hypocrisy. Set in Victorian England, the two bachelors, Algernon and Jack, fight over which one of them will take the name Ernest in order to win their own girl. Wilde circumvents conventionalism and employs superior satirical strategy to not only teach the importance of being earnest, a characteristic held dear by Victorian society, but he also chastises his world for the hypocrisy between man and woman and between upper and lower classes. Earnest does more than criticize Victorian society: the play remains
exaggeration around a core of society.” Satire exposes the absurdity embedded in society through exaggerated extremes of social norms. Satire is the hyperbolic expressions of absurdity, which provides clarity through sarcasm and offensive exaggerations to project a society’s ethics. In Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde exposes the absurdity of Victorian aristocratic social propriety. Wilde utilizes numerous ironic puns and sarcasm in order to satirize Victorian social responsibilities
the people of the Victorian Era act. The play itself follows Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, and their quest to get acquainted with their future fiancées, Cecily Cardew and Gwendolen Fairfax. Additionally, Wilde wrote the play during the aestheticism movement, which promoted the creation of art for art’s sake. Through the use of humor, irony, and sarcasm, Wilde highlights the artificiality of Victorian society. From this, two major themes arise: people from the Victorian Era place significance
as a children’s story, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has remained a mainstay with children and adults for well over one hundred and fifty years. Adults and children today can see the faults of government and society with Carroll’s use of logical nonsense to satirize Victorian era society, morality, and their sense of justice. One
2015 The Victorian Age: An Upper Class Society The Victorian Period, the years between 1837 and 1901, was named after the reign of the great Queen Victoria in English civilization. It was during her regime that England gained economic prosperity, experienced the rapid growth of the empire, encountered dramatic changes and religious beliefs. Various social classes represented the population of England, comprising of the upper class, the middle class, the working class and the under class. Social order
Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, playwright and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. During the late Victorian era of the 19th century, when literature was more economically accessible, Oscar Wilde's works became profoundly famous. Wilde's works have been critiqued and admired for years due to his exalted style of writing and ability to encode his morals. Oscar Wilde
The Importance of Being Earnest is a trivial comedy that filled with sarcastic and witty Victorian aphorisms while satirizing the Victorian society and their social morality. Wilde criticizes against the arrogance, self-importance, ignorance, and hypocrisy of the Victorian high society, also targets plenty of ideals and morality facts that were as ridiculous as they were nonsensical. Earnestness is a determined and serious desire to do the correct thing. Ironically, not one character in the play
uncomfortable talking about in a non-comedic setting. However, the greatest type of comedy is one that makes the reader think, one that provokes “thoughtful laughter” from them. “The Importance of Being Earnest”, a satirical play written during Victorian Era Britain by Oscar Wilde, is such a piece literature. By poking fun at the time period in which his characters live in during one particular scene, as well as illustrating the unsubdued hilarity of a character during that scene, Wilde is able to
A central theme of English literature in the Victorian Era was the criticism of various facets of the society. With all the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution, authors such as Charles Dickens used their work to express their views on the social system and stratification of classes. Likewise, Oscar Wilde was a playwright whose criticism, expressed in the form of satire, mostly targeted the upper classes. His famous play The Importance of Being Earnest provides a prime example of the use
Sofi Sosa Professor Klein British Literature 11 December 2017 Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest presents a satirical play that is used to emphasize the insignificance and absurdity of certain “rules” within Victorian society. The main characters in the play characterize Victorian high society; therefore, the criticism that arises from Wilde’s exaggeration extends further than the play itself. More specifically, Wilde exaggerates the consumption of food, something that seems to be