THE IRONIES OF LOVE: IRONICAL DIALOGUES IN MARY SHELLEY

: This paper aims at analyzing an ironic dialogue in Mary Shelley biopic (2017), concerning she and her husband Percy Shelley. Under the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough (1992) and his three dimensional conception of discourse, we analyze how the ironies occur in this dialogue, considering text, discursive practice and social practice. Besides, we categorize irony according to Muecke (2001): Irony as a Rhetorical Enforcement; Irony as Analogy; Irony of Events; Comic Irony; and Double Irony. We assume that irony is a figure of speech applied by the characters once they are well-known people from literature and the filmmaker enters not only as a director, but also as the manipulator behind the movie plot. However, we could also note that the dialogue is based on the topic of masculine domination by Bourdieu (2002).


INTRODUCTION
"Irony is a disciplinarian feared only by those who do not know it, but cherished by those who do" (Kierkegaard, 1989, p. 326).Would the irony be a disguised bad temper or is it just the opposite?It is common to say that irony happens when the speaker says something, but means the opposite.We will see that this is such a short view of the concept, because we miss the intertextual complexion and the situational context of discourse.So if we say: -"That's amazing!My phone is broken!"it is clear that having a telephone broken is not a situation we consider amazing, but we express a criticism humorously around a bad thing that happened.
The fact is that irony is a figure of speech so much worked by great names of literature, such as Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Dostoevsky and others.Speaking of literature, it comes the name of Mary Shelley, the author of the notable romance, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus.Her life along with her relationship with her husband Percy Shelley, as well as the creation of this book are the themes of her biopic which carries her name and that was released in 2017.
The movie is directed by an Arab woman, Haifaa Al Mansour and so, the discussion also emphasizes how the ironies occur throughout the dialogue, considering the feminine eye on it and arguing on the points of masculine domination presented by the filmmaker's gaze.
Taking into account Mary and Percy Shelley's contributions to literature and counscious that irony is an ability among poets and authors, we highlight a dialogue between their characters in the movie in the moment which they begin to know each other.Specifically, we seek to analyze how the ironies occur in the dialogue, by applying as theoretical-methodological development Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough (1992) and categorizing irony according to Muecke (2001), which are: Irony as a Rhetorical Enforcement, Irony by Analogy, Irony of Events, Comic Irony and Double Irony.After choosing the scene dialogue based on the point of investigating one representing the beginning of the couple's relationship, we transcribe it and apply the categories mentioned above.
We conduct a bibliographical research about the theme of irony according to the following authors: Kiekegaard (1989), Maingueneau (1997), Muecke (2001) and Wilson and Sperber (2012).Critical Discourse Analysis is also guided by Blommaert (2005).In addition, we investigate the topic of masculine domination by Bourdieu (2001) and include two Mary Shelley's biographies, writen by Marshall (1889) and Sampson (2018).
Thus, this paper is organized into five sections, being this introduction the first one.The second section presents the theoretical background, containing the subjects of irony, Critical Discourse Analysis and masculine domination.The third one details the methods of analysis, continued by the fourth section, which carries on the data analysis and their results.Lastly, final remarks close this work.Fairclough (1992) observes that there is a traditional concept around irony that elucidates it as saying one thing and meaning another.However, he recommends that this is such a limited concept, once it ignores the intertextual nature of irony.In other words, an ironic utterance reverberates someone else's by communicating some type of negative attitude towards it.

