Notesale: Turn your study into money

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Plays are UNDERLINED
3 Acts, Stage setting is in a very fashionable part of London
◦ Act 1: "luxuriously and artistically furnished"
Trivial comedy for serious people:
◦ fighting over the muffins, over the cucumber sandwiches, the
problems they have are trivial
◦ he reverses the rules saying things like: if the lower class doesn’t
set the right example who will

Characters:
• Role of Chasuble: reverend, represents the church
• Ms
...

Act One:
• Lane’s character creates humor, their dialogue
...

• Eating is a very big part of the play
...

• The two settings: the country, and the city
...

• Lady Bracknell represents establishment, character that judges all
...
you” page 2 (chiasmus)
◦ Wilde takes proverbs and reverses them, like “divorces are made in
heaven"
◦ Algernon can eat the cucumbers sandwiches, but Jack cannot
...

▪ Use of exaggeration: “Gwendolen is devoted to bread and
butter"
◦ “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t
read"
▪ Reversal: shouldn’t talk about modern culture in “private”,
supposed to be in public
◦ Page 5, “it is very vulgar
...
"
▪ Impression is a dentist pun, double meaning
◦ Reversal: Make it “improbable”, page 6
...

◦ Page 8, her hair turned “gold” from grief
Act Two:
• Immediate reference to culture
...
Cecily claims that to live a
new life one must eat
...
“celibacy leads weaker vessels astray”, she drew her
metaphor from the fruits, while he drew his previous metaphor from the
bees
...

◦ Dressed in the deepest mourning, however the minister asks a
stupid question, comic poke to the minister and the church
...

◦ “I suppose you know how to christen all right”, supposed to be
obvious
◦ Miss Prism says: “they don’t seem to know what thrift it”, social
class comment, I keep telling them to stop having kids, because
they don’t understand that they have to pay for baptism
...

◦ Pun at the word “sprinkling”, comical explanation of the ceremony
...
It would be childish” Implies
he is a baby, acting childish
...

• Dialogue between Cecily and Jack goes to show:
◦ weather on the same level of engagement
◦ love is born in imagination
◦ paradox: diary intended to be published, natural hair with help of
others
• Pun on education: reversal, he knows so much he hasn’t written a book
Act Three:
• Classical three act play, falling action and resolution
...

• We are at the Manner house, in the country
...

• The dialogue:
◦ “Cecily
...
That looks like
repentance
...

◦ Echoing in the dialogue, in both what men and women say
...

▪ “Gwendolen
...

▪ Jack
...
[Clasps hands with Algernon
...
”
▪ “I do not propose to undeceive him
...
” She is
▪ “(Long engagements) They give people the
opportunity of finding out each other’s

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character, “before marriage, which I think is never
advisable"
▪ Social hypocrisy: “Never speak disrespectfully of Society,
Algernon
...
”
▪ Trivial matters: “he number of engagements that go on
seems to me considerably above the proper average that
statistics have laid down for our guidance
...
"
Stage directions show that characters want to show their importance and
their strength:
◦ “Lady Bracknell
...
] You must be
quite aware that what you propose is out of the question
...

◦ moral issues are trivial: eating muffins, drinking his wine, his
moral grounds are not real

Theme:
The Nature of Marriage Marriage is of paramount importance in The Importance
of Being Earnest, both as a primary force motivating the plot and as a subject for
philosophical speculation and debate
...

Algernon and Jack discuss the nature of marriage when they dispute briefly
about whether a marriage proposal is a matter of “business” or “pleasure,” and
Lady Bracknell touches on the issue when she states, “An engagement should
come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be
...
In general, these assumptions reflect the conventional preoccupations
of Victorian respectability—social position, income, and character
...
” Lane remarks casually that he believes it to be “a very
pleasant state,” before admitting that his own marriage, now presumably ended,
was the result of “a misunderstanding between myself and a young person
...
” His own views are
relentlessly cynical until he meets and falls in love with Cecily
...
He tells Algernon, however, that the
truth “isn’t quite the sort of thing one tells to a nice, sweet, refined girl
...
She forgives him, she says, on the grounds that she
thinks he’s sure to change, which suggests Gwendolen’s own rather cynical view
of the nature of men and marriage
...
Algernon
thinks the servant class has a responsibility to set a moral standard for the upper
classes
...
” “More
than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read,” Algernon
points out
...
Instead, he makes fun of the whole Victorian idea of morality
as a rigid body of rules about what people should and shouldn’t do
...
The play’s central
plot—the man who both is and isn’t Ernest/earnest—presents a moral paradox
...
Characters such as Jack,
Gwendolen, Miss Prism, and Dr
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What Wilde wants us to see as truly moral is really the opposite of earnestness:
irreverence
...
Inventiveness Algernon and Jack may create similar deceptions, but
they are not morally equivalent characters
...
He rounds out the deception with
costumes and props, and he does his best to convince the family he’s in
mourning
...
In contrast, Algernon and Cecily make up
elaborate stories that don’t really assault the truth in any serious way or try to
alter anyone else’s perception of reality
...
In some ways, Algernon, not Jack, is the play’s real
hero
...

