On Beauty

Some of Howard’s academic authority depends on the idea that realism reveals truths about life and that it’s the responsibility of ethical people to interrogate beauty. However, he refuses to live truthfully in his personal life and is regularly swayed by his own vulnerability to the Western ideals of beauty he rails against in his lectures. He presents himself as someone who prizes clarity and integrity, but his actions undermine those values.

This motif is full of situational irony that only builds as the novel continues. Howard shapes the ethics of young students and positions himself as a critic of empire and hypocrisy. However, he fails to act differently from the institutions he denounces in any of the situations that really matter in his own life.The irony builds as the novel contrasts what Howard teaches with what he does. He asks his students to think critically about beauty and their own responses to it, and to avoid sentiment when making evaluative decisions. He speaks about moral courage. However, when he is himself faced with moments that require self-discipline or openness, he withdraws or lies. His claims to intellectual rigor collapse in private where he avoids responsibility for his actions and deceives his wife. The motif feels more and more hypocritical each time he praises responses to art that aren’t solely responses to conventional beauty, because the reader already sees the gap between Howard's words and choices.

Both the content and the context of Monty Kipps’s attack on Howard’s Affirmative Action committee are deeply ironic and full of hypocrisy. Monty’s article in the Wellington Herald accusing Howard and his allies of “privileging liberal perspectives over conservative ones” and “suppressing right-wing discussion and debate on campus.” Monty frames himself as a defender of free speech and intellectual diversity, yet his very act of publishing the piece actually undercuts this claim. Although he’s evangelizing free speech, Monty uses his platform in the Herald to dominate the conversation, not to invite further dialogue. The situational irony lies in the fact that while he’s arguing against what he sees as ideological silencing, his own words aim to discredit and shut down the Affirmative Action committee’s existence entirely. He insists that Howard is suppressing conservative thought, but his article creates a situation where Kipps becomes the very figure he’s attempting to expose. 

Smith sets the stage for dramatic irony as well here, because the reader understands that Monty’s apparent concern for intellectual fairness is not actually grounded in his principles alone. Readers already know that Monty and Howard are locked in a personal and ideological rivalry that makes Monty’s article more about winning a fight than preserving fairness. Monty (and his supporters) cannot see that his method of engagement contradicts his stated goal, but the reader can.

This quote by West is one of her most-repeated ironic anecdotes. The quote’s irony works by mocking the idea that claiming dignity or autonomy deserves a radical label, as “feminist” would have been in West’s lifetime. West’s words suggest that feminism is so misunderstood that even simple resistance to being treated “like a doormat” is a subversive act. Smith sets this joke at the heart of Kiki’s kitchen, the location where women are most traditionally pigeonholed by patriarchal oppression. The physical description of the decaying button with its “yellowed and curled” parchment links its decay to Kiki’s own weariness and sense of having had enough. The fridge keeps West’s clever message visible, but Kiki’s daily reality still includes being steamrolled by Howard and dismissed by his academic colleagues.

Students at Wellington use “tomato” as a joking shorthand for the object of study of any given class; a math class might involve investigating “the square root of tomatoes,” for example. In this scene, Victoria claims Howard’s art history class is about refusing to enjoy or admire the “tomato”, by which she means the pieces of art the students are analyzing. Instead, she says the ”tomato” must be treated as something meaningless. She thinks the purpose of his class is to expose the art Howard is talking about as flawed and false, holding no value in itself. This metaphor mocks the idea of beauty being redemptive. In Victoria’s opinion, Howard’s class is not really about understanding or engaging with art; it’s about the idea that art is a “phoney construction.” 

The way Victoria delivers her praise is full of situational irony. She says she loves the class because it discourages emotion or personal reactions to art, yet her tone is emotional and full of enthusiasm. She shows obvious excitement even as she praises the rejection of the “tomatoes” Howard asks them to discuss. She wants to seem serious, but the praise actually reveals how little she understands the ideas she repeats.Her tone of flattery undercuts the argument she thinks she’s making.