The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde
Earnest
Adjective

1.serious in intention, purpose, or effort;

sincerely zealous: an earnest worker.

2.showing depth and sincerity of feeling:

earnest words; an earnest entreaty.

3.seriously important; demanding or

receiving serious attention.

Noun The TITLE, which refers to both

the quality of being serious
4.full seriousness, as of intention or and the quality of being
purpose: to speak in earnest.
sincere, is the play’s primary
object of satire.
Early Life
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
Wilde was born on October 16,
1854 in Dublin, Ireland. His
father, William Wilde, was an
acclaimed doctor who was
knighted for his work as medical
advisor for the Irish censuses.
William Wilde later founded St.
Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital,
entirely at his own personal
expense, to treat the city's poor.
Oscar Wilde's mother, Jane
Francesca Elgee, was a poet and
a skilled linguist and had a deep
influence on her son's later
writing.
Wilde was a bright and bookish child. He
attended the Portora Royal School at
Enniskillen where he fell in love with Greek
and Roman studies. He won the school's prize
for the top classics student in each of his last
two years, as well as second prize in drawing
during his final year. Upon graduating in 1871,
Wilde was awarded the Royal School
Scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin.
At the end of his first year at Trinity, in 1872,
he placed first in the school's classics
examination and received the college's
Foundation Scholarship, the highest honor
awarded to undergraduates.
Upon his graduation in 1874, Wilde received a scholarship for further study at Magdalen
College in Oxford. At Oxford, Wilde continued to excel academically, receiving first class marks
from his examiners in both classics and classical moderations. It was also at Oxford that Wilde
made his first sustained attempts at creative writing.

Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live

with his friend, Frank Miles, a popular portraitist among
London's high society. There, he continued to focus on writing
poetry, publishing his first collection, Poems, in 1881. While the
book received only modest critical praise, it nevertheless
established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer.

The next year, in 1882, Wilde traveled from

London to New York City to embark on an
American lecture tour.
On May 29, 1884, Wilde married a
wealthy Englishwoman named
Constance Lloyd. They had two sons:
Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born in
1886. A year after his wedding, Wilde
was hired to run Lady's World, a once-
popular English magazine that had
recently fallen out of fashion.

During his two years editing Lady's

World, Wilde revitalized the magazine by
expanding its coverage to "deal not
merely with what women wear, but with
what they think and what they feel.
The Lady's World," wrote Wilde, "should
be made the recognized organ for the
expression of women's opinions on all
subjects of literature, art and modern
life, and yet it should be a magazine that
men could read with pleasure."
Acclaimed Works
Beginning in 1888, while he was still serving
as editor of Lady's World, Wilde entered a
seven-year period of furious creativity, during
which he produced nearly all of his great
literary works.

Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan,

opened in February 1892 to widespread
popularity and critical acclaim, encouraging
Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary
literary form.

Over the next few years, Wilde produced

several great plays—witty, highly satirical
comedies of manners that nevertheless
contained dark and serious undertones. His
most notable plays were
A Woman of No Importance (1893),
An Ideal Husband (1895) and
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his
most famous play.
Personal Life and Prison Sentence

Around the same time that he was

enjoying his greatest literary success,
Wilde commenced an affair with a
young man named Lord Alfred
Douglas.

On February 18, 1895, Douglas's

father, the Marquis of Queensberry,
who had gotten wind of the affair,
left a calling card at Wilde's home
addressed to "Oscar Wilde: Posing
Somdomite," a misspelling of
sodomite.

Although Wilde's homosexuality was

something of an open secret, he was
so outraged by Queensberry's note
that he sued him for libel. The
decision ruined his life.
When the trial began in March, Queensberry
and his lawyers presented evidence of Wilde's
homosexuality—homoerotic passages from his
literary works, as well as his love letters to
Douglas—that quickly resulted in the dismissal
of Wilde's libel case and his arrest on charges
of "gross indecency." Wilde was convicted on
May 25, 1895 and sentenced to two years in
prison.

Wilde emerged from prison in 1897, physically

depleted, emotionally exhausted and flat
broke. He went into exile in France, where,
living in cheap hotels and friends' apartments,
he briefly reunited with Douglas.

Wilde wrote very little during these last years;

his only notable work was a poem he
completed in 1898 about his experiences in
prison, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."
Death and Legacy
Wilde died of meningitis on November
30, 1900 at the age of 46.

More than a century after his death,

Wilde is still better remembered for his
personal life—his exuberant personality,
consummate wit and infamous
imprisonment for homosexuality—than
for his literary accomplishments.

Nevertheless, his witty, imaginative and

undeniably beautiful works, in
particular his novel The Picture of
Dorian Gray and his play The
Importance of Being Earnest, are
considered among the great literary
masterpieces of the late Victorian
period.
THEMES

#1. The Nature of Marriage

Pleasant or Unpleasant. Each character’s
response reflects the conventional
preoccupations of Victorian respectability
—social position, income, and character –
closely tied to deception

#2. The Constraints of Morality

#3. Hypocrisy (DECEPTION)

#4. The Importance of Not Being

“Earnest”
Earnestness can take many forms,
including boringness, solemnity,
pomposity, complacency, smugness, self-
righteousness, and sense of duty, all of
which Wilde saw as hallmarks of the
Victorian character.
MOTIFS

#1. Puns: In The Importance of Being

Earnest, the pun, widely considered to be
the lowest form of verbal wit, is rarely just
a play on words. The pun in the title is a
case in point. We find out he is neither
Earnest nor Ernest.

