Hope Leslie: Situational Irony 3 key examples

Mr. Fletcher and Martha have just had a conversation about how he never stopped loving Alice. He likes his life with Martha, but she is in many ways not the wife he feels he was destined to have. The Fletchers are now going to be tasked with raising Alice's children. This may seem poetic and fitting to him, but it is also ironic. When he moved to America, he thought he was surrendering a family with Alice. Instead he has inherited the children she had with another man. This inheritance comes without the title of Sir William Fletcher and without his uncle's fortune. By choosing his beliefs over his love for Alice, Mr. Fletcher has ended up responsible for both of the families he might have chosen, and also none of the social status and wealth betraying his beliefs might have earned him.

Mr. Fletcher is not bitter about the situation, as readers might expect him to be. Instead, he develops an extraordinarily close and protective relationship with the older child, also named Alice. He renames her "Hope" because she reminds him so much of her mother that she represents the hope of another chance at being close to the woman he once loved. The situational irony of Mr. Fletcher's penniless "inheritance" of Hope allows the novel to suggest that the greatest inheritance of all is the "hope" of a family free from internal religious and political conflict.

Mononotto is shocked and horrified at the realization that he has cut his daughter's arm off instead of Everell's head. Magawisca has expressed clearly that she is opposed to Everell's execution. She bonded with the Fletcher family while she was living with them. Mr. Fletcher was not even there most of the time, and Magawisca does not see Mrs. Fletcher or the children as responsible for the violence against her people because they did not participate in the Mystic massacre directly. If Mononotto had simply yielded to Magawisca's earlier pleas not to carry out revenge on a boy who was not himself responsible for the Mystic massacre, she would never have felt that she needed to intervene. Because Mononotto takes such a strong and merciless stance against the colonists, he ends up hurting his own family more than he would have if he had let Everell go.

It is important to note that Mononotto has previously been known to the colonists as a reasonable and just leader, in contrast to the more violent Sassacus. This juxtaposition of a good-natured, compliant American Indian against a violent American Indian has historically been used to argue in favor of colonialist policies and practices, and against Indigenous people's actions to protect their sovereignty. In this case, the juxtaposition also helps the novel make the point that frontier violence turns people vengeful, violent, and rigid in their sense of justice. This moment proves that such rigidity can backfire by perpetuating more senseless violence.

Sedgwick's point is perhaps a good argument against colonial violence, but Magawisca, Mononotto, and the other American Indians represented in this scene are clearly reflections of Sedgwick's own imagination as a white woman rather than representations of real people. Sedgwick sets up a strong contrast not only between Mononotto's formerly just leadership and Sassacus's violent leadership, but also between Magawisca's mercy and the merciless onlookers Sedgwick describes as "savages." As much as Sedgwick wants to advocate for fair treatment of American Indian people, she nonetheless buys into the racist juxtaposition of "good," deserving American Indian people and "bad," undeserving American Indian people. Magawisca's "goodness" here is reflected in her belief that Everell, Mrs. Fletcher, and the other white children did not participate directly in colonial violence. Sedgwick puts this idea in Magawisca's mouth. In reality, readers should note that Magawisca herself has been held captive by the Fletchers and made to work for them, so it seems unlikely that she would entirely excuse Mrs. Fletcher and the children, especially Everell, who is the eldest.

Jennet accused Nelema of witchcraft after she used her knowledge of natural remedies to save Cradock from a snake bite that would otherwise have killed him. Hope uses verbal irony to point out the situational irony: Nelema is being held responsible for "the crime of curing Cradock," which of course should be considered a wholly good deed—the opposite of a crime. Furthermore, Nelema is being held responsible for everything that has gone wrong in the community since the time of the raid that killed many of the Fletchers. This is ironic because Nelema has always been a helpful neighbor, on whom the Fletchers and others have relied for local knowledge and resources.

Hope uses further verbal irony to tell Everell about her remedy for the cruel situation. She writes in her letter that she had a dream Nelema promised that she would one day see Faith alive again. She also writes that she heard Digby was unaccounted for the same night Nelema disappeared from custody. In the following chapter, the narrator reveals that Hope is performing the role of helpless damsel by writing that she dreamed about Nelema and that she has simply heard strange rumors about Digby. Her feigned passivity misdirects anyone who intercepts her letter from understanding what she really means: no passive damsel, she intervened directly in the "justice" proceeding brought against Nelema. She and Digby worked together to release Nelema from prison, and Nelema promised to repay her debt by reuniting Hope with Faith. Hope dislikes the cruel irony of Nelema's sentencing, so she manipulates the situation for a better outcome and claims outwardly to be helpless against political forces.