The Importance Of Being Earnest By Oscar Wilde

“I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.” (IOBE P.24). Most people would not create another life in order to obtain happiness as their own should give them enough pleasure. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, not one, but two characters end up leading a double life with the same name. Jack Worthing is an upper-class man who lives in the country being Cecily Cardew’s guardian. When not in the country but in the town, Jack calls himself Ernest. Algernon, “Ernest’s” friend in the town, is another upper-class man, who lives the life of a bachelor in the town. When he gets tired of the city, he goes into the country as Jack’s brother Ernest.
During this time period, people looked at marriage not really for love but based on specific criteria like wealth, family, and social status. Lady Bracknell throughout the entire play will not give Jack permission to marry Gwendolen since we do not know about his familial background even though he has some wealth, did not mind his political views, and liked that he had two houses. Lady Bracknell says “You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter - a girl brought up with the utmost care - to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?” (IOBE P.15). The only way that Gwendolen’s mother would allow her daughter to marry him would to try to find someone that he is related to and find information on his deceased parents to provide Lady Bracknell with that knowledge. When Lady Bracknell gets information that her nephew Algernon wants to marry Jack’s ward Cecily she does not like that. But as soon as Jack mentions that Cecily has loads of money saved, she immediately changed her opinion of her as Algernon has gone bankrupt. She says “Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her.” (IOBE P.47). From Lady Bracknell’s lines in the play, the readers can all see that she thinks very highly of herself and the upper class which fits perfectly into what the Victorian Era was
Oh! Of course, I have been rather reckless. (IOBE P.24).
This can be seen as verbal irony as he was saying how he took bad actions during his life but him saying being reckless is him talking about getting himself into this situation of leading a second life.
Oscar Wilde does not just use dramatic and verbal irony in The Importance of Being Earnest, he uses the third type of irony called situational irony. Situational irony is when a situation ends up having a completely different ending than what was intended. When Jack in the second act of the play announces “Ernest’s” death, Cecily comes in and says that his brother Ernest has arrived and he tells her that he does not have a brother. This ends up as situational irony since at the end of the play the characters and audience find out that Jack and Algernon are actually brothers. It is very comical when we find out since the two have been pretending they were brothers for the past day or two when in reality they actually were related. When they learn of the news Jack says “Algy’s elder brother! Then I have a brother after all. I knew I had a brother! I always said I had a brother! Cecily,—how could you have ever doubted that I had a brother?” (IOBE P.53). Jack’s feelings about having a brother have done a complete 180 and put the blame on Cecily for saying that he did not have a brother when he was the one who said