Oscar Wilde The Importance Of Being Earnest Gender Essay

Once upon a time gender was vastly defining for a person. It determined what a person had to look like, how one acted, and ultimately who someone was in society. Gender was even the same thing as sex. We can see countless examples of this all throughout the world’s history. As a matter of fact, it is the majority of it. Only recently, first truly coming into the spotlight in the 1970s, have we started to see the changing of this ideology. It is quite obvious what the difference of the two sexes is, however sex does not mean gender. Sex is referring to the biological and physical characteristics that separates women from men. In simpler terms, sex is what you were born as. Gender, on the other hand, is referring to the socially fabricated roles,
This philosophies is quite unmistakably represented in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest. Through the various characters like Jack and Cecily, it is clear to see common traits that appear to group the woman and the men into their two distinct categories. This belief that is shown in the play is explicitly written about in “The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits.” In this essay, Sarah Stickney Ellis maps out all of the expectations for women to act in that society. She not only states the apparent importance of it, but then justifies and defends it like it is the only possible credence. These ideas that Sarah Stickney Ellis protects and encourages are extraordinarily powerful. They are still relevant today. Luckily, they have become an empty shell of an idealism today. With the world slowly crawling to more equality for various groups, we can see these constructed norms fade away. This can be seen in various different forms of literature. One of the biggest examples is The Hunger Games. This book, written by Susan Collins, completely defenestrates the idea of what the role of women and men are in Ellis’s late 19th, early 20th century