OSCAR WILDE

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

Oscar Wilde was one of the most successful playwrights of his day but he was also a complex person full of contradictions. Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854, the son of a distinguished surgeon and a nationalist poetess. He went to Trinity College in Dublin and then to Magdalen College in Oxford. After graduating he was forced to earn a living and moved to London, where his fellow Irishmen Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats were settled. Wilde established himself as lecturer and a writer for periodicals but foremost as a spokesperson for the aesthetic movement whose credo was “art for art’s sake.” In 1882 he visited America on a successful lecture tour where he claimed that “to disagree with three fourths of all England on all points of view is one of the first elements of sanity” (Norton 1720). He married in 1884 and had two sons. He wrote three volumes of short fiction with little success but excelled as a critic of literature and of society in essays like “The Decay of Lying” (1889), “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1890) and “The Critic as Artist” (1890). His only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) created a sensation but his most outstanding success came as a writer of society comedies staged in London between 1892 and 1895, including Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. However, in 1895, after having a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, he was accused of homosexuality and was sentenced to prison with hard labour for two years. In prison he wrote the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) and his prose confession and critique of himself, De Profundis (1905). When he was released, in 1897, he was a ruined man, divorced and declared a bankrupt. He went into exile to France, where he lived under an assumed name until his death in 1900.

The duality of Wilde is fascinating as well as confusing. He was a man of numerous identities and his position in society was ambivalent. He was at the same time a colonized Irishman and a socialite, a husband and a homosexual, a successful playwright accepted in high society and a socialist. He was “the Anglo-Irishman with Nationalist sympathies; the Protestant with life-long Catholic leanings” (Holland 3). As a dandy he dressed in colourful costumes in contrast to the sober black suits of the Late Victorian middle classes and yet he was admitted to good society because of his charismatic manners and witty conversation. As a spokesperson for the “aesthetes,” who revolted against the earnestness of Victorian ideals and enjoyed mocking middle-class opinions, Wilde challenged and shocked his audience by using sensational imagery, hyperbole, dandyism and decadence. In his own life and in his art he criticized society; he “criticized his audience while he entertained it” (Peter Hall, Guardian), and like a jester he was allowed to do so. But when he was arrested he went from fool to martyr, from comic to tragic. He became a mere Irishman and commoner who had dared to have had “an intimate relationship with the son of a peer of the realm” (Cave vii). Three days before he died, when asked about his life, Wilde said: “Some said my life was a lie but I always knew it to be the truth; for like the truth it was rarely pure and never simple”

The last line echoes one of the characters in Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest – A Trivial Comedy for Serious People (1895), a play very much concerned with double identities and the question of what is true. My thesis is that Wilde, in this play, employed the well-established Late Victorian concept of double identity as well as a dualistic theme, revealed in the language and in the strategies of lying, in order to exploit the hypocrisy of society. In The Importance of Being Earnest, there are two principal male characters, Jack and Algy, who have invented aliases that enable them to lead a double life. The dualistic theme is not only displayed in the characters’ use of double identities but in the language of the play and the play as a whole. The name Ernest is a pun and the dialogue is full of contradictions, misunderstandings and lies which are true and vice versa: the characters say one thing and mean something else and are sometimes more truthful when they actually are lying. What does the theme of double identity and dualistic language convey? What is true and what is false? Why all these paradoxes? Why lie? In this essay I will show that in The Importance of Being Earnest the notion of double identity and duality is connected to the language and the lying and reveals a society of double standards of morality and turn out to be a deconstruction of Victorian moral and social values. I will also argue that the duality, the double identities and the lying might be explained partly in a colonial context. Since Wilde was Irish and a covert homosexual, he represented a despised ‘other’. Through his studies, reading Classics at Oxford, Wilde was granted access to the privileged though. He could thereby be regarded as a part-time outsider. Peter Raby asserts in “Wilde’s comedies of Society” that Wilde used this position to portrait and expose English society, a society that still ruled a large part of the world, and that he imitated Englishness as “a subtle form of insult”

In The Importance of Being Earnest, there is an obsession with names, and especially with the name of Ernest. Griffith states in Writing Essays about Literature that playwrights usually keep their characters simple enough for the audience to understand during the course of a performance and therefore often use stock characters and give them names to indicate their traits (Griffith 93). Investigating the characters’ names and their possible connotations can therefore add to the understanding of the characters and their identity. To name something is to give it an identity, which is particularly interesting in a play so utterly concerned with identity. Moreover many of the characters lead double lives or at least have a secret past, i.e. a double identity.

