What Are Lady Bracknell Gender Roles

Wilde also critiqued the gender roles of the time period. His character, Lady Bracknell, has been played on many occasion by male actors because of her strong and brash behaviors. She is seen as an immovable obstacle for Jack to overcome. Jack at one point describes her as, “Never met such a Gorgon… In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth,”(Wilde Earnest 1). The Lady is a monster, a repulsive creature. She is not the prim, delicate woman of Victorian England. During this time period women were still expected to be meek and bow to their husbands wills. Lady Bracknell is above this, she is the decision maker, the one that Jack will have to bow too, not the other way around. The two ideas seem to contradict each other. A female character breaking the gender roles of the time period. But then the role is played not by a strong female actress but by a man in
Oscar Wilde was a proud Dandy, and he helped bring the movement back into light with his entrance into English society. Lord Henry and Dorian Gray were examples of dandies, Wilde mentions this when he writes of Dorian’s influence, “Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty,” (Wilde Dorian Gray 104). Algernon and Jack are also examples of dandies as seen when Algernon dresses up as Earnest, “dressed extravagantly like a dandy,” (Wilde Earnest 2). This examples contribute to Wilde’s own admission of Camp. Being a dandy is part of five of Susan Sontag’s: Notes on Camp. She states, “So Camp is the modern dandyism,” (Sontag). Oscar Wilde can not hide away from his preference of dress, the need to take pleasure in the beauty of vanity. He, in modern society, would be viewed as a someone who fits the mold of a gay man. He was almost everything he wished to be, except for being able to be true to his own