The importance of being E(a)rnest by Oscar Wilde "The Importance of Being Eernest" is a play that made controversy in the lush mansions of Victorian society. Subtitled "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People," The Importance of Being Earnest jokingly criticized Victorian manners and morals and attacking the society of the rich and luxurious. Oscar Wilde incorporated his own beliefs and ideology into the play by alluding to Victorian society "lets duplicity led to happiness." It is this "happiness" Wilde's play focuses on by concentrating the theme of the play on marriage. As the first act comes to a rather confusing end, John and Algernon reveal the secret of the play; nothing is exactly as it seems. “The Importance of Being Earnest” is a highly exaggerated play called a farce, which revolves around the plot of two available bachelors who find themselves in an unusually complicated “love knot.” The characters John and Algernon pretend to be people that do not truly exists. The plot never ceases to stop and continually adds to the already large l arge knot these two gentlemen have developed. In this late Nineteenth Century play, Oscar Wilde presents a story full of suspense but also light enough to merely be enjoyed. As the plot progresses, the audience wonders what Wilde will say next. The whole play is built upon a foundation of irony in which the characters talk highly of moral issues but lack these in and of themselves. Each character is very important to the play and the continuance of the plot. Without John’s inventive story of a brother named Ernest, the whole knot would never have been tied. The friend Algernon causes some of the confusion to magnify the size of the knot that was created by John’s “white lie.” The girls, Gwendelon and Cecily, give the plot an extra twist because they both fall in love with Ernest and will only marry a man named Ernest, yet neither know or even suspect that there really isn’t an Ernest. Algernon’s aunt, Lady Bracknell, is the blocking figure. Her motive is to prevent the marriage of her daughter Gwendelon to John, known as Ernest. Lady Bracknell is also the ”deus ex machina” because in the last act of the
play, she is the one that starts to put all the details together to slowly cause the untying of the knot Wilde skillfully created. Morality and the constrains it imposes on society is a favorite topic of conversation in the play. Algernon thinks that the servant class has a responsability to set a moral standard for the upper classes. Jack thinks reading a private cigarette cigarette case is "ungentelmanly". "ungentelmanly". "More than half of modern culture depends depends on what one shouldn't shouldn't read", Algernon points out. These restrictions and assumptions suggest a strict code of morals that exists in Victorian society, but Wilde isn't concerned with questions of what is or isn't moral. The very title of the play is a double-edged comment on the phenomenon. The play's central plot - the man who both is and isn't Ernest/earnest Ernest/earnest - presents a moral paradox. Earnestness, which refers to both the quality of being serious and the quality of being sincere, is the play's primary object of satire. Characters such as Jack, Gwendolen, Miss Prism - Cecily's governess governess - who put a premium on sobriety sobriety and honesty, are either hypocrites, hypocrites, or else have the rug pulled out from under them. What Wilde wants us to see as truly moral is really the oposite of earnestness : irreverence. Jack's discovery that his life has not been a fiction, that he has indeed been both both "Ernest" and and "earnest" during during the years he thought he was deciving his friends and family, amounts to a complex moral paradox based on an elaborate pun. For years he has been been a liar, but at the the same time he spoke the truth : he really has been been both "earnest" (sincere) and "Ernest". In a way , Jack has become become his own fiction, fiction, and his real life has become the deception. His apology to Gwendolen and his observation that it is "a terrible terrible thing for a man to find out that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth" is both a characteristic Wildean inversion of conventional morality and a lost jibe at the hypocrisy of Victorian society.
