The Secret Scripture

Roseanne uses anecdotes about salmon in moments in which she refers to the slipperiness of her character. She compares Dr. Grene’s desire to question her effectively with the art of catching a salmon, which she thinks depends on both “luck and instinct” (76). Just as her husband Tom was unable to catch salmon, Dr. Grene is unable to “catch” Roseanne. Her comparison of her ex-husband and the doctor in this analogy is important because neither man ever succeeded in getting her to conform to their expectations and needs.

Similarly, she thinks back to her youth and wonders why she agreed to meet John Lavelle on Knocknarea, knowing that it was “a wretched thing” for a married woman to meet a man alone (176). She wonders why she craved his company, which she compares with the limited Garravoge River, when she had the bounty of her husband’s love and the friendship of Jack and Old Tom, which she compares to the expanse of the sea. Then again, Roseanne knows that “[t]he open sea [cannot] keep [her]” (190). Like the salmon, she wanted to be free to befriend whomever and wanted to go wherever, despite the limitations of her time and her country.

The novel uses lambs in the traditional sense of the “sacrificial lamb” that must suffer, in this case, as a result of Eamon de Valera’s economic war. During the years of de Valera’s presidency, people took the train through the country and observed slaughtered lambs perishing in the fields, the results of there being no market for lamb meat. The slaughtering was also an indication of the nation’s disturbing devaluation of life.

Lamb meat figures again when Roseanne thinks of how Mrs. McNulty’s bungalow smelled of it. The smell of cooking meat made Roseanne queasy, which she found strange at the time, given her mother’s taste for “all forms of meat, even offal and innards […] a lamb’s heart” (158). The difference was that Roseanne associated her mother’s tastes with home and comfort, while Mrs. McNulty’s taste for lamb was a harbinger of the danger that Roseanne faced from her mother-in-law’s wolflike nature. Mrs. McNulty later turned Roseanne into a sacrificial lamb by using her to atone for Mrs. McNulty’s own past sins, particularly for having Tom by a man who wasn’t her husband.

Later in the novel, when recounting his own infidelity, Dr. Grene claims that, despite the tendency for us to demonize each other for common bad behavior, we aren’t intent on preying on each other like wolves. Instead, we’re “lambs,” because of our relative unawareness of the dangers that exist all around and our frequent helplessness in response to them. 

Hammers and feathers symbolize the burdens of trauma and living with a history of violence. The images of falling hammers and feathers appear in the context of a memory, which the reader later learns may be false, in which Roseanne recalls her father taking her into the tower in the graveyard to teach her the lesson that all things fall at the same rate. He dumps out a handful of feathers and “two mason’s hammers” (34). They watch the former drift away, while the hammers fall straight to the ground.

In Father Gaunt’s deposition, he describes how Joe Clear was beaten with hammers in the tower by rebels who sought revenge against him for his treatment of them during his years in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). They then stuffed his mouth with feathers, some of which “burst from his mouth [and] flew up” and out of the tower window, while “the hammers fell down, striking Roseanne as she stood gazing up” (179). Roseanne, Dr. Grene concludes, has repressed the trauma of witnessing her father’s death and revised the incident. However, Dr. Grene likely imagined the detail about Joe’s mouth being stuffed with feathers—an act of humiliation, designed to signal cowardice. Because of the unreliability of Roseanne’s memory, as well as her idealization of her father, it’s unclear what she has actually witnessed, which leads Dr. Grene to rely on Father Gaunt’s deposition for the truth about Joe Clear’s death. Unable to live with the weight of her trauma, symbolized by the hammers that killed her father, Roseanne creates a light story that assuages her memory. Hammers and feathers, therefore, also symbolize Roseanne’s habit of countering deeply traumatic events in her life with stories of levity, revising her painful history so that she can cope with it.

Daffodils signal survival and the continuation of life, despite hardship. Dr. Grene notes that Roseanne “puts a lot of faith in those daffodils along the avenue,” knowing that they signify “the improvement of the weather” and “the turning of the year” (197). Roseanne is likened to both daffodils and roses in the novel. Her relationship with daffodils is connected to her own determination to survive, despite losing the men she loved most, being ostracized by her community, losing her child, and, ultimately, being committed. It gives her relief to see the daffodils return every winter, letting her know that no circumstances are harsh enough to stop their will to return for another season.