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** The Importance of Being Earnest - A Critical Essay ** The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Born in Dublin in 1854, Oscar Wilde was the son of the distinguished surgeon Sir William Wilde and of Jane Francesca Elgee, a feminist and ardent proponent of Irish nationalism. After studying classics at Trinity College, Dublin, Wilde won a scholarship to Oxford University, where he earned a reputation as a brilliant scholar. After his graduation in 1878, Wilde took up residence in London, where he soon established himself as a writer and leader of a new aesthetic movement that championed “art for art’s sake” and promoted the works of contemporary French poets and critics. Witty, outspoken, and flamboyant, Wilde enjoyed great success as a spokesman for aestheticism in both England and America; he also attracted considerable notoriety—in 1881, Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan poked fun at Wilde and aestheticism in their comic opera, Patience. That same year, Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which a handsome young man’s moral corruption is reflected in the increasing ugliness of his portrait, caused a sensation among the English reading public. Outside the novel, Wilde was a successful poet and essayist too, but he achieved his greatest triumphs as a writer of social comedies for the stage—Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895). Bestknown is his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Although the play purports to deal with trivialities (Wilde actually subtitled the play “A trivial comedy for serious people”), it deftly satirizes institutions and characteristics of the era—from social class, marriage, and morality, to hypocrisy, social conformity, and the desire for respectability.

Events in History at the Time of the Play **The importance of earnestness.** Above all, Wilde’s play satirizes “earnestness,” a peculiarly Victorian quality usually associated with sober behavior and a serious turn of mind. The concept of “earnestness” had its origins in several nineteenth-century phenomena: the outbreak of revolutions in Europe; the subsequent reevaluation of political and social attitudes; the growing reaction of the rising middle class to the selfish hedonism of the aristocracy; and the Evangelical Movement of the Anglican Church, which had advocated worthy causes (such as the abolition of slavery), had favored the observance of a strict code of morality, and had rigorously censured worldliness in others. “Earnestness” also carried multiple meanings:  To be in earnest meant intellectually is to have or to seek to have genuine beliefs about the most fundamental questions in life, and on no account merely to repeat customary and conventional notions insincerely. . . . To be in earnest morally is to recognize that human existence is. . . a spiritual pilgrimage from here to eternity in which [one] is called upon to struggle with all his power against the forces of evil, in his own soul and in society. . . . The prophets of earnestness were attacking a casual, easygoing, superficial, or frivolous attitude, whether in intellectual or moral life; and demanding that men should think and men should live with a high and serious purpose. (Houghton, pp. 220-22)

In The Importance of Being Earnest, the comedic conflict between “earnestness” and frivolity manifests itself in a number of ways: from the pun in the title, to the squabbles between serious Jack Worthing and the more lighthearted Algernon Moncrieff, to the irresistible fascination the name “Ernest” holds for the play’s two heroines. Jack’s intended, Gwendolen Fairfax, ardently declares that “[Ernest] is a divine name. It has music of its own. It produces vibrations” (Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, p. 13). Similarly, Cecily Cardew confesses to a smitten Algernon that “it has always been a girlish dream of mine to love someone 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” (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 41). Even Algernon demonstrates his awareness of the Victorian passion for “earnestness” when he reacts to Jack’s revelation of his true name: “You answer to the name of Ernest. You look like an Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn’t Ernest” (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 6).

Ironically, the term “earnestness” had yet another, more exotic, meaning: Homosexual members of [Wilde’s] audience probably grasped the pun’s other significance in the subculture of the nineties, for Uranian “love in earnest” was the love of the same sex. The term Uranian was derived from the name of the Greek God Uranus (“Heaven”), whose genitals were severed by his son, Chronus, and cast into the sea, the bubbling foam around them generating the birth of Aphrodite. The focus in the myth is on the male’s creative capacity without the female. In fin-de-siècle London, a Uranian. . . was a male homosexual. (Beckson, London in the 1890s, p. 186)

As a practicing homosexual, Wilde would almost certainly have been aware of the additional implications of the term “earnestness.” He may even have taken a secret pleasure in perpetrating this esoteric pun on a largely unsuspecting Victorian audience, which would have perceived nothing untoward in the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest, ending as it does with two heterosexual marriages.

