from mental illness does not inherently make anyone any more artistic or brilliant than anyone else; after all, the vast majority of geniuses have not been tortured and the vast majority of people who have been tortured haven’t been geniuses.

Dark academia can and should move away from the romanticizing of mental illness. Having a love for knowledge and literature does not have to mean romanticizing alcoholism, sleep deprivation, depression, suicide, and so forth. In fact, one might argue that knowledge and literature are things that can help give a person’s life meaning, help them to deal with their own mental illnesses, and help them to avoid self-harming behaviors.

ABOVE: Photograph of the famously depressed poet Sylvia Plath sitting amid piles of books in a posed photograph for LIFE

Dark academia as a substitute for the academic humanities

The criticisms that people are already making of dark academia are thoughtful and well-aimed. What really struck me in particular about dark academia, however, is something that other commentators don’t really seem to have paid much attention to. I noticed that, in many cases, dark academia seems to act as a meagre substitute for what many of the people affiliated with the aesthetic actually seem to want, which is a real academic education in the humanities.

Since finding out about the existence of dark academia, I’ve read a whole bunch of blog posts about it and watched a whole bunch of YouTube videos. I’ve noticed that the people associated with the aesthetic are usually in their late teens or in their twenties. They are either going to college soon, in college right now, or have just finished college. They often wax at length about how much they love the humanities—but yet they often admit that they haven’t taken any college-level classes in the humanities, usually because they haven’t been able to.

One notable exception to this is the popular dark academia YouTuber who goes by the name R. C. Waldun, who, from what I can gather, either is a current humanities major or has a humanities degree. He also has a video with the amusingly over-the-top title “Why Dark Academia Is the Modern Renaissance,” in which he goes on at length talking about his love for the “classics” and especially Charles Dickens, but yet even he seems oddly unaware of how many people were already reading the “classics” before the whole dark academia phenomenon came along. He says:

“This is just the surface manifestation. This is just the beginning of everything. Right now, it’s all about the clothing, the dark sweaters, the old dusty libraries, but, over time, because these texts—for example, people like Shakespeare, like Homer, if you like Charles Dickens, if you like some even older stuff, like, if you really wanna go back to the original sources—because this phenomenon has already entered the public consciousness, over time, these texts will become more and more ubiquitous. You’re going to see these small pockets of community, they’re going to start talking about Byron, they’re going to start talking about, like, how they loved Keats.”

What Waldun doesn’t seem to entirely realize is that the texts he’s talking about are already pretty much ubiquitous, because he’s talking about the foremost figures in the traditional “western canon.” This is especially the case when it comes to Shakespeare. There have been countless films and television shows based on Shakespeare’s life and plays alone. It is nearly impossible to go anywhere without seeing some kind of Shakespeare reference.

Moreover, there are already “small pockets of community” centered around reading and discussing the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, and Dickens. Indeed, these “pockets of community” have literally existed for centuries. They are not anything new by any stretch of the imagination.

If I found out that someone I knew who was not a classics scholar (like, say, a person I went to high school with) was obsessed with the works of Byron or Keats, I wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised. If, on the other hand, I found out that the person was obsessed with works of the obscure Hellenistic poet Aischrion of Samos, the Augustan poet Sulpicia, or the late Byzantine poet Stephanos Sachlikis, then I might think that it was something new and unusual.

ABOVE: Lord Byron in Albanian Dress, painted in 1813 by Thomas Philips

Modern public interest in the classics regularly waxes and wanes. Periods of interest are often triggered by specific cultural moments. For instance, in the 1996 film The English Patient, the eponymous patient’s only possession is a tattered old copy of The Histories by Herodotos of Halikarnassos. The film’s outstanding commercial and critical success led The Histories to become an unexpected bestseller.

Various recent film and television adaptations of the Trojan War, such as the television miniseries Helen of Troy (2003), the movie Troy (2004), and the miniseries Troy: Fall of a City (2018), have inspired countless people to read the Iliad and the Odyssey who would not have read them otherwise. The COVID-19 pandemic even got people reading Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, the framing story for which is about a group of young people hiding away in a secluded villa outside Florence during the height of the Black Death.

I do, however, agree with Waldun that dark academia is unusual. What makes it stand out is the fact that it is primarily popular among young people who are college-aged.

