Importance of being earnest genre. Historical Context of The Importance of Being Earnest by Allison Hambrick on Prezi 2019-01-16

SparkNotes: The Importance of Being Earnest: Key Facts

When Lady Bracknell interrogates Jack, we learn that all she cares about is his money, his trendiness, and his family name. Her mad thirst for love based on the charming name earnest made Gwendolen's love substance-less. The dandy pretends to be all about surface, which makes him seem trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. The situation at hand is so impossible to believe that it is almost laughable, in … fact it is so given the way it is handled. 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. So the pun is that the title of the play appears to mean: The Importance of being a Serious Person ; but when we watch the play we realise that the real title is: The Importance of having Ernest for a First name. Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Importance of Being Earnest Study Guide from LitCharts

While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. In this Play he has explained the exaggerated … lives, the people at the time led. In the play Wilde shows Jack and Algernon are being in loveless love with Gwendolen and Cecily respectively. It has been argued that Wilde's plays are not so much about people as about words. Algernon has made up an invalid friend in the country to excuse himself from unwelcome family obligations. To a very large extent, this figure was a self-portrait, a stand-in for Wilde himself. It is the only thing that makes me put up with them at all.

Introduction Reading The Importance of Being Earnest The Importance of Being Earnest: Advanced

The play, with these main points in mind, becomes a comedy when Gwendolen and Cecily meet together in the country and the search for the truth becomes absolutely hilarious. In general, these assumptions reflect the conventional preoccupations of Victorian respectability—social position, income, and character. The decriminalization of homosexuality in England in 1967 and the emergence in American of an interest in gay culture, and particularly in the covert homosexual literature of the past, has made it possible to view the play in a different light. The Importance of Being Earnest as a Comedy of Manners The Importance of Being Earnest is an enlightening example of comedy of manners as it makes fun of the behavior of Victorian aristocracy which attaches great value to hypocrisy, frivolity, superficiality, artificiality and money mindedness. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impassibility! Food and gluttony suggest and substitute for other appetites and indulgences.

SparkNotes: The Importance of Being Earnest: Key Facts

Hence he invented an invalid friend in the country to use as an escapade from the town, creditors and relative. Almost always these attempts are simply distractions. By making a mockery of the Victorian ideals, Wilde threw a satirical spotlight on the Victorian age as a whole. 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. 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 faddish cult of living an earnest life was on the rise in the Victorian society. Because Victorian society permitted youths to lead a double life, Jack chose that name.

The Importance of Being Earnest as a Comedy of Manners

The Importance of Being Earnest. This love devoid of emotional depth is satirized by Wilde in the play. Hence Oscar wilde Unlike his other serious writings made this play a comedy yet successfully tried to bring the real message in front of our eyes i. Literary and artistic acclaim were slow in coming to Wilde. These dresses include hard bustles, elaborate hats, and as in the production I saw puffed sleeves.

The Importance of Being Earnest as a Comedy of Manners

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. Wilde seems to regard as most fundamentally moral those who not only freely admit to creating fictions for themselves but who actually take pride in doing so. Gwendolyn in goggles and cap driving a motor car also added nothing and seemed to place the play some years after the fact. It was first performed on 14 February 1895 at in. It was the last play he ever wrote due to his trouble with the law over his homosexuality and his conflict with the Marquess of Queensberry. Ugly, selfishness, unnecessary pride, false sense of self-worth and dangerous haughtiness developed as evils which corroded the simple charm and unspoiled nature of people. Wilde became known for his flamboyant style of dress, his contempt for traditional values, and his belief in aestheticism, which embraces the principle of art for the sake of beauty alone.

The Importance of Being Earnest Study Guide from LitCharts

She didn't even look upon Cecily for Algernon until she got to know she has a large personal fortune. The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde's career but also heralded his downfall. With the name Earnest Jack went to town to meet his friend, Algernon. She fell in love with him on the spot. Part satire, part comedy of manners, and part intellectual farce, this play seems to have nothing at stake because the world it presents is so blatantly and ostentatiously artificial. The pun in the title is a case in point.

The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)

Wilde used this self-deprecating character as his greatest criticism of Victorian society by portraying him as shallow by nature and relatively ineffectual. As a consequence, decadence occured. Characters such as Jack, Gwendolen, Miss Prism, and Dr. He wrote about how young men then, loved to sit idle and wanted to have fun most of the time and live a life of extravagance. The play derives force from a brilliant fabric of epigram and paradox.

The Importance of Being Earnest (2002)

What does the society get from those people who fall in love out of the magical, charm of name only? Many of the characters in the play spend their time trying to convince each other, and themselves, that they are high-minded people with strong morals and are admired in society. In many ways, The Importance of Being Earnest was an artistic breakthrough for Wilde, something between self-parody and a deceptively flippant commentary on the dramatic genre in which Wilde had already had so much success. The big mistake movie directors often make when making a movie from a stage play is to feel compelled to get the play off the stage and out into the streets and countryside. Lady Bracknell makes light of a grave tragedy through her position of social rank in relation to the boy. The moralism of Victorian society—its smugness and pomposity—impels Algernon and Jack to invent fictitious alter egos so as to be able to escape the strictures of propriety and decency.