The Importance of Mockery
Mockery is usually perceived as a negative concept, but if one thinks about the purpose behind it ones impression can change. Mockery can be defined as an imitation, counterfeit, or fake (Dictionary.com). It is like a mirror image of how someone is acting. For example, if someone is complaining and another mocks them, it is to show how annoying and irritating they are being. The mocker is helping the complainer by indirectly telling them they need to change how they are acting. The complainer should accept the correction before they embarrass themselves, if they haven not already. Mockery should not always be scorned upon as a malevolent act, but as a way of help or correction.
In 1 Kings 18 the reader finds Elijah
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People were so concerned on the way they talked, their social order, their manners, and their style that they forgot about the things in life that really mattered. It seems as though Wilde became so agitated he had to make fun of it so people could see how foolish they were being. Parker believes the whole play is based on defining human identity and Lady Bracknell is a great example of this. She is so concerned with outer appearance that she forgets to check on character and personality. When Lady Bracknell meets Cecily for the first time she is not impressed, but once she finds out Cecily has a lot of money her feelings toward the young girl suddenly change. “The chin a little higher, dear. Style largely depends on the way the chin is worn. They are worn high, just at present” (Wilde 81). This is a farce of how overly concerned people were with their …show more content…
In “The Function of Decorum at the Present Time: Manners, Moral Language, and Modernity in ‘an Oscar Wilde Play,’” Mackie believes “In The Importance of Being Earnest the staging decorum accomplishes more than an ironic mockery of the conventional moral shibboleths that police conduct.” Mackie is stating that Wilde uses the behavior and speech relevant to the Victorian culture. It has nothing to do with mockery, but giving respect to the culture and the way the Victorians lived. The purpose for writing this play was to show how different people celebrate life in a different way. One facet Wilde wants to portray is language. He believes the characters converse in a stylized form of wit (Mackie 146). An example can be found on page 29 when Algernon asks Jack what he wants to do. Jack replies with “Nothing!” and Algernon says “It is awfully hard word doing nothing. However, I don’t mind hard work where there is no definite object of any
The Importance of Being Earnest, a satirical and hypocritical masterpiece, conveys the role of treasured values such as aristocracy and love, and addresses the concept of treating all serious matters of life with genuine and sincere triviality. Although excessively foolish in their nature, the characters of Oscar Wilde’s skillfully-written play truly represent the preposterous principles embodied by the Edwardian upper class. The ludicrous and incongruous ideals cherished by a noble society reveal the superficiality of the caricatures enclosed within. “Any relations in a social order will endure, if there is infused into them some of that spirit of human sympathy which qualifies life for immortality.” (George W. Russell)
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 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.
Oscar Wilde's, "The Importance of Being Earnest" revolves around the dichotomy of the true definition of honesty versus the victorian definition of honesty. It is apparent that Wilde's opinion is that true honesty is expressed through being genuine to one's self as opposed to putting on a front as is important in victorian ideals. In this work, Wilde uses humor to off-set the seriousness of the theme of the story. One who has studied this work can also clearly see that Wilde is using sarcasm to say things that would not have been accepted by society if they were said bluntly. For example he exemplifies in a very sarcastic manner the hypocracy that victorian society represents by the very fact that they pretend to uphold honesty above all else yet their only concern is appearence of things, not their true nature.
