Lady Chablis

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In John Berendt’s national bestseller novel, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, he utilizes certain techniques of humor such as invective, irony and humor through his portrayal of one of his character, whose name is The Lady Chablis. The Lady Chablis was a woman with a great deal of opinion and because of this John Berendt was able to combine a few of her opinions in order to reveal a larger purpose in the novel. Savannahians consider themselves as a whole of being people who are on a higher standard than most. They are sophisticated, classy, educated and bourgeoisie but The Lady Chablis begs to differ. The Lady Chablis identifies how these Savannahians are not who they claim to be. One of the purposes of using The Lady Chablis’ invective,…show more content…
She believed the whole idea of a debutante ball was fictitious because it was a mock cotillion; the same idea applied to the debutantes because their actions and rituals were only mocks of what the ladies who participated in the cotillion were doing. The Lady Chablis quotes in her invective from the chapter, Black Minuet, “But Lavella,’ I said, ‘what are you gonna do this summer when you get off from school? Huh? You’re gonna work at the Burger King on West Broad Street. Right? Well, honey, Cotillion debutantes do not work at the Burger King” (327). She does this in order to discredit Lavella and the other debutantes because she knows after all of the money they have spent, time and effort that they have put into this ball there would not be any drastic improvement in their life once all of it is over. The Lady Chablis knows the debutantes want to justify themselves into thinking that because they are in the debutante ball and considered a debutante that they belong to the “high society” when they actually do not. The Lady Chablis portrays the debutantes as “imposters” because they fed off of the idea of a cotillion and the ladies in a

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