The Two Faces of The Importance of Being Earnest

The Two Faces of The Importance of Being Earnest

The Two Faces of The Importance of Being Earnest

It is generally thought that Oscar Wilde’s body of work has three most important achievements: the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (first published in 1890), the play The Importance of Being Earnest (first performed in 1895) and the letter De Profundis (written in 1897). Of these three masterpieces, The Importance of Being Earnest is often regarded as a superficial, if virtuoso, farce or comedy of manners and is dismissed “as a trifle of dialogues” (Reinert, 1957, p. 14). However, this is a shallow approach to a play of hidden depths and meanings, in which the audience or readers “can sense a solid substance beneath the frothy surface, the nature of that substance [remaining] an enigma” (Parker, 1974, p. 173).

One of the secrets of the play is its attitude towards social hierarchies. Is The Importance of Being Earnest a criticism of the rigidity and hypocrisy of Victorian society or is it a manifestation of Wilde’s cold elitism and affinity for exclusionary aesthetics? This essay will attempt to answer this question and will conclude that both views are valid, though there are good reasons for giving more purchase to the latter.

The careless attitude towards The Importance – the first working title of which was The Guardian (Raby, 1994, p. 142) – may be due to Wilde’s own flippant way of referring to his play: in an 1894 letter to the actor George Alexander, the playwright calls it his “somewhat farcical comedy” (Wilde, 2000, p. 620), and in another one from 1895 he describes it as “trivial” and says that it was “written by a butterfly for butterflies” (Wilde, 2000, p. 630). The first production of the play about four young lovers who, through entertaining schemes and assumed personalities find their right partner, opened in 1895 at the St James’s Theatre and was initially received with acclaim, even though the Marquess of Queensberry – the father of Wilde’s troubled and troubling companion Lord Alfred Douglas, aka Bosie – tried to sabotage the opening night by creating a scene and stopping the performance. The theatre, however, managed to prevent this with the help of twenty police officers, who guarded the entrances of the theatre, and the Marquis had to content himself only with sending Wilde “a grotesque bouquet of vegetables” (Wilde, 2000, p. 632). Yet Wilde’s libel case against Queensberry began during the run of the play, and when he lost it and was arrested for gross indecency, his name was first erased from the playbills and then the show was cancelled altogether (Freshwater, 2013, p. 284).

Nevertheless, since its initial short life, the play has been revisited and celebrated by many generations of both critics and theatregoers. It can be argued that this is primarily due to his masterful usage of language, making the characters’ speech “as hard and glittering as possible” (Paglia, 1991, p. 534). The mere employ of sparkling verbosity, however, is an unlikely reason for the play’s success, both in English and in translation in other languages, which leads to the conclusion “that Wilde’s witticisms contain a wealth of unsuspected meaning” (Paglia, 1991, p. 541).

One way of approaching the play’s hidden essence is to read The Importance as a devastating critique of the hypocrisy of Victorian society, with its Puritanical ideals that it never lived up to. Given that in De Profundis, the letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from prison, Wilde muses that “[t]o be entirely free, and at the same time entirely dominated by law, is the eternal paradox of human life that we realise at every moment” (Wilde, 2003, p. 997), it would be reasonable to suggest that he wanted to expose “the ludicrous and sinister realities behind the fashionable façade of an over-civilized society where nothing serious is considered serious and nothing trivial trivial” (Reinert, 1956, p. 17). This ridicule of those in positions of power has ancient roots in the western theatrical tradition, and Wilde was particularly influenced by “Restauration and eighteenth-century manners comedy” (Foster, 1956, p. 19). However, although he satirises the ruling class of Imperial Britain, with its “grotesquely hypocritical moral absolutes” (Brown, 2003, p. 353), characterising the play as a manifestation of social protest would be erroneous. At best, “it subjects the social institutions of its milieu to ridicule but stops short of advocating specific reforms” (Lalonde, 2005, p. 666). In other words, at the end of the play, the order of Society, personalised in Lady Bracknell, prevails: the two young men, both leading double lives of pr