Sian Williams
In her 2005 novel On Beauty, Zadie Smith pokes drily at fossilised structures of power lurking in a trendily liberal university in the USA, whose graduates are churned out into glamorous internships ‘in Clinton’s Harlem offices or at French Vogue’. Set in the year of writing, On Beauty unearths tensions between men and women; teachers and students;educated hipsters and immigrant townspeople.
Anyone who’s found themselves scrolling down the virtual hallways of dark academia or hot librarian-core knows the enchanting-ness of such a smug, haughty university, which has amplified two decades since Smith wrote On Beauty. Though Smith satirises the self-congratulating campus, I indulged in reading about its term-time bustle, so far from my ownZoom lectures led by staff on shaky, pay-scarce contracts at a London arts uni. As arts and humanities departments crumble under the strain of meagre funding, liberal arts education has taken on the mythical aura of a lost world within the girl-coded crevices of social media, resurrected through memes which curate photos of schoolgirlish Miu Miu flats alongside covers of hefty Russian literature books. The more impractical a degree, the more arousing.In The Secret History, a novel set in the ‘80s whose cover frequently stars in dark academia memes, the rich-kid protagonists plough their parents’ money into learning arguably the most ‘useless’, and therefore fetishizable, subject: Ancient Greek. Today’s debt-ridden students can only fantasise about forking out for such an unemployable qualification.
On Beauty centres on Howard Belsey, a lecturer of another such nebulous topic: Art History. Howard, pissed about the idolisation of old white artists as exceptional masters and geniuses, is drafting a book called Against Rembrandt. His critical sensibilities seep into wider life where he wisecracks about the ideologically constructed assumptions behind his wife and kids’ remarks. A flower for him is ‘an accumulation of cultural and biological constructions circulating around the mutually attracting binary poles of nature/artifice’.
Ironically, despite Howard’s career in defecating on ideologies of individual greatness, he and his scholarly clique are revered religiously on campus. Howard’s fellow lecturer and extramarital lover, Claire, for instance, exudes a bohemian romanticism with her ties to Mick Jagger and famous poem deconstructing an orgasm. Like other chicly-dressed auteurs— Sofia Coppola or Joan Didion, maybe— Claire is adored by a cult following of contemporary young women. Howard’s own student fan-club— Meredith, a Foucault enthusiast who dresses in historical costume, and Christian, an American with a faux-European accent— has an intensity which makes up for its size (Howard’s wife wonders whether Christian is ‘in love with her husband’).
Howard and his pals’ literary circle-jerk takes a hit when right-winger Monty Kipps arrives in the faculty with a program of homophobic lectures and weeding out working-class students.So begins a bitchy feud between Howard and Monty on the front lines of stuffy staffrooms and theory journals. For all his anti-gay agenda, Monty’s pompous Victorian suits are almostcampy, laying bare the dullness of Howard’s more cool, detached cynicism.
But like dark academic TikTokers now, it’s the teachers’ girl tutees who most intimately understand studying’s seductiveness, particularly Howard’s daughter Zora and Monty’s daughter Victoria. Both are products of their lofty milieu— even Zora’s tutors feel like ‘just another of the six billion extras’ in a show about her life. They watch as she uses her dad’s reputation to threaten her way into Claire’s poetry class despite her clunky verse; runs a campus-wide campaign to get her crush, Carl, into a class he doesn’t really care about in order to win his affection; smiles ‘about things she did not know’ in an self-assuredly knowing way. But underneath Zora’s militant output of pushy emails and righteous college paper think-pieces lies a more slipper-ily defined, barely post-pubescent self. In a universal moment for girls on their first day of a new university term, she scrutinises her reflection in a shop window, wondering ‘What would I think of me?’ Though she had been gunning for ‘bohemian intellectual; fearless; graceful’ in her mom’s old ‘blouse with an eccentric ruff’ and an unidentifiable ‘kind of hat’, it strikes Zora now that ‘this was not it at all’.
Zora’s unsuccessful attempt at sophistication illuminates her fragility. Being what her peers call ‘a text-eating machine’ is her salvation from the plodding grind of life: her parents floundering marriage and her unrequited feelings for Carl, who’s more interested in hispornographic email correspondence with Victoria. Zora’s worship of scholars— ‘she found it extraordinary that they should be capable of gossip or venal thoughts’— offers her a fantastical escape, being too enthralled by the gossiping of two philosophy grads at a party to notice how one is preoccupied in a ‘study of her chest.’
Despite Zora’s classroom prowess, she recognises with a feeling of annoyance Victoria as her ‘superior’ in the conventional looks department. So Victoria receives another kind of gratification in class; the satisfying monopolisation of her dad’s rival, Howard’s, ogling attention. In bed with the white professor, Victoria experiences vicarious agency just by proximity to him; under the glow of his legitimising gaze, she runs her fingers through her afro-textured hair like how ‘one might muss hair much longer and blonder’.
Zora and Victoria’s seminar sparring takes place in the 2000s as well-to-do girls are spurred into a race for success, of which education is the cutthroat centre. Dressed in form-fitting corporate skirts and heels, girls embody a hyper-productive economic drive— think CEOs yelling at each other on reality TV and writing bestsellers about shattering glass ceilings.Individual aspiration replaces feminism, which is stuffy and uncool; Zora and her mates wouldn't be caught dead being so earnest about women’s rights, preferring to eyeroll and use ‘complex theoretical tools’ to take the piss out of mainstream TV shows. Zora runs herself calculatedly like a sort of enterprise, with a before-class exercise regime as part of her ‘Zora Self-Improvement Programme’. Her classmates too echo Zora’s rigorous self-monitoring, repeating her carb-cutting order of fish without rice to the waiter as they all eat out. Few are spared from Zora’s panoptic vigilance, not least her mum, who she blames for her dad’s cheating: “My mom doesn’t do herself any favours – she’s like three hundred pounds.”
There is something sexy about being restrained within the walls of such oppressively rigorous institutions. I can’t pretend I wouldn’t be just as infatuated as Zora by the theory-fluent in-crowd she drunkenly tries to infiltrate at parties. Elite higher education breeds what Natalie Wynn, in her video essay on the Twilight films, calls Default Heterosexual Sado-Masochism; the way eroticism is intelligible through structures of power, so that girls often get off on the idea of yielding, prey-like, to someone authoritative. In this way, submitting your punishingly laborious essays to a higher power— whether that’s your big, strongly-ranking school or your teacher who’s writing a long, hard book on Rembrandt— is hot. Libidinal activities become an intellectual pursuit; “I’m like, hello, what kind of a sophisticated guy in his fifties doesn’t have an affair?” Zora gushes about her dad. And for Victoria, every hard-on Howard gets under his desk from her explicit emails edges her closer to a seductive fount of control.
Sources
Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media, and the End of Welfare by Angela McRobbie, 2020
On Beauty by Zadie Smith, 2005
“TOP GIRLS? Young Women and the Post-Feminist Sexual Contract” by Angela McRobbie, Cultural Studies Vol. 21, Nos. 45 July/September 2007
‘Twilight’ by Natalie Wynn, 2024 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48&t=3s