The Importance of Not Being “Earnest” Earnestness, which implies seriousness
or sincerity, is the great enemy of morality in The Importance of Being
Earnest
...
When characters in the
play use the word serious, they tend to mean “trivial,” and vice versa
...
”
For Wilde, the word earnest comprised two different but related ideas: the notion
of false truth and the notion of false morality, or moralism
...
However, what one member of society considers decent or indecent
doesn’t always reflect what decency really is
...
The characters who embrace triviality and

wickedness are the ones who may have the greatest chance of attaining
seriousness and virtue
...

Puns In The Importance of Being Earnest, the pun, widely considered to be the
lowest form of verbal wit, is rarely just a play on words
...
The earnest/Ernest joke strikes at the very heart of Victorian
notions of respectability and duty
...
She is, after all, quick to forgive Jack’s deception
...
In Act III, when Lady Bracknell quips that until recently she had no
idea there were any persons “whose origin was a Terminus,” she too is making an
extremely complicated pun
...
In Wilde’s day, as in the England of today, the first stop on a railway line
is known as the “origin” and the last stop as the “terminus
...
Wilde is poking fun at Lady Bracknell’s snobbery
...
In general, puns add layers of meaning
to the characters’ lines and call into question the true or intended meaning of
what is being said
...
The play contains
inversions of thought, situation, and character, as well as inversions of common
notions of morality or philosophical thought
...
” Similarly, at the end of the play, when Jack calls it “a terrible thing” for a
man to discover that he’s been telling the truth all his life, he inverts conventional
morality
...
Lady Bracknell usurps the role of
the father in interviewing Jack, since typically this was a father’s task, and
Gwendolen and Cecily take charge of their own romantic lives, while the men
stand by watching in a relatively passive role
...

Death Jokes about death appear frequently in The Importance of Being Earnest
...
With respect to Bunbury, she suggests that death is an
inconvenience for others—she says Bunbury is “shilly-shallying” over whether

“to live or to die
...
” Miss Prism speaks as though death
were something from which one could learn a moral lesson and piously says she
hopes Ernest will profit from having died
...
Besides giving the
play a layer of dark humor, the death jokes also connect to the idea of life being a
work of art
...

Symbols:Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent
abstract ideas or concepts
...
” As defined by Algernon, Bunburying is
the practice of creating an elaborate deception that allows one to misbehave
while seeming to uphold the very highest standards of duty and responsibility
...
Similarly, Algernon’s imaginary invalid friend
Bunbury allows Algernon to escape to the country, where he presumably
imposes on people who don’t know him in much the same way he imposes on
Cecily in the play, all the while seeming to demonstrate Christian charity
...
The
difference between what Jack does and what Algernon does, however, is that Jack
not only pretends to be something he is not, that is, completely virtuous, but also
routinely pretends to be someone he is not, which is very different
...

Through these various enactments of double lives, Wilde suggests the general
hypocrisy of the Victorian mindset
...
Act I contains the
extended cucumber sandwich joke, in which Algernon, without realizing it,
steadily devours all the sandwiches
...
”
Cecily responds by filling Gwendolen’s tea with sugar and her plate with cake
...
” On one level, the jokes about food
provide a sort of low comedy, the Wildean equivalent of the slammed door or the
pratfall
...
Food and gluttony
suggest and substitute for other appetites and indulgences
...
Algernon, when the play opens, has begun to suspect that
Jack’s life is at least partly a fiction, which, thanks to the invented brother Ernest,
it is
...
When Algernon says in Act I, “More than half of
modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read,” he may be making a veiled
reference to fiction, or at least reading material perceived to be immoral
...
This is an
allusion to a mysterious past life that a contemporary audience would have
recognized as a stock element of stage melodrama
...
When Cecily and Gwendolen seek to
establish their respective claims on Ernest Worthing, each appeals to the diary in
which she recorded the date of her engagement, as though the mere fact of
having written something down makes it fact
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Several of the characters attempt to create a
fictional life for themselves which then, in some capacity, becomes real
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