Thinking Activity: The Importance of Being Earnest

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

This blog post is a response of thinking activity on "The Importance of Being Earnest" by Oscar Wilde, which is given by our professor Dr. Dilip Barad Sir.

“[The Importance of Being Earnest] is exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy…That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.”

— Oscar Wilde, from a January 1895 interview with Robbie Ross, published in the St. James Gazette

 The Importance of Being Earnest: A trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. The play was first published in 1895 at the St. James’s Theater in London. It is regarded as one of his finest works. Like most of the Victorian literary works, the main theme of the play is the triviality with which it deals with the institution of marriage, resulting in a satire on Victorian society and its aftermath. Although The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy, there is a serious subtext about Victorian hypocrisy. The play repeatedly mocks Victorian traditions and social customs, marriage, and the pursuit of love in particular.

Wilde explained its philosophy:

"That we should treat all trivial things very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality."

The Importance of Being Earnest tells the story of Jack Worthing who use clever deception to adjust their social interest. Jack has created a fictional brother Ernest, whom he uses as an excuse to escape from country to town. While another character Algernon, who lives in the town, uses the same technique, by creating a friend, Bunbury. This fictional friend provides him opportunities for taking adventures in the country. His intentions are totally different from that of Jack. Algernon basically uses this fictional friend because he wants to live or behave freely. It seems that he is tired of living the life of a gentleman. While Jack uses the name Ernest to sound like a gentleman, and because he started loving Gwendolen Fairfax, Algernon’s Cousin. Later in the play, Algernon disguised as Ernest to meet Cecily, Jack’s ward. When both the girls found their identity, they refused to marry them only because none of them are named Ernest.

Throughout the play, Ernest is a name that encompasses qualities of the ideal man, honourable, passionate, sincere, and deeply trustworthy. Gwendolen says,

“We live in an age of ideals . . . And my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. . .. The only really safe name is Ernest.”

When Jack asks her that what if his name is something else besides Ernest. He gave his real name as an example, but instantly regrets that. Gwendolen thinks that the name John has no harmony that Ernest consists of.

"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."

Both Gwendolyn and Cecily dream of marrying a man named Ernest seems more than a coincidence. Cecily admits,

 “It had always been a girlish dream of mine to love someone whose name was Ernest. There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence.”

Wilde seeks to mock many aspects of Victorian society in this play. He is satirizing the normal views of people in the Victorian era, as they focus more on very minor and unimportant things, highlighting their superficiality. Wilde wanted to make people more aware of the more important things in life, which he does by satirizing Victorian society’s views and ideals such as things like religion and marriage. Religion and marriage are usually two things that are held in very high regard by others, but by mocking them, Wilde is making people aware of how nonsensical they are acting and how stupid they look at times. This is done by the clever usage of epigrams, paradoxes, irony, and sarcasm.