Tropes in "Public Secrets"

Daniel's statement is understood as a critique because of the language she uses. That is clear to us readers, however, it is important to explore why. What are the ways that Daniel uses language that help the reader understand her writing as a critique?

Interpreting it through the lens of Killingsworth's "Appeal Through Tropes," Daniel utilizes some tropes to make her case. The phrase "public secrets" in itself is a critique. It is ironic and oxymoronic for something to be both public and a secret. Daniel says, "There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are 'public secrets' - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself, like the troubling 'don't ask, don't tell'" (Daniel). This particular public secret about which she is writing is "a secret kept in an unacknowledged but public agreement not to know what imprisonment really means to individuals and their communities" (Daniel). The phrase "Public Secrets" serves as a critique on the collective voluntary ignorance of the public. "When faced with massive sociological phenomena such as racism, poverty, addiction, abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical" (Daniel). Killingsworth says, "The ironic appeal, involves as it does the development and maintenance of emerging communal relationships, proves extremely important in the destabilized, ever-shifting social relations of modern times" (Killingsworth 133). Thus irony is without a doubt a useful tool in a critique.

At the conclusion of the editor's introduction, the question is posed, "What function does the three million dollar razor wire fence at the California Correctional Women's Facility serve? Certainly, it keeps people 'in' the prison, but perhaps, more crucially, it gives society an easy 'out,' functioning as a convenient screen for our disavowals about systemic injustice, social inequality, and the crippling effects of poverty" (Daniel). In this way, the "three million dollar razor" is shown as a metaphor for society's "easy out." About metaphors, Killingsworth says, "We can see that metaphor is not merely one technique among many but is instead a crucial way of thinking, an attempt to bridge conceptual gaps, a mental activity at the very heart of rhetoric" (Killingsworth 123). Daniel attempts to figuratively break down the razor wire fence by letting the reader know that it is destructive and a product of blissful ignorance.