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The Importance Of Being Earnest Double Life Analysis

715 Words3 Pages

Oscar Wilde’s mocking the Victorian way of life in “The Importance of Being Earnest” The Victorian age, which occurs, as its name says, during the time Queen Victoria ruled, is known for prudish, sanctimonious, and hypocritical behaviour of the people who lived at that specific period of time. Victorian people were often living double lives in order to maintain their appearance as moral and ideal in the eyes of the society but also to have fun and joy in “wrongdoings” without being marked as immoral, irresponsible and less than their society impose. This way of life Victorian people lived Oscar Wilde successfully mocks in his play The Importance of Being Earnest. The way Wilde mocks this lifestyle of the society he lived is by creating double …show more content…

Cecily, a young woman who keeps diary entries about things and events that occurs only in her head as a result of an imagination, lives in a way a double life too. An example of that is when she tells Algy or her Earnest how they are already in a relationship for a certain period of time even though they have just met.
You silly boy! Of course. Why, we have been engaged for the last three months (Wilde, Act 1:1767).

There is also Lady Bracknell who carries characteristics of a typical snob behaviour that relates with upper class, such as thought of being better than everyone else and again, as it suits Victorian era, hypocrisy when changing her mind about marriage between Algy and Cecily finding out that Cecily has a quite good financial status. Lady Bracknell says: “Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her” (Wilde, Act 3:1779).

To conclude, Oscar Wilde deals with Victorian social issues by mocking the lifestyle of the Victorian people mostly concentrating on the upper class. He delivers their hypocrisy and insincerity by creating a double life which refers to the false moral and fake values that people push as norms in a society which are completely absurd and unobtainable since they are unnatural; therefore at the end they are not followed. The ideal of the Victorian era is false and

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