Essays on The Importance of Being Earnest

Names play a pivotal role in Oscar Wilde’s drama “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The naming of the characters is deliberate and well thought-out. Their name alludes to the pigeonhole for each of their characters. A name is a typecast and in Victorian times, when...

In Oscar Wilde’s, The Importance of Being Earnest, satire is used to emphasize the triviality and absurdity of certain conventions within Victorian society. The play’s main characters epitomize Victorian high society; thus, the criticism that arises from Wilde’s exaggeration extends further than the play itself....

“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces” (2257). So the character of Lady Bracknell observes at the conclusion of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The play as a whole is one firmly preoccupied with the idea of surfaces and...

Oscar Wilde vigorously attacks the institution of heterosexual marriage in his play “The Importance of Being Earnest” by employing light comedy in order to portray characters that are shallow, immature, and oblivious about the commitment into which they are about to enter. Marriage is also...

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde and Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw are both satirical plays meant to criticize Victorian society and war, respectively. While both plays were written by Irish authors familiar with London and both were first performed...

Richard Foster states that The Importance of Being Earnest has a “multivalent nature” and thus implies that a farce or comedy of manners are not particularly urbane genres and are therefore ‘unsuitable’ for The Importance of Being Earnest. Foster argues that the play could be...

Algernon is a comic to a contemporary audience because of his dandyism, his enjoyment of self-gratification, his inverted morals and his double life. Wilde presents Algernon as a dandy figure who is more concerned with style over substance; indeed, Algernon’s nature can be seen through...

The interpretation that “we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” greatly applies to the Importance of Being Earnest. The Importance of Being Earnest is a subversive comedy of manners with...

Honesty is an important trait that is conveyed throughout society. It is the foundation for a long-lasting and meaningful relationship, and it is expected to be practiced in almost every social interaction. Much like today, the Victorian Era valued honestly and upheld the idea of...

In the closing lines of the first act of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Algernon remarks, “I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious,” to which Jack responds, “Oh, that’s nonsense Algy. You never talk about anything but nonsense.”...

Oscar Wilde frames “The Importance of Being Earnest” around the paradoxical epigram, a skewering metaphor for the play’s central theme of division of truth and identity that hints at a homosexual subtext. Other targets of Wilde’s absurd yet grounded wit are the social conventions of...

When novels are adapted to films, often writers and directors make changes, especially if the book was written a significant time ago. They make these changes to draw modern viewers in. Oliver Parker composed the adaption of The Importance of Being Earnest. His adaptation is...