**Courtship, marriage, and social class.** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Throughout the nineteenth century, courtship and marriage were conducted according to certain rules, especially among the upper classes. For the wealthy and well-established, courtship revolved around the “London Season,” a threemonth- whirligig of social occasions, ranging from parties and balls to sporting events and artistic exhibitions. The Season began after Easter, coinciding with the opening of Parliament, and ended around late July, after Parliament declared a recess, at which point the aristocrats retired to their country estates.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The Season’s main objective was far more serious than the calendar of events suggests, the goal being suitable marriage matches. For 17- or 18-year-old young women, this meant matches to men of equal or superior wealth and status. The population of debutantes grew more mixed in the latter half of the century; the season “in Oscar Wilde’s London” took on an extra dimension, providing “the social link between the old landed gentry and the new industrial wealth” (Von Eckhardt, Gilman, and Chamberlin, p. 116). Featured, along with aristocrats’ daughters, were the daughters of successful businessmen and bankers, who showed an eagerness to marry into “good families” and a willingness to spend thousands of pounds to do so. Wealthy young American women entered the mix too, finding the often impoverished English lord receptive; apparently their money was not too “new” for these lords, the way it was for upper-class families in New York. England’s aristocrats were encumbered at the time not only by their everyday expenses but also by the imposition on their estates of heavy taxes or “duties,” to be paid during their lives and even after their deaths. In the play, Lady Bracknell demonstrates her awareness of this circumstance when she declares, “What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime; and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up” (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 16).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">In many respects, steps in courtship and marriage were the same as earlier in the century. Men and women still chose prospective partners with care. The man especially looked upon marriage as a career move since the woman’s property became his after the wedding, although the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882, respectively, gave the wife some control over bequests and over property that she managed to acquire on her own. After a man proposed and a woman accepted, he was expected to inform her parents of his intentions and acquaint them with his financial circumstances. Her parents, in turn, acquainted him with the amount of their daughter’s fortune. Then lawyers for the bride and groom negotiated a marriage settlement, resolving such concerns as the wife’s spending or “pin” money, the “portions” that would go to any children of the marriage, and the “jointure”—in the form of money or property—that would be bequeathed to the wife should her husband predecease her. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde satirizes the mercenary and businesslike aspects of Victorian courtship in his depiction of a grueling interview between Lady Bracknell and Jack after Jack has proposed to her daughter, Gwendolen. Producing a pencil and notebook, Lady Bracknell interrogates the suitor on every particular from his income—between 7,000 and 8,000 pounds a year—to the address of his London townhouse:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">LADY BRACKNELL: What number in Belgrave Square? <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">JACK: 149. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">LADY BRACKNELL: (shaking her head) The unfashionable side. I thought there was something. However, that could easily be altered. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">JACK. Do you mean the fashion, or the side? <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">LADY BRACKNELL: (sternly) Both, if necessary, I presume. (<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px;">Importance of Being Earnest, p. 17)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">**A fly in the ointment—marriage and the “New Woman.”** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">In Wilde’s time, the rituals of courtship and marriage were complicated by a social phenomenon: the rise of the “New Woman.” The term was mostly applied to a vanguard of middle- to upper-class women of the 1880s and 1890s who increasingly forsook the traditional female role of self-effacing wife and mother and sought lives beyond the domestic sphere. In her most extreme form, the New Woman sought to claim the same freedoms of thought, speech, and dress that men had possessed for generations. Many in the mainstream regarded her with alarm and disdain—in the popular press, she was derided, ridiculed, and exhorted to return to hearth and home. “There is a New Woman” quipped Punch magazine on May 26, 1894, “and what do you think? / She lives upon nothing but Foolscap and Ink! / But though Foolscap and Ink are the whole of her diet, / This nagging New Woman can never be quiet!” (Punch in