The main characters do use their double lives to escape social regulation, although in differing ways and on each character different social pressures are acting. The women live alternative mental lives through fantastical journals whereas the men, due to their comparatively greater social freedom, are able to create alternative physical lives. Jack pursues a double life due to the pressures of rural, family responsibility. Algy does the same due to the authoritarian influences of his relatives and his financial troubles. 'The Importance of Being Earnest' was written in the tradition of the 'well-made play', fast paced and almost farcical plays peopled by stock characters, as described by Peter Raby; "two pairs of young 'romantic' lovers, a pair of older 'grotesques', separated orphan brothers and a 'blocking' parent." The heroes were conventionally brave and possessed `earnestness', valued very highly in Victorian society, encompassing all the aspects of an ideal man who had family piety, was in control of his expenses and had no debts, kept pace with society yet had solemn responsibility. The female characters have a parallel set of values; subservience, family piety, innocence and the limited role of women in the male dominated Victorian society. Jack and Algy, who are nearly polar opposites to the conventional Victorian hero wish to escape the demanding social expectations. Cecily wishes to escape her stock role as an innocent, protected ingénue and attempts this through the far more eventful whirlwind romance of her diary. Gwendolen, who lives a life of social convention supervised by a repressive mother, wishes to jettison this influence and in her diary lives a `sensational' life otherwise disallowed.
Algy is trivi...
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I believe that all four characters are using their various forms of Bunburying to escape the social restrictions of their sex. The ladies need to find entertainment and liberation from the frustrating limitations of their sex; both are chaperoned and hemmed in by annoying maternal figures. For the men this means liberation from imposed responsibility and their relatively pressured positions as figures in a male dominated society. Both heroes also use their alternative lives to pursue the object of their desires however; this is not the pressure of society and in this respect the statement is not correct. Although they do find relief they never achieve a real escape as all of them must return to reality. Therefore Bunburying is more of a temporary release from the characters' rigidly controlled existences than true liberation.
This creator separates the significance of keeping up the senior high agreeable review over the span of the show and furthermore the time. This source separates the gauge of keeping up amiable financial through the play and how it has an awesome effect. The Importance of Earnest is a sensational play that shows the greater part of that. This play is centered around the origination of the social class and keep up the abnormal state of progress. This significance of this source is that it is making the connection between the idea of social class headway to the play by oscar Wilde " The Importance of Being Earnest". Over the span of the play, there are numerous characters who remain inside their social class yet there are likewise the individuals who are plainly characterized as being beneath a specific class yet plays as their equivalent. For instance, Lane is just Algernon's house keeper however when he
Oscar Wilde, the writer of The Importance of Being Earnest, celebrated the Victorian Era society while criticizing it in his play. Through his play, he utilized the humorous literary techniques of pun, irony, and satire to comment on the impact of Victorian Era society left on the characters themselves. These comedic literary devices also help to show how the members of this society in the Victorian Era live by a set of unspoken rules that determine politeness, as well as proper etiquette to live by. Wilde uses a pun in the title of the work, as well as in the character personalities. Different types of irony appear in many scenes in the play, to flout the rules of society, as well as mock the intelligence of the upper-class characters, compared to the lower-class characters. Wilde satirizes the rules of the upper-class society of the Victorian Era through the dialogue of the characters. The time period in which these characters live, impacts their daily lives, and their personalities.
In “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde he uses satire to show whether or not marriage is pleasurable or just a social obligation. In general many use marriage or “love” as a way of creating a higher social status. In “Pride and Prejudice” Jane Austen also uses satire to show inequality that controls a relationships between a men and a women and how it can affect a women's choice and opinion regarding marriage. Although the two stories are different they have plenty of similarities when it comes to demonstrating how much people depended on their reputation when it comes to marriage or love.