ABOVE: Illustration by Taddeo Crivelli from a manuscript copy of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron from Ferrara, dating to c. 1467, now held in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford

I suspect that a large part of why dark academia has become so popular among young people in the past couple years is not because the humanities are facing a grassroots resurgence, but rather because the professional academic humanities are dying out. College itself is increasingly difficult for lower-income students to afford. Meanwhile, prospective college students are increasingly being told not to major in the humanities under any circumstances because, if they major in the humanities, they’ll supposedly never find a job.

I cannot recall how many times an adult or fellow student personally warned me not to major in the humanities, telling me that, if I did, then I would make myself completely unemployable. Quite often, telling someone that you plan to major in a humanities field provokes exactly the same reaction as it would if you told them that you plan to cut off your dominant arm with a hacksaw; they look at you in shock and say something like, “Why would you do that? You’ll cripple yourself for life.”

Societal norms increasingly dictate that it is acceptable to study the humanities and have an appreciation for them—as long as you do so as an amateur and a hobbyist, not as someone with a degree in them. The idea is that you can enjoy the Iliad, the Odyssey, the tragedies of Sophokles, the plays of William Shakespeare, the sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, et cetera, as long as you have a degree in a different field and a paying job doing something else.

Statistics, however, show that the conventional wisdom about humanities majors supposedly being unemployable is not true. Although the academic job market for the humanities is utterly abysmal right now for a lot of complicated reasons that I won’t go into, the overall job market for people with both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in the humanities is pretty good; statistically speaking, humanities majors are just as likely to be happily and gainfully employed as STEM majors.

Humanities majors do tend to make a bit less money on average than people with some other kinds of degrees, but the average salary for a humanities graduate is still much higher than the average salary for someone who only graduated high school. In fact, the average salary for a person with a degree in a traditional, respected humanities discipline like history, English, “classics,” or philosophy is very close to the average salary for a person with a degree in biology or psychology, but I’ve never heard of anyone being warned not to major in biology because they supposedly “won’t find a job”!

Nonetheless, so many students believe that majoring in the humanities will make them unemployable that many students who would have otherwise majored in the humanities are instead majoring in other fields. These students still feel an attraction to the humanities and so some of them are trying to recreate in their own lives the feeling and the aesthetic of what they imagine it must be like to study the humanities, hence a part of the reason why dark academia is apparently having such a moment right now.

ABOVE: Stock photo from this article on Live Science that is apparently supposed to represent whatever that magical thing we call “STEM education” is like nowadays

Dark academia’s often shallow understandings of literary texts

If we accept that, at least for some young people, the dark academia aesthetic is indeed acting as a substitute for a traditional humanities education, then it is a flawed substitute. Obviously, wearing tweed does not make someone a scholar, but I think that even many of those who are trying to incorporate genuine scholarly rigor into the aesthetic are, in general, getting less out of it than they would get out of studying the same subjects in a traditional university setting.

The English professor Kevin J. H. Dettmar has written a quite merciless indictment in The Atlantic of the film Dead Poets Society, which, as I have already mentioned, is one of the major sources of inspiration for the dark academia aesthetic. Dettmar argues that, through the figure of Mr. Keating, the film rejects critical, scholarly approaches toward understanding poetry in favor of a hollow, egoistic, anti-academic approach that imposes what a person wants a poem to say over what the poem itself actually says. Mr. Keating repeatedly quotes poetic passages out of context and badly misinterprets them to mean what he wants them to say and he essentially rejects the idea that poetry should be analyzed in any way altogether.

I think that Dettmar may be a bit too harsh in his condemnation of Dead Poets Society—a film which I personally enjoyed—but it is impossible for me to deny that his primary contention about the film rings true. Moreover, a similar criticism can be made of many aspects of the dark academia aesthetic as a whole.

The dark academia aesthetic seems to place most of its emphasis on appreciating “classic” literature, “classic” art, and “classic” music. Merely appreciating “classic” literature, art, and music can be a fine thing for people to do as a hobby, but, as far as I’ve seen, the aesthetic culture tends not to place much emphasis on understanding of works of literature, art, and music in terms of their cultural and historical context.

In real life, a scholar of the humanities is not someone who merely enjoys reading and has read a lot of old books; a scholar of the humanities is someone who examines the works they read critically to understand what the author’s message is, who possesses or seeks to acquire in-depth knowledge of the historical and cultural context in which the works they study were written, who generally knows something or other about literary, historical, and sociological theory, and who, when reading a text, is not afraid to criticize what the author says. (We’ll come back to this last point in a moment.)

