Secrets

The short story’s structure signals the importance of the past in its characters' lives, interspersing flashbacks from the point of view of the protagonist with the epistolary format of Great Aunt Mary’s letters. The catalyst for this retrospection is the death of Great Aunt Mary, but the conflict stems from an incident in the youthful protagonist’s childhood, suggesting how war’s severance of relationships can create a legacy of generational trauma.

The story starts with a harsh depiction of death that foregrounds Great Aunt Mary’s fragility both physically and mentally. The author juxtaposes the protagonist’s life as a student in a relationship with Aunt Mary’s lonely end. Thus, the opening of the story primes the reader to dive deeper into the collapse of one woman’s hopes and dreams many years prior, especially as that collapse relates to death.

Although Great Aunt Mary’s lover survived the war, it soon becomes clear that the atmosphere of death was responsible for the end of their relationship and for the implied changes to both their characters in the conflict’s aftermath. In his letters from the battlefront, John grapples with guilt over seeing other soldiers die while he lives. To survive, he gradually closes himself off emotionally in his correspondence with Aunt Mary; the letters chart a progression from physical distance to emotional distance, with the cold ground he references suggesting not only the way the war has “frozen” people’s lives for its duration, but also the emotional “freeze” that follows as they find themselves permanently shaped by wartime trauma. This trauma carries over to Great Aunt Mary, who similarly buries her emotions, refusing to address a significant loss she experienced during and after the war. Her reaction to the protagonist’s prying—“You are dirt” (33)—even evokes the frozen ground that symbolizes John’s emotional state.

As a child, the protagonist struggles to grasp the connections between Secrets, Trauma, and the Limits of Emotional Intimacy. He does not understand his aunt’s reticence or grasp the significance of invading her privacy, though he clearly knows what he’s doing is wrong; he pretends to check the postcards for overlooked stamps before moving on to the letters, justifying his incursion in his own mind. In the wake of her scolding, he harbors significant Guilt and the Desire for Forgiveness. The incident becomes another familial secret, as demonstrated by the protagonist’s oblique question at the end about whether Mary said anything about him. Presumably, he hoped to hear that she forgave him, but her condition before death makes it unlikely that she would have been able to even if she wished to.

The protagonist’s silent suffering and tears show how a broken connection between family members can complicate the grieving process, as he and Mary never had a chance to clear the air between them. The protagonist can only belatedly ask for forgiveness from “the woman who had been his maiden aunt, his teller of tales” (33). The wording here is significant, as the narrator accepts Mary as she chose to present herself to him. Like the protagonist’s passive observation as his mother burns the letters he was so curious about, it is an implicit admission that he was wrong to pry, even if Mary’s reaction was itself extreme.

The story’s ending therefore suggests that it is as damaging to keep secrets from oneself as it is from others. The protagonist seems to have avoided thinking about his childhood experiences with Mary out of shame, to the point that he cannot initially tell what he feels in the wake of her death—“anger or sorrow” (25). Ultimately, however, her loss clarifies his emotions in a way that is cathartic. This is in keeping with how the story depicts Love in the Face of Death, with the experience of mortality intensifying that of love. In confronting his emotions, the protagonist simultaneously honors the person Mary was while ending the cycle of trauma by doing what she did not: acknowledge it directly.