#2. Inversion: The play contains inversions

of thought, situation, and character, as
well as inversions of common notions of
morality or philosophical thought.

#3. Death

#4. The Dandy: a witty, overdressed, self-

styled philosopher who speaks in
epigrams and paradoxes and ridicules the
cant and hypocrisy of society’s moral
arbiters.
SYMBOLS

#1. The Double Life: the notion of

“Bunbury” or “Bunburying.”

As defined by Algernon, Bunburying is

the practice of creating an elaborate
deception that allows one to
misbehave while seeming to uphold
the very highest standards of duty and
responsibility.

#2. Food: Food and gluttony suggest

and substitute for other appetites and
indulgences.

#3. Fiction & Writing: Life as an art

form, i.e., diary.
The CHARACTERS
John (Jack/Ernest) Worthing, J.P. -
The play’s protagonist. Jack Worthing is
a seemingly responsible and
respectable young man who leads a
double life.

In Hertfordshire, where he has a country

estate, Jack is known as Jack. In London
he is known as Ernest.

Jack is in love with his friend

Algernon’s cousin, Gwendolen
Fairfax. The initials after his name
indicate that he is a Justice of the Peace.
Algernon Moncrieff -

The play’s secondary hero.

Algernon is a charming, idle, decorative

bachelor, nephew of Lady Bracknell,
cousin of Gwendolen Fairfax, and best
friend of Jack Worthing, whom he has
known for years as Ernest.

Algernon is brilliant, witty, selfish,

amoral, and given to making delightful
paradoxical and epigrammatic
pronouncements.

He has invented a fictional friend,

“Bunbury,” an invalid whose frequent
sudden relapses allow Algernon to
wriggle out of unpleasant or dull social
obligations.
Gwendolen Fairfax -

Algernon’s cousin and Lady

Bracknell’s daughter.

Gwendolen is in love with Jack,

whom she knows as Ernest.

A model and arbiter of high

fashion and society, Gwendolen
speaks with unassailable authority
on matters of taste and morality.

She is sophisticated, intellectual,

cosmopolitan, and utterly
pretentious.

Gwendolen is fixated on the name

Ernest and says she will not marry a
man without that name.
Cecily Cardew -

Jack’s ward, the granddaughter of the

old gentlemen who found and adopted
Jack when Jack was a baby.

Cecily is probably the most realistically

drawn character in the play.

Like Gwendolen, she is obsessed with

the name Ernest, but she is even more
intrigued by the idea of wickedness.

This idea, rather than the virtuous-

sounding name, has prompted her to fall
in love with Jack’s brother Ernest in her
imagination and to invent an elaborate
romance and courtship between them.
Lady Bracknell - Algernon’s snobbish, mercenary,
and domineering aunt and Gwendolen’s mother.

Lady Bracknell married well, and her primary goal in

life is to see her daughter do the same. She has a list
of “eligible young men” and a prepared interview she
gives to potential suitors.

Like her nephew, Lady Bracknell is given to making

hilarious pronouncements, but where Algernon means
to be witty, the humor in Lady Bracknell’s speeches
is unintentional.

Through the figure of Lady Bracknell, Wilde

manages to satirize the hypocrisy and stupidity of
the British aristocracy.

Lady Bracknell values ignorance, which she sees as

“a delicate exotic fruit.” When she gives a dinner
party, she prefers her husband to eat downstairs with
the servants.

She is cunning, narrow-minded, authoritarian, and

possibly the most quotable character in the play.
Miss Prism -

Cecily’s governess. Miss Prism is an endless

source of pedantic bromides and clichés.

She highly approves of Jack’s presumed

respectability and harshly criticizes his
“unfortunate” brother.

Puritan though she is, Miss Prism’s severe

pronouncements have a way of going so far
over the top that they inspire laughter.

Despite her rigidity, Miss Prism seems to have Rev. Canon Chasuble, D.D. -
a softer side. She speaks of having once The rector on Jack’s estate. Both Jack
written a novel whose manuscript was “lost” or and Algernon approach Dr. Chasuble to
“abandoned.” request that they be christened “Ernest.”

Also, she entertains romantic feelings for Dr. Dr. Chasuble entertains secret romantic
Chasuble. feelings for Miss Prism. The initials after
his name stand for “Doctor of Divinity.”
Lane -
Algernon’s manservant.

When the play opens, Lane is the only person

who knows about Algernon’s practice of
“Bunburying.”

Lane appears only in Act I.

Merriman -

The butler at the Manor House, Jack’s estate in

the country.

Merriman appears only in Acts II and III