The Secret Scripture

“It is funny, but it strikes me that the person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them.” 

Roseanne writes this thought in her testimony while thinking about her parents. She contrasts her father’s perpetual storytelling with her mother’s lack of stories. Roseanne suggests that one must protect one’s stories and ensure that they persist long after death by telling them. It is this belief that leads her to write her testimony, both to provide evidence that she lived and to reclaim a narrative that others have attempted to control and manipulate.

“And a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour [sic], is a true hero.” 

Roseanne is thinking of her father, an impoverished man, who took pleasure in music and verse. Roseanne’s fondness for musicality will later lead to her attraction to her future husband, Tom. Though there are class and religious differences between the men, both use music to buoy their spirits.

“For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens […] but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth. History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man’s dominion of the earth.”

Roseanne is recalling the night when Joe Clear called upon Father Gaunt to consult with him about burying Willie Lavelle, a rebel fighting against the Free State soldiers. In later years, stories floated around Sligo, claiming that she had put her father in danger, stories that don’t coincide with her memory of events. This leads Roseanne to think that history has less to do with fact than with what people want to believe and with what they suppose happened. She concludes that historical accounts are likely more interesting than the truth of what occurs in life.

“That is to say, he thought of the Protestant religion as an instrument as soft as a feather transformed into a hammer by the old dispensation, and used to batter the heads of those that labored [sic] to live in Ireland, the most of them Catholics by nature. His own father loved Presbyterianism, and he did himself, but he was mortally sorry, no, he was mortally angry at the uses it had been put to, along with the religions of the Anglicans, Baptists et cetera, in Ireland.” 

Though Joe Clear was a Presbyterian, and fond of the faith under which he was raised, he acknowledged the persecution of Catholics in Ireland. For Joe, his faith was a gentle thing, designed to bring comfort, that had been weaponized. The motif of hammers and feathers recur in the novel and are later used literally by Joe’s enemies to get revenge against him for having once belonged to the Royal Irish Constabulary.

“We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.” 

Dr. Grene is thinking both about his concern over his wife Bet’s health—he has noticed swelling in her legs, which could be because of clotting—and how to question Roseanne effectively during his sessions with her. He realizes that he cannot find the language that he needs to speak to either woman. His estrangement from his wife, despite their living together, has made it difficult to appear sincere when questioning her about her health. Similarly, his position as Roseanne’s psychiatrist makes his desire to know more about her life seem disingenuous.

“Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not. Sometimes peril to the body, sometimes a more intimate, miniature, invisible peril to the soul. When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a scared refugee in a site of war.” 

Roseanne recalls her and her father’s guilt over the burning down of the orphanage where he was assigned to catch rats. Roseanne was present when a paraffin-soaked rat escaped from her father’s grip. Later, it became the culprit in spreading a fire that engulfed the entire building. Roseanne contemplates the difficulty of speech and the damage she senses it can cause, which is why she remains silent during her sessions with Dr. Grene.

“Because a lone person takes great comfort from her people, in the watches of the night, even the memory of them.” 

Roseanne is holding her father’s old copy of Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, his most beloved book. Having it in her possession not only makes her feel closer to him but gives her a sense of legacy. She begins to wonder about those aspects of her father’s history that she never knew, wonders if her grandfather, too, may have been in possession of the book. Roseanne’s association of the book with her forefathers not only reminds the reader of her connection to her ancestry but also of her tendency to identify more with her paternal lineage, which is indicative of her internalized sexism.

“It is always worth itemising [sic] happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can.” 

Roseanne has started a new life after her father’s death, working as a server at Café Cairo. There, she has met Tom, who comes in with his brother to order tea. She has made friends and has an amicable relationship with her employer, Mrs. Prunty. She recalls that these benefits seem small, but they are worth noting in the interest of reminding oneself of moments in which life can be good. Throughout the novel, Roseanne experiences a series of grave misfortunes. Her gift is to be grateful for the instances, however fleeting or simple, in which she was content.

