Depravity
The irony begins right in the title of the essay “The Depravity of English Ladies.” The titular depravity is not a recognition of the sincerity of the author, but rather the encompassing view toward the country’s female population applied by a rising wave of moral-mongering pundits, preachers and pamphleteers. The author takes ironic exception both the attackers and those attacked:
“The moralists must keep their audience awake. They have turned their lanterns on our homes and showed us mothers, wives and daughters, all wanton and mercenary at heart, saved from absolute dishonor only by their selfishness and the preventive etiquettes of society.”
Housewifery
Of greatest irony, doubtlessly, is the fact that in a collection titled A Housewife’s Opinions, the plural form of “housewife” occurs exactly twice: in the essay “The Domestic Economy Congress, 1878” and in the essay titled “Domestic Service.” That latter essay also happens to the only instance in which the singular version of the term appears.
Infallible People
Another essay that is a highlight of Webster’s meticulously controlled sense of irony is “Infallibility.” One could go through and pick out any number of excerpts which prove the point of her mastery, but arguably none cuts so deeply into the bone of the target of her ire as the following which reads as if it could have been written yesterday about someone you know:
“Infallible people do not usually fritter away eloquence in arguments. Why should they, haying so simple and final a logic? There are only two sides to any question, the right and the wrong ; and their side is the right one.”
Webster, the Stand-Up Comic
Webster reveals her talent for the ironic point need not be satirically corrosive, but can take philosophical flight on the wings of a much more lighthearted sense of humor in the essay titled “Imagination.” It is a classic set-up that also reveals that had the author been born a century later, she might well have enjoyed a career as comedian or comedy writer:
“Imagination is the wings of the mind. But then a good many practical people hold that the mind is a bird which ought not to fly.”
"Virtue is its Own Reward"
In this essay, the mechanics are irony are inverted and reversed. One of the great contrarian minds of Victorian literature, Webster finds within this time-honored proverb nothing but irony. Removal of its ironic component, in fact, leaves it as utterly meaningless as a random collection of words. With the skill of a prosecutor proving the hero of a story is really its villain, she tears apart all the meaning invested in the phrase to divulge that, in fact, the ironic reality is not only that acts of virtue are rewarded well beyond the virtuous act itself, but that people fully expect to be rewarded beyond the self-satisfaction of acting virtuously. Then she really goes for the kill by further offering evidence that people acting without virtue, but believed nonetheless to be models of virtue, also enjoy extensive rewards.
