The Importance of Being Earnest

Because Victorian norms were so repressive and suffocating, Wilde creates episodes in which his characters live secret lives or create false impressions to express who they really are. Jack and Algernon both create personas to be free. These other lives allow them to neglect their duties in Algernon's case, or to leave their duties and pursue pleasure, which happens to be in Jack's case. Various characters in the play allude to passion, sex and moral looseness. Chasuble and Prism's flirting and coded conversations about things sexual, Algernon stuffing his face to satisfy his hungers, the diaries (which are the acceptable venues for passion), and Miss Prism's three-volume novel are all examples of an inner life covered up by suffocating rules. However, the major target of Wilde's scathing social wit is the hypocritical mask of society.

Frequently in Victorian society, its participants comported themselves in overly sincere, polite ways while they harbored conversely manipulative, cruel attitudes.

"You brute! You coward!" from an anonymous artist'...

English: Still photograph from Act 1 of the origin...

Oscar Wilde in 1889

Wilde exposes this divide in scenes such as when Gwendolen and Cecily behave themselves in front of the servants or when Lady Bracknell warms to Cecily upon discovering she is rich, but the play truly pivots around the word "earnest." Both women want to marry someone named "Ernest," as the name inspires "absolute confidence"; in other words, the name implies that its bearer truly is earnest, honest, and responsible.

Victorian values were perpetuated through courtship and marriage, both of which had their own rules and rituals. The strict Victorian class system, in which members of the same class marry each other, perpetuates the gulf between the upper, middle and lower classes. Snobbish, aristocratic attitudes further preserve the distance between these groups. The aristocratic Victorians valued duty and respectability above all else. Earnestness, a determined and serious desire to do the correct thing was at...