The Importance of Being Earnest By OSCAR WILDE

The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

Plot

Set in "The Present" (1895) in London, the play opens with Algernon Moncrieff, an idle young gentleman, receiving his best friend, whom he knows as Ernest Worthing. Ernest has come from the country to propose to Algernon's cousin, Gwendolen. Algernon, however, refuses his consent until Ernest explains why his cigarette case bears the inscription, "From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack." "Ernest" is forced to admit to living a double life. In the country, he assumes a serious attitude for the benefit of his young ward, Cecily, and goes by the name of John (or Jack), while pretending that he must worry about a wastrel younger brother named Ernest in London. In the city, meanwhile, he assumes the identity of the libertine Ernest. Algernon confesses a similar deception: he pretends to have an invalid friend named Bunbury in the country, whom he can "visit" whenever he wishes to avoid an unwelcome social obligation. Jack, however, refuses to tell Algernon the location of his country estate. Gwendolen and her formidable mother Lady Bracknell then call on Algernon. As he distracts Lady Bracknell in another room, Jack proposes to Gwendolen. She accepts, but seems to love him very largely for his professed name of Ernest; Jack resolves to himself to be rechristened "Ernest". Lady Bracknell discovers them and interrogates Jack as a prospective suitor. Horrified that he was adopted after being discovered as a baby in a handbag at Victoria Station, she refuses him and forbids further contact. Gwendolen, however, manages covertly to swear her undying love. As Jack gives her his address in the country, Algernon surreptitiously notes it on the cuff of his sleeve; Jack's revelation of his pretty young ward has motivated Algernon to meet her.

Act II moves to Jack's country house, the Manor House in Woolton, Hertfordshire, where Cecily is found studying with her governess, Miss Prism. Algernon arrives pretending to be Ernest Worthing and soon charms Cecily. She falls smitten with this Ernest, so Algernon plans for the rector, Dr. Chasuble, to rechristen him "Ernest". Jack, meanwhile, has decided to put his double life behind him. He arrives in full mourning and announces Ernest's death in Paris of a severe chill, a story undermined by Algernon's presence in the guise of Ernest. Gwendolen now arrives, having run away from home, she meets Cecily in the temporary absence of the two men, and each indignantly declares that she is the one engaged to "Ernest". When Jack and Algernon reappear, their deceptions are exposed.

Act III moves inside to the drawing room. Lady Bracknell arrives in pursuit of her daughter and is surprised to be told that Algernon and Cecily are engaged. She has an initial doubts on whether Cecily will be a suitable wife for her nephew but the size of Cecily's trust fund removes her doubt. However, stalemate develops when Jack refuses his consent to the marriage of his ward to Algernon until Lady Bracknell consents to his own union with Gwendolen.

The stalemate is broken by the return of Miss Prism. Lady Bracknell recognises the governess: twenty-eight years earlier, as a family nursemaid, she took a baby boy for a walk in a perambulator and never returned. Miss Prism explains that she had abstractedly put the manuscript of a novel she was writing in the perambulator, and the baby in a handbag, which she had left at Victoria Station. Jack produces the very same handbag, showing that he is the lost baby, the elder son of Lady Bracknell's late sister, and thus indeed Algernon's older brother – and suddenly eligible as a suitor for Gwendolen. Gwendolen remains firm that she can only love a man named Ernest. What is her fiancé's real first name? Lady Bracknell informs Jack that, as the first-born, he would have been named after his father, General Moncrieff. Jack examines army lists and discovers that his father's name – and hence his own real name – was in fact Ernest. As the happy couples embrace – Jack and Gwendolen, Algernon and Cecily, Dr. Chasuble and Miss Prism – Lady Bracknell complains to her new-found relative: "My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality." "On the contrary, Aunt Augusta", he replies,

"I've now realised for the first time in my life the vital Importance of being Earnest".

Analysis of Major Characters

1.     Jack Worthing

Jack Worthing, the play’s protagonist, was discovered as an infant by the late Mr. Thomas Cardew in a handbag in the cloakroom of a railway station in London. Jack has grown up to be a seemingly responsible and respectable young man, a major landowner and Justice of the Peace in Hertfordshire, where he has a country estate. In Hertfordshire, where he is known by what he imagines to be his real name, Jack, he is a pillar of the community. He is guardian to Mr. Cardew’s granddaughter, Cecily, and has other duties and people who depend on him, including servants, tenants, farmers, and the local clergyman. For years, he has also pretended to have an irresponsible younger brother named Ernest, whom he is always having to bail out of some mischief. In fact, he himself is the reprobate brother Ernest. Ernest is the name Jack goes by in London, where he really goes on these occasions. The fictional brother is Jack’s alibi, his excuse for disappearing from Hertfordshire and going off to London to escape his responsibilities and indulge in exactly the sort of behavior he pretends to disapprove of in his brother.

