Oscar Wilde defined, “The Importance of Being Earnest”, as a “trivial comedy for serious people’’, which also happens to
be the play’s sub-title. “The Importance of Being Earnest”, is considered as the supreme denotation of the late 19th century social and moral attitudes, exposing the corrosive morality of the Victorian upper-classes, whose seemingly smooth and sordid appearance was embroiled in the garb of sham morality and inner emptiness.
The characters in this play, never abstain from being flippant. On the contrary, their flippancy is their very nature. As a result, Wilde has devised extravagant motives and proceedings to match their styles of conversation and views pertaining to life. From the opening lines between Algernon and his manservant Lane,we instantly gauge that we are in the company of individuals with a highly developed sense of their self-importance. With the entrance of Jack (the play’s principal protagonist), the “Pleasure motive” rings out aloud and clear:
Algy: dear Ernest? What brings you to Town?
Jack: O Pleasure, Pleasure! What else could bring one anywhere.
The work in their case is the exacting effort to seem trivial in idle conversation. This delightful make-belief is what the Wildean comedy draws its strength from. The mental alertness and effervescent wit that infuses the dialogue, is the very essence of this Satire.Wilde once said: “Modern life is complex and relative. Vulgarity is the most vivid fact of modern life”. That is why they scorn theory and the appearance of simplicity. “The truth” as Algernon says, “is rarely pure and never simple”. Algernon endorses a double-life and indulges in what he calls, “Bunburying”---imparting the play its moral significance.
Pivotal to the play’s Satire is its all important theme of Marriage. This play very slyly, satirizes the bourgeois-ideal of marriage, as an exercise in the mean spirited preservation of property. This Wilde achieves through the portrayal of the grande dame, Lady Bracknell, who happens to be the standard bearer of institutionalized Victorian morals. Her marriage questionnaire carries in an absurd manner the whole weight of the commercially minded society she epitomizes. This comes to the fore vividly, through the manner in which she addresses Jack:
Lady Bracknell(to Jack): What is your income? In land or in investment?
Her interview of Jack is indeed indispensable to Wilde’s Social Satire, in which without even addressing Jack, she reduces her daughter (Gwendolen’s) suitor to a social impossibility. In elegant accents of pompous bigotry, Wilde’s puppets turn moral values upside down. Lady Bracknell reflects upon this by saying: “Fortunately, education in England produces no effect what so ever”.
Wilde also criticizes the illusions attached to the conventional notions of Love and Romance. He portrays heroines as “idealists”, where the idealism lies in wanting to marry a man named Ernest. More than any other female in the play, Gwendolen ironically suggests the qualities of Conventional Victorian womanhood .Most of the play’s satirical observations, spring from Cecily’s romantic illusions about love. She too seems to be infatuated, like her female counterpart, with the name of “Ernest”.
In Act –II Wilde exposes with ironic overtones the religious hypocrisy and corruption of the Church. This becomes evident through the Church Rector’s flawed spirituality, who in giving the same sermon on all occasions, exposes the meaninglessness of religious practices and the obviously hackneyed words of sermons.
Meanwhile, the plot of mistaken identities gets revealed in all its absurdity when Jack enters the Manor House in his, “Black mourning dress” and comically declares, his brother Ernest to be dead. Gwendolen: Is your name really John?
Jack: Gwendolen! It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly, that all his life he had been speaking nothing but the truth…
Towards the end, the issue of identity ends in a somewhat complex resolution ending with the discovery of the ill-fated hero’s (Jack) true parentage. Here, Wilde ridicules the literary conventions of the day and through it he lampoons the Victorian Melodrama in which true identities were revealed and long-lost family members were united in a most absurd manner. This clearly indicates that all these years Jack was unknowingly speaking the truth because, his real name is Ernest. He indeed, has an unprincipled brother, Algernon.
The curtain lines of the play are shared by Lady Bracknell and Jack:
Lady Bracknell: My nephew you seem to be displaying signs of triviality…
Jack: On the contrary, I’ve realized for the first time in my life the Vital Importance, of Being Earnest.
The joke in the title, with its “pun” on the word: “Earnest” is often thought of as a mock-pompous piece of frivolity, but in reality it is much more than that. The term “Victorian Earnestness” also has its deadly connotations of sexual-double standards and homosexuality---a jibe at Wilde, the homosexual. Therefore, the satire in “The Importance of Being Earnest” is in many ways self-directed.
This lends greater credibility to the play’s satirical dimensions as Wilde strictly inveighs against the aristocracy’s frivolous and ostentatious life styles, their crass materialism, and their almost vulgar obsession with tedious formalism.Wilde scrutinizes in a most artful manner a radical reconsideration of his society’s ethics. This serves to vindicate our stance that Wilde was true to a writer’s purpose that reforming society by instilling in his characters the true realization of their follies and moral inadequacies.