Irony
The linguist proceeds with common situations that irony may be identified, such as a flagrant inconsistency between evident meaning and situational context, indications in a speaker's tone of voice or written text and interpreter's suppositions on beliefs and moral principles of the text producer.
Related to the tone of voice, Wilson and Sperber (2012) note that it is signalized by an intonation which may be lower, slower and more profound than their corresponding literal ones and it is generally a suggestion to the speaker's mocking, scornful attitude.Maingueneau (1997) complements that in an ironic utterance, the speaker takes the words, but not the viewpoint they represent.Thus, there is a distance marked by different levels which are linguistic, sign and situational ones.In case of lacking the indications mentioned above, the author suggests that the only way is trusting the context in order to regain the contradictory aspects.Kierkegaard (1989) asserts that irony has no purpose at all, that is, its purpose is the irony itself.Due to this, the concept is sometimes confused with dissimulation and hypocrisy.
It turns out that dissimulation has an external foreign purpose to the dissimulation itself and hypocrisy is concerned on morality domain.
In view of this, Maingueneau (1997) and Muecke (2001) agree that the purpose of irony is to provoke ambiguity, although it is an implied phenomenon.Kierkegaard (1989) emphasizes that whether an ironic figure of speech is misinterpreted, one may not put the blame on the speaker, unless the subject to whom it is directed is someone as clever as irony and is fond of fool around friends and enemies.
For Muecke (2001), the concept of irony is cloudy, inconsistent and multiform.Based on the paradoxical of irony, we consider that the ironic utterance leads to divergent meanings as a puzzle game, by which one may find it easy or hard to understand, smart or aggressive, good tempered or grumpy.We agree with Kierkegaard (1989, p. 326) when he says that Anyone who does not understand irony at all, who has no ear for its whispering, lacks eo ipso [precisely thereby] what could be called the absolute beginning of personal life; he lacks what momentarily is indispensable for personal life; he lacks the bath of regeneration and rejuvenation, irony's baptism of purification that rescues the soul from having its life in finitude even though it is living energetically and robustly in it.
The concept of irony has changed throughout history.According to Muecke (2001), eironeia or irony is first mentioned in the work by Plato named Republic when the philosopher refers to the concept according to Socrates, in a manner that the interlocutor was conducted smoothly.The author asserts that this term does not emerge in the English language until 1502 and it appears in general literature in the beginning of the eighteenth century.He adds that in England, the concept expanded gradually with different types of meanings, such as dissimulation, parody, mocking and so on.Although it had obtained several meanings in early nineteenth century, it has not lost the old ones.
According to him, the semantic development of the word has been at a random because the concept is the intensifying result of people having, every now and then, adjusted it over the centuries, applied the term either in an instinctive or inattentive form: "There is little to be done about this.Most people will continue to use a word like 'irony' without knowing or caring to know precisely how it has been used before or whether there is not a more suitable word already in use" (Muecke, 2001, p. 7).Muecke (2001) identifies some examples that illustrate irony which are divided into categories: Irony as a Rethorical Enforcement; Ironic Mockery; Irony by Analogy; Irony Naivety; Unconscious Irony; Self-betraying Irony; Irony of Events; Comic Irony; Ironic Incongruity; Double Irony; Catch 22 Irony; and Romantic Irony.We take some of them as categories of analysis in this work.
In this sense, the Romantic period has a role in the enlargement of the concept of irony which was elaborated at that moment in Instrumental Irony, that is, someone being ironical while the author calls Observable Irony to refer to things exposed as ironic.Now we advance precisely to where the analysis is about: Percy Shelley was a romantic poet who used to apply irony in his poems, so we may observe a poetical form of irony in the film dialogue.As Kierkegaard (1989, p. 388) notices: "The more irony is present, the more freely and poetically the poet floats above his artistic work".
Just as irony occurs along the poem and not in a specific point, so the poet's speech is full of this stylistic device in the film dialogue.We note that literature, fiction and audiovisual are the appropriate match for illustrating ironic speech, as Muecke (2001, p. 69) points out that every Observable Ironies are characterized as theatrical, since the oberver occupies a place which is indispensable to culminate the irony: "Irony is not just something that happens; it is something that is at least picturable as happening".
In this context, the filmmaker plays an important role in this stratagem, once she (taking into account the fact that the filmmaker is a woman, Haifaa Al Mansour) gets into the movie not as a director, but "[...] metaphorically only, as manipulators of the lives of others" (Muecke, 2001, p. 75).
Hence, irony is constituted by the actor and actress themselves, from the moment they put on 'the mask' and the custome, they play characters from past eras, speak another language and learn some accents.This is the case of the movie analyzed here, which represents literature public figures from England in the nineteenth century.

