Theme Of Death In The Importance Of Being Earnest

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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. Death is an unstoppable event that occurs in every individual’s life, and yet it is a very taboo topic as people rarely broach the subject because it causes incredible distress; it is certainly not a comical topic of conversation and one that is very seldom and rarely congratulated. Yet Oscar Wilde manages to deliver the ever present looming topic of death as if it held the same gravity as a bad hairdo in his comedic play, The Importance of Being Earnest. Instead of expressing support, sorrow and sympathy for the victims of Death and for the relatives, Wilde treats Death in comparison to a result of an impromptu action; no more serious than if a person was to walk into another, due to lack of observation in where they were going; The Importance of …show more content…

In Act III, it highlights the contrast of a person’s life, Bunbury, to an inanimate object, suggesting that Miss Prisms lost black bag and the discovery of that bag, is more important than being ‘dead’. This is not an unusal reference in comparison to all other themes, analogies and metaphors discussed in The Importance of Being Earnest, but it is another hidden reference that adds to the quantity, which makes it a questionable and curious point due to this scene being part of the closing Act, which demonstrates it large importance to

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