John Worthing, called Jack, is the protagonist of the play. Jack has a country estate in Hertfordshire where he is the Justice of Peace. He is a serious, responsible guardian to his adoptive father’s granddaughter Cecily and he stands for all the Victorian values of morality: duty, honour and respectability; “When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so” (Wilde 301). However, he pretends to have an irresponsible brother, named Ernest, who lives a scandalous life and always gets into trouble, which requires Jack to rush off to London to his assistance; “In order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes” (301). Thereby, Jack can disappear for days and do as he likes. In London, Jack goes under the name of Ernest; “My name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country” (300), and can live the life he pretends to disapprove of. He thus uses Ernest, his alter-ego, both as an excuse and a disguise to keep his honourable image intact. Jack does, in fact, not know his real name and who he is for as a baby he was found in a hand-bag in the cloak-room at Victoria Station. Wilde used to incorporate place-names, as well as other material at hand, into his comedies, and the name of Worthing was borrowed from a seaside resort in Sussex where Wilde had spent a holiday while he worked on the play (Raby 143). Worthing had the serious properties apposite to a guardian and a Justice of Peace and the name of John/Jack is traditionally and plain enough as we are to understand from Gwendolen: “there is very little music in the name of Jack… It does not thrill. It produces absolutely no vibrations… And I pity any woman who is married to a man called John” (307). John Worthing is accordingly a solid, respectable name, suitable to the protagonist’s position and identity as a Justice of peace, a guardian and a pillar of society. However, his name and identity are not exciting and therefore restrictive. Hence, his invention of Ernest gives him new possibilities.

The name Ernest had previously appeared in one of Wilde’s comedies of society, A Woman of No Importance, in which Mrs Allonby mocks her absent husband Ernest. Russell Jackson admits in his essay “The Importance of Being Earnest” that ‘earnest’ in some circles was a code-word for homosexuals, but claims that it first and foremost had connotations of ‘probity’ and ‘high-mindedness’ and that “The claims that Wilde was writing out his Irishness in the double selves of his protagonists are more convincing than the argument for The Importance of Being Earnest as a specifically gay play” (Jackson 173). In The Importance of being Earnest, the characters are more occupied with the name Ernest than the fact of actually being earnest. Marrying a man called Ernest can be a goal in life; Gwendolen exclaims: “my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence. The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you” (306), and Cecily is of the same opinion “it had always been a girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest… There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest” (332). At the end of the play Jack has to reconcile his two names and identities and then he finally understands who he really is.

Algernon Moncrieff, Algy, is the other main principal character of the play and he invents an imaginary friend to conceal his double life as well as borrow Jack’s alias Ernest to impose on Cecily. Algernon Moncrieff’s name is Scottish and aristocratic in sound; “It is not at all a bad name. In fact, it is an aristocratic name. Half of the chaps who get in to bankruptcy Court is called Algernon” (332). He is the charming, idle, selfish, witty dandy of the play, Wilde’s alter-ego, just as Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance and Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. While the latter two are evil and the two former are good, Algy has no moral convictions other than to live beautifully. To be able to escape dull social obligations: “in order that I can go down into the country whenever I choose” (301), he has invented an imaginary invalid friend called Bunbury who lives in the country and constantly summons Algy to his deathbed. In that way Algy can indulge himself while suggesting seriousness and duty. Further in the play he impersonates Jack’s invented brother, Ernest, to approach Cecily. Consequently, in spite of his high position in the aristocracy, Algy employs Bunbury as an alibi and Ernest as a double character in order to escape society and improve his prospects.