Masculine Domination
We introduce the thoughts of Bourdieu (2002) on this study because we believe it may contribute to develop the line of reasoning around the irony categories.The author asserts that women are more intuitive than men to non-verbal signs, such as tone, and identify better a sentiment portrayed nonverbally and interpret the implicit of a dialogue.
The writer defends the idea of existing a strength of the masculine order which makes justification needless, once this order is neutral and it does not have to be legitimized by discourses.This order functions in a symbolic mechanism: it is the sexual division of labour, a very strict distribution of the activities assigned to each sex, of their place, time and instruments it is the structure of space, with the opposition between the place of assembly or the market, reserved for men, and the house, reserved for women, or, within the house, between the male part, the hearth, and the female part -the stable, the water and vegetable stores; it is the structure of time, the day and the farming year, or the cycle of life, with its male moments of rupture and the long female periods of gestation (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 9-11).
He calls the phenomenon as symbolic violence and according to him, even the best intentioned of men accomplish some type of symbolic violence because it does not function at dregrees of conscious intentions.In fact, the author compares masculinity to nobility.
In this male environment, Bourdieu (2002) notes that women are perceived by the male eye.We may say that this is also noted in dominant cinema.But in this case, there is a feminine eye, that is, the view of a female director and she is the one behind the making of plots.
Afterwards, the sociologist brings a topic in which he wonders whether it is an exception for masculine domination and concludes that is love.He reflects that love is domination agreed, unknown as such and basically approved, in happy or unhappy passion.
When it comes to love, domination seems dominated or even neutralized.In this context, there is a paradox between lovers, since they give up freedom for each other and they have power over each other at the same time.He calls it a miraculous truce, that is, the suspension of power relations, in which a person recognizes herself in the other as another self in a splendid reflexivity, transcending the options of egoism and altruims: "in which two beings can 'lose themselves in each other' without being lost" (Bourdieu, 2002, p. 111).

Critical Discourse Analysis
According to Blommaert (2005), voice symbolizes the way people control to make themselves clear or decline to do so.For this reason, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is a crucial method to analyze dialogues, since it considers discourse as a tool of power, by analzying it to have social impact: "[...] giving voice to the voiceless, exposing power abuse, and mobilising people to remedy social wrongs" (Blommaert, 2005, p.25).
Considering discourse the language in action and relating it with society, we assume Fairclough's method (1992) once he concentrates on the production and interpretation of texts.That is why, the text is not the process, but the product of the process of the text production and the process of social interaction related to this is the discourse.
His approach comprehends discourse from three dimensions: text (text analysis is arranged in four main headlines, that are, vocabulary, grammar, cohesion and text structure); discursive practice (requires processes of text production, distribution and consumption); and social practice (concerned to ideology and hegemony).These dimensions are represented by the scheme that follows: Picture 1: Three-dimensional conception of discourse Fairclough (1992, p. 73).
The linguist explains that text analysis is also named description and the other two dimensions are also named interpretation.Thus, discourse provides with the formation of these three dimensions of social structure which directly or indirectly sctructure and compel it: "Discourse is a practice not just of representing the world, but of signifying the world, constituting and constructing the world in meaning" (Fairclough, 1992, p. 64).
It is worthy noting that discursive practice is not the opposite of social practice, once the first one is a peculiar form of the second one.On the way of assuming discourse as discursive practice implies that subsequent to text analysis, the next step is to analyze the speech acts and coherence, that is, elements that associate a text to its expanded social context (Blommaert, 2005).
These three dimensions are guided progressively as descriptioninterpretationexplanation, respectively.In short, the stage of description centralizes on the textuallinguistic properties, while the second stage presents ideological framings conducted by means of categories supplied by participants and in the stage of explanation, social theory is required to reveal the ideological foundations of interpretative operation (Blommaert, 2005).