ABOVE: Screenshot from the movie Dead Poets Society showing John Keating in his classroom with his students

The blog The Niche is not strictly a dark academia blog, but I inadvertently stumbled across it while searching for information about dark academia and it does seem to be somewhat dark academia-adjacent, since it has a substantial number of posts about popular dark academia topics, including classic literature, The Secret History, Donna Tartt, and Dead Poets Society.

It also has a post published on 9 June 2019 titled “Virgil Had a Pussy and I’ll Prove It,” in which the author, a transmasculine person named Peyton, who acknowledges that he has no credentials whatsoever and that he doesn’t “know jack about shit,” attempts to half-jokingly “prove” that the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro (lived 70 – 19 BCE), commonly known in English as “Virgil” or, more correctly, “Vergil,” was, in fact, a transgender man with a vagina.

Now, in fairness, this is not the most ridiculous argument anyone has ever made about Vergil. We do know for a fact that there were transmasculine people in the Roman world, since, as I discuss in this article I wrote in August 2020, the Syrian satirist Loukianos of Samosata (lived c. 125 – after c. 180 CE) wrote a dialogue, which is included in his larger collection The Dialogues of the Courtesans, which features a character who very clearly fits the modern definition of a trans man. The character in question was assigned female at birth and has female anatomy, but he explicitly insists that he is a man, goes by the masculine name “Megillos,” takes offense when referred to by his female name, and presents as masculine when in private.

Nonetheless, the specific argument that Vergil was a trans man is based on extraordinarily flimsy evidence. Peyton’s first piece of evidence is that there are surviving Roman inscriptions that include the name Vergilia, which is the feminine form of the name Vergilius. This, however, is fairly easily dismissed, since Vergilius was not a personal name unique to the poet Vergil, but rather a nomen, or family name, that was borne by every member of Vergil’s family. All the males in the family took the masculine form of the name Vergilius and all the females took the feminine form Vergilia.

Peyton’s second piece of evidence is that the grammarian Servius, who lived from around the late fourth century and into the early fifth century CE and wrote commentaries on Vergil’s works, records that Vergil’s schoolmates perceived him as shy and reserved and therefore gave him the nickname Parthenias, meaning “virgin” or “maiden.”

This argument is likewise easily dismissed. For one thing, the reliability of this story in the first place is pretty dubious, since Servius was probably writing over four hundred years after Vergil’s death and may not have been relying on trustworthy sources. Furthermore, even if the report were true, young cisgender boys make fun of other cisgender boys who seem less masculine by calling them girlish names all the time, so other boys calling Vergil a “virgin” would not indicate that he was trans. Finally, the name Parthenias is a masculine form, so it actually means something like “boy virgin.”

ABOVE: Illustration of the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro from the Vergilius Romanus, a fifth-century CE Roman illustrated manuscript copy of his works in Latin

Peyton’s final argument is that Vergil portrays Dido the queen of Carthage as a female with male qualities, that his portrayal of her is sympathetic, and that this portrayal is best explained by the author having transitioned from female to male himself.

This argument reminds me little a bit of the novelist Samuel Butler’s mind-numbingly bad, sexist argument in his 1897 book The Authoress of the Odyssey that he could tell the author of the Odyssey was a young woman living in Trapani, western Sicily, in the eleventh century BCE, based solely on his own interpretation of the epic itself, which makes no explicit reference to its author whatsoever. The classicist Peter Gainsford has already written an excellent take-down of Butler’s argument on his blog and I intend to write my own article on the subject at some point.

Peyton’s argument has essentially the same flaws as Butler’s. First, he argues that Vergil portrays Dido as a woman with masculine qualities and that his portrayal of her is favorable. This is a reasonable argument, although not one with which all classicists would agree.

The problem is that he assumes that the reason why Vergil portrays Dido this way must be because Vergil was a trans man himself, ignoring the more likely possibility that Vergil was simply a cisgender man who was slightly less sexist and more tolerant of gender nonconformity in women than most of his contemporaries. Ultimately, we can’t infer information about an author’s personal background based on the author’s characters. As awesome as it would be if Vergil really were a trans man, the overall likelihood of this possibility is extremely tiny.

I am fully in favor of more people reading and finding enjoyment in the Aeneid and other works of ancient literature. I’m also in favor of reexamining ancient authors’ lives using modern academic understandings of gender to perhaps see things that might previously have been overlooked. I’ll even acknowledge that crackpot theories on this subject can be pretty fun.

