The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

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• John 'Jack' Worthing: Main character. Goes by the name of Ernest when in London.
• Algernon 'Algy' Moncrieff: Best friend of Jack. Cousin of Gwendolen.
• Lady Bracknell; Aunt Augusta: Wealthy older lady. Mother of Gwendolen, aunt of Algeron.
• The Hon. Gwendolen Fairfax: Daughter of Lord and Lady Bracknell
• Cecily Cardew: Ward of Jack Worthing, grand-daughter of Thomas Cardew
• Miss Laetitia Prism: Cecily's tutor
• Reverend Canon Frederick Chasuble, D.D.; Dr. Chasuble: Vicar on Jack Worthing's country estate
• Lane: Algeron's man servant
• Merriman: The butler at the Manor House, Jack’s estate in the country.
• Mr. Ernest Worthing: Jack's fictional brother, whose fake existence gets Jack out of the country
• Willis: Add a description of this character.
• Mr. Bunbury: Algy's fictional invalid friend whose fake existence gets Algy out of engagements he doesn't want to go to in the city.
• Miss Cecily Cardew: The 18-year-old ward of Jack Worthing
• Mr. John Worthing
• Miss Fairfax
• Mr. Algernon Moncrieff
• Gwendolen Lady Bracknell
• Uncle Jack

Quotes edit see section history

• “The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by always being immensely over-educated.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “Well, I can't eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would probably get on my cuffs. One must eat muffins quite calmly, it is the only way to eat them.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon. Only people who can’t get into it do that.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “To speak frankly, I am not in favour of long engagements. They give people the opportunity of finding out each other’s character before marriage, which I think is never advisable.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating...”

  Lady Bracknell

• “Two weak points of our age are its want of principles and its want of profile.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “Algernon is an extremely, I may say an ostentatiously, eligible young man. He has nothing, but looks everything. What more one can desire.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “I never go without dinner. No one ever does, except vegetarians and people like that.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “Well, one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “When I am in trouble eating is the only thing that consoles me.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “It is very vulger to talk about one's business. Only people like stock brokers do that, and then merely at dinner parties.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “...by persistently remaining single, a man converts himself into a permanent public temptation.”

  Miss Prism

• “I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.”

  Cecily

• “The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “...the truth isn't quite sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.”

  Jack

• “I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodvess we had a few fools left”

  Jack

• “Relations are simply a tedious pack of people, who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “I hate people who are not serious about their meals. It is so shallow of them.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance. Ognorance is like a delicate fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone. The whole theory of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate education produces no effect whatsoever.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “...if one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others.”

  Lady Bracknell

• “...in married life three is company two is none.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow. Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University. They do it so well in the daily papers.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn't read”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “...girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don't think it is right”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “Divorces are made in Heaven.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. .... The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “...if the lower orders don't set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility”

  Algernon Moncrieff

• “Ms Prism: Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.Cecily: Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.”

• “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Lady Bracknell
• Mr. Worthing
• Aunt Augusta
• Worthing
• London
• Miss Fairfax
• Paris
• Hertfordshire, England

