The Importance Of Being Earnest Satire Analysis

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 monarch. During her reign, “Queen Victoria, conveyed connotations of "prudish, "repressed," and "old fashioned" (Roth). Wilde used the Victorian ideals to ridicule the upper-class by using satire in his play. The upper-class would have been the ones in the audience watching the play and they should have realized his use of satire to mock their attitudes and pretentious values. Oscar Wilde satirizes marriage, honesty, and sexuality throughout the play that the upper-class would be attending. In the Victorian Era, marriage was viewed as a means to financial success. Marriage was a matter of convenience for money, not for love. The marriage

He used values that were important in the Victorian Era, and the uppity attitude of the upper-class that would be watching the play, by using satire. Those watching the play should have been able to see the humor that Wilde put into his work. It used satire to focus on their shallow views of true love or living a double life. Wilde mocked the values the audience members lived by. The upper-class lived as their social values, snobbery, and focus on money were more important than true love, friendship, and family. He took what he saw in the realms of the upper-class and found a way to throw satire into the mix. The Importance of Being Earnest effectively satirizes Victorian society and their standards through this