The Importance of Being Earnest: Satire and Identity

Introduction: Wilde, Context, and the Play

The Importance of Being Earnest is a nineteenth-century satire that pokes fun at Victorian values and attitudes. It is unmistakably humorous, yet its background adds a layer of biographical intrigue. Oscar Wilde's homosexuality is an important part of the story surrounding the play. On opening night in London at the St. James's Theatre, the Marquess of Queensberry — father of Lord Alfred Douglas, an intimate friend of Wilde's — had planned to arrive with a "bouquet of rotten vegetables and disrupt the show" (Wikipedia). Wilde discovered the scheme in advance and Queensberry was not permitted into the theater. Shortly afterward, however, Wilde's homosexuality became public knowledge. He was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for alleged "gross indecency." Upon his release he moved to Paris, where he published Earnest, and that effectively marked the end of his career as a playwright.

Plot Summary: Identity, Deception, and Revelation

In the first act, a character known as "Earnest" arrives in London to visit his friend Algernon Moncrieff. The real purpose of the visit — made by "Earnest," whose actual name is John Worthing — is to propose marriage to Algernon's cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax. The play employs the device of switching and concealing true identities, a technique that was hardly new to the stage; Shakespeare frequently used hidden and switched identities as well. In fact, Earnest has been leading a double life, which mirrors Wilde's own circumstances, suggesting that the playwright was drawing on his personal experience when crafting his characters.

Earnest is also "Jack" and "John," depending on where he is and with whom he is speaking. Jack proposes to Gwendolen and she accepts, though she appears to be captivated by the name Earnest in particular, so Jack adopts that name for her benefit. Complications arise when Gwendolen's mother, Lady Bracknell, interviews Jack to assess his suitability as a husband. She discovers that he was an adopted child, found as an abandoned baby at Victoria Station — a background she considers wholly unacceptable for her daughter. Nevertheless, Gwendolen privately declares her love for Jack. Matters grow still more entangled when Algernon overhears Jack giving Gwendolen his country address and travels there himself to meet Jack's other love interest, Cecily.

Algernon meets Cecily and pretends to be "Earnest." Cecily had been led to believe that Earnest was Jack's brother, so she falls for Algernon under the impression that he is exactly that. The confusion is considerable, but highly amusing when witnessed on stage.

When Jack arrives at his country home — where Algernon has already charmed Cecily under the guise of being Earnest — Jack claims to be in mourning, announcing that his brother Earnest has died in Paris of a chill. In Cecily's mind, however, Earnest is very much alive. The confusion reaches its peak when Gwendolen arrives, having fled her mother's home in anger, and she and Cecily compare notes. When Jack and Algernon appear together, their deceptions are exposed and both women are furious.

In due course it is revealed that Cecily is heir to a considerable fortune, further complicating the situation. To add yet another twist, Cecily's governess, Miss Prism, confesses that twenty-eight years earlier she had placed a baby in a handbag and left it in the cloakroom of a railway station — the very location where Jack had said he was found as an orphan. "Mother!" Jack cries, but it is ultimately determined that Jack is not Miss Prism's illegitimate child. He is, in fact, the legitimate son of Lady Bracknell's sister, which makes him Algernon's older brother. The resolution of this twisted series of revelations confirms that Jack, who has long used "Earnest" as an assumed name, has been unwittingly truthful about his real identity all along. He then reminds the audience of "the vital importance of Being Earnest."

Distortion, Moral Conduct, and Restoration Comedy

Deception and frivolity are essential ingredients of farce, and Wilde's deliberate switching of identities serves to distort the play's thematic surface intentionally. This troubles the critic Mary McCarthy, who complained that the play has the character of a "ferocious idyll" and argued that the only moral alternatives Wilde offers are "selfishness and servility" (Parker, 1974). By "deliberately distorting actuality," however, Wilde is expressing what most audiences recognize as a "comic version of the human condition," as D. Parker argues in Modern Literature Quarterly. Parker suggests that while McCarthy applies standards poorly suited to a farcical play — particularly one of that era — her claim that the play is rooted in selfishness may contain a kernel of truth, since the heroes of Restoration comedy bear a clear resemblance to Wilde's characters.

Restoration comedy refers to the theatrical period between 1660 and 1710 in England. For the eighteen years preceding 1660, the Puritan authorities in power had banned public stage performances. Once that prohibition was lifted, the restoration of live theatre brought about "a renaissance of English drama" featuring "sexual explicitness" that appealed to socially diverse audiences — aristocrats, their servants and associates, and a substantial middle class (Princeton University, 2008).

Parker does not argue that Wilde's play is an exact replica of Restoration comedy, but maintains that it clearly "owes something to the Restoration comic tradition" (p. 1). Within that genre, the selfish man is considered generous because he is "not repressed" and possesses a "good nature." Algernon's declarations in Earnest read like lines lifted directly from a Restoration play: "My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree" (Parker, p. 1). Parker uses this parallel to counter McCarthy's objections and to illuminate Wilde's dramatic method. The point is not that Algernon and Jack are to be admired for their roguishness or their romantic exploits, but rather that Wilde assigns them these characteristics because their behaviors carry symbolic weight.

Conclusion

Wilde's play has been put down by some critics because it is a farce that offers no real moral lesson — as though critics expect some ethical or instructive value to emerge even from a comedy of this kind. Taken for what it is, however, The Importance of Being Earnest is a masterful work built on an improbably intricate sequence of strange coincidences, reversals, and circumstances in which characters' true identities remain concealed until the very close of the play. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly.

Works Cited

Parker, D. (1974). Oscar Wilde's great farce: The Importance of Being Earnest. Modern Literature Quarterly, 35(2), 173–186.

Princeton University. (2008). Restoration comedy. Retrieved June 28, 2013, from http://www.princeton.edu.

Wikipedia. (2010). The Importance of Being Earnest. Retrieved June 28, 2013, from http://en.wikipedia.org.