Aestheticism In The Decay Of Lying By Oscar Wilde

In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the belief that “all the trivial things of life [should be treated] seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” was explored in great detail. Wilde’s intent of mocking the hypocrisy and degrees of the British aristocracy is achieved through the employment of ideas and themes such as deception, characterisation and exploration of character’s names and words.

       In the play “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Oscar Wilde focused on the Victorian Age by mocking the Victorian principles and ideals. Wilde utilized satire and mockery through the character to make fun of their culture, principles, behaviors, and morals of the Victorians. Wilde also used the characters in the play to demonstrate the political, social, and religious views in the late 1900’s.

Act III offers happy resolution to the problems of identity and marriage that drive much of the humor in the previous acts. Wilde continues to mock the social customs and attitudes of the aristocratic class. He relentlessly attacks their values, views on marriage and respectability, sexual attitudes, and concern for stability in the social structure.

Miss Brill remarks how the woman’s hair, face and “even her eyes, [are] the same colour as the shabby ermine” and that the “ermine toque was alone.” The reader can recognize the way Miss Brill and the woman are mirror images: Miss Brill’s fur and the woman’s toque, the woman being rejected and Miss Brill’s loneliness. Even though she notices the specifics of the woman, Miss Brill does not display any awareness regarding the similarities between them. Through indirect characterization, the reader may discern that Miss Brill is preventing herself from consciously empathizing with the woman. She has a world in her mind where she is happy with observing the lives of others. When a truthful image threatens to tarnish her creation, she rejects that notion. She does not want to acknowledge the real world, a world where she is lonely and

In the play by Oscar Wilde “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Wilde takes a comedic stance on a melodrama, portraying the duplicity of Victorian traditions and social values as the modernism of the twentieth century begins to emerge. The idea of the play revolves around its title of the characters discovering the importance of being earnest to their individual preferences. The author uses the traditional efforts of finding a marriage partner to illustrate the conflicting pressure of Victorian values and the changing presence of modern thought.

The play, The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde was written in the Victorian Age of England. During this time morality was connected with sexual restraint and strict codes of conduct in public. This play hilariously critiques Victorian moral and social values while the characters in the play try to figure out the meaning of “earnestness”. Wilde uses humor and irony to publicly ridicule the self-aggrandizing attitude of the Victorian upper classes, as well as to expose their duplicity and hypocrisy in regards to their social behaviors.

The Importance of Being Earnest, written by a fascinating Oscar Wilde reveals a story of social class and hierarchy during the roaring Victorian time period (1837-1901). Focusing his writing on the social classes, the play becomes comical when he exposes the flaws held by the upper class during this time. Wilde saw earnestness as being a key ideal in Victorian culture for much of British society struck Wilde as dry, stern, conservative, and so “earnestly” concerned with the maintenance of social norms and the status quo that it had become almost inhuman. This play depicts certain characters that conform so easily to the conventional social status and characteristics of the Victorian culture. Such characters include Algernon, Jack, Cecily, and Gwendolyn. These characters introduce many themes that focus on the Victorian lifestyle, primarily the issues of being “earnest” and one’s own morality.

Henry’s shocked, “dearest Miss Moreland, what ideas have you been admitting?” not only crushes Catherine’s “visions of romance” and humiliates her of all the gothic tendencies she had entertained throughout the novel, but it also serves to humble the reader; who presumably acted as eagerly as Catherine did in seeing the superficial and assuming that General Tilney was a terrible villain. However this overt satire of gothic literature and its heroines, who “plain as any” Catherine openly defies, also acts as a platform where Austen can criticise her society and how they value texts that openly objectify and demean women to superficial creatures. When Austen says, “gentlemen read better books,” in Miss Austen Regrets, the intertextual link in her words and the use of lighting and shadow elongates her face and emphasise the bitterness of her words. Allowing the responder to understand Austen’s own awareness of the confines that she as a female author experienced in the patriarchal and classist society of 19th Century England. This translates to Northanger Abbey when the mockable Catherine says, “if I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I never will be tricked into it.” Revealing a deep level of integrity and honesty that the more socially accepted Isabella seems to lack. Austen mocks Catherine as a means of openly addressing the contemptuous nature of gothic literature, however she imbues Catherine with qualities integral to a wholesome human being to showcase to the responder, especially in the context of 19th Century England, that society’s gender roles not only shapes female relationships negatively but also shapes the characterisation of women in literature which contributes to the misogynistic mindset of the time and the

