Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnes

Another of Wilde’s plays, and perhaps his most famous, The Importance of Being Earnest, is a comedy, and so it is easy for the audience to become entranced by the humor of the show without examining the underlying symbolism and satire that makes it so funny. The play is, at its core, about the mischief that can ensure when names are given too much importance. The name Ernest, in particular, is coveted by the two main male characters, Jack and Algernon, but also by the two main female characters, Cecily and Gwendolen (Garland 272). But it is not just the name Ernest that is given special significance in the play: other names and terms of address come to represent the dominance that characters are able to exert over each other (Garland 272),
Through the play, “we are made to share Wilde’s view of the ludicrous and sinister realities behind the fashionable façade of an over-civilized society where nothing serious is considered serious and nothing trivial trivial” (Reinert 17). In the interactions between people who subscribe to Victorianism, such as Gwendolen and Cecily, the trivial matter of addressing each other while having a conversation is turned into a manner of enormous social importance. In contrast, in the interactions between people who subscribe to Bunburyism, or the total rejection of Victorianism, matters as serious as pretending to have a dead brother Ernest or sick friend Bunbury are treated lightly. Gwendolen and Cecily’s Victorianism leads them to become enraged at each other without reason, while Jack and Algernon’s Bunburyism very nearly leads to their mutual loss of the women whom they love. In this way, Wilde shows that moral ideals should lie in the middle between Bunburyism and Victorianism because of the consequences of taking both ideas of extremes (Reinert 18). Jack sums up the moral best in the last line of the play when he proclaims that he has “now realized the vital Importance of Being Earnest” (Earnest 313). Through this play, Wilde states that the key to success is to simply behave without thought for social
His characters learn their moral lessons—that selfishness and vanity are corruption, that Victorian morality is hypocritical and empty, and that only a balanced life can lead to true moral satisfaction—through the individual situations with which they are presented and through the different ways in which they deal with those situations. Ultimately, the genius of these works lies in the fact that though they are so different, it is only when considering them together that Wilde’s full criticism of Victorian society in his writing can be