“When the late Pope died I had also odd emotions then. I was deeply moved by the death of a man who had not been helpful to those of my patients who are religious, but also gay, or God help them, women […] In his death he became more democratic maybe, because death includes everything, likes everything human—can’t get enough of it […] death is mighty and dreadful. The Pope made short work of it.” 

It is 2007, and Dr. Grene is writing in his commonplace book about how he finds himself more impacted by the deaths of notable strangers, which contrasts with his inability to embrace his grief over the loss of his wife, Bet. Dr. Grene’s reticence is related to his fear of what will happen if he explores the breadth of his emotions. It is therefore easier to view death as a more general phenomenon than as something that affects him personally. He wavers between a desire for intimacy and fearing the consequences of it.

“America was crying out for women, we were as good an export as gold to America. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds went, every blessed year. Lovely women, round women, small, ugly, strong, exhausted, youthful, ancient, every damn category. Freedom I suppose they were after, following their instincts. They’d rather be maids in America than old maids in bloody Ireland.” 

Roseanne suspects that Tom is preparing to propose to her, though she isn’t interested in marriage. She expresses, instead, a desire to immigrate to the United States, which she envisions as a place where women are not only free but valued as long as they are willing to work. Her usage of the phrase “bloody Ireland” is a double entendre, signaling the violence that has engulfed the country as well as Roseanne’s exasperation with a place in which her only choices are marriage or pitiful spinsterhood.

“But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.” 

Dr. Grene is recalling his deceased wife Bet’s fear of aging. The sense of disbelief that one sometimes registers at one’s aging body correlates with an inability to accept the completion of the past. Both Dr. Grene and Roseanne remain tethered to the past, which causes Dr. Grene to marvel at his age, while Roseanne is so disconnected from the present that she no longer knows her age. 

“We like to characterise [sic] humanity as savage, lustful, and basic, but that is to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer.” 

Dr. Grene is reflecting on his infidelity with his colleague, Martha. Both confessed to their spouses about their indiscretions and faced the consequences of losing intimacy. He imagines the view of infidelity that would be taken by the Church, the view that led to Roseanne’s ostracism so many years before, and accuses it of mischaracterizing human nature, which is not as bold as they would have us think but prone to fear and acting out destructively because of fear.

“I suddenly saw it. I suddenly thought, Tom has married a mad woman. It is a thought that haunted me many many [sic] times since. But I am nearly proud to say that it was I myself first had that thought.” 

Roseanne has agreed to a secret meeting with John Lavelle on Knocknarea. She knows that a married woman meeting a man alone is a transgressive act. Both religious instruction and cultural conditioning have taught her to distrust herself and to believe that only a woman without good sense could commit such an act. In hindsight, she ironically expresses pride that she was willing to condemn herself before Father Gaunt could do it.

“It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be—may not be real, I suppose.” 

Roseanne considers the faulty, misleading nature of memory. She is constantly shifting from past to present to recall her past and make sense of it. However, she has been so thoroughly convinced of her lack of authority in understanding who she is that she doesn’t even trust her own recollections. There is also her tendency to idealize certain aspects of her past, particularly her memories of her father. 

“But if I put my faith in certain memories, perhaps they will serve as stepping stones, and I will cross the torrent of ‘times past,’ without being plunged entirely into it.” 

Though Roseanne doesn’t trust her memories and cannot be certain that they are all valid, she chooses to believe in them so that she has something to anchor her to her history. She wants to speak authoritatively about her own experiences instead of allowing people like Father Gaunt and Mrs. McNulty to define her, rendering her passive and helpless in her own story.

“The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire.” 

