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The Importance of Being Earnest, written by Oscar Wilde, is a novel about two friends who lead double lives. Throughout the novel, the reader sees both sides of John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff’s personalities. Both characters exhibit a serious upper class personality in one setting but also have a completely different personality that allows them to be more carefree and pleasure-seeking. Ultimately Worthing & Moncrieff’s double lives allow them to express different sides of themselves and in turn discover their true selves. The main character of the story is John Worthing, a Justice of the Peace in Hertfordshire where he owns a country estate. In his country estate, John is force to uphold a respectable and serious demeanor because of his position in society. To escape this serious life, Jack creates his fake brother named Ernest. John, nicknamed Jack, describes his reasoning for his fake brother by saying that because of his position as a guardian to a Miss Cecily Cardew he “has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects [...] and a high moral tone can hardly be said ...
The set for The Importance of Being Earnest is realistic and as such, ostentatious. From Algernon’s dark, rich and fashionable townhouse to Jack’s light, airy and flowery country house, the set is very lavish. It would be easy for the actors to become lost amidst th...
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.
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.
Wilde’s Earnest Satire: The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedic play that was written by Oscar Wilde in the late 1800s. He believed that people in the Victorian Era took life too seriously. He wrote this play with various forms of satire to ridicule the strict lifestyle the upper-class were boxed into. The upper class had pretentious values and behaviors that characterized Victorian life. During the Victorian Era, people were living under Queen Victoria’s monarchy.
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.
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
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.
The Importance of Being Earnest gets its comedic aspect from the ridiculous characters and how they view earnestness as opposed to ‘Ernestness”. For example the main struggle of the characters is that they are more concerned with the fact that they are Ernest, not that they are particularly earnest. In Oscar Wilde’s play, Jack and Algernon, the two men in the story, face the challenge of appearing Ernest and earnest in front of their love interests, both of whom only want to marry each of the men because their name is earnest. There are also funny characters such as Lady Bracknell who represents the flaws and the ‘un-earnestness’ in society at the time. Oscar Wilde did an excellent job writing this
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.
“A storyteller makes up things to help other people; a liar makes up things to help himself” (Wallace 89). This quotation accurately describes the character Algernon from the great play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde. The play was written in 1895 and is the example of Comedy of Manners, the form, where author satirizes the manners and behavior of the society. In this story we see how Algernon and his friend Jack try to lie to the society by creating second identities, fall in love, and at the end decide to finish their silly games, because of strong feelings. Although, Algernon is not the protagonist of the play, his character
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.
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 satirical piece usually has a didactic side to it.
Highlighting differences between the characters allows the audience to combine what they have learned about each of the individuals to quickly gain to insight into the characters, making this technique one of the best ways to show development. When it is introduced that Jack and Algernon have created an imaginary person, whom they can visit when they desire leave home without questions from family, the audience can compare Jacks and Algernon’s reasons for using this excuse. Jack created an imaginary brother, whom he pretends to visit when he plans to do something that would set a bad example for his ward, because, according to him, “when one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects.” (I) Comparatively, Algernon created a invalid called Bunbury that gets terribly sick whenever Algernon has an appointment he does not wish to attend, allowing him to miss the appointment by pretending to visit his sick friend. From this situation, the audience could easily form new opinions on each character. Rounded, complex characters are developed when the audience is given opportunities to understand the characters through motive comparisons, like this one, in turn enhancing the audience's theatrical
Archer once said, “What can a poor critic do with a play which raises no principle, whether of art or morals, creates its own canons and conventions, and is nothing but an absolutely willful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality?” These words by archer help to reveal what Wilde intended to show in this play. Wilde in response to his play said, "we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious and studied things of life with sincere and studied triviality (2).” Despite the depiction of humor, the play is one of the best plays of the 19th century compared to other British plays. The characters of this play live by the words of Wilde, they treat all serious matters as jokes, and vise versa. This paper through the analysis of themes such as identity, the importance of marriage and social class, will reveal the greed as well as hypocrisy that hide under the Victorian politeness which invites audiences and readers to consider moral principles. All the aristocrats of the play have a crucial role in using deceit to make this possible.