24 pages • 48 minutes read
Bernard MaclavertySecrets
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1977A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Secrets, Trauma, and the Limits of Emotional Intimacy
The story’s title suggests that secrets will be the catalyst for its narrative development. This proves true in more than one sense, as the story explores not only the central secret—Mary’s relationship with John—but also the protagonist’s intrusion into his great aunt’s privacy, which neither of them seem to have discussed afterwards. Although the secrets themselves negatively impact familial relationships, the story also cautions against prying into others’ secrets in an attempt to force intimacy.
MacLaverty establishes Mary’s secrecy even before the incident involving the letters. When the protagonist asks about the history of her cameo ring—a family heirloom—Mary tells him it was once a brooch belonging to her grandmother, but declines to say more when the boy pushes. Although Mary may simply (as she herself explains) not know anything else about the ring, her response also discourages the boy from being “inquisitive.” She repeats the admonition the first time the protagonist asks about the letters, presumably piquing his curiosity all the more.
“Secrets” therefore asks readers to question what an appropriate amount of curiosity is in a family. The protagonist shares a loving bond with Mary, but his attempt to know her more deeply—reading the letters—backfires and actually severs their closeness. In her feelings of betrayal, Aunt Mary further fractures their relationship by striking him “across the side of the face” and calling him “dirt” (32). Although this physical and emotional abuse is uncalled for, the story suggests that the boy was in fact wrong to pry, if only because he was tacitly asking for more than the Mary he knows is capable of giving. John’s letters imply that she was once a more open person, even suggesting that she might use her position as a teacher to help others learn to “express” themselves. However, like her former lover, Mary closed off as a result of wartime trauma. If not ideal, repressing her emotions has allowed Mary to survive.
Therefore, the protagonist’s invasion of his aunt’s privacy is a risk without a reward: He learns more about Mary, but the knowledge does not benefit him or her in any way. What’s more, the incident that passed between them becomes a burdensome secret in its own right. The protagonist’s question about Mary’s dying words imply that he has never told his mother what happened (if he had, he presumably would have asked more directly), so he is alone in his feelings of guilt and grief. More even than his prayer for forgiveness, his decision to remember Mary as his “maiden aunt” and “teller of tales” suggests that he now recognizes that what Mary offered him was enough and that he should not have pressed her for more.
Guilt and the Desire for Forgiveness
Although the causes for and extent of his shame only become clear in retrospect, the protagonist’s guilt over his actions as a child and his desire for forgiveness motivate his actions in the narrative present. That he describes himself “called” to Mary’s deathbed suggests the ambivalence of his feelings toward her; he goes because he is ordered to, not necessarily because he wants to. He then leaves the room before she dies, unable to bear the sight of her suffering. Though this is not an unreasonable reaction in and of itself, it seems likely that repressed guilt is intensifying his grief. His feelings in the wake of her death are even more confused: The narrator describes him “trembling with anger or sorrow, he didn’t know which” (25). Unaddressed feelings of shame have left him unable to grieve in a straightforward fashion.
Although Mary’s reaction was extreme, the guilt the protagonist feels stems from a clear transgression: She told him explicitly not to touch her letters, he knew she would react badly to his prying (hence why he waited until she was gone to do so, and tried to stuff the letters into the desk before she returned), and he realized that what he was doing was wrong, as evidenced by the way he performed for himself, “pretend[ing] to look at the postcards” to justify his presence in her room (30). However, the story also explores guilt that is not rooted in wrongdoing—e.g., the survivor’s guilt that John/Brother Benignus harbors as a soldier in World War I. This feeling is implicit in much of his writing to Mary; he can hardly stomach seeing the frozen dead bodies of the soldiers and says that he has “lost all sense of feeling” but feels “[s]heer white trembling anger” (31). However, it emerges most clearly in his final letter, which suggests that he joins a religious order to atone for participating in the war, surviving it, or both: “I feel deeply that I must do something, must sacrifice something to make up for the horror of the past year” (32).
Warranted or not, feelings of guilt are not easy to dispense with. Presumably, it is the very intensity of the protagonist’s shame that stops him from asking for his great aunt’s forgiveness, but in delaying the conversation, he ultimately misses the chance to have it: Mary dies with the issue between them unaddressed. This perhaps sheds light on John’s religious conversion. There are forms of guilt that nothing on Earth seems to assuage, and when faced with this reality, John turns to the idea of an all-forgiving God.
Love in the Face of Death
“Secrets” begins with a death, and the letters that the protagonist reads as a child deal heavily with mortality on the WWI battlefront. MacLaverty does not sugarcoat the reality of death in either case, describing a soldier who dies of a shrapnel wound to the throat, as well as Mary’s labored breathing and inability to open her eyes in her final moments. However, these descriptions coincide with various forms of love—romantic, familial, etc.—and the apparent contrast suggests that the experience of mortality can deepen one’s appreciation of others and of love itself.
The connection is particularly clear in John’s letters, which repeatedly reiterate his love for Mary in the midst of the horrors of war: “The only thing that remains constant is my love for you” (31). They also hint at the way experiencing death can intensify such feelings, making one more aware of life’s fragility while exposing one to a particular kind of intimacy and vulnerability. Of the soldier with the shrapnel wound, John remarks, “I pulled him into a crater and stayed with him until he died” (31-32). While his actions could stem simply from a sense of obligation, it seems more likely that he felt a connection to the man in that moment of suffering. In fact, this is one reason why the protagonist cannot stand to be in the same room with Mary as she dies; knowing all too well how fiercely she protected her “dignity” in life, he doesn’t want to see her in a vulnerable state (and perhaps doesn’t feel worthy of it).
Nevertheless, Mary’s death does spark an emotional reawakening in the protagonist, leading him to inspect the emotions he repressed as a child. He and Mary once shared a loving bond, and while his invasion of her privacy permanently damaged their relationship, it did not destroy the protagonist’s love for his great aunt. In the wake of Mary’s death, those feelings reemerge; he yearns to reclaim the bond he had with his aunt, which is why he asks his mother if Mary said anything about him before she died. Although he does not get the forgiveness he hoped for, the moment nevertheless proves cathartic. Her death has forced him to acknowledge his feelings of love and guilt, the implication being that he will not suppress his emotions going forward as Mary herself did.
