The Bastard
So, the book starts off with Gareth St. Clair’s rule for dealing with his father. A bad relationship, that. And soon enough, it is revealed why: Gareth is another man’s child. And yet, it has always seemed easy to pass Gareth off as the real scion of his loins for one very conveniently ironic—or ironically convenient—reason:
“No,” Gareth said again. “It can’t be. I look like you. I—”
For a moment Lord St. Clair remained silent. Then he said, bitterly, “An unhappy coincidence, I assure you.”
The Bridgerton Irony
The Bridgerton family irony is in full swing in this novel. This is the ironic foundation upon which all romances in the series are built: the man and the woman who wind up together commence their relationship by resisting any thought that romance will be the endgame. Ironically enough, these two always windup in communing in holy matrimony and the same holds true in this entry.
The Unrakish Rake
Gareth St. Clair has developed a reputation as being a bit of a rake. The devil-may-care user of women who sees them merely as objects to be collected rather than human beings to be understood. This reputation begins to seem ironically misplaced to Hyacinth upon learning of his heedless devotion to weekly ritual that is, needless to say, not quite the epitomic of rakishness:
“It made Hyacinth wonder if he was truly the rogue society made him out to be. No true devil would be so devoted to his grandmother.”
Lady Danbury’s Advice
Lady Danbury has a conversation centering on advice to Hyacinth on how to go about attracting the attention of a certain young and very available bachelor. The entire conversation is, when taken out of context, verging just a little into the territory of off-color. The centerpiece of the subject matter is bosoms, after all, with an emphasis on whether Hyacinth’s meets the standard for heaving healthily in the direction of the intended. What sends the conversation beyond merely off-color and into the territorial waters of ironic is that Lady Danbury is Gareth’s grandmother and the bachelor in question is Gareth so therefore the advice is that from a grandmother to a young lady on how to lay a marriage trap for her own grandson
“for the life of me, I don’t know why the boy shuns your sort…Young, female, and someone he would actually have to marry if he dallied with…Just yank your dress down a little when next you see him…Men lose all sense at the sight of a healthy bosom. You’ll have him—”
The Double MacGuffin
The “MacGuffin” what Alfred Hitchcock called the “thing” which stimulates the plot and character motivations of a story that usually turns out to be of no lasting interest to the story on the part of the audience. For instance, the MacGuffin in Psycho is the money that Marion Crane steals at the beginning of the film which sends her on her date with destiny at the Bates Motel. The money winds up sinking to the bottom of the swamp with Norman Bates none the wiser of its existence. Without that theft, there is no story, but of all those who have seen the film, who even remembers the amount?
The MacGuffin is therefore an example of irony and there is an example in this story. There is a diary in this story that is a kind of MacGuffin in that it is the device which brings the two lovers together, but within that MacGuffin is yet another: hidden jewels. Hyacinth spends a great deal of her married life on a desperate search for these jewels only to wind up disappointed. In the Epilogue, however, there is a character who actually does discovered these missing jewels entirely by accident. And, ironically—not accidentally—keeps the revelation a secret from Hyacinth.
