Assignment Important of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Name- Hinaba D Sarvaiya.

Roll no- 09

Paper no- 104 Literature of the Victorians

Email id- hinabasarvaiya1711@gmail.com

Enrollment no- 4069206420210032

Submitted to- Department of English MKBU.

 "The Importance of being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde.

Introduction:-

Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest derives much of its comedic and thematic helf from the way in which it inverts the values of every day life. The play constantly pokcs fun at conventionally serious topics like love, death, and religion while simultaneously handling trivialities with the utmost seriousness.

Let's discuss about the author:-

Oscar Wilde was an incredibly influential Irish poet, writer, and playwright that changed the way people wrote and the structure of writing. He was one of the greatest writers of the 18th century and possibly one of the greatest writers and wordsmiths of all time. His works earned many awards and high acclaim, even years after his death, leaving a legacy that most people would do anything for. He used a newfound way of writing and presented himself in a enigmatic and eccentric way. His clever and often dramatic writing, as well as his image and personal scandals, completely shook up the world of literature and art and keeps us shaking to this day.

It wasn’t until the production of his four plays in the 1890s that Wilde achieved his greatest success. "They were Lady Windermere’s Fan," "A Woman of No Importance," "An Ideal Husband," and "The Importance of Being Earnest." All of the plays are well made comedies but out of them The Importance of Being Earnest is considered Oscar Wilde’s best and most characteristic drama. The play had more realistic characters and situations than the previous three plays he and written before. Wilde was involved in the middle of a scandal with Lord Alfred Douglas who was the son of the Marquis of Queensberry. He was arrested in April. The charges were committing homosexual acts. Wilde was sentence to serve two years hard labor. While Wilde was in prison his play The importance of Being Earnest was a huge success up until that point. Promoters removed Wilde’s name from advertisements and programs, but attendance to the play slowly dwindled. While in prison, Wilde continued to write. Of his writings he created a poem call The Ballad of Reading Gaol and the essay De Profundis. After his release he retired to France, where he lived the remainder of his life. He attempted to revive his literary career there as well but unfortunately was unsuccessful.

The Importance of Being Earnest :-

Importance of Being Earnest is quite an amusing play. Oscar Wilde is able to set the scene very well. The verbal wit in the play reflects on who Oscar Wilde was. The details that are put in the names, how and where people were brought up, and the way they dress print a beautiful picture in the mind. Wilde’s play seems to have you look at the actors and try to find the real people that you can relate to under the social norms. For the time when this was made, the play is brilliant and light-hearted. I can definitely see why Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is one of the writer’s greatest achievements and reflect the pinnacle of his writing career.

Let's discuss about the hypocrisy of Victorian Society:-

The Victorian Period in English literature is roughly taken to

be between 1830 and 1900, approximately coinciding with

the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) in England. The

age is well-known for its sham seriousness, hypocritical mo-

rality and artificial sophistry. Living a double life was quite a

common practice of the period. Oscar Wilde hurls his shaft

against the hypocrisy and snobbery of the aristocratic society

of the late Victorian England.

The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde’s most stage-

successful play, was first produced by George Alexander at

the St James’s Theatre on 14 February 1895. It is a portrait

gallery of the Victorian upper class life. It focuses on certain

binaries – moral / immoral, serious / trivial, town / country and

so on. Studying the hypocritical morality of the period, Sid-dhartha Biswas in his book Studies in The Importance of Be-

ing Earnest comments:

Victorian morality, as we all know, was a storehouse of con-

tradictions and inconsistencies. It was more dominated by ta-

boos erected by social constructs rather than by any system based on rationality. By the end of the nineteenth century the baggage of this morality was creating pressure on socio-literary fields and a break was quite in the offing.Wilde’s

play provides a mirror image of this society.

A comedy of manners is a descriptive term applied to a play whose comedy comes from social habits of a specified society. The play normally bases on the dominant members of the society. The social habits involve the manners and the morals practiced in the specified society. The play normally features the conduct and social status of the upper classes in a given society and how they interact with the lower classes. In most cases, the lower classes interact with the upper classes by taking roles as servants, trade people and other responsibilities as such. Therefore, I think this play can only act in a hierarchical society with a population of different classes and social status.

The Importance of Being Earnest A Trivial comedy for serious People:-

Though Wilde originally gave the play the subtitle A serious comedy for Trivial people, he decided to change it to A Trivial Comedy for serious People. The art of satire is to ridicule ideas, conditions, or social conventions with which the audience is familiar without alienating that audience, members they must attend to production. If wilde openly and publicly insulted them by reffering to them as "Trivial People" they would not attend and might even react more forcefully. Despite his efforts, however, people did indeed realise he was calling them trivial though his comedy, and in part. This caused the play to be banned.

Characters in the play:-

 

Joh(Jack/Ernest)Worthing:

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. As a baby, Jack was discovered in a handbag in the cloakroom of Victoria Station by an old man who adopted him and subsequently made Jack guardian to his granddaughter, Cecily Cardew. 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.