More than any other character in the play, Jack Worthing represents conventional Victorian values: he wants others to think he adheres to such notions as duty, honor, and respectability, but he hypocritically flouts those very notions. Indeed, what Wilde was actually satirizing through Jack was the way people generally tolerate hypocrisy in conventional Victorian manner. Jack uses his alter-ego Ernest to keep his honourable image intact. Ernest enables Jack to escape the boundaries of his real life and act as he wouldn’t dare to act under his real identity. Ernest provides a convenient excuse and disguise for Jack, and Jack feels no qualms about invoking Ernest whenever necessary. Jack wants to be seen as upright and moral, but he doesn’t care what lies he has to tell his loved ones in order to be able to misbehave. Though Ernest has always been Jack’s unsavory alter ego, as the play progresses Jack must aspire to become Ernest, in name if not behaviour. Until he seeks to marry Gwendolen, Jack has used Ernest as an escape from real life, but Gwendolen’s fixation on the name Ernest makes it obligatory for Jack to embrace his deception in order to pursue the real life he desires. Jack has always managed to get what he wants by using Ernest as his fallback, and his lie eventually threatens to be his downfall. Though Jack never really gets his punishment, he must scramble to reconcile his two worlds in order to get what he ultimately desires and to fully understand who he is.

2.     Algernon Moncrieff

Algernon, the play’s secondary hero, is closer to the figure of the dandy than any other character in the play. A charming, idle, decorative bachelor, Algernon is brilliant, witty, selfish, amoral, and given to making delightful paradoxical and epigrammatic pronouncements that either make no sense at all or touch on something profound. Like Jack, Algernon has invented a fictional character, a chronic invalid named Bunbury, to give him a reprieve from his real life. Algernon is constantly being summoned to Bunbury’s deathbed, which conveniently draws him away from tiresome or distasteful social obligations. Like Jack’s fictional brother Ernest, Bunbury provides Algernon with a way of indulging himself while also suggesting great seriousness and sense of duty. However, a salient difference exists between Jack and Algernon. Jack does not admit to being a “Bunburyist,” even after he’s been called on it, while Algernon not only acknowledges his wrongdoing but also enjoys doing it. Algernon’s delight in his own cleverness and ingenuity has little to do with contempt for others. Rather, his personal philosophy puts a higher value on artistry and genius than on almost anything else, and he regards living as a kind of art form and life as a work of art—something one creates oneself.

Algernon is a proponent of aestheticism and a stand-in for Wilde himself, as are all Wilde’s dandified characters like Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. Unlike these other characters, however, Algernon is completely amoral. Algernon has no moral convictions at all, recognizing no duty other than the responsibility to live beautifully.

3.     Gwendolen Fairfax

More than any other female characters in the play, Gwendolen suggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood. She has ideas and ideals, attends lectures, and is serious on self-improvement. She is also artificial and pretentious. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest, and she is fixated on this name. This preoccupation serves as a metaphor for the preoccupation of the Victorian middle- and upper-middle classes with the appearance of virtue and honor. Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Ernest, whose name, she says, “inspires absolute confidence,” that she can’t even see that the man calling himself Ernest is fooling her with an extensive deception. In this way, her own image consciousness blurs her judgment.

Though more self-consciously intellectual than Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen is very much like her mother. She is similarly strong-minded and speaks with unquestionable authority on matters of taste and morality, just as Lady Bracknell does. She is both a model and an authority of elegant fashion and sophistication, and nearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect. As Jack fears, Gwendolen does indeed show signs of becoming her mother “in about a hundred and fifty years,” but she is likeable, as is Lady Bracknell, because her pronouncements are so outrageous.

