The frequent use of antinomy in Oscar Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, has often been interpreted as a literary device that serves as a “jubilant celebration of male homosexual desire,” as analyzed by Christopher Craft.[1] Other...

Oscar Wilde frames "The Importance of Being Earnest" around the paradoxical epigram, a skewering metaphor for the play's central theme of division of truth and identity that hints at a homosexual subtext. Other targets of Wilde's absurd yet...

In the closing lines of the first act of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," Algernon remarks, "I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious," to which Jack responds, "Oh, that's nonsense Algy. You never talk about...

Oscar Wilde creates a successful, complex comedy by maintaining consistent conflict and contradiction in the action, dialogue, and characters of The Importance of Being Ernest. Dramatic or comedic action is essentially exaggerated conflict. Wilde...

Names play a pivotal role in Oscar Wilde's drama "The Importance of Being Earnest." The naming of the characters is deliberate and well thought-out. Their name alludes to the pigeonhole for each of their characters. A name is a typecast and in...

Oscar Wilde vigorously attacks the institution of heterosexual marriage in his play “The Importance of Being Earnest” by employing light comedy in order to portray characters that are shallow, immature, and oblivious about the commitment into...

“We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces” (2257). So the character of Lady Bracknell observes at the conclusion of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. The play as a whole is one firmly preoccupied with the idea of surfaces and...

Through the scope of a satirical lens, both Anthony Trollope’s novel Barchester Towers and Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest take turns examining the carefully structured norms of courtship and marriage in Victorian England....

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde and Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw are both satirical plays meant to criticize Victorian society and war, respectively. While both plays were written by Irish authors familiar with London and...

In Oscar Wilde’s, The Importance of Being Earnest, satire is used to emphasize the triviality and absurdity of certain conventions within Victorian society. The play’s main characters epitomize Victorian high society; thus, the criticism that...

The interpretation that “we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality” greatly applies to the Importance of Being Earnest. The Importance of Being Earnest is a...

Richard Foster states that The Importance of Being Earnest has a “multivalent nature”[1] and thus implies that a farce or comedy of manners are not particularly urbane genres and are therefore ‘unsuitable’ for The Importance of Being Earnest....

Honesty is an important trait that is conveyed throughout society. It is the foundation for a long-lasting and meaningful relationship, and it is expected to be practiced in almost every social interaction. Much like today, the Victorian Era...

Algernon is a comic to a contemporary audience because of his dandyism, his enjoyment of self-gratification, his inverted morals and his double life. Wilde presents Algernon as a dandy figure who is more concerned with style over substance;...

Traditionally, drama has been an outlet for the extraordinary; only fairly recently with more modernist plays have the focus been shifted onto more ordinary lives. Greek tragedy follows the fall of a noble protagonist; by comparison, domestic...

Throughout history, women were perceived as inferior to men socially, economically, and intellectually. In modern society, the majority of people would call out this statement for its blatant misogyny and inequality. However, such a claim would...

Social critique has long been at the heart of drama, whether through satire, allegory or more direct devices, enabling dramatists to comment on the state of the world as they see it, to pose their own idealized version of society or to put forward...

Composed by Oscar Wilde to be first played at the St. James Theatre of London in the year of 1895, The Importance of Being Ernest has since named itself one notable satire among the blooming era of comedies that dwell on the hypocrisy of the upper...

The measure of a manâs character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.

Thomas Babington

Morality is the very foundation of goodness and the pillar of righteousness. Immorality, however, is the threshold towards conspicuous...

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes of a beautiful young man with an ugly secret. While Dorian Gray will forever retain the innocent looks of his youth, his portrait will degenerate with every wrong he commits. Unburdened and...

After ten weeks of intently studying a wide range of some of literature's greatest authors and their representative works, one is hard pressed to single out only four of these transcendiary pieces from such a distinguished list. However, four of...

Murder, sex, scandal, and drug abuse-all of these sins of the main character thread together to shape Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, a dark tale of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth while his portrait bears the scars of...

The Unconscious Image of the Conscious Mind

“Psychology helps us to talk about what the novelist knows” (Fish and Perkins), as through the meticulous analysis of a literary work, its major themes or symbolism, one can theoretically reach at the...

Throughout history, art has played a major role in portraying the structure of society and the different roles people play in it. In Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, art seems to dictate the life of young Dorian Gray to the point of...