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Imagery
Definition of Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this... read full definition
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how... read full definition
Book 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Tom's Education:
In an example of situational irony, Mr. Tulliver spends hundreds of pounds on Tom’s education—believing that it will help him to become financially successful—only to find that it has not prepared Tom for the workforce at all. Mr. Tulliver communicates his intentions early in the novel:
“What I want, you know,” said Mr Tulliver — “what I want is to give Tom a good eddication; an eddication as’ll be a bread to him. That was what I was thinking of when I gave notice for him to leave the ’cademy at Ladyday. I mean to put him to a downright good school at Midsummer. The two years at the ’cademy ’ud ha’ done well enough, if I’d meant to make a miller and farmer of him, for he’s had a fine sight more schoolin’ nor I ever got: all the learnin’ my father ever paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and the alphabet at th’ other.”
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Book 2, Chapter 4
Explanation and Analysis—Mr. Stelling:
With the character of Mr. Stelling—Tom’s teacher and an Oxford-educated minister—Eliot is satirizing clergymen who have no integrity in relation to teaching yet receive high praise and high incomes anyway. The following passage—which contains verbal irony—communicates Eliot’s satirical intentions:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Any of those low callings in which men are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to clergymen: was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr Stelling be expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business? any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation.
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Book 6, Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—Stephen Desiring Maggie:
Stephen falling in love with Maggie when he is pursuing marriage with Lucy is an example of situational irony. Stephen’s feelings for Maggie are ironic because Lucy, according to everyone in St. Ogg’s, is the epitome of feminine beauty (she is even referred to as the “Belle of St. Ogg’s”), with her blonde curly hair and caring, gentle demeanor.
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Book 7, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Maggie's Reputation:
After Maggie returns from running away with Stephen, the townspeople of St. Ogg’s judge her fiercely and essentially ostracize her, assuming her to have had an extramarital affair with him. The narrator points out the situational irony inherent in the townspeople’s judgements in the following passage:
Unlock with LitCharts A+We judge others according to results; how else? — not knowing the processes by which results are arrived at. If Miss Tulliver, after a few months of well-chosen travel, had returned as Mrs Stephen Guest — with a post-marital trousseau, and all the advantages possessed even by the most unwelcome wife of an only son, public opinion, which at St Ogg’s, as elsewhere, always knew what to think, would have judged in strict consistency with those results.
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