Marks, p. 11). From the vantage point of the mainstream press, she was a wild woman, a social insurgent, a manly woman. She threatened to take the initiative, reverse gender roles, and confuse society altogether. Certainly she confounded the etiquette of courtship. From a Punch Cartoon, September 26, 1896

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">**“Two Sides to a Question”** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">“Oh, Flora, let us be man and wife. You at least understand me—the only woman who ever did!” <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">“Oh yes, I understand you well enough, Sir Algernon. But how about your ever being able to understand me?” <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">(Punch in Marks, p. 35)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Marriage-minded masculine contemporaries wondered how to court this more assertive female. How dominant was she going to be? They worried about being “emasculated by feminine aggressiveness” (Marks, p. 38). In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde examines the more comic aspects of this potential situation. Gwendolen and Cecily are not representative of the New Woman—both grew up in sheltered upper-class households with the expectation of marrying. Nonetheless, they are more aggressive and forthright than their suitors. Gwendolen criticizes Jack for taking so long to propose and notes his lack of polish when he at last makes her an offer of marriage. Cecily meanwhile informs an astonished Algernon, masquerading as Jack’s brother Ernest, that in her imagination she has carried out an entire romance—complete with courtship, engagement, and separation—with his alter ego.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">**Aesthetes, decadents, and dandies.** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">During the latter half of the nineteenth century, many artists and intellectuals were caught up in the aesthetic movement that had spread throughout Europe. The movement had its roots in a German theory proposed by philosopher Immanuel Kant that a pure aesthetic experience resulted from disinterested contemplation of an object, without reference to reality or consideration of the object’s utility or morality. French intellectuals further developed the doctrine, declaring that works of art were self-sufficient and had no purpose beyond existing and being beautiful. French aestheticism adopted as its slogan L’art pour l’art or “art for art’s sake,” a rallying cry taken up by converts to the movement, who included Charles Baudelaire and, later, Oscar Wilde. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Some aesthetes, notably Baudelaire, also became involved in another movement, called the decadence, which admired the artistic qualities of ancient, even decaying, cultures such as those of the late Roman Empire and Byzantine Greece. The Decadent writer usually adopted a highly artificial style and bizarre subject matter, seeking to shock, enthrall, or even to appall the audience. In its most extreme forms, Decadence “emerged as the dark side of Romanticism in its flaunting of forbidden experiences, and it insisted on the superiority of artifice to nature” (Beckson, London in the 1890s, p. 33).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The Decadent movement, in its turn, helped to revive and redefine the concept of the “dandy,” a term that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was usually applied to foppish men of fashion largely concerned with fine clothes and polished manners. In his essay “Le Dandy” (1863), however, Baudelaire argued that the dandy’s taste for satorial elegance was only “a symbol of the aristocratic superiority of his mind” (Baudelaire in Beckson, London in the 1890s, p. 35). The new dandyism of the late Victorian Age shared several characteristics with Decadence, including “worship of the town, and the artificial; grace, elegance, the art of the pose; sophistication and the mask. The wit of epigram and paradox was called upon to confound the bourgeois” (Baudelaire in Beckson, London in the 1890s, p. 35).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">In The Importance of Being Earnest, the characters reflect the aesthetic, decadent, and dandified attitudes of Wilde himself, albeit in exaggerated form. Artifice, not nature, rules the play’s drawing-room milieu. Jack exhibits the dandy’s preference for London when he remarks to Algernon: “When one is in the town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring” (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 2). The young women in the play also express their preference for the artificial and beautiful over the natural and genuine. When Cecily praises the “wonderful beauty” of Algernon’s explanation for his deceit, Gwendolen concurs, declaring, “In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing” (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 55).