The Secret Scripture

The losses that Roseanne experienced in her youth were the results of the Irish Civil War. Roseanne grew up during a time in which Ireland was trying to determine its national identity, whether it could truly declare sovereignty while being a part of the United Kingdom and whether Protestants and Catholics could coexist peacefully in the country. Roseanne was a relatively passive witness to this civil war and to the Second World War. She seems to have a limited understanding of the circumstances leading to both. Meanwhile, all the most important men in Roseanne’s life—Joe Clear, Tom, Eneas, and John Lavelle—are involved in and compromised by these wars. The novel uses the backdrop of the Irish Civil War to examine how this broader, long-standing historical event impacted personal relationships. Tom, for instance, allied himself with a more fascist element. These politics contribute to his rather stringent views about women, thus disallowing him from loving Roseanne and regarding her as a partner. Though Roseanne survived the conflict, she became an emotional casualty because of the losses of her father, of her husband’s love, and of her friendships with John Lavelle and Eneas.

The most oppressive force in Ireland in the first half of the 20th-century is also the institution to which the nation flocks for comfort: the Catholic Church. In the novel, Father Gaunt represents the Church’s strictness toward sexuality and its policy of regarding women, particularly young and beautiful ones like Roseanne, as objects of original sin. For these reasons, he enforces the Dancehall Act at the Plaza, ensuring that men and women do not dance too closely together. Unable to ward off the popularity of jazz, a musical form that encouraged sexual expressiveness, the priest uses the Church’s power to enforce condemnation to discourage aspects of behavior regarded as sinful.

Father Gaunt is a man who seems “to long for the banishment of women behind the front doors of their homes, and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess” (135). Tom, whose elitism and devotion to the Church align with Father Gaunt’s sensibilities, epitomizes this image of masculinity. However, Tom’s marriage to Roseanne is problematic for Father Gaunt, given that it is an alliance with a Protestant and, worse, with a woman whom Father Gaunt regards as disobedient because of Roseanne’s refusal to become a Catholic and to behave as a proper wife. Mrs. McNulty is the antithesis of Roseanne. Though Mrs. McNulty is the result of a union between a Protestant and a Catholic and had a child out of wedlock, her self-denial and total submission to the Catholic Church makes her a favorite of Father Gaunt, despite her unkind and spiteful nature. This indicates that clergymen like Father Gaunt aren’t interested in the perpetuation of goodness but in obedience.