Another example of dualism in the characters’ behaviours is found in Lady Bracknell, Algy’s aunt and Gwendolen’s mother, who sets herself up as guardian of the morality of the society and implying that she is the only reliable source of taste and probity. She is found to be a parvenu, a social climber, and not an aristocrat at all; “When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way” (349). Lady Bracknell’s name is derived from a place in Berkshire where Lord Alfred Douglas’s mother had a summer home, which Wilde had visited.

The two young ladies of the play, Gwendolen and Cecily, represent the city and the country and both of them have secret lives. The names of the two young ladies are differentiated in a way that: “Gwendolen Fairfax carries a certain weight and crisp urbanity, appropriate for Lady Bracknell’s daughter”, whereas the name “Cecily Cardew, has a musical lightness about it” (Raby 145). Gwendolen, the sophisticated city lady, leads a ‘double life’ in the sense that she pretends to go to a lecture but instead runs away to Ernest in the country. Cecily Cardew, Jack’s ward, is a natural girl, almost a child of nature and she is just as imaginative, enthusiastic and as capable as Jack and Algy to invent a fantasy life. She lives a ‘double life’ in her diary where she invents a romance and even an engagement to Jack’s wicked brother, Ernest. The diary becomes her fantasy world; “I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life” (318). She even buys herself a ring and writes letters from him, “The three you wrote me after I had broken off the engagement are so beautiful, and so badly spelled, that even now I can hardly read them without crying a little” (331).

Cecily’s governess, Miss Prism, in comparison, has two very different sides: one rigid and prude puritan side where she highly approves of respectability; “As a man sows, so shall he reap” (323), and harshly criticizes people who live for pleasure only, and one more soft romantic side where she talks about having written a novel. What is more, she has romantic feelings for Chasuble, the vicar. Her dark secret is that she confused a baby and a manuscript twenty-eight years ago and placed the baby by mistake in her handbag, which she deposited at Victoria Station. Chasuble, ever so fond of metaphors, calls Miss Prism ‘Egeria’, which is the name of the Roman nymph who taught the Roman king judicial responsibility and self-discipline and her name is as a consequence an epithet for a woman who provides guidance. Yet Miss Prism’s real name is Laeticia, which means ‘joy’ and ‘delight’ and shows that she has two sides, the moralistic guiding governess and the softer romantic self.

In contrast, Canon Chasuble D.D. is aptly and properly named after the ecclesiastical canon and a liturgical vestment; a chasuble is an ornament garment worn by priests. D.D. stands for Doctor of Divinity and he is constantly carrying out christenings; it is as Miss Prism says: “one of the Rector’s most constant duties in this parish” (324). Even Jack and Algy request christenings, and Chasuble can thereby be seen as highly connected to the notion of giving a name. To give a name is to give a definition. There is thus a theme of christenings in the play and when Jack and Algy ask to be christened it is as if they want to go back to childhood and change their identity. To change one’s name and identity is an important concern from a postcolonial point-of-view where one can be almost doomed by a name since a name might reveal your nationality or your otherness: To change one’s name and to gain a new identity is a device to fit in better and to get better prospects. Jack is not allowed to get married when he is Jack Worthing. However, his new identity in the end as Ernest Moncrieff gives him better prospects; a name is therefore of great importance.

Raby argues that Wilde used names in his plays as an act of revenge. In 1894 he was in a dispute with his publishers, Lane and Matthews, so he used their names as the manservant and butler in The Importance of Being Earnest. He relented in the case of Matthews, though, and changed it to Merriman (Raby 145). In the play, even the seemingly unimpeachable Lane turns out to have led a double life when he lets slip that he has been married: “I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young lady” (296). It is, in short, not only the upper-class that is forced to lead a double life; the entire society seems to be constrained to the same device.

