OSCAR WILDE: The Importance of Being Earnest
Making Fun of Victorian Values and Society and
Parodying Dramatic Conventions

by

 Bernadette Wonner

Tabel of Contents

1. INTRODUCTION 3

2. PARODYING DRAMATIC CONVENTIONS  4

3. MAKING FUN OF VICTORIAN MORES AND SOCIETY 11

4. CONCLUSION 15

BIBLIOGRAPHY 16

1. Introduction

Earnest rejected all conventional values and thereby eluded conventional evaluation William Archer¹ To pun this quotation in another way: How can a play that rejected all conventional values still be valueable? The Importance of Being Earnest survived despite of its content which was indirectly criticizing Victorian society and lampooning dramatic conventions decades and is still a very popular play.

Earnest was written by the Irish author Oscar Wilde who was born in 1854 in Dublin and died in 1900 in Paris. His well-read mother, née Jane Francesca Elgee, introduced Oscar and his brother early to English, French and Italian literature so that when Oscar went to board at the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, he was far ahead of the other pupils in academic ability and literary culture.² Wilde´s upbringing in this sophisticated environment and his excellent college education at Oxford laid the foundations of his career as an author and writer. After leaving college in 1878 Wilde moved to London in order to earn money since he lacked cash. Wilde´s other, presumably for him even more important intenion was to enter society as soon as possible. He succeeded in doing both, earning money and entering London society. The theatre was very popular in the whole of the 19th century and offered rich rewards to popular dramatists and so Wilde, almost inevitably turned his attention to dramatic work which means writing for stage. By the time Earnest, his final and most lasting play, opened in 1895 Wilde was the most successful dramatist in London. The audience adored the witty play full of repartee which represented Wilde´s late-Victorian view of the aristocracy, wit, social life, and marriage.

The play tells the story of Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, who both lead a double life in order “to escape the restrictive moral mask of Victorian etiquette and be true to their own impulses.”³ . When they both fall in love a series of crises threatens to spoil their romantic pursuits. This seminarpaper will provide a deeper interpretation of the The Importance of Being Earnest analyzing Wilde´s intentions for writing it. The play, in plot as well as in the presentation of the characters, is written in an obviously ironical way in which he is lampooning the society at the end of the 19th cenutry. But Wilde also mocks at the way plays were written at that time since elements in Earnest differ from the dramatic conventions. The analysis will present on the one hand the literary interpretation of the play, that means to what extent Wilde is parodying the way literature was usually written during that period. It will provide an outline of different dramatic genres and types in comparison to Earnest. On the other hand the socio-cultural interpretation will be presented, analyzing in how far Wilde is making fun of the Victorian society and its mores. Of course, both, the literary and the socio-cultural interpretation of the play are related to each other but a divison is necessary in the course of the analysis to give clear explanations.

2. Parodying Dramatic Conventions

To start a discussion about the thesis that Wilde is parodying dramatic conventions it is necessary to know what is meant by dramatic conventions, that means to have an overview about the different relevant genres and types or the answer to the question what genre The Importance of Being Earnest actually belongs to. Kohl states that the author himself gives the answer to that question by describing his play a “farcial comedy”:

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1 Eltis, Sos, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde. Oxford, 1996, 173.

2 Cp. http://www.buedg.daig-kastura.de/earnest98/earnew3.htm

3 http://www.buedg.daig-kastura.de/earnest98/earnew3.htm (09.05.2003)