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.
Literary Devices
Allusion
An allusion is a literary reference to a recognizable figure, event, work of art, etc. “Secrets” alludes to several novels when describing the protagonist’s childhood interactions with his grandmother. Most—Lorna Doone, Persuasion, and even Wuthering Heights—are love stories, hinting at Mary’s repressed romantic side. However, the most significant allusion is to Miss Havisham, a character in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations left traumatized by the abrupt breaking off of a relationship; when her fiancé leaves her at the altar, she preserves everything as it was on the day of her wedding, letting the cake rot and her dress fade around her. Like Mary, Miss Havisham is thus an example of remaining frozen in one’s grief. However, the parallel otherwise works to Mary’s advantage, particularly in its allusion to Pip. Pip, the protagonist of Great Expectations, is a young boy when Miss Havisham summons him to visit her estate as part of an elaborate scheme for vengeance; in keeping with this, she manipulates him and allows her adoptive daughter to bully him. By contrast, Mary and the young boy in “Secrets” have a genuinely loving relationship until he breaches her privacy and she lashes out in response.
Flashback
The flashbacks in the story provide context for the protagonist’s complicated relationship with Great Aunt Mary and explain why he might feel conflicted when she dies; it is not merely grief but rather Guilt and the Desire for Forgiveness that inform his actions and give the story its emotional weight. The flashbacks also unveil the secrets that Aunt Mary hid from him and his mother throughout her entire life, with John’s letters acting as a flashback within a flashback, filling in events that occurred prior to the protagonist’s life. The flashbacks therefore develop both characters while symbolically suggesting the weight of past trauma in both their lives.
Mood
The mood of the story—the atmosphere or impression it creates—comes through consistently because of the work’s brevity, and is predominantly somber. The story opens with a death and then dives into the protagonist’s repressed memories of guilt. The letters the protagonist reads darken the mood further, describing the horrors of war from the battlefield itself. The subject matter of the entire short story centers around pain and loss. Great Aunt Mary could not move past the loss of her lover, so she repressed anything related to that past. This is the central trauma from which the story’s mood flows, as it’s the fractured relationship between Mary and the protagonist that gives Mary’s death its particularly sorrowful cast. Because the protagonist ultimately does what Mary could not—begin to work through his feelings of guilt and grief—the mood shifts in the story’s final sentences, becoming bittersweet.
Setting
The setting of the story—the house where the protagonist lives with his mother and great aunt—establishes its interior focus on emotions and sets the parameters of its exploration of Secrets, Trauma, and the Limits of Emotional Intimacy within a family. The house in which Mary is dying is the same one in which the protagonist once snuck into her room and read her personal letters, illustrating the extent to which secrets have surrounded the family over the years. What’s more, reminders of these secrets are impossible to escape; it seems to be the sight of irises on Mary’s table that sparks the protagonist’s memories of his childhood transgression, as there was a similar bouquet present when he was collecting Mary’s stamps. The effect of confining the story to one house (and nearly to one room) is somewhat claustrophobic, suggesting the psychological experience of living amid unaddressed trauma.
