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7 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Lady Bracknell: I hope you are behaving very well Algernon: I am feeling very well, Aunt Augusta Lady Bracknell: That's not quite the same thing. In fact the two things rarely go together |
Here Wilde shows Aunt Augusta's wit, and he also is lampooning the stiff upper lip Victorian Society, showing how pleasure and behaving aren't the same thing. |
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I hadn't been there since her poor husband's death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger. |
By using this paradox Wilde is mocking the upper classes and their thinly veiled cattiness, exposing that they aren't as polite as they seem. |
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I had some crumpets with Lady Harbury, who seems to me to be living entirely for pleasure now |
This is a hyperbole by Wilde, showing how in the virtuous and devote Victorian society, something as simple as a crumpet was seen as such an extravagance that it showed a completely pleasurable life. |
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I think it is high time that... made up his mind whether he was going to live or to die |
This is another exaggeration of the dismissive attitudes of particularly the upper class towards the ill, adding shock value to Wilde's piece |
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French songs I cannot possibly allow. People always seem to think that they are improper, and either look shocked, which is vulgar, or laugh, which is worse. But German sounds a thoroughly respectable language, and indeed I believe it is so. |
By Wilde using vague terms like think or believe it shows the ignorance of Victorian Society, and the racial prejudices on Victorian society. |
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An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. |
This is a lampoon of the patriarchal society, where women, especially the young from rich families, had very little choice in who they married, and is mocking the idea of marrying for love, when in theses families marriage was about money and power. |
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[Looks in her pocket for a note-book and pencil] |
This is a clever stage direction by Wilde because it is a hyperbole of the marriage game of Victorian society, making what should be a causal thing, (a woman meeting her daughter's lover) into a formal investigation. |
