Clueless
Almost beyond question, the single most ironic sentence of descriptive prose by the narrator is the insight into the mind of George Tryon as he grows tired of Dr. Green discussing how beautiful the daughter of a certain unnamed negro woman has grown to be. (For the sake of clarity, the woman--unknown to him--is the woman he intends to soon marry.) Tryon, the narrator tells the reader:
“could not possibly have been interested in a colored girl, under any circumstances, and he was engaged to be married to the most beautiful white woman on earth.”
Ivanhoe
When Rena decides to pass as white, she takes on the name Rowena. At the social event of the season (for the whites of town) she is actually crowned the Queen of Love and Beauty. In Ivanhoe, another Rowena is named the Queen of Love and Beauty at another social event of the season (for white people.) That Lady Rowena is generally held to be one of literature's chivalric models for ideal womanhood. The irony here should be quite obvious.
Dr. Green
While Tryon waits in Dr. Green’s office for the doctor to arrive, he casually flips through a medical journal. Not a book, not a pamphlet, not a novel nor any other example of text, but a medical journal in which he flips to an article by a contributor located in the South. The article in this medical journal to which Dr. Green obviously subscribes contains a scientific argument which Tryon decides is well-considered if verbose essentially stating that
“it behooved every true Southron to stand firm against the abhorrent tide of radicalism, to maintain the supremacy and purity of his all-pervading, all-conquering race, and to resist by every available means the threatened domination of an inferior and degraded people.”
Just a few minutes later, Tryon listens as Dr. Green says, in reference to a beautiful young black woman from town with the figure of a Greek goddess: "twenty-five years ago, I could not have answered for myself. But I would advise the girl to stay at the North, if she can.”
The ironic inference being, of course, that if she’d been around when the doctor was a young man, it would not have been the supposedly "inferior and degraded" black men of town who would have posed the greatest threat, but members of the assumed "superior and supreme" race.
A Stranger's Optimism
The novel opens with a chapter titled “The Stranger from South Carolina” in which narrator has penetrated directly into the thoughts of a character without advance warning. The opening paragraph is framed as mere philosophical musing and only in the second paragraph is it revealed that these are thoughts of a character and not objective narration. That character is a young man who has been away from home living a secret life by passing as a white man. He has come returned home filled with the optimism of his own success to convince his sister to join in his secret identity among white society. His philosophical musings will prove to be tragically ironic:
“And yet there are places where Time seems to linger lovingly long after youth has departed, and to which he seems loath to bring the evil day. Who has not known some even-tempered old man or woman who seemed to have drunk of the fountain of youth?”
The Bottom Rail on Top
A phrase developed in the wake of the Civil War which for a time came to be attributed almost exclusively to the consequences of emancipation and abolition of slavery: “the bottom rail on top.” The phrase became a popular metaphor for the shift in power: the formerly dominant slave masters were no weaker than the formerly submissive slaves. The phrase is used just twice the novel; once by John Warwick, the black man passing as white, and once by Dr. Green, the subhuman reprobate passing as human. Warwick explains to his mother and sister early in the book that the Civil War changes things forever for African-Americans by putting “bottom rail on top.” Later on, after Rena has followed her brother and taken on the white persona of Rowena, Dr. Green explains to George Tryon that
“enemies may overturn our institutions, and try to put the bottom rail on top, but they cannot destroy our Southern hospitality.”
The sheer volume of irony contained within that highly dubious, remarkably naive, and historically short-sighted assertion is itself enough to fill a book.
