Irony in Kate Chopin’s Selected Short Stories

Abstract

Many authors often employ irony as a powerful literary device since it makes the language of their literary works more suggestive and more emphatic. They usually use irony as a kind of satire, thereby to emphasize faults in their characters or in society in general.  Among the American writers who use irony in their short stories is Kate Chopin. This study aims to discuss the nature of irony in Kate Chopin’s three short stories, “The Story of an Hour”, “The Storm”, and “Desiree’s Baby”. The study tries to analyze the presence of three main types of irony, their functions, their relation to the theme or message of the story, and the reasons behind the use of irony. The study concludes that though Chopin satirizes her contemporary society through irony, her irony is neither humorous nor funny but invariably tragic. She deliberately uses irony in her stories. She creates an atmosphere of suspense by adding turns and twists to the stories in order to shock the reader. Another reason for using irony is to employ her unconventional ideas about the condition of women and to bring the reader to the main theme of the story. Moreover, the ultimate goal behind all is to criticize as well as to highlight the flaws of the American patriarchal society of her lifetime and to support her feminist ideas.