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Setting
Situational Irony
Explanation and Analysis—Mary at Chapel:
Mary's visit to St. Bonny's is a moment of situational irony, where the role reversal between mother and daughter is made clear:
I saw Mary right away. She had on those green slacks I hated and hated even more now because didn’t she know we were going to chapel? And that fur jacket with the pocket linings so ripped she had to pull to get her hands out of them. But her face was pretty—like always, and she smiled and waved like she was the little girl looking for her mother—not me.
Mary and Twyla's positions are flipped: Twyla internally scolds Mary for her impropriety, and Mary looks to Twyla for comfort and relief like a lost child. This is an especially ironic scene because, although Twyla clearly fends for herself much more than an eight-year-old ought to, just paragraphs prior, Morrison touches on her still-childlike nature: she could not help but eat the Easter marshmallows before the mothers arrived and is completely preoccupied by the presentation of her construction paper box. This age-appropriate childishness on Twyla's part foregrounds how truly immature Mary must be to seem so much more naive than her daughter, and how tragic it is that Twyla has a mother who lets her down to such a degree.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Gar Girls:
Twyla remembers the gar girls and discovers the situational irony (from her now-adult perspective) of their vulnerability, despite her childish fear of the older girls:
The big girls on the second floor pushed us around now and then. But that was all. They wore lipstick and eyebrow pencil and wobbled their knees while they watched TV. Fifteen, sixteen, even, some of them were. They were put-out girls, scared runaways most of them. Poor little girls who fought their uncles off but looked tough to us, and mean. God did they look mean.
At this point, the setting of the story is still St. Bonny's, but Twyla indicates here that she is not writing from that setting and is looking back on her experiences, editing and reinterpreting them in real time. Her thoughts and opinions have changed, and from her older and wiser perspective, the gar girls were neither terrifying nor purely malicious: they were victims just like Twyla and Roberta had been. They were also young girls in a vulnerable situation, if slightly older than Twyla and Roberta. This use of irony motions toward a sense that judgements rooted in a moment can be readily rewritten as people mature, and that no judgement on a person's character is truly final.
Related Themes:
