68 pages • 2 hours read
Sebastian BarryThe Secret Scripture
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2008A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaPart 1, Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself”
Roseanne was born in Sligo, Ireland. She now lives in Roscommon General’s a mental hospital, which is managed by Dr. Grene—a man whom she thinks resembles St. Thomas. Roseanne is very old, but she doesn’t know her age. She decides one day to write an account of her life, using an inkwell filled with blue biro ink that Dr. Grene has given her.
Roseanne’s long-deceased and beloved father, Joe Clear, spent much of his life working in a graveyard for Catholics, where he was superintendent. Joe Clear was a Presbyterian, which made him an outlier in Sligo. He also sang operettas and rode a motorbike. In his free time, Joe Clear read old sermons by John Donne and Sir Thomas Browne. When he was young, he sailed with the British Merchant Marine and entered “every port in Christendom before he was seventeen” (16). While staying at his favorite boarding house in Southampton, he met Cissy, a chambermaid. Cissy was a dark-haired, dark-skinned beauty with emerald-green eyes.
While she was growing up, Joe Clear told Roseanne many stories. One of them was about how he went to another boarding house after being unable to find a bed in his favorite one. He awoke in the middle of the night in the new boarding house to the sound of someone breathing beside him. Joe Clear got up and went to the door but found that it was locked. He demanded that the woman running the house open it and she obliged. The next morning, while leaving to catch his next ship, he noticed the shabbiness of the strange boarding house in the morning light.
In another story, Joe Clear witnessed another motorcyclist hit a wall in Tullamore at a great speed. The motorcyclist then rose to the heavens, “as if on wings” (21). The man, an Indian, lay on the other side of the wall—awake, smiling, and unharmed. Because of his ethnicity, those in Tullamore still refer to the story as that of “The Indian Angel” (22).
Cissy, on the other hand, never told Roseanne any stories. Moreover, most of the items in the family home belonged to Joe, including his motor bike and a cottage piano that a widower gave him in lieu of pay. The keys were pristine, as no one had played the piano much. Occasionally, Roseanne played it while her father merrily sang Neapolitan songs.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Dr. Grene’s Commonplace Book”
When writing in his commonplace book, Dr. Grene takes over as the narrator. He writes about how Roscommon is in “terrible condition” (26). There are “bats in the roof and rats in the cellar” (27). However, practices have improved at asylums. Irish asylums in the last century practiced “clitoridectomies, immersions, and injections,” all of which have been discontinued (26-27).
Dr. Grene knows that not everyone in the asylum is mad. Some were committed for social reasons. Roseanne is the oldest person in the asylum and, possibly, in all of Ireland. Dr. Grene is curious about Roseanne, but he doesn’t “[delve] into her life,” not wanting her to dislike him (30).
Amid Dr. Grene’s musings about Roseanne, the narrative switches to “Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself.” When Roseanne was 10, Joe Clear took her “to the top of the long thin tower in the graveyard” (31). She saw all of Sligo from there. He wanted to prove a statement that he had made while they were still at home—that “[a]ll things fall at the same rate” (32). Her mother, Cissy, replied, “[I]t’s the rare thing rises” (32). At the tower, Joe Clear stuck a bag out of the tower’s window. He shook out the contents, which were a handful of feathers and “two mason’s hammers” (34). The feathers, which had been taken “from the feather bolster” on his and Cissy’s bed, drifted away (21). The hammers continued to fall.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Roseanne hides her writing from Dr. Grene, who visits her in the morning. He asks Roseanne if she has everything that she needs on this cold day; she does. She notes that “[t]he beauty of Dr. Grene is that he is entirely [humorless], which makes him quite humorous” (38). She’s been under his care for more than 30 years. He apologizes for her mice problem, though Roseanne believes that the asylum will never be rid of mice. John Kane, the custodian, puts down traps. The mice eat the cheese from them “with no trouble, and get away like Jesse James and his brother Frank” (39).
Dr. Grene then asks if Roseanne recalls “the particulars of [her] admittance” to Roscommon (39). She lies and says that she doesn’t. Dr. Grene can’t verify the details, because all the hospital records were eaten by mice.
Dr. Grene notes that Roseanne is the “happiest person [he knows],” which means that she ought to be reassessed (40). He tells her that there’s been an “outcry in the newspapers against” incarcerating people in asylums “for social reasons” (40). He assures her, though, that he will not make her homeless. Roseanne feels a sense of dread, admitting that freedom scares her.
Roseanne studies Dr. Grene’s face. He looks to her now “like a ferret” (42). She wonders if he has a wife and children. She likes him because he shares her father’s former interests in classics and poetry. Roseanne learns that Dr. Grene’s full name is William Grene. He engages her in more personal conversation, talking about a visit that he made to the Dublin a week earlier to collect some books on roses for his wife. He went to the zoo while he was there. He recalls the visit with Roseanne. Tears stream down his face when he describes the beauty of the giraffes.
Part 1, Chapter 1-3 Analysis
In the first three chapters, the author establishes the first-person narration from the perspectives of both Roseanne and Dr. Grene. Thus, the story is told by both a supposed mental patient and her doctor, by a centenarian and a person in late middle-age, by a Catholic and a Protestant, and by both a man and a woman. Barry’s use of these contrasts suggests that he’s looking to show that there can be more than one version of the same story. In doing this, he invalidates the notion that any single narrative is truly authoritative. If one applies this notion to history, Barry seems to posit that there is no singular reading of Irish history, that both the recollections of Catholics and Protestants can be given equal consideration.
Roseanne is incentivized to write her personal history, both to assert that she is a valid witness to her own life and to create a history where there seems to be none, given that mice ate her hospital records. In her retelling of her personal history, Roseanne’s father, Joe, figures prominently, while her mother is barely present. Roseanne idealizes Joe but pities her mother. Joe Clear is always telling Roseanne stories, which provide him with context, while Cissy’s relative silence underscores her mysterious character. In fact, Roseanne defines her mother as someone “singularly without stories” and, thus, without a history (11). Cissy is a passive figure in the narrative, while Joe Clear is an active one. Cissy’s vulnerability and inability to change her circumstances cause her to succumb to mental illness.
Rodents also figure prominently in the first three chapters, establishing a motif that will run throughout the novel. Rats, which will feature more prominently later, are present at Roscommon; mice have eaten Roseanne’s records; and Dr. Grene takes on the look of a ferret in Roseanne’s eyes. Rodents appear in the novel in instances in which Barry suggests that a character feels overwhelmed by forces beyond his or her control. Initially, Dr. Grene’s authority and wish to know more about Roseanne make her uneasy, leading to her unflattering vision of him.
Related Titles
By Sebastian Barry
