NON — AFRICAN DRAMA OSCAR WILDE: THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Comment on the use of irony in the play.

Answer Details

Irony is the very lifeblood of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde uses verbal, dramatic and situational irony throughout to satirise the hypocrisy, snobbery and shallow values of Victorian upper-class society.

Irony in the title and the name Ernest. The whole play turns on the pun in the title. The word earnest means sincere and serious, yet the two heroes, Jack and Algernon, are anything but sincere; they build their romances on lies. Both women declare they can love only a man named Ernest, so the men scramble to be christened Ernest. It is deeply ironic that a name associated with truthfulness is won through elaborate deception, and that Jack turns out, by an accident of birth, to be genuinely named Ernest after all.

Verbal irony and epigram. Wilde fills the dialogue with witty inversions that mean the opposite of conventional wisdom. Characters solemnly utter absurdities as if they were profound truths, for example treating trivial matters like cucumber sandwiches with grave seriousness while treating serious matters like marriage and death with flippancy. This constant reversal mocks the values of the society being portrayed.

Situational irony. The plot is built on ironic reversals. Jack invents a wicked brother called Ernest as an excuse to escape to town, while Algernon invents an invalid friend called Bunbury to escape to the country. The deceptions collide comically when Algernon actually appears as the fictitious Ernest. The revelation that Jack was found as a baby in a handbag at a railway station, and is in fact Algernon's elder brother truly named Ernest, is the crowning irony.

Dramatic irony. The audience often knows more than the characters, for instance that neither man is really named Ernest, which sharpens the comedy of the misunderstandings.

Through this rich web of irony Wilde exposes the pretence beneath respectable Victorian society, showing that its supposed earnestness is itself a comic sham.