The Importance Of Being Earnest By Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is play which comically engages with socially prescribed roles and conventions. Set within late Victorian England, the play follows John (Jack) Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff, two gentlemen who create false identities in order to escape the burdens of upper-class life. Often subtitled as A Trivial Comedy for Serious People, the play is characterised by a constant sense of frivolity, whereby the seriousness of upper-class life is absent, allowing Wilde to question and satirise its very nature. As a homosexual man living during this time, Wilde’s interrogation of late Victorian roles and conventions gains further significance, as this was a society whose unwritten rules of conduct directly oppressed
Having interrupted Jack and Gwendolen's intimate discussion, Lady Bracknell is horrified to learn about their engagement plans, informing Jack that he is not on her list of ‘eligible young men.’ As Lady Bracknell proceeds to interrogate Jack, he states that he knows neither of his parents and was discovered in a handbag as a baby, to which Lady Bracknell reacts aghast, declaring that she will not allow her daughter to ‘form an alliance with a parcel.’ By equating Jack to a ‘parcel,’ Lady Bracknell effectively dehumanises him, exposing a cruelty in her character which emanates from her unhealthy concern for her own reputation. However, at the very end of the play, Lady Bracknell’s haughty assumptions are unveiled as being both flawed and hypocritical. When it is revealed that Miss Prism had been a governess for Lady Bracknell and her husband, she admits to having lost one of the children in a handbag, only for Jack to realise that that child was him. After discovering his father’s name in the army lists from the time, Jack learns that he is in fact Ernest Moncrieff: Algernon’s elder brother and Lady Bracknell’s nephew. Here, Wilde creates a great sense of irony by revealing that Jack, the man whom Lady Bracknell had previously shunned from her family, is actually her nephew. This moment strongly underscores the dubious nature of Lady Bracknell’s presumptions, as her efforts to maintain a strong reputation are in clear conflict with reality, signalling the wider dilemma faced by a society whose constant triviality obscures