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The play itself, on the other hand, goes beyond art for art’s sake, its dialogue constituting satiric social commentary on earnestness, courtship, and other aspects of late Victorian life. Farce was a popular genre in Wilde’s era and The Importance of Being Earnest invokes many ingredients of the average Victorian farce—the vacation resort, the imaginary identity, competing claims to the same name, and the figure of the foundling or homeless child (see **Great Expectations and Jane Eyre**, also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). There was an iconoclastic bent to other farce too; the forward female was a common type of character, for instance. But in other farce of Wilde’s time, the iconoclasm remains beneath the surface; after getting laughs, characters apologize for their transgressions “as a violation of the good order and just standards of society” (Powell, p. 120). In contrast, Wilde’s dialogue shows open irreverence for those standards, and without apology or retraction.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">JACK: If you don’t take care, your friend Bunbury will get you into a serious scrape some day. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">ALGERNON: I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">JACK: Oh, that’s nonsense, Algy. You never talk anything but nonsense. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">ALGERNON: Nobody ever does. (Importance of Being Earnest, pp. 23-24)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;"><span class="gale_subheader" style="color: #885500; font-family: Verdana,Arial; font-size: 12pt;">The Play in Focus <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">**Plot summary.** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The play opens with Algernon Moncrieff, a young dandy, preparing to entertain his formidable aunt, Lady Bracknell, and her daughter, Gwendolen Fairfax, for afternoon tea. As his butler, Lane, sees to the refreshments, Algernon receives a visit from his friend, Ernest Worthing, newly returned to London after a short stay in the country. Ernest is delighted to hear that Gwendolen, whom he hopes to wed, will be coming to tea. Algernon, however, demands that his friend explain the meaning of the inscription on a cigarette case he left behind at Algernon’s: “From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack.” After several futile attempts at prevarication, Ernest finally admits that he has a young ward, Cecily Cardew; that his real name is “Jack”; and that he has invented “Ernest”—a profligate younger brother—to serve as a scapegoat for his own adventures in town. Amused by these disclosures, Algernon reveals that to escape boring social obligations in London, such as his aunt’s dinner parties, he resorts to a similar ruse—he has invented an imaginary invalid friend, “Bunbury,” who frequently requires Algernon’s companionship and assistance in the country.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Lady Bracknell and Gwendolen arrive for tea; Jack contrives to be alone with Gwendolen so he can propose marriage. Gwendolen delightedly accepts, telling Jack that it has long been her fondest dream to wed a man named Ernest. Dismayed by Gwendolen’s aversion to his real name, Jack inwardly resolves to be christened “Ernest” as soon as possible. Meanwhile, he and Gwendolen break the news of their engagement to a displeased Lady Bracknell, who subjects Jack to an interrogation regarding his finances and family history. Although Jack can reassure Lady Bracknell that he is wealthy enough to support a wife, he is ultimately forced to admit he knows nothing of his family history: as an infant, he was found in a leather handbag in the cloakroom of the Victoria Railway Station by one Mr. Thomas Cardew. Cardew named him and raised him. Shocked, Lady Bracknell refuses to consider a marriage between her daughter and a foundling. Despite her opposition, Jack and Gwendolen vow eternal devotion and resolve to remain in contact. Unknown to Jack, Algernon secretly writes his friend’s country address on his shirt cuff and plans a “Bunburying” expedition to Hertfordshire to meet the mysterious Cecily.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Living in quiet seclusion with Miss Prism, her governess, Cecily is thrilled to receive a visit from her uncle Jack’s so-called younger brother “Ernest”—in reality, a disguised Algernon— about whom she has woven several romantic fantasies. Algernon, for his part, falls instantly in love with Cecily and begins to court her; he also learns that, like Gwendolen, Cecily is enamored of the name “Ernest.” The lovers’ idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Jack who, on his own, has decided to “kill off” his troublesome younger brother and is displeased to see Algernon impersonating “Ernest” and wooing Cecily. The two friends quarrel vehemently, especially after they learn that each has approached Dr. Chasuble, the local clergyman, about being rechristened “Ernest” to please his respective sweetheart.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Meanwhile, Gwendolen arrives at Jack’s country house and makes Cecily’s acquaintance; for a time, both ladies mistakenly believe they are rivals for the same man, leading to an exchange of insults over the tea table. The appearances of Jack and Algernon clear up this confusion but the ladies accuse their suitors of wooing them under false pretenses and retire to the house in high dudgeon. Alone, Jack and Algernon argue over who has the superior claim to the name of “Ernest”—and who gets to eat the last muffin on the tea table.