The Irony of Maria and Miranda
Maria and Miranda are aged 12 and 8 respectively. They are fathered by Harry who himself gets surprised how his little girls know a lot beyond their ages. These two girls behave like adults and they do not accept that they know many things because they are young girls. People surrounding them are in their forties and when they are told that once they were children, they refuse to accept. Ironically, Miranda and Maria feel that their memories began before they were born. It is hard for the reader to believe that these toddlers can know many things compared to adults at their forties. The author writes:
"Maria and Miranda aged 12 and 8 years, knew they were young, though they had felt that they had lived a long time. They had lived not only their years; but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of grown-ups around them, old people above forty, most of them, who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once. It was hard to believe."
The Irony of the Great Aunt Eliza and Aunt Keziah
Harry is too proud in front of her daughters that in his lineage, all women are slim like his mother. He makes reference to Amy who is very beautiful and slim. However, in the pictures, she seems fat but he disagrees that in his family, there are no fat women since all of them are like her mother who is slim even today. Both Miranda and Maria listen attentively to what their father is saying. These two girls are very intelligent and they critique every statement they disagree with. They are astonished that their father says that in his family lineage there are no fat women. Quickly, these two girls remember the great aunties Kezia and Eliza who are extra huge in terms of body volume. They are seeing that their father is being ironical because he avoids mentioning the two fat aunties. The narrator says:
“But how did their father account for great-aunt Eliza, who quite squeezed herself through doors, and who, when seated, was one solid pyramid monument from floor to neck? What about great-aunt Keziah, in Kentucky? Her husband great-uncle John Jacob, had refused to allow her to ride his good horses after she had achieved two hundred and twenty pounds.”
The Irony of the Family Feeling
The narrator of the story says that Harry must have said a lot about the beauty of females in his family lineage but he did all these because of the love for his family. According to him, every woman in his family is beautiful. He uses poetic, comic and romantic language to describe the beauty that is beheld in his family. It contradicts the reader that sometimes he does not mean what he says. Ironically, his evidence more often contradicts his ideals. The narrator writes:
"This loyalty of their father's in the face of evidence contrary to his ideal had its spring in family feeling and lover of the legend that he shared with the others. They loved to tell stories, romantic and poetic, or comic with romantic humor; they did not guild the outward circumstance, it was the feeling that mattered."
The Irony of the Faded Things
As the young girls are looking at their grandmother’s collections of decorative items, they start conceptualizing and visualizing why the family lineage bragged a lot about beauty. Those decorative items are not worth it because they are not as beautiful as they were made to believe. From what they have heard, the young girls in that house were marvelously dressed and beauty was the order of the day. However, it is ironic to figure out the beauty of these are the kind of clothes and decorative items that they used. The author says:
"It seemed such a pity that these faded things, these yellowed long gloves, and misshapen satin slippers, these broad ribbons cracking where they were folded, should have been all those vanished girls had to decorate themselves with. And where were they now, those girls, and the boys on the odd-looking collars?
The Irony of Life
The little girls are trying to conceptualize how life beyond a life can be. The next world is supposed to be heaven but ironically, there is no one who will ever come to confirm how life looks like there. However, this helps the girls to be imaginative and see the unseen. They are already sharp and brilliant to disagree what they deem wrong. The author writes:
“There was then a life beyond a life in this world, as well as the next ; such episodes confirmed for the little girls the mobility of a human feeling, the divinity of a man’s vision of the unseen, the importance of life and death , the depths the human heart, the romantic value of tragedy.”