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Death: Jokes about death appear frequently in The Importance of Being Earnest. Lady Bracknell comes onstage talking about death, and in one of the play’s many inversions, she says her friend Lady Harbury looks twenty years younger since the death of her husband. With respect to Bunbury, she suggests that death is an inconvenience for others—she says Bunbury is “shilly-shallying” over whether “to live or to die.” On being told in Act III that Bunbury has died suddenly in accordance with his physicians’ predictions, Lady Bracknell commends Bunbury for acting “under proper medical advice.” Miss Prism speaks as though death were something from which one could learn a moral lesson and piously says she hopes Ernest will profit from having died. Jack and Algernon have several conversations about how to “kill” Jack’s imaginary brother. Besides giving the play a layer of dark humor, the death jokes also connect to the idea of life being a work of art. Most of the characters discuss death as something over which a person actually has control, as though death is a final decision one can make about how to shape and color one’s life.
• The Dandy: To the form of Victorian melodrama, Wilde contributed the figure of the dandy, a character who gave the form a moral texture it had never before possessed. In Wilde’s works, the dandy is a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams and paradoxes and ridicules the cant and hypocrisy of society’s moral arbiters. To a very large extent, this figure was a self-portrait, a stand-in for Wilde himself. The dandy isn’t always a comic figure in Wilde’s work. In A Woman of No Importance and The Picture of Dorian Gray, he takes the form of the villains Lord Illingworth and Lord Henry Wootton, respectively. But in works such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde seems to be evolving a more positive and clearly defined moral position on the figure of the dandy. The dandy pretends to be all about surface, which makes him seem trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. Lord Darlington and Lord Goring (in Lady Windermere’s Fan and An Ideal Husband) both present themselves this way. In fact, the dandy in both plays turns out to be something very close to the real hero. He proves to be deeply moral and essential to the happy resolution of the plot.In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon has many characteristics of the dandy, but he remains morally neutral throughout the play. Many other characters also express dandiacal sentiments and views. Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell are being dandiacal when they assert the importance of surfaces, style, or “profile,” and even Jack echoes the philosophy of the dandy when he comes onstage asserting that “pleasure” is the only thing that should “bring one anywhere.” For the most part, these utterances seem to be part of Wilde’s general lampooning of the superficiality of the upper classes. The point is that it’s the wrong sort of superficiality because it doesn’t recognize and applaud its own triviality. In fact, Cecily, with her impatience with self-improvement and conventional morality and her curiosity about “wickedness,” is arguably the character who, after Algernon, most closely resembles the dandy. Her dandiacal qualities make her a perfect match for him.
• The Double Life: The double life is the central metaphor in the play, epitomized in the notion of “Bunbury” or “Bunburying.” As defined by Algernon, Bunburying is the practice of creating an elaborate deception that allows one to misbehave while seeming to uphold the very highest standards of duty and responsibility. Jack’s imaginary, wayward brother Ernest is a device not only for escaping social and moral obligations but also one that allows Jack to appear far more moral and responsible than he actually is. Similarly, Algernon’s imaginary invalid friend Bunbury allows Algernon to escape to the country, where he presumably imposes on people who don’t know him in much the same way he imposes on Cecily in the play, all the while seeming to demonstrate Christian charity. The practice of visiting the poor and the sick was a staple activity among the Victorian upper and upper-middle classes and considered a public duty. The difference between what Jack does and what Algernon does, however, is that Jack not only pretends to be something he is not, that is, completely virtuous, but also routinely pretends to be someone he is not, which is very different. This sort of deception suggests a far more serious and profound degree of hypocrisy. Through these various enactments of double lives, Wilde suggests the general hypocrisy of the Victorian mindset.
• Food: Food and scenes of eating appear frequently in The Importance of Being Earnest, and they are almost always sources of conflict. Act I contains the extended cucumber sandwich joke, in which Algernon, without realizing it, steadily devours all the sandwiches. In Act II, the climax of Gwendolen and Cecily’s spat over who is really engaged to Ernest Worthing comes when Gwendolen tells Cecily, who has just offered her sugar and cake, that sugar is “not fashionable any more” and “Cake is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays.” Cecily responds by filling Gwendolen’s tea with sugar and her plate with cake. The two women have actually been insulting each other quite steadily for some time, but Cecily’s impudent actions cause Gwendolen to become even angrier, and she warns Cecily that she “may go too far.” On one level, the jokes about food provide a sort of low comedy, the Wildean equivalent of the slammed door or the pratfall. On another level, food seems to be a stand-in for sex, as when Jack tucks into the bread and butter with too much gusto and Algernon accuses him of behaving as though he were already married to Gwendolen. Food and gluttony suggest and substitute for other appetites and indulgences.
• Fiction and Writing: Writing and the idea of fiction figure in the play in a variety of important ways. Algernon, when the play opens, has begun to suspect that Jack’s life is at least partly a fiction, which, thanks to the invented brother Ernest, it is. Bunbury is also a fiction. When Algernon says in Act I, “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read,” he may be making a veiled reference to fiction, or at least reading material perceived to be immoral. In Act II, the idea of fiction develops further when Cecily speaks dismissively of “three-volume novels” and Miss Prism tells her she once wrote one herself. This is an allusion to a mysterious past life that a contemporary audience would have recognized as a stock element of stage melodrama. Cecily’s diary is a sort of fiction as well: In it, she has recorded an invented romance whose details and developments she has entirely imagined. When Cecily and Gwendolen seek to establish their respective claims on Ernest Worthing, each appeals to the diary in which she recorded the date of her engagement, as though the mere fact of having written something down makes it fact. Ultimately, fiction becomes related to the notion of life as an art form. Several of the characters attempt to create a fictional life for themselves which then, in some capacity, becomes real. Wilde seems to regard as the most fundamentally moral those who not only freely admit to creating fictions for themselves but who actually take pride in doing so.
• The Constraints of Morality: 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.
• Hypocrisy vs. Inventiveness: Algernon and Jack may create similar deceptions, but they are not morally equivalent characters. When Jack fabricates his brother Ernest’s death, he imposes that fantasy on his loved ones, and though we are aware of the deception, they, of course, are not. He rounds out the deception with costumes and props, and he does his best to convince the family he’s in mourning. He is acting hypocritically. In contrast, Algernon and Cecily make up elaborate stories that don’t really assault the truth in any serious way or try to alter anyone else’s perception of reality. In a sense, Algernon and Cecily are characters after Wilde’s own heart, since in a way they invent life for themselves as though life is a work of art. In some ways, Algernon, not Jack, is the play’s real hero. Not only is Algernon like Wilde in his dandified, exquisite wit, tastes, and priorities, but he also resembles Wilde to the extent that his fictions and inventions resemble those of an artist.
• The Constraints of Morality: 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.
• The Nature of Marriage: Marriage is of paramount importance in The Importance of Being Earnest,both as a primary force motivating the plot and as a subject for philosophical speculation and debate. The question of the nature of marriage appears for the first time in the opening dialogue between Algernon and his butler, Lane, and from this point on the subject never disappears for very long. Algernon and Jack discuss the nature of marriage when they dispute briefly about whether a marriage proposal is a matter of “business” or “pleasure,” and Lady Bracknell touches on the issue when she states, “An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be.” Even Lady Bracknell’s list of bachelors and the prepared interview to which she subjects Jack are based on a set of assumptions about the nature and purpose of marriage. In general, these assumptions reflect the conventional preoccupations of Victorian respectability—social position, income, and character.The play is actually an ongoing debate about the nature of marriage and whether it is “pleasant or unpleasant.” Lane remarks casually that he believes it to be “a very pleasant state,” before admitting that his own marriage, now presumably ended, was the result of “a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.” Algernon regards Lane’s views on marriage as “somewhat lax.” His own views are relentlessly cynical until he meets and falls in love with Cecily. Jack, by contrast, speaks in the voice of the true romantic. He tells Algernon, however, that the truth “isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl.” At the end of the play, Jack apologizes to Gwendolen when he realizes he had been telling the truth all his life. She forgives him, she says, on the grounds that she thinks he’s sure to change, which suggests Gwendolen’s own rather cynical view of the nature of men and marriage.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Oscar Wilde (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PR5818 .I4
• Dewey: 822.8