As this story begins, Mr. Wright has been murdered and his wife the star witness. The evidence is slowly breaking down their so called case. Women of this time period were not treated like men, a woman was only good when she was slaving for her husband and his needs. As Emily Dickinson once wrote “Hope is the thing with feathers/ that perches in the soul/ and sings the tune-without the words, / and never stops at all.” Mrs. Wright used to sing but Mr. Wright did not like that and forced her to a quiet. Mr. Wright was a bitter old man playing a gentleman; never taking a liking to kids he stole her hope for children, leaving her baron in her womb and her heart. He was a control maniac and demanded power in every aspect of this poor woman’s life; No Children, No Song, No Friends; she had nothing, which meant nothing to lose. In Susan Glaspell’s drama, “Trifles”, we explore the gender inequality between men and women of that time and why that has such a large influence on the murder investigation.

Elinor Fuchs sees the play as a world that passes in front of the critic in ‘time and space’; one that has elements that must be understood (Fuchs, 2004, p 6). These elements closely resembles Aristotle’s six elements of a play- plot, character, thought, diction, music and spectacle- elements that are clearly identifiable in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’.

A Satire in The Importance of Being Earnest: Oscar Wilde is known for his satire, and The Importance of Being Earnest is no exception to Wilde's usual mode of satirical writing. The effect of satire will change, however, depending upon the audience, and one of the fascinating things about this play is that the people Wilde satirizes are also the people he expects to be watching the play. Why does Wilde satirize the viewers who will be buying the tickets? What kind of reaction might he be aiming to evoke in his audience? Historical research into social issues of the time might be helpful here.

English censorship and criticism of Wilde’s play have been posed for many reasons, in addition to the obvious issues of blatant depravity on stage. In Perverse Midrash: Oscar Wilde, André Gide, and Censorship of Biblical Drama, Katherine Brown Downey claims, ‘Much criticism of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, both contemporary with it and more recent, suggests that Wilde intended to create a stir with his play, to flout the censor’s rules, and had written

Such as, Marriage, class discrimination, manners and sincerity. Those themes are presented with the Lady Bracknell’s help. Wilde has created, with Augusta Bracknell, a memorable instrument of his satiric wit, questioning all he sees in Victorian upper-class society. With her power and weakness shown, she, as an upper class lady, connects and presents the themes in the play.

Being one of the most famous plays written by Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest is a romantic comedy that makes good use of the conflicts of characters to deal with themes such as marriage, social class and hypocrisy. There are two different types of conflict to drive plot and capture audience attention in a story: internal and external conflict. The former concerns a character’s emotional, moral or ideological dilemma within his own mind; the latter concerns a character’s struggle against an opposing view from another character, society or the nature. In fact, in The Importance of Being Earnest, by increasing the story’s tension and enhancing character development, the internal and external conflicts of Jack Worthing contribute

The genre of comedy, throughout the history of dramatic art has always served to not only entertain audiences, but to make them aware of their own individual flaws, or flaws that exist in society. (Weitz, E.) Comedy has no precise definition, and its boundaries are broad. One function of comedy however has remained the same - to hold up a mirror to the society of the time but through pleasure, inviting audiences to reflect and also providing amusement. Set in the late nineteenth century, the play An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895) epitomises comedy, as both a literary and dramatic genre. Wilde was masterful in his ability to combine aspects of evolved comedic traditions and dramatic conventions to critique Victorian society. Drawing on characteristics of Greek and Roman tragicomedy, the choices in the play’s plot involves elements of tragedy as well as scenes that serve as comic relief and give the audience a sense of finality through a happy resolution. (Bureman, L) Focussing on the upper class stratum, Wilde employs a comedy of manners Molière style, of the Restoration Period in the seventeenth century in the play by combining forms of comedy with aspects of realist drama. The portrayal of archetypal figures such as Lady Chiltern and Lord Goring satirize rigid moral value of the time and expose their hypocrisies, through dialogue involving irony, wit and humour. Elements of farce and disguises characterized by ‘commedia dell’arte’, a form of comedy first developed in