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Importance Of Being Earnest

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‘The Importance of Being Ernest’ is a comedic play written by Oscar Wilde. It was set and written during the Victorian Era, and is a parody of the Victorian culture. In the play, there are many different contrasting characters, including the main character Jack, and Algernon, who we find is his brother later in the play. Algernon is a very unserious person, who is also quite irresponsible, and just wants things in life to be fun. We see this a few times throughout the play. For example, when there has been a big argument between Jack and Algernon and their fiancés, he eats muffins, and says, when asked about it “Well, I can’t eat muffins in an agitated manner. The butter would get on my cuffs. One should always eat muffins calmly.” This shows …show more content…

One example is his having to look after Cecily, as he is the person who has power over her, because he is her guardian. We see this when Miss Prism says “You know how anxious your guardian is to improve you in every way.” This means that Jack feels strongly that he needs to make sure that Cecily has a good education, and knows the proper social etiquette in Victorian society, and he knows that he is responsible for looking after her properly. In addition, we see that he does also care about Cecily, seeing as if he didn’t, then he wouldn’t want her to be able to learn well, and would most likely leave Miss Prism to sort out all of Cecily’s education, rather than instructing Miss Prism on what to …show more content…

One similarity is that they’re both quite deceptive in order to achieve what they want. The reason we know this is because they both “Bunbury”. One point where we see Algernon reveal that he thinks “Bunburying”, or using a fake identity or person, is an okay and a normal things to do is where he says “I naturally want to talk to you about Bunburying. I want to tell you all of the rules.” From this, we know that he thinks it’s a fine thing to do, and we know that he himself is also quite deceitful in that way. Also, it shows us that he’s happy to find out that Jack does the same as him, and him not finding it strange means that he thinks it’s quite a common thing to be done. Both characters are untruthful about their true identities at different points in the play, with them both pretending to be Ernest

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