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Critical appreciation of the importance of being earnest
Critical appreciation of the importance of being earnest
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Large decorated carriages drawn by massive gallant horses, beautiful women dressed in striking gowns throwing magnificent parties, and five o’ clock tea times are common aspects of the Victorian Era. This is the period that a person should imagine while reading many of the works composed by Oscar Wilde.
The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the most important plays written by Oscar Wilde. The setting takes place in London during the present time of its production, February 1895 in the Victorian Era. Both main characters, John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, find an escape from their everyday lives through a pseudonym or false identity. John, usually referred to as Jack, uses the name of Ernest to retreat into the city from his life in the country with his eighteen-year-old ward Cecily. The story begins with Jack informing his friend, Algernon, that he is planning to propose to his first cousin, Gwendolen. Upon hearing this news, Algernon confronts Jack, who he knows as Ernest, with his discover of Cecily. When Jack ultimately tells Algernon about his false identity in the city, Algernon also confesses to having a pseudonym for the country. The plot unravels after Gwendolen accepts Jack’s proposal, under the name of Ernest, and Algernon decides to also use the identity of Ernest to meet Cecily at Jack’s country home. The conflicts arise when everyone ends up at Jack’s home, each knowing each other by a separate name.
Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland to an aristocratic family in the midst of the Victorian Era. Wilde was marked as a brilliant child, receiving scholarships to Trinity College and Oxford University. He preferred to speak about and entertain the importance of ideas in life and often attacked the ...
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...en deceived, Jack’s anger with Algernon, and Miss Prism’s finding of her handbag are all events encompassed with superficial statements from the characters.
The characters and their actions are accurately described as superficial because they act with an inability to develop ideas about the more important matters at hand. Each character focuses on the surface meaning of the predicament in which they are placed. With this external, hasty, and trivial outlook on life, the characters are destined for a life with little meaning for anything truly significant.
Works Cited
Meisel, Martin. “Wilde, Oscar.” The World Book Encyclopedia. USA: Field Enterprises Educational Company, 1973.
“Superficial.” The American Heritage Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1982.
Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. Ed. Stanley Appelbaum. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1990.
characters and places in the novel, as to give the impression of artificially (Miller 107).
...erpreted as dark and significant to the period. The comedy Wilde achieves is at the expense of the characters who are seemingly intelligent adding to the ironic structure that much of the comedy is based on. Many of the comic elements of the play are shown through human reactions to Victorian repression and the effect it has on the men and women of the time. Love seems to be nonexistent within the finds of the fierce and brutal Aristocracy when so many of the qualities they value are not based on human qualities but that of the class’s social norms. Wildes Characters are at often times not subtle about their distaste in marriage and love, Algernon is no exception to this “In aried lie, three is company, two is none” showing that they all have distorted views on many of the social practices that make them morally sound, thus adding to the satire elements of the play.
The Importance of Being Earnest is regarded as one of the most successful plays written by Oscar Wilde, a great 19th century playwright. Oscar Wilde deals with something unique about his contemporary age in this drama. It addresses Victorian social issues, French theatre, farce, social drama and melodrama. All these factors influenced the structure of the play in a large scale. This play is basically a Victorian satirical drama showcasing the social, political, economic and religious structural changes that affected 18th century England. It was the time when British Empire had captured most part of the world including Oscar Wilde’s homeland, Ireland. The aristocrats of England had become dominant over the middle and poor class people and Wilde wrote plays with the motivation to encourage people to think against the English aristocracy and artificiality.
Throughout The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde plays around with the standard expectations along with the absence of compassion of a Victorian society in the 1890’s, he demonstrates this through several genres of comedy such as Melodrama, Comedy of Manners, Farce, dark humour and Irony, as well as portraying the themes, death and illness, in this play in a brilliance of unusual amount of references.
In conclusion, The Importance of Being Earnest strongly focuses on those of the upper class society and the vanity of the aristocrats who place emphasis on trivial matters concerning marriage. Both Algernon and Jack assume the identity of "Ernest" yet ironically, they both are beginning their marital lives based on deception and lies. Lady Bracknell represents the archetypal aristocrat who forces the concept of a marriage based on wealth or status rather than love. Through farce and exaggeration, Wilde satirically reveals the foolish and trivial matters that the upper class society looks upon as being important. As said earlier, a satirical piece usually has a didactic side to it.
When trying to understand these particular characters’ experiences, it is very important to consider their worldviews, which promote “[th...
The Importance of Being Earnest appears to be a conventional 19th century farce. False identities, prohibited engagements, domineering mothers, lost children are typical of almost every farce. However, this is only on the surface in Wilde's play. His parody works at two levels- on the one hand he ridicules the manners of the high society and on the other he satirises the human condition in general. The characters in The Importance of Being Earnest assume false identities in order to achieve their goals but do not interfere with the others' lives. The double life led by Algernon, Jack, and Cecily (through her diary) is simply another means by which they liberate themselves from the repressive norms of society. They have the freedom to create themselves and use their double identities to give themselves the opportunity to show opposite sides of their characters. They mock every custom of the society and challenge its values. This creates not only the comic effect of the play but also makes the audience think of the serious things of life.