Beyond that, Wilde originally wrote a four-act version of the play but it was later to be reduced to three acts and one scene that Wilde himself thought to be one of the funniest was “The excised scene, involving Gribsby”. In that scene ‘Parker and Gribsby, Solicitors’ are announced but only one gentleman is in the hall. He later explains “I am both, sir. Gribsby when I am on unpleasant business, Parker on occasions of a less severe kind” (Wilde 432). In the tree-act version, however, the name of Miss Cardew’s solicitors is Markby, Markby and Markby. The name Markby is borrowed from an old-established firm of London solicitors connected to Wilde’s friend Robert Baldwin Ross, to whom The Importance of being Earnest was dedicated. Wilde tried to create a particular resonance in the selections of names and “Markby conveys an air of respectability, indeed gentility, far removed from the less salubrious solicitors of the four-act version, Gribsby and Parker, in which ‘Gribsby’ has the ring of a particularly ruthless, Dickensian kind of lawyer” (Raby 144). Merlin Holland, Wilde’s grandson writes in “Biography and the art of lying” that Wilde had an “almost childlike pleasure in the grandeur of historic names: ‘Surely everyone prefers Norfolk, Hamilton and Buckingham to Smith or Jones or Robinson’” (Holland 9), Wilde is supposed to have said. According to Holland this proves Wilde’s fascination with the aristocracy. In brief, the characters’ names are carefully chosen to give the right connotations, and the importance of names is emphasized as a theme in the play. Different names give different possibilities; names can be restrictive but also beneficial, depending on the situation. Since names are connected to identity, a new name can lead to an identity with new possibilities and better prospects. In addition, there are other ways to escape restrictions: by leading a double life or inventing a double identity, i.e. a complement to their selves.

As shown in this chapter, the theme of dualism and complementary character is evident in the play. There are two male principles, Jack and Algy. They argue most of the time, very often about food, and accuse each other of trivial things just like siblings would do and in the end they in fact turn out to be brothers, i.e. complementary, and Jack can exclaim: “Then I have a brother after all. I knew I had a brother! I always said I had a brother” (356). Furthermore, there are two young ladies, Gwendolen and Cecily, who are even more complementary characters since they represent two sides of England. Gwendolen represents the fashionable city and Cecily the natural countryside; both of them reconcile and become sisters, sisters-in-law, but not until “they have called each other a lot of other things first” (314), as Algy so accurately predicted in the first act. These two brothers and two sisters make two couples. Jack escaped to the city and pretended to be Ernest and found his bride and Algy escaped to the country, pretended, just like his brother, to be Ernest and found his bride. Chasuble and Prism also ends up being a couple, reconciling church and education and Lane and Merriman, the perfect butlers add perfectly to the symmetry of the doublings. The only one who is on her own is Lady Bracknell, representing Victorian values and society, “insisting that she is the pinnacle of convention, good form and normality and that others must in consequence behave according to her dictate” (Mighall 430). She tells everyone what to do and stands, as suggested in the stage directions of the first production, in the middle of the stage at the end of the play with the couples grouped symmetrically around her (Cave 429).

The evidence so far suggests that Wilde was, just as the title of the play implies, highly aware of how important a name could be. Each name has a certain ring to it, including connotations, and is a starting-point to one’s position in life. In Victorian society a name could be an advantage point or a doom. Victorian morality was based on, and presumably even inseparable from, colonial and imperialistic morality, i.e. heavily self-righteous. The assumption was that the ruling class are ruling just because they are superior and implicitly good and the others are ruled over because they are inferior and accordingly bad. From our point of view it was a very oppressive morality, which contained a moral control of human behaviour. Hence, to escape the repressive morality, all the characters are compelled to lead a double life or invent a double character. The duplicity of the characters, their fluid identities, becomes a satire over Victorian behaviour as well as a more truthful description of what a human being is. The duality is enhanced by the complementary characters and the doublings but duplicity is also manifested in other aspects of the work, foremost in the language and in the lying.

Compiled By Dr. Asis De