Mrs Dalloway And The Importance Of Being Earnest

Love is all about feeling something. A connection with another individual that affects them not only in their social life but deep down, it pulls at their heart. Marriage is the joining of two souls that deeply care about each other enough to devote their lives to each other. Their desire to spend time with each other everyday rules above all else. The books of “Wuthering Heights” “Mrs.Dalloway” and the “Importance of Being Earnest” shows the irony and exposes the fact that in each respective time period that the novels were set in, no one marries for their feelings for one another. Love is an ideal to strive for at all times, but there is rarely an instance where love is the reason for marriage. One individual might love the other, but in …show more content…
All the characters ever worry about is their marriage to one another or their past experiences with relationships that didn’t work out. The whole book of Wuthering Heights is set upon the love triangle of Heathcliff, Cathy, and Edgar. Cathy and Heathcliff are madly in love, but Cathy decided to marry Edgar for his money. This leaves Heathcliff in a rage for the rest of this life, swearing revenge upon Edgar and what he took from him, “I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!” (Page 69). The whole narrative of the story is revenge, and how one's heart, broken by love, can narrate the rest of the story. It works the same way within Mrs.Dalloway, but this time it’s focused on regret. It’s a bit trickier to catch due to the constant changing of consciousness, but the story constantly thrives upon the flashbacks of each of the protagonists with their past relationships with other characters within the story. These memories are only focusing on regret, and how their lives could differ from their reality that they live now. From Edgars regret of not trying harder for Clarissa to fall in love with him, to then Clarissa remembering her rebellious teens with her fiery, ragamuffin friend Sally, “It was her warmth; her vitality, [...] she would paint, she would write” (Page 75), all the characters …show more content…
Society has their own set of rules that everyone has to follow. If one does not heed the rules, their lives and family lineage will be looked down upon by society. These rules vary from each book but are relatively the same and very repetitive. If you are born in the upper class, you are required to marry someone else who is in the upper class. The same goes for middle and lower class. The only variation in this rule is in Earnest, where if you are marrying someone, you need to know if their family name is credible and if they have a large reserve of money. These rules are what support each character's decision in marriage, even if they don’t think about it. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy decided to marry Edgar for his money and because Heathcliff's lower class, even though she loves him, "It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am,” (Page 99). In Mrs.Dalloway, Clarissa marries Richard for his money, and now she doesn’t see herself as her own person anymore, She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest