Flynn Harrigan Professor Napier English 1020 27 February 2023 Literary Irony in “The Birthmark” and “A Cask of Amontillado” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” tells the story of a man named Aylmer who desires to remove a birthmark from his wife Georgiana’s otherwise perfect face. After a chilling dream, Georgiana agrees to attempt to remove the birthmark, even if the procedure puts her life at risk, bringing Aylmer back to his experimental background. After reviewing some of his past experiments, Georgiana recognizes that he never fully achieves his original goal. After drinking a supposedly foolproof potion, Georgiana falls asleep, briefly wakes up, then dies in front of Aylmer. Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Cask of Amontillado” describes Montresor’s …show more content…
The two most prevalent types are perhaps situational and verbal. Towards the end of Hawthorne’s piece, after Aylmer successfully creates an elixir to remove his wife Georgiana’s birthmark, she dies after drinking it. This acts as an example of situational irony because, while Aylmer intended to create a perfect version of Georgiana by removing her birthmark with the potion, as he believed that her birthmark made her less than perfect, he ended up killing her and permanently removing his love from his life, which is certainly the opposite of what he originally intended. Other situational irony related to the event in the story is explained by the narrator’s statement that “…[the birthmark’s] departure was more awful still. Watch the stain of the rainbow fading out the sky, and you will know how that mysterious symbol passed away” (Hawthorne 377). The reader likely expected Aylmer to have a joyous reaction following the removal of the despised birthmark, but instead he is devastated when his beloved Georgiana dies. He watches his love fade out of his life just as a colorful rainbow fades from the sky. At some points in the story, Georgiana refers to her birthmark as “magical.” This acts as an instance of verbal irony because, if the birthmark was truly as treasured as Georgiana claimed that it was, she would never want to remove it from her face. Therefore, the opposite of what she said is actually