Epistolary Novels
The novel is an example of epistolary literature in which the narrative is moved forward through the correspondence of various characters writing to each other. The result can be maddening to the modern day novel reader because it now seems a little gimmicky, but the irony for those contemporary bookworms is that such a form was actually widely accepted as reading material because compendia of actual correspondence was a popular genre of literature at the time. Thus, the transfer from reading real life letters by actual historical figures to reading a novel composed of letters was not only far from being a gimmick, it would actually have been the traditional third-person narrative which novels would eventually adopt which would have seemed the gimmick at the time of publication.
Incest
Perhaps the most ironic aspect of the actual story is that one of the two great sexual taboos which are almost universally observed by all civilizations (the other being bestiality, of course)—incest—is here treated sympathetically. In fact, the irony is that the sympathy mentioned in the title is directed specifically toward the two characters whose love becomes doomed as a result of discovering the true nature of their relationship.
Is the Entire Book Ironic?
An argument has been forwarded by some critics and academic scholarship that the entire novel should be read ironically. This interpretation primarily rests upon one’s opinion of certain characters whom the reader is told are intelligent and insightful—Mrs. Holmes and the tediously rational Mr. Worthy, for instance—but whom it is quite easy to dismissed as objects of satire. The possibility that the first American novel is not what it appears to be, but is in fact a deeply cynical and ironic satire of the British novels which it replicates is almost too enticing to dismiss, but ultimately whether this is truly an example of the novel’s irony or not will eventually become a decision each individual reader must arrive at independently.
Anti-Catholic Irony
A bit of irony is expressed in Letter III from Harrington to Worthy that might pass unnoticed by modern readers. Harrington observes that “to suppose a smart, beautiful girl, would continue as a companion to the best lady in Christendom, when she could raise herself to a more eligible situation, is to suppose a solecism—She might as well be immured in a nunnery.”
A solecism is technically the definition of a mistake in grammar, but is here used in the more symbolic sense of a paradoxical concept expressing the ironic circumstances of a smart and beautiful girl winding up in a nunnery. The ironic dimension of this idea is constructed upon a long-standing Protestant bias toward Catholicism with the fundamental suggestion being that to wind up as a nun would require one to be Catholic which, by definition, would mean that a smart and beautiful nun could only be an example of cosmic irony.
Intents and Purposes
The novel was a fairly new and not particularly well-judged form of literature when this book was published. In those uneasy early decades when the novel form was trying to gain respectability as well as readership, it was widely assumed that in order to make it more palatable to offended tastes, it should serve some purpose: namely, to teach something about the real world. It is for this reason that so many early prototypes attempt to create a “based upon a true story” background for what is in reality pure fiction. Another popular method used by early novelists was to claim the novel form could be used for moral instruction and this is quite clearly delineated by the author in the Preface: “the dangerous Consequences of SEDUCTION are exposed, and the Advantages of FEMALE EDUCATION set forth and recommended.”
The irony, of course, is that the real lesson the novel teaches by the end is not about the consequences of seduction or the advantages of a female education, but, quite simply that sex sells and the more lurid and deviant the sex, the more irresistible the enticement. Make no mistake: this is a book about incest far more than it is about a book about the dastardly consequences awaiting those who seduce and those who would easily be seduced.
