Author: d4
Last saved by: Alfonso
Company: HCData

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST  - (COMENTARIU)

	"The Importance of Being Eernest" was an Oscar Wilde's early  experiment in Victorian melodrama. Part satire, part comedy of manners and part intellectual force, this play seems  to have nothing at stake because  the world it represents is so blatantly and ostentatiously artificial. Below  the surface of the light,  brittle comedy, however, is a serious subtext that takes aim  at self-righteous moralism and hypocrisy, the very aspect  of Victorian society that would, in part, bring about Wilde's downfall.
	John Worthing, known as Jack, the play's protagonist , is  a pillar  of the community, in Hertfordshire, where he is  guardian to the pretty Cecily, the  eighteen-year-old grandaughter  of the late Thomas Cardew, who found and adopted him when he was a baby. In Hertfordshire, Jack has responsabilities: he is  a major landowner, and justice of peace, with tendants, farmers, and a number of  servants and other employees all dependent on him. For years he has also pretended to  have an irresponsable black-sheep brother named Ernest who leads a scandalous life in pursuit  of plasure and  is allways getting into trouble of a sort , that requiers Jack to   rush grimly off to his assistance. In fact, Ernest is merely  Jack's aliby, a phantom  that alows  him to disappear  for days  at a time, and do as he  likes. No one but  Jack knows that he  himself is Ernest. This is the name  Jack goes by , to London, which is where he really goes on these occasions, probably  to pursue  the very  sort of behavoir he pretends to disaprove  of his brother.
	The double life is the central methaphor in the play, epitomized in the notion  of "Bunbury" . As defined by Algernon, Bunburying is a practice  of creating  an elaborate deception that alows jack to apear far more moral and responsable than he actually is. Similary, Algernon's  imaginary inalid frien, Bunbury allows Algernon to escape to the country, where he presumably imposes on people that don't know him, in much  the same way he mposes to Cecily  in the play, all the while seeming to demonstrate Crishtian, charity.
	The opening scene of " The Importance of Being Ernest" establishes  a highly stylized , unrealistic  world in which  no one talks the way ordinary people talk and very little seems to matter to anyone.Algernon and Lane, as well as  most other characters in the play, are  both literary constructs, that is, litarary devices  creates solely to  say particular things at particular moments. They have almost no life or significance apart from the way they talk. Theyr language  is sharp, brittle, and full of elegant witticism and mild, ironic pronouncements..For exemple, Lane's first line , when he says ironically that he did'n feel it was "polite" to listen  to Algernon's badly piano playing, is an insult  couched in polite , elegant language.
	A central purpose of the scene between these two characters is to lay the foundation for the joke about the cucumber sandwiches,  an incident that marks the first appearace of food as a source of  conflict as well as a substitute for  other appetites. Algernon absentmindedly eats all the  cucucmber sandwiches ordered especially for Lady Bracknell, during the dialog with Lane.In this  particular  scene, food substitutes  for the ideea of sex. The ideea becomes apparent in the early excange between Algernon and Jack over the question  whether  Jack should eat the cucumber sandwiches or bread and butter that were made for Gwendolen, the woman he is in love with. Here, algernon interprets eating as a form of  social,  even sexual, presumption; when Jack demonstrates too much enthusiasm for the bread and butter, he is being reproached  that he's behaving as though he were "married to Gwendolen already", as though he had touched her in an aggressive or salacious manner.
	 The scene to come after  in which Jack proposes to Gwendole portrays a reversal of Victorian assumption about  gender  rols, Gwendolen taking the whole business of marriage out of Jack's hands. Wilde has some fun with the rigidity of Victorian convention when he has Gwendolen backtrack and insist that Jack start  the whole  proposal proces over again, doing it properly.
	To make fun of  values of London society, which  put a higher premium on  social connections than on character or goodness,  Wilde uses Lady Bracknell's interview of Jack. More disquieting  than the questions  themselfs, is the order  in which she asks them. Such trival  questions like whether  he smokes or not, suggest the vacuity of London society, where more  weightly issues are  of secundary importance. The inquering about  Jack's family background, however, reveal Lady Bracknell's darker side. When  Jack admits he has "lost' both his parents, Lady Bracknell replies an elaborate pun: "to lose one parent , Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as  a misfortune: to lose both loks like carelessness." Lady Bracknell responded in an equally callous way to Bunbury's lingering ilness when she remarked: "i must say... that I think it is  high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die.This shilly-shalling with the question is absurd" .  In funny, but absurd pronouncements like these, Lady Bracknell reveales an unsettling notion that colored every aspect of Victorian life: poverty and misfortune are,  to some extent, an outcome of moral unworthiness.
	Morality and the constrains it imposes on society is a favorite topic of conversation in the play. Algernon thinks that the servant classs has a responsability to set a moral standard for the upper classes. Jack thinks reading a private cigarette case is "ungentelmanly".  "More than half of modern  culture depends on what one shouldn't read", Algernon points out. These restrictions and assumptions suggest a strict code of morals that exists in Victorian society, But Wilde isn't  concerned with  questions of what  is or isn't moral. The very title of the play is a double-edged comment on the phenomenon. The play's central plot - the man who both is and isn't Ernest/earnest - presents a moral paradox. Earnestness, which refers to both the quality of being serious and the quality of being sincere, is the play's primary object of satire. Characters such as Jack, Gwendolen, Miss Prism - Cecily's governess -   who put a premium on sobriety and  honesty, are either hypocrites,  or else have the rug pulled  out from under them,. What wilde wants us to see as truly moral is really the oposite of earnestness : irreverence.
	Jack's discovery that his life has not been a fiction, that he has indeed been both "Ernest" and "earnest" during the years he thought  he was deciving his friends and family, amounts to a complex moral paradox based on  an elaborate pun. For years he has been a liar, but at the same time  he spoke the truth : he really has been both  "earnest" (sincere) and "Ernest". In a way , Jack has become his own fiction, and  his  real life has become  the deception. His apology to Gwendolen and his observation that it is "a terrible  thing for a mann to find out that all his life he has  been speaking nothing but the truth." is both a characteristic Wildean inversion of conventional morality and a lost jibe  at the hypocrisy of Victorian society.