Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

1. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) The Importance of Being Earnest

2. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

3. Young Life • Irish playwright Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin to flamboyant parents: • His father was a world-renowned society surgeon and widely acknowledged philanderer • His mother was a political activist and a well-known writer who published under the name Speranza. • Wilde attended Trinity College in Dublin in the 1870s and in 1878 earned a B.A. from Oxford University • He won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for his long poem Ravenna.

4. Early Career • In 1881, Wilde published a collection entitled Poems • Subsequently spent a year on a lecture tour in the U.S.A. • According to legend, he gave memorable instance of his wit: At customs, Wilde was asked if he had anything to declare. He replied, “Only my genius.” • During these early years, Wilde began carefully cultivating his public image as an aesthete (one having sensitivity to the beautiful), wearing colorful velvet jackets, breeches, and a lily or sunflower in his lapel.

5. Adult Life & Literary Career • Over the next few years, Wilde married and had two sons. • He edited a magazine called Woman’s World. • Also, he became more or less open about his homosexuality—a notorious affront to Victorian mores. • His fiction and poetry began to be published widely for the first time in the mid-1880s. • One collection of stories, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), was a particularly striking popular success. • Besides poetry and fiction, which included the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Wilde also wrote essays and criticism.

6. Wilde’s Plays • His plays, however, form the literary core of his work. • Wilde’s first theatrical hit, Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), is a “drawing room” comedy about a young married couple and a mysterious older woman who wants to reenter London society. • Another success, A Woman of No Importance (1893), deals with the interaction between a womanizer and a woman with a secret. • An Ideal Husband (1895) centers around a loving husband who is trying to keep the contents of an incriminating letter away from his wife, and in so doing sparks an unexpected romance. • During this period, Wilde also penned a very different kind of drama, Salome (1893), a one-act play based upon the biblical story of King Herod’s stepdaughter and St. John the Baptist.

7. The Importance of Being Earnest • The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), Wilde’s masterpiece, explores the tangled courtships of two couples. • As in the three comedies mentioned above, Wilde delights in tweaking rigid Victorian values concerning marriage and things extramarital, status and striving, and respectability and notoriety. • Also like these comedies, The Importance of Being Earnest is quickly paced, tightly plotted, and excruciatingly funny.

8. Wilde’s Private Life & Death • Around the time of the premiere of Earnest, things went very badly in Wilde’s private life. • The Marquess of Queensbury accused the author of having an affair with his son, and Wilde decided to sue the Marquess for libel. • Wilde lost the libel case, and testimony from it was used to try him for homosexuality, a crime in Victorian England. • The first trial ended in a hung jury, but Wilde was retried, convicted, and sentenced to serve two years’ hard labor. • Two works came out of Wilde’s time in prison, the prose work De Profundis (1897) and the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). • Wilde left England upon his release from prison, never to return. He died in poverty in Paris a few years later.

9. Analysis Comedy in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest Wilde’s nineteenth-century play, The Importance of Being Earnest, demonstrates many elements of classic comedy. First of all, Jack and Algernon, both witty and clever characters, exhibit human failings (pride, deception) that suggest they will receive their comeuppance before the final curtain falls. However, their failings are minor foibles, not the tragic flaws that lead to the downfall of tragic heroes. Furthermore, the characters themselves are ordinary citizens of their time; they are not kings, generals, or high born leaders, as tragic heroes usually are. We can guess from Jack and Algernon’s conversation in the first scene that there will be complications related to confusions of identity, a typical element in comedy. Jack has asked Algernon to introduce him as “Ernest” to Algy’s London friends. In addition, Jack sometimes claims that Ernest is, in fact, a trouble some younger brother, whom he must rush to help, while Algernon has invented an elderly relative, Bunbury, who supposedly develops terrible illnesses whenever Algy wants a change of scene. It is clear that these deceptions will come to haunt their perpetrators in ways that will humiliate them but amuse the audience. Two young women are also mentioned in this scene, Jack's ward, Cecily, and Algernon’s cousin, Gwendolyn. It’s easy to predict that romantic complications—presaged by Jack’s admission that he loves Gwendolyn—will become part of the action. The standard conclusion for comedy is an on-stage wedding, often of more than one couple. Whether or not this outcome provides the final scene may be discovered by those who seek out and read the full text of the play or (even better) enjoy it on stage (or on video).