Sexuality
Irena has immigrated to an America that is Puritanical in its desire for unmarried women to remain chaste and virginal. At the same time, once a woman is married, she feels an equal amount of pressure to suddenly become a vixen in the bedroom. The irony of Irena’s fear of sexuality transforming her into a ravenous beast almost as elegantly eloquent as it gets from a symbolism perspective: pressured not to be sexual until it is agreeable to society and then ostracized when she can’t fulfill that expectation.
King John
According to the story Irena tells Oliver, King John drove out the Mamelukes and came to our village he found dreadful things. The people bowed down to Satan and said their Masses to him. They had become witches and were evil. King John put some of them to the sword and burned some of them in fires.” The irony? One repeated so often in actual history: the person paid tribute and memorialized as the emancipator turns out to be just as despotic as the vanquished now gone.
The Ironic Death of Dr. Judd
Dr. Judd remains so convinced that Irena’s revulsion of the idea of having sex is all about repressed desire. Dr. Judd, in turns, desires Irena sexually himself. He decides to have his cake and eat it too by pressing him urges upon Irena, convinced that all it will take to unleash the wild sexual animal within her is a real man. Turns out, however, she’s a real tiger and he’s left dead on the floor. Belief in science is ironically killed by religious alternative to such logical explanations for motivation.
Alice Loves Her Cats
In one of the more obvious examples of irony, Alice is shown getting along swimmingly with various actual cats. The cat woman that is married to the man she desires…not so much.
You Marry, You Die!
Irena is obviously well-acquainted with the history of her Serbian village where King John drove the cat people out into the wild, thus ensuring a genetic strain existing which produced the pretty young woman who marries Oliver. Never have so few marriage proposals set up such an ironic twist: by consummating the marriage, she ironically ensures Oliver’s death, but refusing to marry him would likely send him running straight into the arms of Alice which is, of course, exactly what happens when she refuses to consummate the marriage. Oh, irony of ironies!