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Drama › Playwrights, A-Z › ( W ) › Wilde, Oscar
• Books › Literature & Fiction › World Literature › British › Classics › Wilde, Oscar
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Authors, A-Z › ( W ) › Wilde, Oscar
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Drama › British & Irish › 19th Century

Links to Supplemental Material edit see section history

• External Review: The Importance of Being Earnest is one of Wilde's most famous plays and still commands the affection of the public through its cinematic adaptations; most recently with Reece Witherspoon and Colin Firth. In Earnest, Wilde uses a mixture of social drama; popular at the time and other popular but less politically engaged forms such as melodrama and farce. The use of gentle parody is probably what protected Wilde from the more biting attacks aimed at his contemporaries such as Henrik Ibsen and Thomas Hardy who commented to similar effect on the values and attitudes of Victorian society. Within the drama Wilde manages to satirise the values that many still believed were the very reason for the great triumphs of Victorian Britain on the world stage. These were the ideas of respectability, self sacrifice, moral rectitude and high mindedness that were closely associated with the Victorian aristocracy. Little by little however Wilde reveals all these to be simply elements of an elaborate mask worn by the ruling elites, behind which each is engaged in precisely the opposite modes of behaviour. In short the principle characters will go to any lengths to avoid their responsibilities and place self interest at the top of their own agendas. Through the literary techniques of dramatic irony parody and reversals Wilde reveals the moral hypocrisy at the heart of the Victorian establishment.
• External Review: This play was the last play written by the celebrated Oscar Wilde, and proved to be his most popular and enduring. This hilarious satire is all about the double lives of two would-be bridegrooms. The plot involves two fashionable young gentlemen, Algernon Moncrieff (Algy) and his close friend John Worthing (Jack), and their eventual successful courtship of Gwendolen Fairfax (Algy's cousin), and Cecily Cardew (Jack's ward).
• Wikipedia Article: The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at St. James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae in order 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. Contemporary reviews all praised the play's humor, though some were cautious about its explicit lack of social messages, while others foresaw the modern consensus that it was the culmination of Wilde's artistic career so far. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde's most enduringly popular play.

Movie Connections edit see section history

• Importance of Being Earnest (IMDb): 2002: Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Reese Witherspoon.
• The Importance of Being Earnest (IMDb): 1952: Michael Redgrave.

More Books Like This edit see section history