Dangerous Secrets Exposed in Susan Griffin's Our Secret

Dangerous Secrets Exposed in Griffin's Our Secret

Secrets are apart of every human being. Even children, in their earliest years in this world, learn how to bury secrets in their hearts. In Susan Griffin's "Our Secret," she explores the subconscious, aiming particularly at the dark secrets that lie in the abyss of the human heart. Griffin claims that the darkest secrets of each person are similar in the sense that these secrets are perverted and prejudiced thoughts. These concealed evils are so deeply imbedded that people forget or choose to forget the existence of these malicious thoughts. However, these are often the thoughts that will encourage a person to take to violence. Griffin believes that people share similar forms of hidden desires, biases, and savageness. The effects of keeping these evil human characteristics deeply buried also have similar effects on the different individuals. Even the way of countering the negative effects caused by these locked up secrets are common among the "family" and the "statesman and bombers."1

Although each person has an element of individuality, people are not all that different from one another in their basic desires. Everyone is a product of the "DNA molecule," and everyone has been a "fertilized egg" (Our Secret 363, 365). There are numerous traits shared by everyone, and one of which is people's capacity to have and hide their perverted thoughts. Everyone is capable of having depraved thoughts, and these thoughts are not so different from one person to another. Griffin's grandfather keeps "a stack of magazines" of "women or girls uncovered in ditches, hacked to pieces or other wise mutilated" that he does not allow Griffin to look at (335). These magazines indicate that Gr...

... middle of paper ...

...o realized too late.

Like Griffin says, "family secrets mingle with the secrets of statesman and bomber" in the sense that the secrets may vary among individuals in context, but many different secrets share the same effect on people. These secrets and desires that people keep inside are dangerous sources of violence and malice, and there is virtually no way to be rid of these hidden evils. People may often be provoked to hurt, and these are the times when people need to look into their anger and see the pain that they can cause by releasing their rage physically. This is perhaps the only way to stop violence in a person, whether he is just a simple man, the president, or an emperor.

Works Cited:

Griffin, Susan. “Our Secret”. Ways of Reading Eds. David Bartholomae and Anthony

Petrosky. Sixth edition. Boston. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002.