The context of the play "The Importance of Being Earnest"

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play written is Oscar Wilde, and its premiere took place in London, on February 14th 1895.

The context of the play is set during the Victorian England; it is a humorous play due to the fact that characters maintain diverse fictitious identities in order to escape from unwanted social obligations. The play is filled with witty dialogue and it critizieses the hypocrisy of society during the Victorian Era. This is Oscar Wilde’s most popular play.

In this play there are severe critics to some of the ways people lived in the Victorian England, and the use of the language in the play is satiric, and it uses all the literary recourses to achieve the critic that Wilde wants to make to the society of the time, this language usage and literary forms that Wilde uses show the maturity that Oscar Wilde had achieved at that time for example.

Marriage that is of mayor importance in the play, it motivates the plot and it is a subject to debate. The nature of Marriage is questioned from the very beginning of the play, and this subject never disappears at all, the way marriage is seen during the play, reflects the way of thinking of the Victorian Society in which marriage involves respectability, social position, income and character.

It also deals with morality and what it imposes to society; for example, Algernon believes that the servant class has the duty to set a moral ideal for the upper and richer classes. Wilde doesn’t care of what is moral and what is unmoral. Instead, Wilde makes fun of the Victorian way of seeing morality, as it is supposed to be a rigid set of rules that say what people should and shouldn’t do. The play has as its primary object to satire, and it presented moral paradoxes, since many of the characters are presented as sober and honest, however, they act as hypocrites, in the end, what Wilde intends us to see, is irreverence, witch is the opposite of earnestness.

Earnestness, which means to be serious or sincere, is the great antagonist in the play. All through the play Wilde depicts the Victorian character by using the actions of the characters and their way of thinking, which could be: pomposity, smugness, solemnity, complacency and many others.

Wilde uses the world earnest to portrait two related, however, different ideas, the idea of false truth and the idea of false morality.

To sum up, the Importance of being Earnest is related to Oscar Wilde’s life, as the Victorian moral and himself did not convene and he was very critic to the false moral of that time, that made him suffer and that he didn’t accepted due to his ideals.

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