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin, Ireland on October 16, 1854. Wilde was top of his class at the elite private school he attended. He then proceeded to go to Oxford University, where he prevailed as well. He married Constance
The Importance of Being Earnest was nearly a Victorian example of an episode of 'Seinfeld.'; The characters contained within often find themselves in the most peculiar of situations, so strange that we can find them humorous. They even, at times, seem to represent situations in which we may find ourselves involved. One such example is in Act One, where Jack realizes that Gwendolyn loves the name Ernest. He tries through several ways to talk to her and find out if she could love him if his name was Jack. She considers the entire question to be hypothetical and unimportant, since she's always known him to be Ernest. The entire dialogue that occurs during the discussion has humorous pieces that add to the colorful nature of the play. One piece of the dialogue is spoken by Jack, where he says, 'Gwendolyn, I must get christened at once—I mean, we must get married at once.'; Wilde shows how society would tend to care about what was on the outside of a person, such as their name or wealth, rather than their character.
It is in these ways Wilde challenges Victorian earnestness.
One major theme of The Importance of Being Earnest is the nature of marriage. Throughout the entire play, marriage and morality serve as the catalyst for the play, inspiring the plot and raising speculation about the moral character of each person. Throughout the entire play, the characters are constantly worried about who they are going to marry and why they would marry them. This theme is the most prevalent theme throughout the entire play and shows what impact marriage had on a Victorian society. This essay will prove that marriage is the theme of this play.
Oscar Wilde was born in October 16, 1854, in the mid era of the Victorian period—which was when Queen Victoria ruled. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901.While she ruined Britain, the nation rise than never before, and no one thought that she was capable of doing that. “The Victorian era was both good and bad due to the rise and fall of the empires and many pointless wars were fought. During that time, culture and technology improved greatly” (Anne Shepherd, “Overview of the Victorian Era”). During this time period of English, England was facing countless major changes, in the way people lived and thought during this era. Today, Victorian society is mostly known as practicing strict religious or moral behavior, authoritarian, preoccupied with the way they look and being respectable. They were extremely harsh in discipline and order at all times. Determination became a usual Victorian quality, and was part of Victorian lifestyle such as religion, literature and human behavior. However, Victorian has its perks, for example they were biased, contradictory, pretense, they cared a lot of about what economic or social rank a person is, and people were not allowed to express their sexuality. Oscar Wilde was seen as an icon of the Victorian age. In his plays and writings, he uses wit, intelligence and humor. Because of his sexuality he suffered substantially the humiliation and embarrassment of imprisonment. He was married and had an affair with a man, which back then was an act of vulgarity and grossness. But, that was not what Oscar Wilde was only known for; he is remembered for criticizing the social life of the Victorian era, his wit and his amazing skills of writing. Oscar Wilde poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” typifies the Vi...
The concept of character is an illusion, a reality where ‘there are no facts, only interpretations’. In this illusory reality, like Alice, we stumble through the looking-glass from the world of reality into the world of appearance, of illusion. We find ourselves among heroes and villains that seem familiar but, in fact, could not be stranger. In Henry James’ ‘In the Cage’, an unnamed telegraphist, restricted by ‘the cage’ in which she works, peers through the rims of the looking-glass and, seeking to escape from the mundane reality of her existence, imagines her own fantastic reality. James interrogates the concept of character through the relation between appearance and reality, in that the unnamed narrator defines herself and others, living vicariously, through the mock reality she creates. Ford Maddox Ford’s narrative in ‘The Good Soldier’ is dogged by the narrator’s inability to distinguish appearance from reality, resulting in not only an unreliable narration but also a skewed perception of reality. The result is that Ford’s interrogation of the concept of character, through unreliable narration, suggests personal perception is all we can ever have, that the concept of character is not objective, it is an illusion, one individuals perception of the truth. It is the relation of appearance and reality to the interrogation of concept of character I will now explore, that we mustn’t look for ‘the old stable ego of the character’ but treat the concept of character as an illusion, merely a perception, not an objective concept.
Between the years of 1837 and 1901, British history experienced a revolutionary period of economic and cultural growth. The new wealth that came with expansion created new class structures as an age of domesticity was inspired. As a result of this, the art world changed too. Writers became realistic as they believed they were serving a higher moral purpose while creating. They wrote of actual and practical life in the form of dramatic monologues. Visual imagery illustrated their emotions while their tone and sound reflected the poems meaning. Though many authors became known during this time period, Oscar Wilde is –debatably- one of the most controversial poets of the Victorian Era.
Characters play a crucial role in The Importance of Being Earnest. Jack and Algernon, the main characters of the story, establish themes such as the double life while addressing social issues of the Victorian era (Spark). At certain points in the play, they each establish a separate persona called "Ernest," which they use for their own benefit. Jack, for example, uses his "Ernest" as a means of escaping from his life in the country, where he is held in high esteem; on the other hand, Algernon follows Jack's example and creates his own "Ernest" for the sole purpose of meeting Cecily (Wilde 36). Who, then, is the protagonist of the story? From one perspective, Jack is seen as the morally "better" of the two, since Algernon is more often seen