Father Gaunt and Jack have ordered Roseanne to remain in her tin hut alone while Father Gaunt and Mrs. McNulty decide on the future of her marriage. Roseanne helplessly obeys them and diminishes her pain and rage against that of others, less out of an awareness of the world’s pain—Roseanne remains very naïve—but out of a habit of negating her pain. She characterizes her own experiences as “small griefs” and “only cinders,” which are additional indications of how the sexist culture in which she was raised has taught her not to take her feelings and experiences seriously.

“I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have both become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?” 

Once again, Roseanne wonders if her memories and her fantasies have become one and is uncertain about the validity of what she claims to remember. This renders her act of creating a “testimony” problematic, while also explaining her silence in response to Dr. Grene, which he perceives as resistance. Roseanne wants to be truthful, but she struggles to know what the truth is. Personal history, like national history, is composed of both actual events and our perceptions of them.

“Now, dear reader, I am calling you God for a moment, and God, dear dear God, I am trying to remember. Forgive me, forgive me if I am not remembering right.” 

Roseanne is placing faith in the prospective reader of her testimony to judge her life, as God would judge. The reader is both “dear,” like an intimate friend but also her “God” and, therefore, the only person who can redeem her against Father Gaunt’s deposition, which casts her in a harsh light.

“It is like a forest fire, burning away all traces of her, traversing her narrative and turning everything to ashes and cinders.”

Dr. Grene describes Father Gaunt’s deposition, which contrasts with Roseanne’s testimony because it is a destructive document, attempting to erase Roseanne’s understanding of her own experiences and coercing the reader into accepting the father’s version of events as the only valid ones.

“He does not ever pretend to understand her, but he certainly claims a hold on her history.” 

Father Gaunt’s misogyny prevents him from sympathizing with Roseanne and disallows him from seeing her as anything other than a source of sin and resistance, given her refusals to take his “advice” to convert to Catholicism and marry Joe Brady. In revenge, he claims her story, usurping control over her narrative because of being unable to control her actions.

“I was then too weary to explain yet again, for the millionth time in sixty years and more, that I wasn’t Mrs McNulty. That I wasn’t anybody, wasn’t in fact anybody’s wife. I was just Roseanne Clear.” 

The medical doctor, with whom Roseanne has just become acquainted, has told her that the mental hospital will be demolished. In this instance, she resolves herself to the fact of her annulment, assuming that Tom must not have loved her much to allow Father Gaunt and Mrs. McNulty to rob Roseanne of her identity as Tom’s wife. The language that Roseanne uses—“wasn’t anybody,” “just Roseanne Clear”—signals that she doesn’t think that her identity amounted to much without her status as Tom’s wife, in keeping with the conventions of her time, which only valued women who fulfilled their traditional roles.

“A savage sense entered me, of being of such small account in the world that I wasn’t to be helped, that priest and woman and man had put out an edict that I wasn’t to be helped, I was to be left to the elements, just as I was, a walking animal, forsaken.” 

Roseanne is giving birth to her child, conceived illegitimately with Eneas. She gives birth alone, like a wild animal, and feels ostracized from her community because of her supposed indiscretion with John Lavelle. Because of her vulnerable state and her presence within the storm on the beach, Roseanne feels, quite rightly, that something bad can happen to her and that no one cares or would help her if they could. Father Gaunt has ensured her total isolation as a result of her refusal to conform.

“I once lived among humankind and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels […] If our suffering is great on account of that, yet at close of day the gift of life is something immense. Something larger than old Sligo mountains, something difficult but oddly bright, that makes equal in their fall the hammers and the feathers. And like the impulse that drives the old maid to make a garden, with a meagre rose and a straggling daffodil, gives a hint of some coming paradise.” 

In this passage, Roseanne mentions some of the novel’s key symbols—objects that have had significance in her life: the hammer and feathers that, here, signify how life’s hardships are just as important as its pleasures; the “meagre rose,” which signals hope in the face of being abandoned by beloved ones; and the “straggling daffodil,” whose ability to return every spring and to withstand frost corresponds to Roseanne’s ability to withstand the world’s indifference and cruelty in order to survive.