This play is a comedy of
manners and farce (and almost a satire). poking fun of witty aristocrats
(comedy of manners) and using devices of farce. It attacks important Victorian topics: marriage, wealth, manliness, station, class distinction,
education and religion. Usually authors
use devices as tools to an end. In Earnest
the tools become part of the comedy.
For example, the excess use of marriage as a happy ending clearly works
as not just a cause of humor but the subject of the humor.
1. Mistaken identities
2. Coincidences
3. Mistimings (discovery scenes)
4. Brothers separated at birth
5. Lovers preferring the other lover’s love
6. Parent who blocks a marriage
7. Foolish/wise clergy
8. “Insuperable barriers” love forbidden by
class or wealth
9. The recognition scene
10. Marriage as the answer
to the problems
1. Puns (dentists and making false impressions)
2. Epigrams ( in marriage three is company, two is none)
3. Wildean paradoxes
4. Repartee
Wilde quotes:
“The well-bred contradict
other people. The wise contradict
themselves.’
“Only the shallow know
themselves.”
“No artist desires to prove
anything. Even things that are true can
be proved.”
“. . . an educated person’s
ideas of art are drawn naturally from what art has been, whereas the new work
of art is beautiful by being what art has never been.”
Bentley, The
Playwright as Thinker:
The play is farce, a genre
which, being the antithesis of serious is not esily put ot serious uses. It is so consistently farciacal in tone.,
characterization, and plot that we rarely care to root out any more serious
content. But as th title confesses, it
is about earnestness that is Victorian colemnity, a term which has come to mean
a false seriousness, that which means priggishness, hypocrisy, and lack of
iron.
Henry Popkin Preface,
The Importance of Being Earnest
Invariably, wit comments
upon its opposites, slowness of thought and infelicity of expression; implicitly
it ridicules dullness and solemnity.
Similarly, Wilde attacks society on aesthetic grounds. what he
recommends to us, and by implication only, is not social reform, women’s
suffrage, or child-labor laws but style—a style of life, of behavior, and of
speech. By showing the height of wit
and manners, he criticizes their absence.