4.     Cecily Cardew

If Gwendolen is a product of London high society, Cecily is her opposite. She is a child of nature, as ingenuous and unspoiled as a pink rose, to which Algernon compares her in Act II. However, her ingenuity is contradicted by her fascination with wickedness. She is obsessed with the name Ernest just as Gwendolen is, but wickedness is primarily what leads her to fall in love with “Uncle Jack’s brother,” whose reputation is wayward enough to intrigue her. Like Algernon and Jack, she is a fantasist. She has invented her romance with Ernest and elaborated it with as much artistry and enthusiasm as the men have their false obligations and secret identities. Though she does not have an alter-ego as vivid or developed as Bunbury or Ernest, her claim that she and Algernon/Ernest are already engaged is rooted in the fantasy world she’s created around Ernest. Cecily is probably the most realistically drawn character in the play, and she is the only character who does not speak in epigrams. Her charm lies in her idiosyncratic cast of mind and her imaginative capacity, qualities that derive from Wilde’s notion of life as a work of art. These elements of her personality make her a perfect mate for Algernon.

5.     Lady Bracknell 

Algernon’s snobbish, mercenary, and domineering aunt and Gwendolen’s mother. Lady Bracknell married well, and her primary goal in life is to see her daughter do the same. She has a list of “eligible young men” and a prepared interview she gives to potential suitors. Like her nephew, Lady Bracknell is given to making hilarious pronouncements, but where Algernon means to be witty, the humor in Lady Bracknell’s speeches is unintentional. Through the figure of Lady Bracknell, Wilde manages to satirize the hypocrisy and stupidity of the British aristocracy. Lady Bracknell values ignorance, which she sees as “a delicate exotic fruit.” When she gives a dinner party, she prefers her husband to eat downstairs with the servants. She is cunning, narrow-minded, authoritarian, and possibly the most quotable character in the play.

6.     Miss Prism  

Wilde gets a kick out of Miss Prism. Wilde’s own sons had governesses that he disliked, and he seems to channel all that aggression (good-naturedly) into her character. She is romantic and repressed.
We first see Miss Prism in her role as educator, which she takes very seriously. As an unmarried woman in a society obsessed with marriage, Miss Prism takes her job as her identity. It gives her some status, when she normally would have none. She uses a lot of flashy vocabulary – "utilitarian" and "vacillating" – and even tries to impress Dr. Chasuble with made-up words like "womanthrope".

Miss Prism jumps at the chance of taking a walk with Dr. Chasuble. She is totally into him. His sermons, his lectures, his metaphors all make her stomach swarm with butterflies. Cecily clearly recognizes the infatuation and uses it to get out of her lessons. Miss Prism is excited to even take a stroll with the preacher, but, in true Victorian style, she hides it under fake-scholastic references and roundabout arguments:

Miss Prism lacks maternal instincts. For one thing, she is ready to forget the whole Ernest character. "After we had all been resigned to his loss, his sudden return seems to me peculiarly distressing". Ernest seems so wayward, and Miss Prism believes that they are better off without him. And besides, he deserved it: "As a man sows, so shall he reap".
She is not only unmarried, but is definitely not willing to be called "mother" under any circumstances.
Miss Prism's nurturing deficit, her neglect or violation of her official duty is what caused all the trouble in the first place. Miss Prism was the absentminded babysitter so lost in fictional fantasies that she forgot about young Ernest Moncrieff in his stroller. That indeed is a crime.

She highly approves of Jack’s presumed respectability and harshly criticizes his “unfortunate” brother. Although she is Puritan, Miss Prism’s severe pronouncements have a way of going so far that they inspire laughter. Despite her rigidity, Miss Prism seems to have a softer side. She speaks of having once written a novel whose manuscript was “lost” or “abandoned.” Also, she entertains romantic feelings for Dr. Chasuble.

7.     Dr. Chasuble

As a clergyman, Dr. Chasuble is a natural target for Oscar Wilde who had no reverence for clergymen. The playwright has already lampooned the Victorian Virtues of beauty, youth, fashion, social ascendance, and education – he isn’t going to leave out religious piety. Chasuble is willing to christen the two wannabe-Ernests with no questions asked. Christening is a sacrament, usually meaning "sacred," but Chasuble just seems happy to have the business.

Chasuble and Miss Prism are pretty much male and female versions of the same character: stuffy, pedantic, and celibate. Their flirtations echo each other.

Chasuble conceals his romantic signals to Miss Prism beneath silly, scholarly figures of speech, just as Miss Prism hides her own feeling under her metaphor drawn from fruits. All this subterranean flirting pays off at the end of the play. Affected by the romantic atmosphere, Chasuble embraces his "Laetitia" implying that there would be the third engagement to the resolution of the play.

8.     Lane

Lane is Algernon’s butler – and his comic object in the first scene. When the play opens, Lane is the only person who knows about Algernon’s practice of “Bunburying.” Lane appears only in Act I. Algernon knows his master well and is able to cover for him when, for example, all of Lady Bracknell’s sandwiches disappear. Lane’s ease with deceit emphasizes Wilde’s point that everyone understands his or her role in this society, and excels at playing it.

