The destruction of The Sojourner (Situational Irony)
The Sojourner is a symbol of power and magic to the students of Saxon College, an unbelievably large tree supposedly endowed with special powers. The tree is so special that the students choose to hold the Wild Child’s funeral service beneath its enormous branches. However, because the college president refused to allow the service to be held in the chapel, the students grow frustrated. In the confusion of their misdirected anger, they chop down The Sojourner, destroying the very thing on campus that they held most dear.
The rules at Saxon College (Situational Irony)
At Saxon College, students can do whatever they want as long as they wear “spotless white gloves.” This saying represents how limiting the rules at Saxon are: girls are punished for such “offenses” as having male visitors on the grounds ten minutes after visiting hours are over. These rules are futile and ironic because of where Saxon is located and the political moment of the time—near Atlanta, where the civil rights movement and the police backlash are in full, brutal swing. The school refuses to acknowledge what it knows is going on—the students spending a week in jail, the professors whose mugshots are shown in the newspaper—and continues to enforce a nineteenth-century ideal of feminine gentility.
Truman's feelings for Meridian (Situational Irony)
Truman’s complicated feelings for Meridian are ironic because his initial distaste for her is the very factor that keeps her constantly in his thoughts. Truman acknowledges that if he had known Meridian was a mother, he would have never looked at her as an object of desire at all. Meridian calls him out on this, pointing out that he wanted a virgin who was “perfect in all the eyes of the world,” not someone who had already borne a child. Truman doesn’t deny this, but at the same time, he believes that it’s the “awareness of his own limitation” in loving Meridian that causes her to become an obsession for him. Despite knowing that Meridian is a mother, Truman continually escapes Lynne to visit her, finding solace in her company in a way that he never wanted to in college.
White hairstyles (Situational Irony)
Truman maintains that the revolution for which he, Meridian, and countless others sacrificed so much throughout the sixties was simply a fad that eventually died down. In one of his conversations with Meridian, he remarks that the revolution was “like everything else in America” in the way that it became a passing trend. Meridian disagrees with this viewpoint. However, Truman points out the striking irony that middle-class white girls began to wear kinky hair, emulating traditional black hairstyles. The very oppressing class that has caused so much pain to blacks thus adopts and appropriates their culture, one sad and darkly ironic end result of the civil rights movement.
