The Importance of Being Earnest-A social comedy revealing the hypocrisy of the Victorian society

The Importance of Being Earnest-A social comedy revealing the hypocrisy of the Victorian society

Oscar Wilde, celebrated playwright and literary provocateur, was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford before settling in London. During his days at Dublin and Oxford, he developed a set of attitudes and postures for which he would eventually become famous. Chief among these were his flamboyant style of dress, his contempt for conventional values, and his belief in aestheticism- a movement that embraced the principle of art for the sake of beauty and beauty alone.
This play’s setting is the late nineteenth century, the Victorian period in England. The Victorian period was marked by rigid moral principles, the conservative and conformist atmosphere, with social prestige as the most important aim, and hypocrisy and mannerism as the means of achieving it. Matthew Arnold said that the roots of the Victorian hypocrisy were in Puritanism, which, after reaching its most brilliant moments in the works of 17th century intellectuals- in the eighteenth century was nothing more than the enthroned ethos of the middle class. Puritanism was losing its force for inspiring new ideas, and became increasingly preoccupied with the issues of social mannerism and moral, and considerably less with the gratification of spiritual needs of the time. That is how the society became full of prejudices and conventionality. Every word and every part of an individual was expected to be in accordance with the rigid moral and behaviour rules, and each, even the slightest deviation from the rule was considered an offence which made the delinquent publicly disgraced. Even literature and art had its cannons which were to be respected.
The culture full of dichotomies in its spiritual milieu inspired Oscar Wilde to reveal its conformist and conservative nature, with a process which put accent on contradictions, but was also overcoming them by the struggle for beauty. He succeeded in this a great deal and mainly in the eyes of unprejudiced critics of the later generations.

This play ridicules the world view of the Victorian period. The themes that Wilde explores are the nature of marriage, the constraints of morality, hypocrisy vs. inventiveness, and the importance of not being “Earnest” in such a society. The play’s central theme is the division of truth and identity that hints at homosexual subtext and Wilde uses paradoxical epigram as a metaphor for this division. He also uses his absurd but grounded wit, wordplay, frantic misunderstanding, and dissonance of knowledge between the characters and the audience to reveal the social conventions of Victorian society as being nothing more than a “shallow mask of manners”. Wilde wanted to show that these conventions force us to lead double lives, a situation in which Wilde was himself due to his homosexuality.
The Importance of Being Earnest was an early experiment in Victorian melodrama, or “sentimental comedy”. Wilde introduced a new character to the genre, the figure of the “dandy’ (a man who pays excessive attention to his appearance). This figure added a moral texture the form had never before possessed. The character of the dandy was heavily autobiographical and often a stand in for Wilde himself, a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams and paradoxes, ridicules the hypocrisy of society’s moral arbiters, and presents himself as trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. In fact, the dandy in these plays always proves to be deeply moral and essential to the happy resolution of the plot.
The play is structured as a gigantic paradox in which Wilde’s hierarchy of types finds itself the right way up. The Dandies are now the true creators of the society, who drag even the puritans and the cliché-mongers (Chasuble and Prism) behind them. They invent a world that matches their own needs, and reality obligingly concedes to their demands. But the needs are real enough: from first to last they are financial. Money is an obsessive concern in this play and it is only when the need for money coincides with its availability that we achieve the ideal state