The Importance of Being Earnest     

               Hello friends, today I have discussed with you a play called The Importance of Being Earnest.  The play is written by Oscar Wilde.  This is a funny kind of play.  In which certain events are created by many characters from which humor is generated.  The play depicts Victorian times.  What kind of relationships and what kind of events happened in married life.  Oscar Wilde has shown what kind of events happen to choose a partner for a wedding.  The sheer reality of society is portrayed in this play.The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways. Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour and the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most enduringly popular play.

        

Key Facts about the play:

Full Title: The Importance of Being Earnest: A Trivial Comedy for Serious People

Author :Oscar Wilde

Type Of Work: Play

Genre: Social comedy; comedy of manners; satire; intellectual farce

Language: English

Time And Place Written: Summer 1894 in Worthing, England

Date Of First Production: February 14, 1895. In part because of Wilde’s disgrace, the play was not published until 1899.

Publisher: L. Smithers

Tone :Light, scintillating, effervescent, deceptively flippant

Setting (Time): 1890s

Setting (Place): London (Act I) and Hertfordshire, a rural county not far from London (Acts II and III)

Protagonist :John Worthing, known as “Ernest” by his friends in town (i.e., London) and as “Jack” by his friends and relations in the country

The Importance of Being Earnest:-

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1 ]   Wilde originally subtitled The Importance of Being Earnest "A Serious Comedy for Trivial People" but changed that to "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." What is the difference between the two subtitles?

            Though Wilde originally gave the play the subtitle A Serious Comedy for Trivial People, he decided to change it to A Trivial Comedy for Serious People. The art of satire is to ridicule ideas, conditions, or social conventions with which the audience is familiar (or even practices and supports) without alienating that audience. In order for Wilde to reach audience members, they must attend the production. If Wilde openly and publicly insulted them by referring to them as "trivial people," they would not attend and might even react more forcefully. Despite his efforts, however, people did indeed realize he was calling them trivial through his comedy, and in part this caused the play to be banned.

2]  Which of the female character is the most attractive to you among Lady Augusta Bracknell, Gwendolen Fairfax, Cecily Cardew and Miss Prism? Give your reasons for she being the most attractive among all.

Inside the play are four lady characters.  Which is as follows...Gwendolen, Cecily, Miss Prism, and above all Lady Bracknell. All the characters are different from each other.  Each actor has a different image of himself.  Which we see inside the play.  If there is any attractive character for me in this lady character it is cicely.

More than any other female character in the play, Gwendolen suggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood. Because the image of women at that time is seen in this character.She is a lovely women.  She loves a guy named Jack who is known as Ernest.

"GWENDOLEN. Jack? . . . No, there is very little music in the name Jack, if any at all, indeed. It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations . . . I have known several Jacks, and they all, without exception, were more than usually plain. Besides, Jack is a notorious domesticity for John! And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John. She would probably never be allowed to know the entrancing pleasure of a single moment’s solitude. The only really safe name is Ernest."

                This preoccupation serves as a metaphor for the preoccupation of the Victorian middle- and upper-middle classes with the appearance of virtue and honor. Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Ernest, whose name, she says, “inspires absolute confidence,” that she can’t even see that the man calling himself Ernest is fooling her with an extensive deception. In this way, her own image consciousness blurs her judgment.

She is lovely women

"JACK. My own one, I have never loved any one in the world but you.

 GWENDOLEN. Yes, but men often propose for practice. I know my brother Gerald does. All my girl-friends tell me so. What wonderfully blue eyes you have, Ernest! They are quite, quite, blue. I hope you will always look at me just like that, especially when there are other people present."

       She loves Ernest.  Because he loves the name Ernest.Though more self-consciously intellectual than Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen is cut from very much the same cloth as her mother. She is similarly strong-minded and speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and morality, just as Lady Bracknell does. She is both a model and an arbiter of elegant fashion and sophistication, and nearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect. As Jack fears, Gwendolen does indeed show signs of becoming her mother “in about a hundred and fifty years,” but she is likeable, as is Lady Bracknell, because her pronouncements are so outrageous.

3]    The play repeatedly mocks Victorian traditions and social customs, marriage and the pursuit of love in particular. Through which situations and characters is this happening in the play.

           Inside the play we find ourselves mocking love because so many characters love each other.  But because of any race or economic separation and reunion happens.  Another special note is that the characters who are loved are loved because of the name.  Which in fact the character of that name does not exist.  Cecily loves a person who has never seen and only got information about him by hearing his name.  And when Algernon comes to be the ernest and he seems to love her.  Which in fact was not Ernest.  Gwendolen on the other hand also loves a man named ernest.  Whose original name was jack.  Gwendolen did not love Jack but loved a man named Ernest.  So from the character of these two couples, we can say that love is mocked in this play, which is love with a name.

           When it comes to marriage, Gwendolen's mother, Lady Bracknell Ernest, tries to find out whose child she really is and what class she comes from.  Which leads us to casteism.  It indicates its place in society.  When his son's wedding to Sicily is about to take place, he 

immediately agrees.  Because he has a lot of money.  So a reality of the society of that time is also seen in this play.

         Morality and the constraints it imposes on society is a favorite topic of conversation in The Importance of Being Earnest. Algernon thinks the servant class has a responsibility to set a moral standard for the upper classes. Jack thinks reading a private cigarette case is “ungentlemanly.” “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read,” Algernon points out. These restrictions and assumptions suggest a strict code of morals that exists in Victorian society, but Wilde isn’t concerned with questions of what is and isn’t moral. Instead, he makes fun of the whole Victorian idea of morality as a rigid body of rules about what people should and shouldn’t do. The very title of the play is a double-edged comment on the phenomenon. The play’s central plot—the man who both is and isn’t Ernest/earnest—presents a moral paradox. Earnestness, which refers to both the quality of being serious and the quality of being sincere, is the play’s primary object of satire. Characters such as Jack, Gwendolen, Miss Prism, and Dr. Chasuble, who put a premium on sobriety and honesty, are either hypocrites or else have the rug pulled out from under them. What Wilde wants us to see as truly moral is really the opposite of earnestness: irreverence.

4]  Queer scholars have argued that the play's themes of duplicity and ambivalence are inextricably bound up with Wilde's homosexuality, and that the play exhibits a "flickering presence-absence of… homosexual desire" Do you agree with this observation? Give your arguments to justify your stance.

           Yes I agree with the author's opinion because a lot of the characters in this play are portrayed the way the author speaks.  The characters shown inside the play show a craze for each other.  Love each other in this play.  And also shows a willingness to marry them.  Some of the barbaric customs in the society stop them.  But they can’t stop themselves.  Which is a mere reality of society.

Concluded :-

           In this novel we are shown the prevailing marriage practice in the society.  The same marriage practice is going on even today.  Which ran in Victorian times many years before today.  Through many of these characters we come to realize that a lover has to follow the norms set in the society in order to settle his lover.  Which is the main theme of the play.

Thank You 

Words -1581