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Women and literature during the victorian era essay
Essay on women in the victorian era
Women in the victorian era essay
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Laughter is a mental state where people shut out some events from their knowledge on how the world really is. Laughter is an expression and a device used by humans to distract them from the seriousness of a specific situation. In The Importance of Being Earnest satire is constantly used because it is distracting and pleasant. Tragedy in Death of a Salesman highlights Willy’s recognize that his life has been a failure. At first, Willy was in denial that he was a failure, to a certain extent this strength. This is a strength because he continued to work hard, despite his failure, to achieve his goal.
The use of humor in The Importance of being Earnest exposes the lack of emotion in some characters. The lack of emotion in the characters is done
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Jack, for example, is not flawless and heroic like people would expect him to be. Jack lives a double life, just like his friend Algernon. He expressed, openly, how much he hates Lady Bracknell. Also, throughout the play, Jack focuses on the social flaw of not being able to have a family name that he can claim. These are all qualities of an anti-hero that cares about nothing, but himself. These weaknesses are all exposed through Wilde’s use of comedy. Oscar Wilde exposes Miss Prism’s weakness through the use of comedy. Miss Prism is the perfect representation of a Victorian woman. She is judgmental, vindictive, and critical. By the end of the play Miss Prisms past is revealed, she was the author of a three-volume novel. She was the person that was responsible, for the fact that Jack was lost as an infant. Miss Prism is the person that confuses a baby with her novel. She places the baby inside a black handbag and she places her novel in a baby carriage. Wilde also uses comedy to mock the image of the Victorian people. Chasuble and Miss prism were supposed to be religious people, but it was obvious that they had feelings for each other, because they are constantly flirting. Wilde exposes the fact that these two religious people are regular just like anybody
AThe Importance of Being Earnest, a play written by Oscar Wilde, is set in England in the late Victorian era. Wilde uses obvious situational and dramatic irony within the play to satirize his time period. According to Roger Sale in Being Ernest, the title has a double meaning to it and is certainly another example of satire used by Wilde. With a comedic approach, Wilde ridicules the absurdities of the character’s courtship rituals, their false faces, and their secrets. Sale, 478.
The Importance of Miss Prism In Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, the character of Miss Prism is wholly underestimated, as she exemplifies points of stereotypicality in Victorian society just as well as other characters do, and acts as the story’s deus ex machina. Miss Prism, as considered one of the seldom older characters in the play, does have the traits of the old-fashioned Victorian lady. Such is the case when speaking of Cecily’s schoolwork, “... you will read your political Economy in my absence. The chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit.
...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.
Oscar Wilde’s, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, play carefully uses satire as a didactic tool to mask the underlying social commentary with the help of comedy through characters theme and dialogue. Wilde uses satire to ridicule class and wealth, marriage and the ignorance of the Victorian Age. Audiences are continually amused by Wilde’s use of linguistic and comic devices such as double entendre, puns, paradox and epigrams, especially in the case of social commentary and didactic lessons. Characters portrayed in the play such as Jack, Cecily, Algernon and Lady Bracknell, allow Wilde to express his opinions on the social problems during the Victorian Age.
Idealism is the process of forming and pursuing ideas and values that are often unrealistic. An idealistic person holds high standards for their future. The vision that an individual has for themselves often plays a part in how their life occurs. Oscar Wilde’s 1895 satire, An Ideal Husband, depicts the lives of idealists and the fruition of their ideals. The play revolves around the tumultuous and highly public lives of Robert and Gertrude Chiltern. Robert is a prestigious member of the House of Commons married to an active and well respected socialite, Gertrude. The pair’s status and marriage are thrown into conflict when Gertrude’s old school nemesis, Laura Cheveley, attempts to blackmail Robert. Wilde’s popular comedy is brimming with witty epigrams, dramatic irony, and subtle symbolism. He demonstrates how the idealism of individuals in nineteenth century British society influences their lives. In the play, Wilde demonstrates that idealism has a significant effect on the destiny of individuals through the depiction of the Chilterns’ monetary and social standards.
“Ignorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone,” engraves Oscar Wilde as he sets the literary table with a bountiful demonstration of Victorian satire. “The Importance of Being Earnest” is evidently a comic critic of late Victorian value (Schmidt 5). Brought into this world from Dublin, Ireland, to well-heeled parents in 1854. Wilde received an opportunity for social improvement when graduating from Oxford University, after receiving a financial scholarship that gave him a first hand account of the upper crust society lifestyle which allowed him to acquire material to poke fun at (Moss 179). Wilde shows his characters as if they knew that people where watching them. By doing that he caused the audience to feel that the actors had authentic regret about their characters actions (Foster 19).
Wilde “awoke laughter” in The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde showed rather than falling in love because you actually liked a person, the people of the Victorian Era fell in love solely on minute details such as physical features, a person’s name, or how much wealth they had. The comedy comes into play when Wilde pokes fun at the process of falling in love, because the characters rush falling in love with the right person, the audience compares the character’s reality with the world’s reality.
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 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.
The irony comes into play when the truth starts to unravel and Jack finds out what really happened to him as a child and why he does not know his parents. After some coincidental events, all the main characters end up in the same room. When Lady Bracknell hears Ms. Prism’s (the woman Jack hired as his nieces governess) name, she immediately asks to see her. She continues to say that Ms. Prism had wandered off with a baby years ago and asks what came about of that. Ms. Prism continues the dialogue to explain how she misplaced a baby that was in her bag at a train station.
Wilde’s criticism of high society and manners are explored through the characteristics of Lady Bracknell; the dialogue between Gwendolen and Cecily; and the characteristics of Jack in the country. Wilde’s criticism of high society and manners is shown by creating absurd situations and characters whose lack of insight causes them to respond in an inappropriate manner. An example is shown in Lady Bracknell’s preoccupation with her own parties and that the lack of sympathy for invalids makes her react to the news of Bunbury’s illness in an exaggeratedly cold manner. “I think it is high time that Mr Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or die. I should be much obliged if you would ask Mr Bunbury, from me, to be kind enough not to have a relapse on Saturday, for I rely on you to arrange my music for me”.
Young women were properly trained to be proper which would mean they would learn how to sing and play piano, read light literature, learn a foreign language like French, and most certainly "the rules of etiquette as well as the art of conversation and the art of silence. ”(“Courtship.") A person can see this when they look at Cecily and the studies that Ms. Prism presents to her, for example German lessons which Cecily despises. This is a good example of how women were prepped to start looking for a gentleman and behave like a well-groomed woman. Wilde uses this to point out how ridiculous it is to have these high expectations put on young women to behave like a woman should.
The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy of manners, whereby Oscar Wilde uses satire to ridicule marriage, love and the mentality of the Victorian aristocratic society. It can also be referred to as a satiric comedy. What is a satire and what is Oscar Wilde trying to emphasize by employing it in his play? A satiric comedy ridicules political policies or attacks deviations from social order by making ridiculous, the violators of its standards of morals or manners. Usually, a satiric piece doesn't serve only as a form of criticism, but to correct flaws in the characters or to somehow make them better in the end.
In the play, Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde ridicules and identifies the negative aspects of Victorian society through comedic dialogue. He uses characters with ridiculous personalities to demonstrate his idea of Victorian life. By making absurd scenes with foolish characters, it is his way of mocking the Victorian lifestyle passive aggressively.
Woodcock, George. The Paradox of Oscar Wilde. London-New York: T.V. Boardman and Co., Ltd., 1950.