9.     Merriman

Merriman is the mirror-butler for Lane. Because everything in this play seems to be symmetrical – Merriman serves Jack in his country home. As with many butlers in Wilde’s plays, he’s useful for entering the scene just when a confrontation is about to escalate.

 

Themes

1.     Triviality

Vice in Earnest is represented by Algy's craving for cucumber sandwiches. Wilde said that the play's theme was "That we should treat all trivial things in life very seriously, and all serious things of life with a sincere and studied triviality." The theme is hinted at in the play's ironic title, and "earnestness" is repeatedly alluded to in the dialogue, Algernon says in Act II, "one has to be serious about something if one is to have any amusement in life' but goes on to reproach Jack for 'being serious about everything'". In the story, the protagonists' duplicity ("bunburying") is merely to avoid unwelcome social obligations. While much theatre of the time tackled serious social and political issues, The Importance of Being Ernest is superficially about nothing at all. It did not follow the idea of other dramatists of the period.

2.     As a satire of society

The play repeatedly mocks Victorian traditions and social customs, marriage and the pursuit of love in particular. In Victorian times earnestness was considered to be the main societal value. It came from religious attempts to reform the lower classes, it spread to the upper ones too throughout the century. The play's very title, with its mocking paradox (serious people are so because they do not see trivial comedies) introduces the theme, it continues in the drawing room discussion, "Yes, but you must be serious about it. I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them" says Algernon in Act 1; allusions are quick and from multiple angles. Wilde good-naturedly exposes the empty, trivial lives of the aristocracy-good-naturedly, for Wilde also indulged in this type of lifestyle. Algernon is a hedonist who likes nothing better than to eat, gamble, and gossip without consequence.

When Jack apologises to Gwendolen during his marriage proposal, it is for not being wicked:

JACK: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?
GWENDOLEN: I can. For I feel that you are sure to change.

3.     Claims of Homosexual subtext

The name Ernest, it has been suggested, might also have a hidden meaning. Theo Aronson has suggested that the word "earnest" became a code-word for homosexual, as in: "Is he earnest?” in the same way that "Is he so?" and "Is he musical?" were also employed. However, many claims were made to deny this suggestion. Wilde was of course a homosexual and he was incarcerated towards the end of his life.

4.      Critique of Marriage as a Social Tool

Wilde's most concrete critique in the play is of the manipulative desires revolving around marriage. Gwendolen and Cecily are interested in their mates, it appears, only because they have disreputable backgrounds (Gwendolen is pleased to learn that Jack was an orphan; Cecily is excited by Algernon's "wicked" reputation). Their shared desire to marry someone named Ernest demonstrates that their romantic dreams hinge upon titles, not character. The men are not much less shallow-Algernon proposes to the young, pretty Cecily within minutes of meeting her. Only Jack seems to have earnest romantic desires, though why he would love the self-absorbed Gwendolen is questionable. However, the sordidness of the lovers' ulterior motives is dwarfed by the priorities of Lady Bracknell, who epitomizes the Victorian tendency to view marriage as a financial arrangement. She does not consent to Gwendolen's marriage to Jack on the basis of his being an orphan, and she snubs Cecily until she discovers she has a large personal fortune.

5.      Manners and Sincerity

The major target of Wilde's scathing social criticism is the hypocrisy that society creates. Frequently in Victorian society, its participants comported themselves in overly sincere, polite ways while they harbored conversely manipulative, cruel attitudes. Wilde exposes this divide in scenes such as when Gwendolen and Cecily behave themselves in front of the servants or when Lady Bracknell warms to Cecily upon discovering she is rich. However, the play truly pivots around the word "earnest." Both women want to marry someone named "Ernest," as the name inspires "absolute confidence"; in other words, the name implies that its bearer truly is earnest, honest, and responsible. However, Jack and Algernon have lied about their names, so they are not really "earnest." But it also turns out that (at least in Jack's case) he was inadvertently telling the truth. The rapid flip-flopping of truths and lies, of earnestness and duplicity, shows how truly muddled the Victorian values of honesty and responsibility were.