In Oscar Wilde’s drama The Importance of Being Earnest, he uses light-hearted tones and humor to poke fun at British high society while handling the serious theme of truth and the true identity of who is really “Earnest.” Truth as theme is most significantly portrayed through the women characters, Gwendolen and Cecily but to present serious themes comically, Wilde portrays women to be the weaker sex of society, despite the seriousness of the subject—the identity of the men they want to marry.
Firstly I would set this play in the 21st century so that a modern audience could relate to it. Algernon, one of the main characters in the play, would live in a luxury apartment in the centre of London, over looking the River Thames. His apartment would have a minimalist theme to it and would be influenced by aesthetic; for example he would have a piece of abstract art on the wall for no reason other than that he thinks it looks nice.
Identity and social class can be closely tied together. Identity is the part of a person that makes up who he/she is. Social class has been known ever since the late eighteenth century. In the play, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, Miss Prism’s identity of knowledge and education leads her into the middle class; while in the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, the monster’s identity leads him into no social class at all, in which he becomes excluded from society. Also, in the play, Fences by August Wilson, Troy’s identity of being an African American male leads in a conflicting struggle with society and with his relationships in his family. Much of literature and artwork can depict this idea of identity and how society places
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 unveiled.
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.
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.
One of the Oscar Wilde’s most loved, well known and successful play ‘The Importance Of Being Earnest’ was written during the summer of 1894 at Worthing, England. It was first performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James’s theatre, London. Jack Worthing, the play’s main character was found and adopted by a wealthy man, Thomas Cardew in a handbag at a railway line where he was accidentally abandoned as a baby. All the respect that has been given to him as acknowledged upper-class Victorian is only because of his adopted father’s wealth. As the protagonist of the play he is expected to be an earnest man to do justice to the title of the play, but it turned out to be that he is nowhere close to that. Wilde has used Jack’s character more to an instrument to represent a set of ideas or attitudes.
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.
Marriage is of paramount importance in The Importance of Being Earnest. In the play, marriage is reflected as the conventional Victorian society respectability, which is character, income, and status. These three criteria were considered to be the nature and purpose of marriage of that time. In a cynical way, marriage was considered as a means to an end.
In conclusion, The Importance of Being Earnest strongly focuses on those of the upper class society and the vanity of the aristocrats who place emphasis on trivial matters concerning marriage. Both Algernon and Jack assume the identity of "Ernest" yet ironically, they both are beginning their marital lives based on deception and lies. Lady Bracknell represents the archetypal aristocrat who forces the concept of a marriage based on wealth or status rather than love. Through farce and exaggeration, Wilde satirically reveals the foolish and trivial matters that the upper class society looks upon as being important. As said earlier, a satiric piece usually has a didactic side to it. In this case, Lady Bracknell learns that the same person she was criticising is actually her own flesh and blood.
The Importance of Being Earnest appears to be a conventional 19th century farce. False identities, prohibited engagements, domineering mothers, lost children are typical of almost every farce. However, this is only on the surface in Wilde's play. His parody works at two levels- on the one hand he ridicules the manners of the high society and on the other he satirises the human condition in general. The characters in The Importance of Being Earnest assume false identities in order to achieve their goals but do not interfere with the others' lives. The double life led by Algernon, Jack, and Cecily (through her diary) is simply another means by which they liberate themselves from the repressive norms of society. They have the freedom to create themselves and use their double identities to give themselves the opportunity to show opposite sides of their characters. They mock every custom of the society and challenge its values. This creates not only the comic effect of the play but also makes the audience think of the serious things of life.
According to two female characters in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Ernest is a name that is typically desirable for a husband and represents high social status and wealth. Earnest, on the contrary, according to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, means to be “serious, sincere”, or, in other words, honest (“Earnest”). Within the irony of the title of Wilde’s play itself, the hypocrisy of the high social class of the Victorian era is revealed. Wilde himself said of the play in one of his letters to Lord Alfred Douglas from Worthing, “The real charm of the play, if it is to have a charm, must be in the dialogue. The plot is slight…but…adequate” (Ericksen, 145).