Satire is customarily discussed as “humor critiquing current political or social issues. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines satire as the type of derisive humor or irony; mocking wit; sarcasm especially employed against something perceived as foolish or immoral.” While the Oxford English Dictionary’s emphasis on humor calls attention to the mockery of these issues, it does not present the consequences of certain actions. In the Onion article titled “Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense From Language Programs” and The Simpsons episode “Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish, satire also addresses the effects of certain decisions on society. Attending to the consequences of the actions or decisions that are being satirized allows us to see how satire can help us come to
Satire, by definition is the use of irony, sarcasm or ridicule to exploit issues. Satire often positions the responder to ironically laugh at themselves
The Princeton encyclopedia states “.. parody has been defined as the exaggerated imitation of work of art. Like a caricature it is based on distortion bringing into bolder relief the salient features of an artist's style or habit of mind. It belongs to genus satire and thus performs the double-edged task of reform and ridicule. Eccentricity, sentimentalism and pedantry are among its major targets, and at its best it is a critical instrument of telling force because it approaches the subject from within rather than from without..” In a nutshell parody can be put into simpler words as a criticism of the ideas and expression of another artist’s original work. The essence of a parody is its comic or satiric contrast to the serious work. What needs to be noted is that parody is considered as the oldest form of literary expression and hence has a variety of definitions that broaden its very meaning. To reason out the universal appeal of parodies, a twofold argument can be put forth; firstly what can...
...ntain her social class, and only worrying about wealth and style over the life and death of others. The art of manners and social discussions are expressed through the dialogue between Gwendolen and Cecily. Although both women showed hatred towards each other, it is done in a civilised manner. Wilde shows this by creating a stylised and artificial atmosphere by making the dialogue repetitive and parallel, thus making their dialogue and comments on insignificant subjects as part of having a polite conversation. Jack also shows the significance of high society and manners by showing that he has a high sense of duty and responsibility in the country; and being serious about Cecily’s education as it can help better her current position as well as his own. Hence, Wilde’s criticisms on high society and manners are expressed through the characters and their dialogue.
Oscar Wildes ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’’ is believed by many to be his most genius work and certainly has withstood the test of time. The play is set in London during the 1890’s in which time frame aristocracy and upper class held the majority of the countries wealth. Many of the comical aspects question the morals of the upper class in which he satirises throughout the play. One method of this, for instance is through one of the main protagonist, Algernon Moncrieff. Algernon is an upper class individual who is oblivious to the world around him in such an exaggerated manner that it makes his character comically adjusted for Wildes own views. Many aspects of the time period are made a mockery through puns and witty remarks from the main protagonists, most if not all are portrayed in a sense that makes them undoubtedly a laughing stock. Wildes methods are not discrete; nor are they obvious, many of the comical comments made are by none other than the protagonists themselves. This furthermore enforces the corrupted morals of the time periods prestigious upper class by showing their sheer inability to acknowledge hypocrisy. For example, in act one; Algernon states “ Lane's views on marriage seem somewhat lax. Really, if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.” This is especially amusing as Algernon believes that the lower class have a duty to set an example when in reality the matter of fact was quite the contrary. Algernon states that he believes the lower class are lacking in morals, he being arguably one of the most morally distorted characters Wilde created makes the double standards more prominent.
The wit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest stems from his place in society and his views of it. He mocks the Victorian aristocracy through his statements and satirising of marriage dependent on social class and wealth, the careful implantation of comedic techniques which add to the effect of the message Wilde aims for the society to take into consideration and the ignorance portrayed by the Victorian society. These socially acceptable mockeries allow the audience to laugh at the satirical social statements while learning a didactic lesson about the current society issues. Through Wilde’s satirical wit, he completes the educational tales he was aiming for, emphasising to readers the insaneness that society can be and its rules.
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.
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.
“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’s purpose in writing The Importance of Being Earnest was to display the artificial barriers that defined the aristocratic Victorian society, and to show that those particular people cared more about trivial subjects than what was of true value. He was able to portray this message in a comedic way.
Oscar Wilde, the scholarly illustrative of the supposed Yellow Nineties, remained toward the end of the nineteenth century and sneered at the Victorian age. He mocked Victorian values most especially in The Importance of Being Earnest, presumably his most prevalent work. Turning on the play of words in the title, the dramatization additionally mocks the general concept of sincerity, a prudence to which the Victorians joined the most extreme centrality. To buckle down, to be genuine, straightforward, and open, and to live sincerely was the Victorian perfect. Wilde not just caricaturizes false reverence and sham prudence, he likewise taunts its real vicinity.