Kyle Gray
Stephan Flores
British Fiction

Roseanne’s Testimony to the Masses

The religious onslaught pushed on the reader in this book has begun to confuse me. Earlier in the book it seemed to me that Roseanne was portraying a very negative attitude toward religion. Father Gaunt was (and still is) portrayed as the bad guy, the fact that she was protestant made her an outcast, and (while Father Gaunt can be blamed for it) it was the church itself that annulled her marriage and left her to her solitary tin hut. But in this latest section we see a great many of things that lead me to believe Roseanne looks at religion in a much brighter light. The turning point for me was on page 256 when Roseanne says, “It is something like the gates of St Peter, banging on the gates, asking for entrance to heaven, and in my heavy heart knowing, too many sins, too many sins. But perhaps mercy!” From that point on the section is dominated by religious images. “The storm burned down from the heavens” “I felt I had my arms outstretched like wings…” “God help me, his striving animal” (263). And the big one, “And Eneas took off his useless uniform, it was that warm, and we stood there as content as ever people were, and we were the first and last people on earth.” Which compares them to Adam and Eve. This section has raised so many questions, what role is religion to play in the big scheme of things? What is Father Gaunt’s final perception going to be? Does Roseanne think she is damned by God? Does she think the worlds view of her changes that in any way? And finally is this reoccurring reference to beauty the way she see’s God seeing her?

Jacklinn Bennett
ENG 570 /Flores
April 14, 2009
Rhyming Roses

In Burning Down the House, a collection of essays on writing fiction, Charles Baxter describes a technique he calls an “echo effect” or “rhyming action,” which is the repetition of an event or image in a narrative, sometimes slightly altered. Sebastian Barry uses this echo effect in The Secret Scripture with the hammers and feathers imagery and with roses. Both Roseanne and Dr. Grene’s wife, Bet, cultivate roses. Dr. Grene says that what Bet enjoyed most about her roses was “the strange moment of floral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a ‘sport,’ something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty” (116). He confesses that he was never much interested in the flowers or their evolution. But at the end of the novel, after Dr. Grene has discovered his true parentage, he walks to the site of Roseanne’s home in Strandhill where he unearths a surviving bush that Roseanne had planted and tended. “All the blooms were uniform, a neat tight-curled rose, except on one branch, whose roses were different, bright and open” (300). Baxter says, “a reverse prophecy, a sense of rhymed events, is unworldly and has something to do with insight. It moves us back into ourselves.” So, what is the insight or significance of the repetition of the roses? Is the appearance of a “sport” on Roseanne’s rosebush a reflection of her, Dr. Grene, both? Do we, as readers, learn anything about ourselves?

Joe Roberts
Stephan Flores
Contemp. Brit. Fiction
4/14/09
Symbolism and the Ushering in of a New Irish Era (or) What’s It All Mean?!

Roseanne calls Irish history of the 20’s and 30’s a “savage fairytale life” (135). Fairy tales and myths have played an especially important role in The Secret Scripture. The Aeneid tells the story of the founding of Rome through Aeneas and his offspring. Aeneas bears Romulus and Remus who propagate the Roman culture and people. It seems fitting to include, as the Catholic Church has its roots in Rome. Eneas (purportedly) impregnates Roseanne (symbol of Mother Ireland) who gives birth in the cave, the location of “the oldest remnant of human life in Ireland”(131). We wait to see what has become of her child and what this child (or twins?) might mean as a symbol for Irish liberation (her child being in “Nazareth”—ushering in of new messiah and new Golden Age, or break with the Catholic Church?). If the semi-mentally impaired John Kane is the son of IRA (John Lavelle) but protects Mother Ireland, what kind of commentary is Barry then making about Irish history in relation to these “terrorist” organizations? Is the mere anarchy cited by Yeats as the geist of the 1900s coming to a close through Roseanne’s offspring? What kind of new era does Barry anticipate, and is it realized?

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
-WB Yeats (1920)