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Gwendolen and Cecily decide to forgive their suitors but remain firm in their resolve only to wed men named Ernest. Jack and Algernon quickly reassure the ladies that they plan to be christened that very afternoon. The couples’ reconciliations, however, are interrupted by the arrival of Lady Bracknell, who has come in search of her missing daughter. Discovering Gwendolen with Jack, Lady Bracknell again forbids their engagement. She is doubly astonished to hear that Algernon has affianced himself to Cecily and subjects the girl to the same cross-examination she earlier suffered Jack to undergo. On learning that Cecily has a fortune of 130,000 pounds, Lady Bracknell quickly withdraws her objections to the match. Jack, however, informs Lady Bracknell that Cecily cannot wed without his consent until she is 35 years old and coldly voices his own opposition to the marriage, citing Algernon’s lack of moral character. But Jack offers to give his consent to Algernon and Cecily’s marriage if Lady Bracknell will consent to his and Gwendolen’s. Lady Bracknell indignantly refuses his terms.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Matters seem at an impasse until Lady Bracknell recognizes Miss Prism as a former nurse who had worked in Lord Bracknell’s household. Many years ago, Miss Prism had taken one of the children— a male infant—out in his pram one day, only to disappear with him completely. Lady Bracknell demands to know what became of the baby. A shamefaced Miss Prism admits that she had gotten the baby mixed up with a manuscript for a three-volume novel she had written. The manuscript was left in the pram, and the baby was placed in a leather handbag that she deposited in a cloakroom at the Victoria Railway Station. Stunned, Jack produces that handbag, which Miss Prism verifies as her own. Believing Miss Prism to be his long-lost mother, Jack attempts to embrace her, but Lady Bracknell sets the record straight, informing Jack that he is the son of her sister, Mrs. Moncrieff, making him Algernon’s older brother. Jack embraces Algernon as his brother, then quickly searches through army lists for the name of his true father, for whom he himself was named. Finally locating the correct list, Jack discovers to his astonishment that his Christian name really is “Ernest John.” The last obstacles to his happiness are removed and the two couples (plus Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble) joyously unite, while Jack assures the still-censorious Lady Bracknell that he has at last realized “the vital Importance of Being Earnest” (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 17).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">**Double lives.** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Much of the comedy of Wilde’s play hinges upon the elaborate double lives led by the two dandy-heroes, Algernon and Jack. Both have created an imaginary person who serves as a “blind” for their activities, but while Algernon’s invalid friend, Bunbury, merely functions as his excuse to avoid boring social responsibilities, Jack’s scapegrace brother “Ernest” is actually a facet of Jack himself, a facet that he wishes to conceal from his young ward, Cecily. Exhibiting the typically Victorian concern for propriety and respectability, Jack explains to Algernon:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">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. And as a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness, in order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in the Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes. (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 7)

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The whole concept of leading a double life was by no means unheard of among Victorians. Indeed, Victorian life seemed to incline naturally towards duality, with public and private spheres making up the separate halves of existence. For men, life in the public sphere involved duty, service, and pursuit of a profession. The private sphere, usually presided over by women, provided men with a domestic haven, a retreat from public duties, in the form of a peaceful home and, ideally, a loving marriage. The separation between public and private life could take on sinister implications, however—especially for men, who possessed more freedom and autonomy than their wives. It was entirely possible for an otherwise respectable middle-class husband to lead a life of promiscuity and depravity, of which his wife might be kept completely unaware. Indeed, during the 1880s, an anonymous Victorian gentleman published My Secret Life, an 11-volume series of memoirs chronicling his many sexual encounters with servants, prostitutes, courtesans, and women of his own class. The author marries twice, once unhappily—which he cites as a partial justification for his promiscuity—and once happily, yet he continues with his secret life despite having found domestic bliss:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">For fifteen months, I have been contented with one woman. I love her devotedly. I would die to make her happy. Yet such is my sensuous temperament, such my love of women, that much as I strive against it, I find it impossible to keep faithful to her, to keep to her alone. . . . My life is almost unbearable from unsatisfied lust. It is constantly on me, depresses me, and I must yield. (Marcus, p. 96).