Nonetheless, Peyton’s article illustrates my point that simply reading the Aeneid, the Wikipedia article about Vergil, and one scholarly article about a much later medieval interpretation of Dido and using these three sources to support an elaborate theory about Vergil being secretly trans is clearly not a real work of scholarship.

I think Peyton himself realizes this. In fact, I’m not sure whether he even fully believes his own theory. The point of his post in the end is merely about how much reading the Aeneid touched him on a personal level. I am, however, sure that some other people affiliated with dark academia are coming up with equally thumbtack-and-string sorts of interpretations and do think they are doing real scholarship, which can be problematic.

ABOVE: Roman fresco from the city of Pompeii dating to between c. 10 BCE and c. 45 CE, depicting the Trojan prince Aineias with Queen Dido of Carthage

As it happens, some people within the aesthetic itself seem to have observed the kinds of crazy interpretations that some of their fellow aesthetes are coming up with. For instance, in R. C. Waldun’s YouTube video about dark academia being the “new Renaissance” that I mentioned earlier, he argues that some people in dark academia may be misinterpreting works of “classic” literature now, but, eventually, they will learn to understand them and interpret them better. He argues:

“That’s kind of what’s happening right now with dark academia, but on a larger scale. It’s attracting people to explore classic literature, but, right now, because this is such a new phenomenon, many people are not used to reading classic literature. They don’t necessarily have the tools, so they come up with all sorts of misinterpretations. They come up with all sorts of silly readings…”

To some extent, I think Waldun is correct. The first step to understanding literature is developing an interest in it. The problem is that people cannot acquire the tools to understand works of literature—and, importantly, understand them in context—unless they are actively trying to learn those tools and they know where they can go to learn them.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that the majority of people involved in dark academia, even the ones who are genuinely motivated to develop an in-depth understanding of “classic” literature, are likely to do so as well as they would if they were taking real-life classes with an instructor and supplemental texts to guide them. This is simply because, although there are plenty of truly excellent resources about “classic” literature available online, it is extremely difficult for people who don’t already know a lot about the subject to find them and tell them apart from other sources that are, shall we say, likely to be less helpful.

This ties into what Peter Gainsford discusses in his blog post from September 2018 titled “The citation problem.” Gainsford observes that, when non-classicists publish articles about classics, they rarely, if ever, cite any works written by actual classicists. He concludes that this problem is at least partly a result of the fact that it is very difficult for people who are not classics specialists to find academic sources written by classicists.

ABOVE: Screenshot from R. C. Waldun’s video comparing dark academia to the Renaissance

A tendency to ignore serious problems in “classic” works

The second flaw that I can observe in dark academia as a substitute for a traditional humanities education is that, as far as I can tell, most people involved in the dark academia aesthetic seem to have little interest in critiquing the flaws and shortcomings of “classic” literature and art. Instead, people involved in the aesthetic seem to be interested in simply being caught up and inspired by the aesthetic beauty of these works, ignoring whatever ugliness may be present within them.

For instance, R. C. Waldun talks about his adoration for the works of Charles Dickens, saying:

“…but, if we give this thing time, if we let it bake, years down the track, these readers—new readers that are getting back into the classics—to realize that, ‘Holy crap! Like, what I’ve read there, might’ve been the best thing that ever happened to me.’ For me, that book was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, um, and recently I started reading Oliver Twist again, because I have this entire thing with Charles Dickens, where I read Great Expectations and didn’t really think twice about it, but it was not until recently that I realized that was one of the best novels I’ve ever read.”

I have not personally read Great Expectations, but I have read Oliver Twist. Overall, I think it is a pretty good book. It’s hardly the best book I’ve ever read in my opinion, but it’s pretty good. (The other books by Charles Dickens that I have read are A Christmas Carol, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield.) Waldun sounds genuinely enthusiastic about Dickens in the video and I’m glad to hear that he is reading books he enjoys.

No matter how much we appreciate these works, however, we should not be blind to the fact that they contain some seriously ugly prejudices. Charles Dickens displays great sympathy in his novels for white British people who are living in poverty, but he is also well known to have harbored intensely racist attitudes towards Jewish people, Irish people, Indian people, Black people, Native American people, and basically anyone who was not a white person of western European or British descent. These bigoted views are often reflected his novels.