METHOD
Firstly, we conduct a bibliographical research about the topic of irony which is supported by Kiekergaard (1989), Maingueneau (1997), Muecke (2001) and Wilson and Sperber (2012).The theoretical-methodological development is constituted by Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough (1992) as well as guided by Blommaert (2005).
The analysis conducted to the thematic of masculine domination that is supported by Bourdieu (2002), who considers the topic an unconscious phenomenon symbolized in the voice and attitude and once it is neutral, it does not require justification.
Since the movie represents a real figure, we have also read two biographies of Mary Shelley, written by Marshall (1889) and Sampson (2018) in order to compare the dialogue wih these readings to notice the filmmaker's intentions on interfering in the movie and orchestrating the lives of others.
Moreover, we have watched the movie Mary Shelley several times with the purpose of choosing the scene to be analyzed.We are inclined to choose a scene that contains a dialogue between the couple Mary and Percy Shelley when they begin to know each other because we conceive so much details worth reflecting on.
After watching and separating the scene to be analyzed, we transcribe its dialogue and apply Fairclough's methodology, by dividing it into categories of ironies according to Muecke: Irony as a Rhetorical Enforcement, Irony by Analogy, Irony of Events, Comic Irony and Double Irony.We also consider them not only in verbal language but also in visual one, observing the elements of film language that contribute to this study.
Subsequently, we organize the data in a graph based on the three dimensional conception of discourse elaborated by Fairclough (1992) as a means to make the analysis didactic, which constitutes: textthe textual elements and the vocabulary within the dialogue; discursive practicethe interpretation of the dialogue and its context, the force of words and the topic of irony; and social practiceexplanation of dialogues, the production of meanings to the categories of analysis, that is, the application of ironies by both parts reveals the game of flirting as well as masculine domination.
Picture 1: Graph to conduct the analysis based on the three dimensional conception of discourse from Fairclough (1992).
Source: The authors.

ANALYSIS A glimpse of the couple
The movie is directed by Haifaa Al Mansour, an Arab filmmaker and according to her, this was the first time she read a piece of material and immediately decided that she wanted to direct that.Her spontaneous decision is due to the fact that she felt connected to Mary's story and what she went through is particular to what a woman is familiar with.
This connection also happens because Haifaa is from Arabia Saudi, under the circumstances where women do not have an equitable treatment as they do in Western culture.Similar to the main character, she is also an artist who had to fight to have her own voice heard. 1ary Wollstonecraft Godwin is the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, a philosophical anarquist and an advocate of women's rights, respectively.It was in this intellectual atmosphere that she grew up, although her mother had passed away a few days after giving birth to her.
When she is four years old, her father gets married again, giving the lady a stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont, who has a child as almost the same age as Mary, Jane Clairmont, but she is going to be called Claire aftewards, as she prefers.Mary and her half-sister grow up together and become very close.Although the two girls are best friends, it seems that Claire does not envy Mary, but she attempted to emulate her.
In contrast to the friendship with her stepsister, the relationship with her stepmother is anything but friendly and this is evident both in the movie and in the biograhies.In the biopic, the two of them use to argue in the extreme while in the biographies, it is written that Mary Jane manipulates William whenever she wants and she takes advantages of this situation to treat her stepdaughter different from her own daughter.
In this way, the movie presents Mary's life from her teenage years, when she starts a relationship with the poet Percy Shelley.While Mary is 16 years old, her lover is 21 and he is already married to a woman who has a child with him and she is expecting their second one.Soon, the couple elope and take Claire along with them, despite of not being mentioned a specific reason for taking her.Therefore, the film is about how these relationships, including her love for Percy, her disappointments related to him, the babies she loses after living with her husband, all this struggling inspired her to create her masterpiece of romantic literature.Conscious that the love for Percy is her greatest inspiration, we excerpt a dialogue between them to be analyzed at this juncture.
In order to contextualize the conversation between them, it happens after Mary hears of a guest to dinner who intends to be an apprentice of her father William Godwin.What a surprise when the guest arrives and it is the man whom she met in a previous trip to Scotland!So Percy comes on the scene and they have dinner.At the end, Mrs. Clairmont, Mary's stepmother, says that Percy should see their bookshop.William Godwin adds that he has a copy of The iliad in the original Greek and suggests to Mary present it to the visitant.Thus, that is the initial point of the dialogue, or in other words, she wants to know why he is at her home and the reason has probably second intentions.Although the family is aware that Percy is there to be William's apprentice, this motive does not persuade Mary and this puzzles her mind.It occurs that until the moment of the dialogue that is analyzed in this work, the girl has no idea that Percy is married, nor that he is a father.However, as we will see, this part of the movie differs from Mary's biographies, which reveal that she was completely aware of the marriage.
After this, they talk about Mary's parents and even though the gentleman does not mention he is engaged, free love becomes the subject of the conversation and he wants to know her opinion about it, as it will be discussed within the analysis.We begin by outlining it in the graph presented in the section of methods to conduct the work.
Picture 2: Graph to outline the analysis.
Source: The authors.
For the rest of the family, the motive for Percy's visitation occurs due to his interest on being William's apprentice, but this does not convince Mary.Hence, when they are alone in the bookshelf, her first question to him is why he is there.
Despite the young man notes that she does not believe him, he asks a rhetorical question, by applying Irony as a Rhetorical Enforcement: "Does it seem so strange that I Text "Does it seem so strange that I would seek out the tutelage of the great William Godwin?" "Feel the curdling of my blood and the quickening of the beatings of my heart" "I'm quite enjoying the, uh, collection" "So I see" "I have no problem with it".

