The Importance Of Being Earnest Essay

The Importance of Being Earnest is a satirical play by Oscar Wilde that highlights the hypocrisy of the 19th century. During the Victorian Era beautiful advances were made in art and science were contrasted by the extremely divided class structure with obscene wealth reigning on one end while harsh poverty and squalor continued below. The ideal nature of the upper class was glorified, but Wilde utilizes literature to show the gluteny and repressed nature of these individuals to a degree nearing hyperbole

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde uses comedic inversions on the topic of love and marriage to criticize and to humorously mock accepted social norms during the Victorian Age. Wilde uses Lady Bracknell’s requirements for a suitable mate for Gwendolyn’s marriage to create humor in something that society takes seriously. After hearing that Jack plans to propose to Gwendolen, Lady Bracknell realizes she must interview him to determine his suitability. She sits him down and asserts, “I

passage of the play, Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, humor is expressed in many ways. Dramatic irony and satire are the most common sources of humor and he makes it very noticeable. Dramatic irony is when the reader understands the situation but the characters in the story haven’t noticed what is really going on. In one of the scenes of the play, Algernon and Cecily are having a conversation, he asks her that if he would mind being with someone that was not named Earnest and had a different

Jaci B. Gray Professor James Reed English 1302.2532 March 26, 2017 The Importance of Value In the drama “The Importance of Being Earnest,” by Oscar Wilde, Lady Bracknell is right to say that “We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces” (Wilde 1604). This play emphasizes that the Victorian era did not value sympathy for the underprivileged, responsibility, or even true honesty. Only wealthiness, class status, and style were what the Victorians’ cared about. An example of this would be when neither

Jarryd Donald Mrs. Mclawhorn English Literature 12 7 February 2017 The Importance of Being Earnest Analysis In Oscar Wilde’s novel The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde's irreverence towards the rules of the Victorian era, such as marriage, honesty, hypocrisy, and social class are heavily touched on through a satirical manner. Wilde portrays Jack and Algernon as advocates of the Victorian upper class who frequently participate in the art of “Bunburying” as a way to live another life without the

AThe Importance of Being Earnest a play written by Oscar Wilde is set in England in the late Victorian era. Wilde uses obvious situational and dramatic irony within the play to satirize his time period. According to Roger Sale in Being Ernest the title has a double meaning to it and is certainly another example of satire used by Wilde. With a comedic approach, Wilde ridicules the absurdities of the character’s courtship rituals, their false faces, and their secrets. (Sale, 478) In the

‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, is utilised by Wilde to draw attention to the superficiality of the social facades predominantly maintained by the upper classes, through the physical depiction of Jack and Algernon’s aliases. Wilde further exemplifies his discontent with widespread social conventions at the time by satirising the arrogance of the aristocracy with a constant underlying representation of the lower classes as a more humble and less pretentious social division. Moreover, the playwright

In Oscar Wilde’s dramatic novel “The Importance of Being Earnest”, Act II displays humor that contributes to the novel as a whole as being dramatic irony. The source of humor in Act II is the fake engagement of Cecily and Algernon. Wilde emphasizes the humor in Act II with the use of her fake letters between them, their break up and the irony of her desire to love someone named Ernest. Wilde contributes to the humorous novel in Act II by Cecily’s actions of creating fake love letters involving

One of Oscar Wilde’s most notable works, The Importance of Being Earnest, showcases Wilde’s bizarre and arguably backwards take on the literary device known as an aphorism. Most commonly, aphorisms are used in a didactic context and tend to reflect some form of ethical guideline or universal truth. It is easy to write off Wilde’s utilization of the device as ironic, as the aphorisms used in the play demonstrate values that are diametrically opposed to those we recognize in the real world; however

Clash of the Classes One should never expect to marry above or below their class for society would never allow the poor to pair with the rich. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, we are met with two women that believe they have met the love of their lives only to reveal the men’s undisclosed identities. Many themes are shown throughout the trials of the play; however, truth versus deceit is the most prominent. Wilde uses satirical techniques including paradoxes, epigrams, and irony