Ernest Quotes

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Recommended: Victorian era literature

Gwendoline Fairfax is a prime example of London’s finest fashionable and sophisticated upper-class. She is in love with Ernest (Who is really Jack), and the daughter of Lady Bracknell. Gwendoline is so set on marrying Ernest (who is really Jack) that she is willing to do it even before she meets him in person. Gwendoline’s character challenges the typical Victorian roles where the female is submissive to the male, She is more aggressive in what she wants and going after it. Which is portrayed in parts of the play where she fights the urge to do what she wants and the urge to do what she is told. However, Gwendoline still embodies the Victorian era by being so fixated on marrying someone named Ernest it does not matter to her if the man is a good person morally or not as long as his name is Ernest. We find that Gwendoline instead of facing the truth when she finds out the about Jack she gives herself her own answer, one she can live with, to why he lied to her in the first place about who he really was. Luckily for her, Jacks real name in fact does turn …show more content…

Lady Bracknell embodies the Victorian matron role with her domineering, snobbish, and lack of compassion characteristics (Orlich 373). Wilde tends to use Lady Bracknell as a stereotype of the upper class where she didn’t care about the type of person one was as long as they appeared to be of importance to society. This is a theme that we see reoccurring in the personality of Gwendoline, backing up the statement Alge made about women always becoming like their mothers in the end. Lady Bracknell’s shallow character is made more clear during the conversation she had with Jack about his childhood and telling him that he need to provide some sense of belonging before she would even consider letting her daughter marry him, completely disregarding the fact that he was lost in a train station

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