The Importance of Being Earnest

First produced by George Alexander at the St. James`s Theatre on 14 February 1895, The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde`s most famous and successful play. After his debut in 1880s there has been a period of less glamorous work as a rewier, editor and occasionally author for journals and magazines. In 1888 he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales. In 1891 he published four books, The Picture of Dorian Gray included. Now, a decade after his debut on the London literary scene, he was a successful dramatist and was slowly becoming a more important figure in the literary life. The Importance of Being Earnest outlasted most of the trivial and serious works of Wilde`s contemporaries, being one of the few plays from that period that remained in theatrical repertoires. In his new Trivial Comedy for Serious People (in early drafts Serious Comedy for Trivial People), Wilde gives the impression that the words flow easily from his pen, but this is part of a strategy for undermining speculations about the seriousness of art. This new play is an experiment, it seems like a trip into a less demanding, less adventurous kind of theatre. Certain reviewers believed that The Importance of Being Earnest lacks not only the serious plot present in other society plays, but also the flamboyant speeches used by characters in order to rise to serious subjects. When we approach this play, it is remarkable to see that it does not resemble with his previous plays; there is a number of omissions and deviations from what we might expect. Three figures prominent in Wilde's previous dramatic works are absent: a woman with a past (the past has become a benign one rather than a menacing secret, with the handbag concealing not a social indiscretion, but a mistake), a dandyish aristocrat (Algernon and Jack lead pointless lives, give statements about modern life and culture but are not villains) and the innocently idealistic young woman forced to confront the vile realities of political and social life (idealism consists in wanting to marry a man called Ernest). The Importance of Being Earnest effects an altogether less menacing transformation of guilt, secrecy and the double life: it allows two young men to 'get into scrapes'. Confession and redemption are easy. When Algernon arrives in the country as Ernest he tells Cecily that he is not wicked at all: If you are not, 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. (n, 122-4) In the final scene Jack has to ask Gwendolen if she can forgive him for not having been deceitful after all: JACK: Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? GWENDOLEN: I can, for I feel that you are sure to change. (111,478-80)

These scenes point to one of the play`s main atrractions, that of mocking the forms and rules of society. Wilde`s stand as a dandy, a performer and (as an Irisman) an outsider gave him a particular use for the conventions both of the social world and of the society drama of the theatre, which gave fictional expressions to its values by describing falling women, reinforcing social discrimination and approving the exlusion of those who erred. This is a subject matter The Importance of being Earnest shares with the earlier plays. The spirit of society`s authoritative exclusiveness is analysed by Lady Bracknell in the most satisfying way Wilde could devise. In the Victorian theatre, sincerity, not style, was held to be the warrantor of laughter. Acknowledging the audience's presence, and allowing the characters of a play to refer to the drama in which they appear, were commonplace in the burlesque and the comic opera, but not admissible in the 'new' modern comedy. Self-consciously created dialogues and situations as well as references to fiction throughout the play make The Importance of being Earnest defiantly artificial. Wilde`s attack on earnestness undermines some well-established moral tones of Victorian living and thinking. Gwendolen says: We live, as I hope you know Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals before starting to formulate the reduction to absurdity of all such notions: that marriage with a man called Ernest can be a goal in life. Among all the play`s inversions of common values (moral/immoral, serious/trivial, town vice/country virtue) this is a direct bearing on the business of the New Drama. Wilde`s charactes both embody and mock dramatic stereotype: his formidable lady, nervous clergyman and vagrant man about town lead double lives as parodies to themselves. His characters are ruthless in the pursuit of their own selfish goals and absurd ideals. Wilde announced in an interview before the opening that the play was 'exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy', but that it had a philosophy, that 'we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality'.