Notably, in Oliver Twist, the character of Fagin is a deplorable, over-the-top anti-Semitic caricature. He is portrayed as a filthy, ruthless, and abusive street criminal who exploits young boys by forcing them to work for him as pick-pockets and is implied to force young girls to work for him as prostitutes. Dickens introduces him in Oliver Twist, chapter eight, describing him as follows:

“In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantel-shelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villanous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and a clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging.”

At the time Dickens was writing, red hair, a large nose, and an ugly face were all seen as stereotypical markers of Jewish ethnicity. Naturally, these are all aspects of how Fagin is portrayed, both in the text of the novel itself and in the original illustrations that accompanied it. In fact, Dickens continually emphasizes Fagin’s Jewishness above all other character traits. Throughout most of the novel, he almost exclusively refers to Fagin as “the Jew,” instead of calling him by his name.

ABOVE: Watercolor illustration by Joseph Clayton Clark depicting the character Fagin from Oliver Twist, who is an anti-Semitic caricature

When a Jewish woman wrote a letter to Dickens asking him why he chose to make Fagin Jewish and constantly refer to him as “the Jew” rather than by his name, Dickens tried to excuse his portrayal by insisting that it was true to life, writing in his reply:

“Fagin is a Jew because it unfortunately was true, of the time to which the story refers, that that class of criminal almost invariably was a Jew.”

Even if this were indeed true, however, it does not explain why Dickens feels the need to constantly emphasize Fagin’s Jewishness and make him into an anti-Semitic caricature of pure evil. The only explanation for why Dickens does this is because he evidently wants to hammer home a racist association between Jewishness and criminal behavior.

It should come as no surprise at all that the Nazis absolutely adored Oliver Twist for its virulent anti-Semitism. In fact, between March and August 1923, when the Nazi Party was just starting out, the Völkischer Beobachter, the primary Nazi newspaper, printed a complete German translation of Oliver Twist in a serial format. The Nazis also drew inspiration from Dickens’s portrayal of Fagin in their later propaganda.

Now, of course, this does not mean that Charles Dickens was a Nazi himself or that he is directly responsible for the Holocaust, but it does mean that we should be critical when approaching his work. The same should be true for all other so-called “classic” writers.

ABOVE: Illustration by George Cruikshank for Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, depicting Fagin in a prison cell awaiting his execution

This point about critically examining the media we consume also applies to art. For instance, I’ve seen several people associated with dark academia express admiration for the sculptures of the Italian Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini (lived 1598 – 1680), namely The Rape of Proserpine (sculpted between 1621 and 1622) and Apollo and Daphne (sculpted between 1622 and 1625).

These people are certainly correct that these statues are genuinely exquisite and the technique that has gone into them is extraordinary, but it is also easy to forget that both of these statues depict scenes of male gods brutally attempting to rape young women. The Rape of Proserpina depicts Pluto grabbing Proserpina, who is flailing in a futile attempt to escape, in order to carry her down to the underworld, where he will violently rape her.

I know that, as soon as I say this, all the Hades stans will come out of the woodwork insisting that rape in this context is a translation of the Latin word raptus, which means “carried off” and does not necessarily imply sexual violence. It’s true that rape does come from raptus, but, in the specific case of Hades and Persephone, the ancient sources are abundantly, explicitly clear that he abducted her and raped her against her will. Many of them give very startling descriptions of Persephone’s visible terror and desperation as Hades abducts her. (I wrote an entire article on this subject in February 2020 if you want to learn more.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the statue The Rape of Proserpine, sculpted between 1621 and 1622 by the Italian Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the detail of the pressure of Pluto’s hand on Proserpina’s flesh in The Rape of Proserpina

Likewise, Apollo and Daphne depicts the god Apollo chasing after the nymphe Daphne, who is fleeing with an expression of abject terror on her face, in order to violently rape her. The statue captures the exact moment as Daphne’s father, the river god Peneus, transforms her into a laurel tree so that she can escape from her divine assailant.

Rape clearly should not be seen as something beautiful, so what does it say when some of the most admired classical sculptures depict it as such? I think it is ok to admire these statues, but, at the same time, we should not let our admiration for the statues’ aesthetic beauty lead us to ignore the serious moral difficulties they pose or to romanticize the sordid crimes they depict.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the statue Apollo and Daphne, sculpted by the Italian Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini between 1622 and 1625

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the detail of Apollo and Daphne’s hair and the leaves sprouting from Daphne’s hands in Apollo and Daphne