The Importance of Being Earnest is a trivial comedy of that reveals the serious and “trivial backwardness” of Victorian high society (Wilde 4). Throughout the play, Oscar Wilde displays the use of puns; the one major pun is in the play title The Importance of Being Earnest. The word “earnest” contains two different but related ideas in the Victorian society. The first is the actual adjective word “earnest” meaning serious or moral. While the characters agree that being earnest is important, their actions shows that they do not know the true meaning of the word. The second is the relevance of the name “Ernest”. This impels two characters Algernon and Jack to invent alter egos using the names “Ernest”. The two definitions of the word “earnest/Ernest” will be compared and contrasted to explain why being earnest was important.
The adjective word “earnest” means serious. The main characters in the play, Jack and Algernon try to persuade others, that they are high-minded people with strong principles and are respected in society. When Jack
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Jack makes his alter ego work extremely well until he decides that he wants to ask one of the ladies he has met in the city to be his bride. However, Jack does not realize how important the name Ernest is to the young woman he is going to propose. This is shown when Jack speaks of how easy it will be to get rid of his alternate personality, "If Gwendolen accepts me, I am going to kill my brother” (Abrams 2227). The importance of being earnest, is observed when Jack finds out that his name is in fact Ernest he says to Gwendolen, “I always told you, Gwendolen, my name was Ernest, didn’t I? Well, it is Ernest after all. I mean it naturally is Ernest.” The last part of the quote, “I mean it naturally is Ernest,” is a pun for the word earnest, meaning that he had, in fact, been telling the truth the entire time. There is also
Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both seems like carelessness.(Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest) This disagreement leads to further complications in the next two acts. Dramatic irony is portrayed in the second act. Dramatic irony is when the audience knows more than the character does. For example, we, the readers, know that Algernon is using the name Earnest to impress his cousin Cecily.
Satire in Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. "The Importance of Being Earnest" is a play by Oscar Wilde, set in the late 1800's. His actors are playing upper class citizens who are very self-absorbed. The play is set amongst upper class, wealthy people. They appear not to work and are concerned with their own pleasure.
This just adds to the satirizing of courtship because the girl only marry him because he has the name Ernest. The characters Lady Bracknell’s and Algernon’s objections are prime examples of dating issues during this era.... ... middle of paper ... ... However, different members of the society have different viewpoints of what is decent and what is not.
Irony in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde The play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is full of irony. Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, the protagonists in the play, get themselves into a complicated situation called Bunburyism (as Algernon refers to it). They pretend to be someone that they are not to escape their daily lives. They lie to the women they admire, and eventually the truth is revealed.
Throughout history, people have pondered the question of human mortality. In examining the issue, the Ancient Greeks, came to the conclusion that there are two spheres of immortality: that which is reserved for the Gods and that which can be attained by mere mortals. The Gods are destined to eternal youth and life; however, for humans who are predestined to die, this existence is impossible to attain. Rather, humans must strive to gain everlasting honor, the only form of immortality available to them.
Oscar Wildes ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’’ is believed by many to be his most genius work and certainly has withstood the test of time. The play is set in London during the 1890’s in which time frame aristocracy and upper class held the majority of the countries wealth. Many of the comical aspects question the morals of the upper class in which he satirises throughout the play. One method of this, for instance is through one of the main protagonist, Algernon Moncrieff. Algernon is an upper class individual who is oblivious to the world around him in such an exaggerated manner that it makes his character comically adjusted for Wildes own views.
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.
