The Importance of Being Earnest

Set in Victorian England, “The Importance of Being Earnest” follows two men who have created aliases and fake friends to avoid commitments and give them an excuse to visit the women they love. Hilarity ensues when they discover that they are using the same alias and the women they love are not only in love with them, but the fake persona they have both assumed. In this film Oscar Wilde satirizes marriage, the actions of women, and the upper class.

Jack Worthing has created a fake brother named Earnest, whom he uses as an excuse to leave the country for the city periodically. As soon as he arrives in the city, he assumes the role of Earnest in order to win the favor of his love interest, Gwendolen Fairfax. His friend, Algy Moncrieff, takes over the role of Earnest in order to visit the country and meet Worthing’s ward, Cecily. When Jack first proposes to Gwendolen, she accepts immediately and says she has loved him from the minute she first heard his name. Jack quickly realizes that she is in love with the name of Earnest and frantically begins to denounce his alias’s name. However, Gwendolen insists she could never love anyone as much as someone with a “Romantic” name like Earnest. This scene satirizes women who are obsessed with their ideas of romance and expect real life to be just like their fantasies. Cecily does the same thing. She fantasizes about marrying Earnest, though she has never met him, simply because she thinks his name is exciting. When Algy arrives, masquerading as Earnest, she instantly agrees to marry him revealing that, in her imagination, they have been engaged for quite some time. She says that at one point, however, she broke it off with him because “it would hardly have been a serious engagement if [she] hadn’t broken it off at least once!” This not only satirizes women and their pursuit of Romantic fantasies, but it also criticizes the trivial and nonchalant way in which society sometimes approachs marriage. These individuals do not know each other well enough to know if they love each other, the men simply know that the women are attractive and the women believe that the men can fulfill their romantic dreams. In the “Importance of Being Earnest” there is not so much an emphasis on being true, but on being earnestly dishonest.

The upper class is also a subject of Wilde’s criticism in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” Many of the ways in which the wealthy are satirized reminds me of the social criticisms in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Lady Bracknell reminds me of Lady Catherine de Bourgh. Each woman wants her daughter to marry a man from a high social class, with money, assets, and a good lineage. They are also very involved in the lives of their nephews, the only difference being that Lady Catherine wanted her nephew to marry her daughter, and thus refused to let him marry Miss Elizabeth Bennet. Lady Bracknell refuses to let her nephew, Algy, marry Cecily until she discovers that the young woman has a large sum of money to her name. Similarly, she will not permit Gwendolen to marry Jack until they discover that he is her long lost nephew. The upper class is obsessed with staying in the upper class. Ironically a flashback reveals that Lady Bracknell was not always a member of high society, though at the present she holds her societal power over everyone else. Through Lady Bracknell and the trivial, costly actions of her nephews, the upper class is made to seem very materialistic and wealth obsessed.

“The Importance of Being Earnest” has been my favorite movie of the semester so far. I enjoyed the amusing mishaps and actions of the main characters and the many parallels with Pride and Prejudice made it even more enjoyable.

Through the characters and their many misadventures in the pursuit of love and marriage, Wilde satirizes the marriage customs of Victorian England, the expectations women have for an unrealistically Romantic lifestyle, and the obsession of the upper members of society to maintain and elevate their social supremacy.