NON - AFRICAN DRAMA OSCAR WILDE: The Importance of Being Earnest what impressions of the upper class life do you form from your study of the play?

Answer Details

In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, the study of the play leaves the reader with a vivid and satirical impression of Victorian upper-class life. Wilde presents the aristocracy as elegant, witty and leisured, but also as trivial, hypocritical, snobbish and obsessed with appearance, and the comedy exposes the emptiness beneath its polished surface.

A life of idle luxury and triviality. The upper class in the play does no useful work. Characters like Algernon spend their days eating, visiting, and pursuing pleasure. Algernon's obsession with cucumber sandwiches and his constant appetite typify a class preoccupied with the trivial. Life is a round of leisure with no serious purpose.

Preoccupation with appearance and form over substance. The upper class values style, manners and reputation far above sincerity. Wilde's title-pun captures this: everyone is concerned to seem earnest while being anything but. Gwendolen loves a man for his name rather than his character, showing how the surface matters more than the reality.

Snobbery and obsession with class and marriage. Lady Bracknell embodies aristocratic snobbery. She interrogates Jack as a marriage prospect chiefly about income, property and family connections, treating marriage as a business transaction and social alliance rather than a matter of love. Birth and money determine a person's acceptability, and being found in a handbag disqualifies Jack regardless of his worth.

Hypocrisy and double lives. The upper class preaches respectability while practising deception. Both Jack and Algernon lead double lives, inventing fictitious persons, "Bunbury" and the wicked brother "Ernest," to escape social obligations and pursue pleasure. This exposes the gap between the class's public morality and private conduct.

Wit and verbal elegance. The upper class is also shown to be brilliantly witty. Its members trade epigrams and paradoxes with dazzling ease. Yet this cleverness often serves to disguise shallowness, and Wilde uses their sparkling talk both to entertain and to satirise their want of seriousness.

Materialism and worship of money. Wealth is the measure of all things. Lady Bracknell's approval of Cecily rises the moment she learns of the girl's large fortune, revealing how thoroughly material considerations govern the class's judgements.

In conclusion, the play impresses upon the reader an image of upper-class life that is elegant and witty on the surface but idle, snobbish, materialistic and hypocritical beneath. Through this portrait Wilde satirises the Victorian aristocracy and its worship of appearance, money and social form.