6.      Dual Identities

As a subset of the sincerity theme (see above), Wilde explores in depth what it means to have a dual identity in Victorian society. This duality is most apparent in Algernon and Jack's "Bunburying" (their creation of an alter ego to allow them to evade responsibility). Wilde hints that Bunburying may cover for homosexual liaisons, or at the very least serve as an escape from oppressive marriages. Other characters also create alternate identities. For example, Cecily writes correspondence between herself and Ernest before she has ever met him. Unlike real men, who are free to come and go as they please, she is able to control this version of Ernest. Finally, the fact that Jack has been unwittingly leading a life of dual identities shows that our alter egos are not as far from our "real" identities as we would think.

7.      Manners and Sincerity

The major target of Wilde's scathing social criticism is the hypocrisy that society creates. Frequently in Victorian society, its participants comported themselves in overly sincere, polite ways while they harbored conversely manipulative, cruel attitudes. Wilde exposes this divide in scenes such as when Gwendolen and Cecily behave themselves in front of the servants or when Lady Bracknell warms to Cecily upon discovering she is rich. However, the play truly pivots around the word "earnest." Both women want to marry someone named "Ernest," as the name inspires "absolute confidence"; in other words, the name implies that its bearer truly is earnest, honest, and responsible. However, Jack and Algernon have lied about their names, so they are not really "earnest." But it also turns out that (at least in Jack's case) he was inadvertently telling the truth. The rapid flip-flopping of truths and lies, of earnestness and duplicity, shows how truly muddled the Victorian values of honesty and responsibility were.

Dramatic analysis

Use of language

While Wilde had long been famous for dialogue and his use of language, he achieved a unity and mastery in the story that was unequalled in his other plays, except perhaps Salome. It achieves a pitch-perfect style. There are three different registers found in the play. The dandyish rudeness of Jack and Algernon shows a basic unity despite their different attitudes. The second register is that of alarming pronouncements of Lady Bracknell. These are startling because of her use of hyperbole and rhetorical extravagance as much as the alarming opinions she expresses. The third is the speech of Dr Chausable and Miss Prism. The speech is distinguished by "pedantic precept" and "idiosyncratic diversion".  Furthermore the play is full of effective epigrams, paradoxes and wits.

Glossary of Terms

1.      a christening: a ceremony of baptism

2.      Anabaptist: a radical Christian sect that saw christening as a confirmation of faith so deemed it inappropriate for infants and supported adult baptism, instead

3.      Apoplexy: a fit of extreme anger that causes death; a stroke

4.      Bunburying: inventing a false person to allow one to leave one's own unpleasant situation

5.      Credulity: tending to believe too quickly

6.      Effrontery: presumptuousness

7.      Egeria: a Roman nymph who advised a king; any female advisor

8.      Gorgon: in Greek mythology, the three sisters including Medusa who had snakes for hair; here, an ugly or terrifying woman

9.      Horticultural: having to do with a garden

10.  Lorgnette: a pair of eyeglasses with a handle

11.  Misanthrope: one who hates people

12.   Perambulator: baby carriage

13.  Portmanteau: a large, hinged leather suitcase

14.  Quixotic: idealistic without being pratical; seeking something unattainable

15.  Salver: tray for serving food and/or drinks

16.  Smart: well-dressed

17.  the Club: private location where men gather together to drink, discuss politics, gossip, and smoke

Suggested Essay Questions

1. Explain the pun of the title. Who is being Earnest in this play? Do Gwendolen and Cecily prefer having husbands named Ernest to having earnest husbands?
2. Analyze the gender reversals in this text. Does the feminized Lord Bracknell foreshadow what Jack and Algernon may become? Are males or females more passive/dominated in this play?
3. How does dramatic irony create humor in The Importance of Being Earnest? Identify a handful of instances in which the audience members know more about what is going on than the characters on stage. Why does this create humor?
4. What is the role of textuality in this play-do letters and diaries have a stronger reliability or ring of truth than conversation?
5. Analyze the various times that the characters eat in this play, primarily the cucumber sandwiches and the muffins. Does eating serve a primarily social or anti-social function?
6. Does Wilde prevent any version of true love? Does the extent to which Gwendolen and Cecily are self-centered affect your analysis?
7. Algernon observes that: "Women only call each other sister when they have called each other a lot of other things first." How does the development of the relationship between Cecily and Gwendolen bear out this remark? What causes them to bond together? What causes them to behave competitively?
8. What does the common classification of The Importance of being Earnest as a "comedy of manners" refer to? Could this play operate in a classless, non-hierarchical society?
9. How do words take on a life of their own in this play? How does this relate to why it is it so easy for Prism to substitute her manuscript for a baby? Analyze diaries as a source of power and truth-making.
10. Analyze the role of class in Lady Bracknell's worldview. If she more impressed by land, by nobility, or by wealth?