Irony In The Age Of Innocence

The Age of Innocence, the representative of American female writer Edith Wharton, is one of the best novels in America in the 20th century. In the novel, the writer applies the device of irony to theme, characterization and words in a creative way. Although irony as an artistic device has various concepts in the western literature and aesthetics, its basic connotation involves the perception or a discrepancy or incongruity between words and their meaning, or between actions and their results, or between appearance and reality, or between appearance and essence. The thesis intends to do a systematic study on the artistic device of irony in The Age of Innocence in terms of thematic presentation, characterization and language style.Chapter One conducts a study of irony in theme of the novel. Wharton is a writer who is always concerned about the problem between the individual and social conventions. In the work, she explores the theme of social progress. On the surface, the novelist describes an age of innocence in which people respect conventions and cherish innocence as the most important merit in morality with nostalgia for old times. As a matter of fact, she reveals an age of ignorance and hypocrisy oppositely. People ignore new things deliberately and resist the trend of times; and they are experienced, worldly and hypocritical in morality, who live in a world of rumors, love intrigues and hypocrisies. The ironic discrepancy between the superficial meaning and the writer's intention entitles the theme of the novel with a charm of profundity and richness.Chapter Two investigates irony in characterization. Edith Wharton is ironic in characterization and gives us a parody of "respectable" gentlemen and "excellent" gentlewomen in old New York. Insightfully, the writer sees the absurd inconsistencies of her characters, and puts a sharp contrast between their appearance and their true personality, what they say and what they do. On one hand, she portrays every character calmly and exposes their true personality; on the other hand, she sympathizes with the protagonist Newland Archer, satirizes the hypocrisies of the minor characters such as Mr. Sillerton Jackson and Lawrence Lefferts, and ridicules the mediocreness and absurdities of those big people like Mrs. Manson Minggot and the Van der Luydens. All the ironies in characterization alert the reader to the dark side of the age: its conservativeness, hypocrisy and worldliness.Chapter Three probes irony in the language style. Due to the abundant use of irony in the novel, the reader is inevitably impressed by the ironic style in it. As a master of language, Wharton's irony is distinguished from other writers. She is good at using images and symbols as ironic clues in order to help the reader apprehend her passionless and metaphorical ironies, especially on the main characters; meanwhile, she favors tiny ironies to produce the comic effect of humor and mild satire, which alleviate the desperate pessimism of the tragedy. The writer's elastic application of ironic language makes the famous work more intriguing and meaningful.Through a systematic exploration of irony in the great work, we can come to a conclusion that the success of The Age of Innocence, to a great extent, is inseparable from Edith Wharton's consummate application of irony.