Irony/Appearance Vs. Reality

Question 1

Argument/ intro

Answer 1

Layers 
Idealised marriage - false appearances 
Respectable figures 
Gods- comical, scandalous, satire 
Deception of Mrs Cheveley 
Farce and fabliau 
"As a rule everyone turns out to be someone else" - L.Markby
"The first deception within the fiction is exercised by the victim of all subsequent deceptions" (j.Nuttall)

Question 2

Marriage

Answer 2

Titian - ‘Triumph of love’
Love of self interest
Merchant - ‘warm Wex’
Gertrude- pedestal
Mrs C and Pluto and Proserpina reveal lies and irony
“Marriage and the country’s financial integrity are rendered vulnerable through an insistence union unrealisable standards of marriage” -R.Jackson
Lady C and Jan - “blind alday”
“It’s the merchants long peace of marriage which is .. bitterly ironical” - D.R.Benson

Question 3

Gods and Mrs Cheveley

Answer 3

Satire - pathetically moral
Venus - irony casts spell on Damyan
Garden- hortus conclusus - Eden
Tree - corrupted by priapus - god of gardens and lust
Mrs C - snake, temptress
Poster 2010: not ‘handsome as hell” but an “instrument of truth” - Billington.
Haymarket 1895 pall mall gazette: Mrs Cheveley was “most inhuman” in the first act and from thereafter became an “impossibly wicked women”

Question 4

Respectable figures

Answer 4

“Appear simple and unrealistic, though they are made up of complex collages formed from various societal influences” - E.Thompson
- Js advice from Placebo, Justinus, Merchant
-Robert: parliament, ‘morally correct’
-Gertrude suffragette
- lord Goring - not hypocritical
Jan’s blindness to mays power
May “I have assured in your hand”
“By letting may off the hook, chaucer shows the inevitability of youths victory over age” T. Davidson
“The shifting styles and various discrepancies that make even a consistent irony of satirical intention seem doubtful” (J.Nuttall)