Dramatic irony derives from a gap between reader knowledge and character-deceiving appearances

Evidence

In fact, the reader’s initial attentions are less absorbed by matters of social status here taken for granted, or by the struggle for Mademoiselle Carmon’s hand, which will set in only later on, than directed to_the solution of a group of puzzles and enigmas. Du Bousquier’ s secret is indeed no secret for the reader, since it is quickly made apparent to us that he is sexually impotent. What this revelation does to our reading, however, is to generate a systematic movement back and forth between what we know (and what poor Mademoiselle Cormon has to marry him to find out) and that external appearance by which the other characters are deceived: not merely his physical strength and his powerful deportment, but also his association with new industrial wealth and with. the Jacobin traditions .of the bourgeois political sys­ tem. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 3841

Categorization

• XREF: The knowing/unknowing reader structure echoes the reader’s work on information asymmetries in the Milgrom law-merchant materials. — connects to: Some persons embody pure negation while irony posits and denies within one act.; Formal technical problems in drama mirror social problems of isolation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2237