The Importance of Being Earnest play by Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest, in full The Importance of Being Earnest:A Trivial comedy for Serious people, play in three acts by Oscar Wilde, performed in 1895 and published in 1899. A satire of Victorian social hypocrisy, the witty play is considered Wilde greatest dramatic achievement.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde, in full Oscar Fingal O' Flahertie wills Wilde, Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art's sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895-97).
Character of play
Jack worthing /Earnest
The play protagonist. Jack worthing is a seemingly responsible and respectable young man who leads a double life. In Hertfordshire, where he has a country estate, Jack is known as Jack. In London he is known as Earnest. As a baby, Jack was discovered in a handbag in the Victoria Station by an old man who adopted him and subsequently made Jack Guardian to his granddaughter, Cecily Cardew. Jack is in love with his friend Algernon's cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax. The initials after his name indicate that he is a justice of the peace.
More than any other character in the play, Jack worthing represents conventional Victorian values; he wants others to think he adheres to such notions as duty, honor, and responsibility, but he hypocritically flouts those very notions. Indeed, what Wilde was actually satirizing through Jack was the general tolerance for hypocrisy in conventional Victorian Morality. Jack uses his alter- ego Earnest tohis honorable image intact. Ernest to enable Jack to escape the boundaries of his real life and act as he wouldn't dare to under his real identity. Earnest provides a convenient excuse and Disguise for Jack, and Jack feels no qualms about invoking Ernest whenever necessary. Jack wants to be seen as upright and moral, but he doesn't care what lies he has to tell his loved ones in order to be able to misbehave. Though Ernest has always been Jack unsavory alter ego, as the play progrsses Jack must aspire to become Earnest, in name if not behavior. Until he seeks to marry Gwendolen, Jack has used Earnest as an escape from real life, but Gwendolen Fairfax on the name Earnest obligates Jack to embrace his deception in order to pursue the real life he desires. Jack has always managed to get what he wants by using Ernest as his fallback, and his lie eventually threatens to undo him. Though Jack never really gets his comeuppance, he must scramble to reconcile his two worlds In order to get what he ultimately desires and to fully understand who he is.
Algernon Moncrieff
The play's secondary hero. Algernon is a charming, idle, decorative bachelor, nephew of Lady Bracknell, cousin of Gwendolen Fairfax, and best friends of Jack worthing, whom he has known for years as Earnest. Algernon is brilliant, witty, selfish, amoral, and given to making delightful paradoxical and epigrammatic pronouncements. He has invested a fictional friend, "Bunbury", an invalid whose frequent sudden relapses allow Algernon to wriggle out of unpleasant or dull social obligations.
Gwendolen Fairfax
Algernon cousin and lady Bracknell's daughter. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Earnest. A model and arbiter of high fashion and society, Gwendolen speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and Morality. She is sophisticated, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and utterly pretentious. Gwendolen is fixated on the name Earnest and says she will not marry a man without that name.
Cecily Cardew
Jack's ward, the granddaughter of the old gentleman who found and adopted Jack when Jack was a baby. Cecily is probably the most realistically drawn character in the play. Like Gwendolen, she is obsessed with the name Ernest, but she is even more intrigued by the idea of wickedness. This idea, rather than the Virtuous- sounding name, has prompted her to fall in love with Jack's brother Ernest in her imagination and to invest an elaborate romance and courtship between them.
Lady Bracknell
Algernon snobbish , mercenary, and domineering aunt and Gwendolen mother. Lady Bracknell married well, and her primary goal in life is to see her daughter do the same. She has a list of "eligible young man" and a prepared interview she gives to potential suitors
Like her nephew, Lady Bracknell is given making hilarious pronouncements, but where Algernon means to be witty, the humor in Lady Bracknell's speeches is unintentional. Through the figure of Lady Bracknell, Wilde manages to satirize the hypocrisy and stupidity of the British aristocracy. Lady Bracknell values ignorance, which she sees as " a delicate exotic fruit." When she gives a dinner party, she prefers her husband to eat downstairs with the servants. She is cunning, narrow - minded, authoritarian, and possibly the most quotable character in the play.
Miss prism
Cecily's governess. Miss prism is an endless source of pedantic bromide and cliches. She highly approves of Jack presumed respectability and harshly criticizes his " unfortunate" brother. Puritan though she is Miss prisms severe pronouncements have a way of going so far over the top that they inspire laughter. Despite her rigidity, Miss prism seems to have a softer side. She speaks of having once written a novel whose manuscript was "lost" or "abandoned." Also, she entertains romantic feelings for Dr. Chasuble.
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