Bunburying In Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Ernest

In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, each character has a distinct alter ego that they wear at some point during the play. Authorities on Wilde 's play have described Bunburying as “the confusion and then the restoration of identities” (Craft 23). The first introduced is called Bunbury. After this first instance of role-playing, the name Bunbury, or the term Bunburying comes to apply primarily to the two male leads throughout the rest of the play, and to equate to a false identity. The protagonist, Jack, Bunburys as his troublesome younger brother Ernest, so that he can experience a life in town as well as one in the country. Algernon, his friend, Bunburys as the original character, Bunbury the invalid, whom he uses to escape …show more content…
Delving into the other characters within the story, Bunbury appears in a variety of other forms, some much less obviouse than that of role-playing.To understand these different forms of Bunburying, one can compare the action of Bunburying to the action of putting on a play. Bunburying, “ascribes modes of reality to fictional persons,” and, “frames it as performance” (Balkin 27). Bringing a play to life requires three basic elements: an existing script provided by a playwright, actors and actresses, and third, an overseer or director, who controls everything and pulls the play together. Within Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, there exists characters who Bunbury, through script writing, characters who Bunbury through acting or role-playing, and characters who Bunbury through directing the course of events. Amidst the slew of master Bunburyists, Cecily Cardew is the greatest of them all. As playwright, actress, and director, Cecily proves herself the greatest Bunburyist by fulfilling all the categories of Bunburying within the …show more content…
She literally writes out an entire script based on the entries in her diary and on the letters the characters in her script exchange. For Cecily, her diary contains the dramatic conflicts and tragic history of the play; within her script Cecily finds the perfect playground for Cecily and her romantic Bunbury. Authorities on Wilde 's play claim that Bunburying stems from worldly desire or “appetite” (Ware 23). For example, Cecily 's Bunbury begins with her appetite for adventure and romance. Cecily utalizes this form of Bunburying as an escape form the boredom of daily life. Cecily is Jack Worthing’s ward. Only eighteen years old, she has spent her entire life alone, save for her tutor and the occasional visitor, in a quaint house in the county. Her studies consist of German grammar, Political Economy, and Geography. Her hobbies consist of gardening and writing in her diary, both of which Miss Prism, her tutor, frowns upon, exclaiming that “such a utilitarian occupation as the watering of flowers” is rather the manservants duty, and remarking absently “you really must put away your diary, Cecily. I really don’t see why you should keep a diary at all” (Wilde 22). Under these suffocating circumstances, it is no surprise that Cecily turns to Bunburying as an escape, and having all the time in the world to abandon her studies for her imagination, Cecily develops a romantic tale of