Discursive practice
The second intentions of Percy's arrival at Wiliam Godwin's house

Irony as a Rethorical Enforcement
Irony as Analogy Double Irony

Irony of Events
Comic Irony

Masculine domination
The game of flirting Figures of literature are good at words for winning the lover's heart and also appyling irony in a discourse would seek out the tutelage of the great William Godwin?".Percy uses the adjective "great" to emphasize the reputation of Mary's father as a tutor for philosophers, suggesting it is an important reason to visit him.Mary's suspicion on the gentleman's attitude is caused by the fact that they had previously met each other in Scoltland, as mentioned earlier.During that time, he became interested on her and vice versa, but soon she needed to come back home and they did not have time to know more about each other.Bourdieu (2002) refers to women's suspicion as female intuition, but for him, it is inextricable linked to objectify a subjective submissiveness which reassures the vigilance needed to foresee desires or escape from offensiveness.
After this, she asks why he is in her house and he anwers: -"To once again feel the curdling of my blood and the quickening of the beatings of my heart".His response is characterized as an Irony by Analogy because this is a reference to what Mary said to him while they were in Scotland in a moment where they talked about the writings of Mary's parents.
At that moment, Percy asked if she was also a writer and her answer was this exactly one, that is, she expected to write something that felt the curdling of her blood and the quickening of the beatings of her heart.This is about feeling something so good to the point of causing sensations in the body.When writing about these bodily emotions, Bourdieu (2002) explains that there is a magical frontier between the dominant and the dominated provoked by the magic of symbolic power which comes from either direction of a couple, because the one who loves someone, whether man or woman, may himself or herself contribute to their own domination, by emerging in bodily emotions or passions.These emotions take visible forms such as blushing, stammering, clumsiness, quivering, irritation, coagulation and heartbeats.Succeeding the scene, Claire enters the bookshop and notes a romantic connection between the couple.She says that William Godwin wants to see Percy who answers to her that he will be with him momentarily because right now he is "quite enjoying the, uh, collection".His reply emphasizes an irony whose purpose is to cause ambiguity, that is, a Double Irony.His utterance reveals a double-edged attitude: by using the word "collection", one may think Percy is referring to the collection of William Godwin's books, but the tone of his voice, the pause when he says "uh" and the smile on his face reveal he is referring to Mary.
The two girls comprehend the double meaning.Claire smiles discreetly and only says: -"So I see" -, complementing the gentleman's irony, which is characterized as Comic Irony once she complements the sense of humour of the man.At the moment, she leaves.Subsequently, Percy changes the subject and tells Mary that her parents are a great source of inspiration to him.In reply, she says that her mother died when she was 10 days old.He is sorry because he has no idea of that, but she tells him that there is no need to be sorry, given the fact that she loves to talk about her.
Mary reveals to Percy that although the contradictions her mother embodied, people ignore them and only talk about Mary Wollstonecraft's desire to live with a married man and his wife.It signs an Irony of Events, once Mary expected people would talk about the writings of her mother as well as the political rights for women she so wished for.
Instead, people used to gossip about Mary Wollstonecraft's personal life, including this case Mary Shelley specifies.Before marrying William Godwin, Mary's mother had an affair with a married man, the painter Henri Fuseli and she proposed to him and his wife a relationship with the three of them.The ironic attitude towards this set of circumstances concerns on the consequence of this love, since Henri abandons Mary Wollstonecraft and because she felt rejected, she tried to kill herself by an overdose of laudanum.This is not the way Mary wants the world to remember her mother.As Sampson (2018, p. 94) observes, Mary Wollstonecraft is a symbol and inspiration in many areas to her daughter "maternal love and its unattainability, the feminine ideal, the active and intellectual woman, the Romantic, unconventional heroine and loveris the perfect touchstone for Mary's relationship with Percy".
Considering the fact that Mary's mother wished for free love, Percy wants to know Mary's opinion about this topic.He is interested at it because he is also adept to free love.
Mary answers that she has no problem with it and she thinks people should live and love as they wish.Her agreement with this social movement that rejects marriage and believes in love without any type of control indicates an Ironic Incongruity because when she says she has no problem with it, the word "no" will reveal the total opposite of her opinion.
According to the other movie scenes and her biographies, she only says that to please her lover and also to follow the old ideas of her parents and mirror her mother.It turns out that Percy will actually prevail on being her only one while she will try to be the perfect match for him: -"[...] indeed I will be a good girl and never vex you any more I will learn Greek andbut when shall we meet when I may tell you all this & you will so sweetly reward me" (Sampson, 2018, p. 101).Bourdieu (2002, p. 13) adds that when the dominated practice the structures concerned to domination that are compelled to them, "[...] their acts of cognition are, inevitably, acts of recognition, submission".
Almost in the end of the dialogue, Percy tells Mary that he does not understand how her parents who were such radical figures at that time, succumbed to marriage.She says that they did this to legitimize her.It is true that Godwin's judgement of marriage was the worst of all laws (Marshall, 1889).
However, Mary's parents get married when her mother gets pregnant of her and the real reason for doing this is because the baby is born in a difficult time for illegitimate children.If rejected, they would suffer of social exclusion (Sampson, 2018).
The conversation ends when Percy invites her to meet him somewhere she chooses, but it takes to the next scene and it is not the concern of this analysis.What really matters is the way the director conducted the dialogue, adding her point of view and it is amusing the way a feminine gaze may interfere in the life of the main character.