The pun on the word "Earnest" suggests two things; it stands for the name but also refers to honesty and integrity. It is also known as a `one joke' or a play on words. Though the name is spelt as "Ernest" the reader still recognizes the double meaning of the title. Two of the main characters, Jack and Algernon, strive to be "Ernest" and "Earnest" in the play, yet they both deceive others to escape lives which they grow tired of. They both hope to marry the girls that they love, yet they are starting the relationships base on false pretence and lies. It is ironic that they both call themselves "Ernest," a name that suggests honesty and sincerity, yet they both create stories to escape something or the other. Jack creates a brother called "Ernest" in the city that he uses as a `scape goat' to leave his prim and proper, respectable country life, whereas Algernon creates a friend by the name of "Bunbury" to escape his aunt's high class society parties. He shows his lack of interest in such social events when he tells Jack,
Two adolescent women who incorrectly consider the men’s names to be Ernest, and who are passionate about the men for this very reason think highly of both Jack and Algernon. In relating the story of mix-ups and mistaken identities, the ideals and manners of the Victorian society are satirized in a comedy where the characters "treat all the trivial things of life seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality"(Wilde, Oscar). Oscar Wilde’s amusing scenes often take their source in societal satire and unconventional (Baselga 15). All the way through his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde satirizes education, women, and morality.
Oscar Wilde begins with a joke in the title that is not only a piece of frivolity. It concerns the problem of recognising and defining human identity. The use of earnest and Earnest is a pun, which makes the title not only more comic, but also leads to a paradox. The farce in The Importance of Being Earnest consists in the trifle that it is important not only to be earnest by nature but to have the name Earnest too. Jack realizes "the vital Importance of Being Earnest"(53) not till the end of the play. Algernon calls the act of not being earnest Bunburying which gives the plot a moral significance. Bunburying means inventing a fictitious character by which one can escape the frustrating social norms. Algernon says to Jack:
In essence, this comedy of manners does have traces of movement from distress to happiness as all the characters within the play were either involved in ‘good’ or ‘bad’ affairs. But despite this, in the resolution Jack learnt from his mistakes which resulted in happiness for him and Gwendolyn as she got married to a person named Earnest. Similarly, Cecily also got married which resulted in celebration, but as Algernon didn’t tell her the truth about his name he hadn’t reformed in the process which indicates that he did stay ‘bad’. Likewise, Lady Bracknell also stayed distressed when she was not part of any comic resolution. As this is the case, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ does conform to this model, but this movement from ‘good’ to ‘bad’ is dependent on the different characters that Wilde has constructed and the situations that they went through.
Throughout the late nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde wrote plays such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest- his most famous play. Earnest is a comedic work that focuses on a pair of wealthy men. They have been leading double lives so that they can go off for periods of time and enjoy living without responsibility while still maintaining their aristocratic reputation. Because of Wilde’s invlovement in the aesthetic movement, it is not uncommon (or unfair) to believe that his work, Earnest included, is nothing more than fluff. That being said, it is also fair to argue that this particular play does have meaning in it. Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest as a commentary on the hypocrisy of the ideal Victorian character. Earnestness is sincerity- which most Victorians believed themselves to be- and so Wilde uses the word ironically. In his eyes, people who considered themselves sincere were actually smug, self-righteous, and pompous. He expresses these opinions clearly through the play’s over-the-top and frustrating characters.
...ntain her social class, and only worrying about wealth and style over the life and death of others. The art of manners and social discussions are expressed through the dialogue between Gwendolen and Cecily. Although both women showed hatred towards each other, it is done in a civilised manner. Wilde shows this by creating a stylised and artificial atmosphere by making the dialogue repetitive and parallel, thus making their dialogue and comments on insignificant subjects as part of having a polite conversation. Jack also shows the significance of high society and manners by showing that he has a high sense of duty and responsibility in the country; and being serious about Cecily’s education as it can help better her current position as well as his own. Hence, Wilde’s criticisms on high society and manners are expressed through the characters and their dialogue.
An aesthete himself, Oscar Wilde created characters who embodied the values of the Aesthetic Movement in his play "The Importance of Being Earnest". The comedy in this title comes with the double meaning in the word "Earnest", both being the name of one of the characters and the virtue none of them seem to exhibit. Making a jab at the sensibilities of the Victorian elite, Wilde uses his characters' obsession with the way things look, the way people act, and the way they live to explain just how much emphasis was put on appearances at the time. Whether or not something is aesthetically pleasing is of utmost importance to these characters.