Irony in Southern Gothic
Irony is a word that gets thrown around a lot (we're looking at you, Alanis), but what does it actually mean? Well, in literature, it can mean a couple of things. First, there's what you could call an ironic use of language: that's when an author (or a character) says the opposite of what he or she means. It's like saying, "That fedora is totally hot," when what you really mean is, "That fedora is totally fugs."
In literature, there's also what you could call an ironic turn of events. That's when the plot of a story takes the characters (and us readers) somewhere totally unexpected—in fact, the opposite of where you'd expect things to end up. That would be like if a story about a tea party with stuffed animals ended with a high-speed car chase and dramatic rooftop shoot-out.
Southern Gothic literature is full of irony. This partly has to do with the history of the South. This was a region that had been extremely wealthy and powerful for much of its history, thanks to slavery, but the South's defeat in the Civil War meant that this once super-powerful and super-wealthy region found itself, well, permanently down in the dumps. Southern Gothic writers deal with the irony of Southern history by writing about characters and events whose lives are shaped by irony.
Shmoops:
Thomas Sutpen, in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, spends his whole life trying to prove that he's better than black people. The irony is that he ends up marrying a woman who is part black. Check out this character's story here.
Big Daddy Pollitt in Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof tries to ignore his own mortality by acquiring huge amounts of wealth. In this quotation (Quote #6), Big Daddy wakes up to an ironic truth: he can't actually escape his mortality.