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">In 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson also explored the hazards of a double life, though in a more fantastic form. In his novel **Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde**, (also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times), the upright physician Henry Jekyll divides himself in two by becoming the sensualist Edward Hyde, who pursues diabolical pleasures that Jekyll denies himself. Both identities perish, however, when a guilt-ridden Jekyll commits suicide.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">While Jekyll’s carnal excesses remained confined to the pages of Stevenson’s novel, there were, as revealed in My Secret Life, Victorians in real life who had illicit sexual and other experiences while wearing an outward mantle of respectability. Wilde’s play alludes to this deception when Cecily tells Algernon, “If you are not [wicked], then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy” (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 29).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">For some, including Wilde himself, homosexuality represented perhaps the most extreme example of a double life, as noted by literary scholar Elaine Showalter:

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">By the 1880s. . . the Victorian homosexual world had evolved into a secret but active subculture, with its own language, styles, practices, and meeting places. For most middleclass inhabitants of this world, homosexuality represented a double life, in which a respectable daytime world often involving marriage and family, existed alongside a night world of homoeroticism. (Showalter, p. 106).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The consequences of being caught in homosexual acts were severe. From the time of Henry VIII, the crime of “buggery,” or sodomy, had carried the death penalty, although history does not record anyone ever being executed for the crime. The law was not officially changed until 1861, with the passage of the Offenses against the Person Act of 1861, which imposed prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life on those caught committing anal intercourse or sexually exploiting people under the legal age of 21. In 1885, the Criminal Law Amendment Act, which had been passed to protect women and girls by suppressing brothels, was revised to include an amendment making “any act of gross indecency” between males an offense punishable by a year— later two years—in prison, with or without hard labor. The law considered males who were intimate with each other criminals, whether the two males were in a committed relationship or not. In 1889, several male aristocrats narrowly escaped prosecution when the police discovered a male prostitution ring in London’s West End. Sir Arthur Somerset, a frequent customer at the brothel and superintendent of the Prince of Wales’s stables, was permitted to escape to the Continent, where he would remain until his death in 1926. To protect the royal family from publicity, other clients were likewise saved from exposure; the British press provided virtually no coverage of the scandal. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Wilde himself was less fortunate. A decade after its passage, the conditions of the Criminal Law Amendment Act imposed a sentence of two years’ imprisonment with hard labor on the playwright: his own double life was over. Wilde’s prison sentence began in 1895, after the debut that same year of The Importance of Being Earnest. In the play, Jack becomes indignant and offended when Algernon, drawing a parallel between their similar ruses, refers to Jack as “one of the most advanced Bunburyists I know” and offers to explain to Jack how the pretense can be maintained after marriage (Importance of Being Earnest, p. 5). “I am not a Bunburyist at all,” Jack retorts. “If Gwendolen accepts me, I am going to kill my brother. . . . And I strongly advise you to do the same with Mr. .. . with your invalid friend who has the absurd name” (Importance of Being Earnest. p. 8). Jack’s reluctance even to utter the name Bunbury may be significant if, as one recent critic argues, the play was using the name as a “private joke” because it was a term that Wilde used for a homosexual pickup (Beckson, London in the 1890s, p. 187). There is, however, no evidence that the term was used in this way before Wilde’s play opened, though “bunburying” did acquire homosexual implications soon after the play’s performance and Wilde’s trial for homosexuality.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">**Sources and literary context.** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">While The Importance of Being Earnest is justly celebrated for its originality, Wilde did in fact draw on his own life and history for some particulars, especially names and personalities he had known. Wilde’s biographer Richard Ellmann speculates that the original for Lady Bracknell may have been Wilde’s maternal aunt, Emily Thomazine Warren, who was several years older than Wilde’s mother, married to an officer in the British army, and disapproving of her sister’s Irish nationalist activities. Other acquaintances lent only their names—for example, Henry St. Bunbury, a classmate of Wilde’s at Trinity, whose surname became the term used to describe Algernon’s elaborate ruse in the play. As a student, Wilde stayed with the Cardews at their country house, promising to name the heroine of his next play Cecily Cardew after one of the family. Similarly, names of real places, such as Worthing and Bracknell, became surnames for characters.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">While the preposterous workings-out of the plot were Wilde’s own invention, the playwright had recourse to the tried-and-true devices of Victorian stage melodrama and, as noted, farce: secret engagements, tyrannical parents, hidden family scandals, missing heirs, and foundling babies.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Wilde may have owed a debt to a particular play if he saw The Foundling, a three-act farce by W. Lestocq and E. M. Robson, performed at Terry’s Theatre in the autumn of 1894. Dick Pennell, the hero of the play, is a foundling who, after various misadventures, discovers that his mother was a woman of rank, lawfully married, and his father pursued a career in India, discoveries likewise made by Jack Worthing, himself a foundling, in The Importance of Being Earnest. But if Wilde drew some inspiration from this farce, his sources were multiple; he drew also upon his own classical scholarship: his use of the device of the misplaced baby was taken from the works of Menander, a dramatist of ancient Greece. Moreover, The Foundling was a conventional farce, emphasizing fast-paced action, more than the quick-witted turn of a phrase. The ordinary farce stressed the physical over the verbal; Wilde’s comedy, on the other hand, featured clever epigrams and elegant phrases. It used language to subvert ordinary farce, creating a “new sensation” and heightening the comic effect of such fare (Powell, p. 119). “Such playing with language. . . was for Wilde one of the. . . secrets of his art, of absurdly reversing the tendencies of language in The Foundling specifically, in Victorian farce generally” to produce a play that became a “stage classic while almost all other farces of the day vanished” (Powell, p. 120).

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The wit, wordplay, and worldliness of The Importance of Being Earnest is not, however, unprecedented; it recalls some of the more lighthearted comedies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as William Congreve’s Way of the World and Oliver Goldsmith’s **She Stoops to Conquer** (in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). Like these predecessors, The Importance of Being Earnest shuns sentimentality: its potentially maudlin moments are invariably interrupted by squabbles between the characters and by frequent pauses for food and drink.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">**Reviews.** <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">The Importance of Being Earnest first opened on February 14, 1895, to great critical and popular acclaim. In a distinct minority, fellow playwright and Irishman George Bernard Shaw was unenthusiastic. Shaw wrote of his displeasure in The Saturday Review: “I cannot say that I greatly cared for The Importance of Being Earnest. It amused me, of course; but unless comedy touches me as well as amuses me, it leaves me with a sense of having wasted my evening” (Shaw in Beckson, Wilde: The Critical Heritage, p. 195). <span style="background-color: #ffffff; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif; font-size: 15px; text-align: left;">Other critics, however, were dazzled by Wilde’s display of wit and absurdity, even those who found fault with his earlier plays. H. G. Wells, who had not liked Wilde’s previous play An Ideal Husband, offered the author warm congratulations in the Pall Mall Gazette for his “delightful revival of theatrical satire” (Wells in Beckson, Wilde: The Critical Heritage, p. 188). Similarly, William Archer, writing for the World, called The Importance of Being Earnest “an absolutely wilful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality” (Archer in Beckson, Wilde: The Critical Heritage, p. 190) A. B. Walkley, reviewer for the Speaker, hailed Wilde as “an artist in sheer nonsense” and said of his new play that “better nonsense, I think our stage has not seen” (Walkley in Beckson, Wilde: The Critical Heritage, p. 196). Finally, Hamilton Fyfe, the London correspondent for the New York Times, cabled America with the news that the opening night audience responded to The Importance of Being Earnest with “unrestrained, incessant laughter from all parts of the theatre” (Fyfe in Beckson, Wilde: The Critical Heritage, p. 189). The knowledge that Wilde had created a masterpiece was not lost on the actors either. Allan Aynesworth, who originated the role of Algernon Moncrieff, later recalled, “In my fifty-three years of acting, I never remember a greater triumph than the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest. The audience rose in their seats and cheered and cheered” (Aynesworth in Beckson, “Oscar Wilde,” p. 214). —Pamela S. Loy