In this Importance of being Earnest play I am going to write about:
*QUESTION:- Evaluate ‘the Importance of being Earnest’ as a comedy of manners embodying the hypocrisy of Victorian age.’
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) by Oscar Wilde is a popular play that is still widely performed in English-language theatres and also in many other languages. For example, the “Théâtre Antoine” in Paris produced it in October 2006 (on tour until March 2008) and a Versailles company performed it at “Le Lucernaire” in September and October 2008.
When first performed, the play was considered as a light comedy and classified as entertainment for Victorian society. However, the writing of the play relies on a creativity and richness that combine different styles. Oscar Wilde was gay in a society stifled by social conventions and governed by very tough laws on homosexuality. Nevertheless, some critics have argued that the playwright dared include homosexual connotations in the text. However, I would argue that more generally, despite very little room for maneuver, he managed brilliantly to challenge the social norms, sexual stereotypes and gender representations of his time while pleasing aristocratic London socialites.
How does Oscar Wilde implement strategies to create tensions and confusion between the norms imposed by social, moral and aesthetic orders? In an article published in The Guardian in July 2007 Terry Eagleton wrote: “Wilde, typically perverse, challenged and conformed at the same time.” In this blog I will show that conformity and resistance are present simultaneously at each stage of the play.
Wilde uses absurd and exaggerated situations, nonsensical language, paradoxical humor and puns. In fact, he invents a new genre, difficult to imitate, combining farce, comedy of manners, social satire and, I would add, “gender parody”.
Judith Butler defines “gender parody” as follows: “Gender parody reveals that the original identity after which identity fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.” For her the origin is a myth and there is a “fluidity of identities”.
In the play Jack and Algernon are not Ernest, but they can become Ernest through baptism. If they take the name of Ernest without even undergoing a physical and psychological transformation they will fit Gwendolen’s and Cecily’s tastes. They will also imitate a model with no origin since Ernest never existed in the first place. Wilde also plays with the illusions created by appearances and mocks the expressive model of gender and the notion of true gender identity. For example, Cecily’s outside appearance is “feminine” but her attitude may be considered as “masculine” since she “has got a capital appetite” and “goes long walks” in Victorian times women were not supposed to have body functions or practice sport. Jack and Algernon are men, but they are effeminate dandies. Algernon spends money extravagantly on clothes and is greedy, qualities often associated with women.
Here, and throughout the play, Oscar Wilde asks the following question: is biology always the framework which constrains socialization practices, making it impossible for culture to minimize, rather than eliminate, the effects of natural biological differences between men and women? The tension between the body as real and the body as discursive remains a key axis of the debate within gender studies. For example, for R.W. Connell in socialization theories, “the underlying image is of an invariant biological base,” whereas for Judith Butler “the body is not a ‘being’ but a variable boundary, a surface whose permeability is politically regulated, a signifying practice within a cultural field or gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality”. The example of drag (in which a person performs a gender that does not match his/her sex) she wants to show that bodies are not “beings” but are the effects of discourses. Maybe the 2005 production at the Abbey Theatre, showing the actor Alan Stanford first dressed as Oscar Wilde transforming himself into Lady Bracknell—Lady Bracknell being a perfect figure to be played by a man—was trying to take this notion on board. It could be argued, though, that this production only emphasized the superficial and camp side of the play, hardly touching the idea of what J. Butler calls “the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core”. If used, gender performativity must “trouble gender”. In other words, it must arouse curiosity and stir traditional feelings and ideas about gender. It is indeed an attractive and challenging notion, although Judith Butler has admitted herself that performativity does not always allow the degree of “free play” with gender that some other queer theorists have suggested.
The play is subtitled “A trivial comedy for serious people”. If it is trivial it thus means that it has no important message to convey. However, Paul Watzlawick, the communication theorist said that “one cannot not communicate,” therefore although there seems to be no message in the play, the message might be precisely that, that there is no message. Oscar Wilde tells us that our world is absurd and that it is pointless to try to find any meaning to it. Life is simply like a bubble of champagne: it makes one’s head light and makes one talk nonsense and act silly, just like the play’s characters. However, it may not necessarily be better to know about the absurdity of the world because as Lady Bracknell puts it “Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone!” In fact, Oscar Wilde seems to say that nothing really seems to matter in life.
As far as the staging of the play was concerned, conformity was the rule for Victorian directors, who chose a naturalist setting and realistic costumes made in London or Paris. When the public saw the actors and actresses on stage they underwent an identification process because they lived in the same flats, wore the same clothes and spoke the same apparent language. The Victorian audience then laughed at itself. Or did it? The scenes would have seemed so exaggerated that they could not possibly have recognized themselves and have taken the play seriously. They actually laughed at social and sexual relationships that, as far as they were concerned, could not exist. Exaggeration and nonsensical dialogues probably helped Wilde get away with the more troubling questions he raised.
Any writer, male or female, can find it hard to work outside the conventions, practices and aspirations of his/her predecessors. Can we then say that Oscar Wilde paved the way for contemporary authors like Frank McGuinness for example? According to Eamonn Jordan, McGuinness’s dramas, for example, “set specific challenges, especially when it comes to female characters. Of all the male playwrights writing today in Irish theatre, McGuinness consistently confronts romanticized, conventionalized and stereotypical gendered roles and imperatives”.
William Archer, one of the critics, wrote about the play in 1895:
It is delightful to see, it sends wave after wave of laughter . . . but as a text to criticism it is barren and delusive . . . it is intangible, it eludes your grasp. What can a poor critic do with a play which raises no principle, whether of art or morals, creates its own canons and conventions, and is nothing but an absolutely willful expression of irrepressibly witty personality.
Here is a audiobook to better understanding of the play:
Here is a Movie Adaptations of Importance of Being Earnest :
1986 Movie:
1952 Movie (with subtitles):
Here is a play performances of the play 'Importance of being Earnest.':
Performed in April 2018 in the Sigurd Lee Theater, Ylvisaker Fine Arts Center on the campus of Bethany Lutheran College: The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, directed by Peter Bloedel.
Mammoth Lakes Repertory Theater presents The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by Susan Dalian, produced by Shira Dubrovner. February, 2018.
Thank you so much for reading this blog. I hope it might be helpful to you all.
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