FINAL REMARKS
This work aimed at analyzing an ironical dialogue in Mary Shelley biopic (2017), concerning her husband Percy Shelley and herself.We seek to analyze how the ironies occur in the dialogue, by applying as theoretical-methodological development Critical Discourse Analysis by Fairclough (1992) and categorize irony according to Muecke (2001): Irony as a Rhetorical Enforcement, Irony by Analogy, Irony of Events, Comic Irony and Double Irony.
After choosing the scene dialogue based on the point of investigating one at the beginning of the couple's relationship, we transcribe it and apply the categories mentioned above.
We assumed that irony is a figure of speech applied by the characters once they are well-known people from literature and the filmmaker enters not only as a director, but also as the manipulator behind the movie plot.However, we could also note that the dialogue is based on the topic of masculine domination by Bourdieu (2002).
By categorizing irony based on the three concept dimension of discourse, we organized the data in textthe textual elements and the vocabulary within the dialogue, discursive practicethe interpretation of the dialogue and its context, the force of words and the topic of irony, and social practiceexplanation of dialogues, the production of meanings correspoding to the categories of analysis, that is, the application of ironies by both parts reveals the game of flirting as well as masculine domination.
In this analysis, we could observe the ironical aspects in both voice and signs of the characters, such as smiles and exchanging glances.Percy is the first one to talk ironically and Mary goes with the flow, by responding to the flirting.Though Claire entries the bookshop and speaks the least, we observe by her reserved attitude and the signs of her face that she also notes the flirting with irony between the couple.
Although they are real figures, the director acts as an architect on guiding the conversation and the movie as a whole.Even they were well-known people from literature and may have used irony frequently (ast least Percy applied the topic in his poems), she is the one responsible for manipulating the entire conversation.
Percy's ironic strategies of winning Mary's heart include playing with words and after that, he brings to the conversation the lady's parents, conscious that this topic will please her and this is part of the flirting game.In this seductive match, we note how masculine domination operates, but in agreement with Bourdieu (2002), when comes to love, it is suspended the power relations and the lovers go beyond the choices of egoism and altruism.
Thus, domination and its acceptance are taken from both parts in this love game.