Satire On Gender Roles In Victorian Culture

The play, The Importance of Being Earnest, was written by Oscar Wilde in the late 1800’s. Wilde wrote the play as a means to satirize the Victorian model and social values. He points out the Victorian Period tendency to value an individual’s status and superficiality over there true personality and nature. In Act II, during Algernon and Cecily’s dialogue, Wilde creates humor by poking fun at their relationship. He achieves this by using ridiculous-diction, “double life” and irony.

Oscar Wilde’s play entitled “The Importance of Being Earnest” illustrates the concept of dual personality, fantasy, love, and lies. Jack, Algernon, Gwendolyn, and Cecily all live in lies. They are manipulated by their fantasies and desire for perfect relationship and love. Jack, the protagonist in the play, is the root of lies because of his imaginary brother named Earnest. Algernon uses the name to win Cecily, while Gwendolyn and Cecily are both fascinated by this name because it expresses strength and perfection of manhood. Due to their search and desire to have Earnest, the male and female characters escape from the reality. Therefore, Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest portrays a gender doubled

Imagine you are being used as a tool and ignored from this world. You would feel depressed. In this world, huge number of women or girls are being excluded from the society or their rights and freedoms are ignored from men. Sometimes they get sexually abused or raped and some women can't get education just because they are female and I believe that this is ridiculous because just they have different gender, they are ignored or sometimes used as a tool.

A power struggle often arises as aspects of society change. With feminism entering the limelight, one predicts there to be uproar from the male gender. Unexpectedly, In Act II, the cattiness is unleashed when Cecily and Gwendolen discover they share lovers. As one of the most comedic events in “The Importance of Being Earnest,” this scene contains hidden symbols. Drama climaxes as snacks are being served with these statements:

In the play, The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, there is a lot of humor that can be found. Specifically, developed behind the characters in this play that display many instances of irony and how important it was to fit into the “status quo” of this time period. There are specific behaviors from the characters of Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen, and Algernon that portray Wilde’s opinion of society during the Victorian Age. The attitude of these characters is snobbish and their manners display double standards and superiority. The play’s use of mockery and irony of these satirical situations is meant to publicly ridicule the self- loving attitude of the upper class while exposing their true absence of intelligence which causes their absurd social behaviors

Lindsay Safriet Mr. Blackburn English IV 20 Nov 2015 Victorian Era Sexism: Annotated Bibliography "Historical Analysis: Women as the "the Sex" During the Victorian Era. "Historical Analysis: Women as the "the Sex" During the Victorian Era. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.

Wilde uses Gwendolen’s and Cecily’s obviously superficial affection towards each other to again accentuate and criticize the importance that the Victorian’s placed on an individual’s name. The practice of naming others as a means to display one’s own dominance is satirized by the irony in the argument between the two young ladies. The audience detects that they are undoubtedly fighting over Ernest as well as superiority, but their true feelings are ironically hidden (rather poorly) under fake earnestness. Garland states that, “both women attempt to define the existence of their opponent through rapidly shifting expression of Identity” (272), and cause a quiet fire in the atmosphere of the scene. Since their fight is so indirect and blatantly petty, Wilde is able to comically criticize females of victorian society that are represented by Gwendolen and Cecily.

Viewing the play of The Importance of Being Earnest from a feminist perspective portrays the men in the Victorian Era to be misogynistic. A perpetuated stereotype in this play is that women should be protected from the truth. “Jack:[In a very patronizing manner] My dear fellow, the truth isn't quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl. What extraordinary ideas you have about the way to behave to a woman”(29)! The belief that women are fragile and unable to handle anything serious is present. Furthermore, when Algernon discovers that Cecily is convinced that they had met before and had had many romantic encounters, she is presented as mentally insane. This perpetuates the belief that women depend on men and could not be satisfied without one in their life. In addition to this, Gwendolen and Cecily are the ones being deceived by Jack and Algernon. This shows that women are stereotypically submissive to men and can be taken advantage of. Through evaluating The Importance

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde uses thoughtful laughter to satirize the Victorian Era. In the Victorian Era, marriage is seen as a way to improve an individual’s social standing rather than a commitment of love. Lady Bracknell interviews Jack to see if his wealth and housing will improve Gwendolen’s social standing. The Victorian Era’s high regard for wealth is satirized as Lady Bracknell’s opinion of Cecily immediately changes as she finds out Cecily is wealthy. Jack and Algernon lie about their identities in order to marry Gwendolen and Cecily.

Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (.1993.) is an enlightening epitome of social class in the Victorian era. The satire is driven by the frivolous behaviour, superficial lives and artificial norms within the Victorian aristocracy. Incorporating his own opinion into the play, Wilde continually attacked and mocked their hypocrisy, views on marriage, and their mannerisms. Throughout the play, Wilde used an abundant range of literary techniques to reinforce his opinion. Irony, paradox and hyperboles, as well as witty epigrams and aphorisms were used astutely and were ubiquitous throughout the play. This contributed to the satirical style and tone of the text, and enabled Wilde to effectively communicate his critical perspective on social class in Victorian England.

Previous to Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Victorian comedies consisted mostly of high and low comedy and of ‘dirty or vulgar jokes, dirty gestures, and sex’. Hence, it is possible to suggest that contradictory to Edouard Roditi’s interpretation, the Importance of Being Earnest carries a moral point of view in the fact it does not exploit sex or sexual preferences to effectuate drollery; Wilde provokes laughter through mistaken identities and the consequences of ‘bunburying’ perhaps to allude that his opinions it that sexuality is not a laughing matter. Providing this interpretation is true, it is acceptable to assume that the reasoning behind the negative criticisms the drama received when first written were due to the fact critics felt appalled that a piece of writing could prove successful without it consisting of any sexual nature and hence deemed The Importance of Being Earnest as, ‘dull in comparison to other plays read over the years’.

On the other hand, the Importance of Being Earnest is not only a comedy of manners, as it is also a comedy of humours. Algernon’s greed is portrayed as his overriding trait which dominates his personality, “Eating is the only thing that consoles me”. Here, Algy’s greed is made out to simply consolidate his grief or disappointment. However, we begin to see that Algernon is very self-absorbed which can lead to selfishness which led to Wilde to discuss Victorian repression and guilt. Eequally, Lady Bracknell shows similar traits of selfishness and is very much self-absorbed, but unlike Algy, Lady Bracknell being a woman seems to hold the power. For example, “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two both looks like carelessness”. Here, Lady Bracknell stretches out her opinions on death, and immediately downsizes Jack to be careless, making anything she says far superior to that of Jack’s words. Furthermore, characters like Cecily and

The Importance of Being Earnest appears to be a conventional 19th century farce. False identities, prohibited engagements, domineering mothers, lost children are typical of almost every farce. However, this is only on the surface in Wilde's play. His parody works at two levels- on the one hand he ridicules the manners of the high society and on the other he satirises the human condition in general. The characters in The Importance of Being Earnest assume false identities in order to achieve their goals but do not interfere with the others' lives. The double life led by Algernon, Jack, and Cecily (through her diary) is simply another means by which they liberate

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.

Even though Cecily and Gwendolen have not been set up by society to be powerful characters, they often exert power over the men in the play. In the Victorian world, the stereotypical characteristics of a male revolved around power, strength, responsibility, and have a strong influence over the women in their lives. However in Wilde’s play, the female characters, Gwendolen and Cecily hold a lot of the power and influence over their respective partners, Jack and Algernon. Instead of being dominant and masculine, Jack and Algernon comically make bad choices, are irresponsible, and passive to their love