Tone Stand Alone Paragraph (Duchess and the Jeweller)

The exemplary Duchess and the prestigious Jeweller”

Throughout the short story, The Duchess and the Jeweller, by Virginia Woolf, the tone is sarcastic and ironic. Woolf specifically named her principal character (Oliver Bacon) in relation to a pig because she was implying that he acted like one in order to get rich, which illustrates her sarcastic tone towards the upper class. One day, the Duchess, which whom Bacon was “friends” with gave him the opportunity to “court” her daughter. Her only condition was that he had to buy the pearls she had brought him; she took them out of her ferret bag, again mocking this idea of a so called “elegant” upper class and foreshadowing that the pearls were most likely bad. By taking the pearls that he knew were faulty, Bacon displayed his moronic desire to be elite. Just as a pig would endlessly search for truffles, Bacon would never give up on this want to be “important”; which was how he viewed the upper class. What is ironic about this is the fact that the Duchess acted vulgar by making a rotten bargain with the jeweller, yet the jeweller wanted to be like her? An upper class citizen is considered: educated, smart, classy and superior, yet the Duchess displays the exact opposite; she needed help from someone who was supposed to be subservient to her. This corrupts the meaning of being “upper” class, how can a man that has more money and in that moment, more class want to be more like the begging Duchess? (Oh what irony!) Woolf was intending to mock this idea of a social hierarchy and she did this throughout the entire story, using sarcasm and irony.