The Importance of Being Earnest

In Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde focuses on the ridiculousness of the Victorian era and their etiquette they had to follow. In his play, he creates characters who follow all the rules and makes them out to be very shallow people who don't care about anything other than the materialistic belongings and superficial meanings, such as the importance of being named Earnest. The characters who follow the edicts exactly all seem alike because of all the social rules set upon them. Jack, Algy, Gwen, and Cecily all are similar to the point where they argue the same way about almost the exact same thing. Such when Gwen and Cecily argued about how much sugar in tea is sufficient and when Algy and Jack were auguring about the proper way to ear muffins, both arguments took place while a very important event was happening that they did not care about. For the girls, they found out they were both engaged to Earnest Worthington. Then the men had their argument right after they told their betrothals the truth about their names not being Earnest. These people do not care about something that is life altering because it would be unaccepted to show so much emotion, as Lady Bracknell would most likely have put it. The authors message of how ridiculous the people of that era was well exampled and portrayed all of them as ignorant people who do not care about anything under the surface of things.


A quote I enjoyed in this play was on page 40 when Jack is confessing to Gwen the truth about his non existing brother,

"Gwendolen--Cecily--it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth.
It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful
position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind."

This quote makes me laugh because Jack had just confessed he is not use to telling the truth and he is not "experienced" in the way of speaking it fluently. This quote proves the authors point in how shallow these people were. They were so use to lying and digging no deeper than the surface that telling the truth is harder than coming up with a story to cover a lie. It is also humorous because he talks about telling the truth as lowering himself and his standards.


I really enjoyed reading this play. I loved the fact that the author was ridiculing the etiquette of the Victorian era and the superficial beliefs they had. I also like it because you can relate it to today's' society. In today's society it is all about looks and higher standards and the importance of having the fanciest item and latest trend. For the women in the play it was all about getting a man named Earnest, today it's all about getting a rich man. Also, with the men, Algy and Jack, they switched identifies to get away from their lives and to fool around, which is found in the present day. Although we have come very far, we still see many examples of extremely shallow and ignorant people today who could relate closely to the main characters to this play.