Oscar Wilde

Honesty is an important aspect of many agreements in everyday life. It is important in school, work and other aspects, like marriage. In Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the satire of an upper-class Victorian marriage can also be seen as a parody of the noble Victorian society as a whole. Wilde uses short dialogue to mock upper-class marriage in order to highlight and ridicule the flashbacks of society as a whole during this Victorian era. Wilde’s clever mind comes up with the…

Ernest Husbands or Earnest Husbands? In the play The Importance of Being Earnest, the characters view love and marriage differently than we do in modern society. In the play, Cecily and Gwendolen fall in love with the name “Ernest” rather than the person or their ability to be earnest. Also, when Lady Bracknell was interviewing Jack, she asked many questions that we would not typically ask when considering marriage. In modern society, most people fall in love with someone because of their…

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”(Act I). The film, The Importance of Being Earnest, is an enjoyable and comical interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s, The Importance of Being Earnest. This phenomenal film stars Colin Firth, Rupert Everett, Reese Witherspoon, and many more talented actors and actresses. In the film, Colin Firth play John Worthing, a responsible and respectable young man.…

and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel? Good morning, Mr. Worthing!” said Lady Bracknell, upon hearing of Jack’s upbringing (Wilde). The mother of Gwendolen, she has very high standards when it comes to choosing a mate for her daughter. Any whisper of marriage for her or her nephew, Algernon, is met with a long string of questions about a number of different issues. It is…

The difference between the novel Oryx and Crake and Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron is that in the novel, society conformed to the idea that the better you looked, the better you fit in with society, whereas in Harrison Bergeron, people have conformed to the idea that being better is a disability and a threat to society. People with a taller stature were given heavy weights to carry that made them sink down, beautiful people were given hideous masks to hide their beauty, and the intellectually…

Words are really just a sequence of noises to which humanity has assigned meaning. Some of these constructed meanings hold different levels of significance to different people. People will try to latch on to whatever meaning they can find because it is reassuring to have something, even as seemingly insignificant as a single word, with which they can find a personal connection. One word that has personal significance to me is “pretentiousness”. “Pretentiousness” is a noun, originating from the…

In many cases one has to act a certain way do to their ethnicity. “You think you’re white” (0) is a quote that was taken directly from the book “Black Boy” where Richard experience this situation. He was told not act, something that he is not. The person never knew him, but thought he was like the rest due to his skin tone. He thought he had the right to judge Richard just because he was black. It shows the mentality an individual thinks about someone different than them . The man thought…

of view. The meaning of the quote can be easily changed by who is reading it, and also whether it is in the context of the original script or on its own. The mental image of the gutter is quite striking. The gutter is dirty, damp, and undesirable. Wilde may have chosen the gutter to illustrate the hopelessness of the human condition because of the time in which he lived. Victorian London was over-crowded, it lacked proper disposal methods, and was a hot-bed of typhus, cholera, and influenza.…

Oscar Wilde is well known for the satire involved within his plays. The Importance of Being Earnest is not an exception to this. Wilde created a brilliant comedy that mocked different aspects of the Victorian lifestyle and unrealistic ideals. Part of the brilliance within this satirical piece is that Wilde mocked the very people that constructed his audience. While the play may be mocking of its own audience, it also draws them in by creating a relatable unrealistic world. In order to…

identity what either allows or inhibits one from interacting with society in its entirety. However, the societal class in which a character was born, or thrust, into is of as much importance, if not more, as a character’s personal sense of self. Both Oscar Wilde’s, “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Robert Louis Stevenson’s, “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” develop themes around the central ideology of self-identity versus how an entire society views the individual. “The…