ENC 1102
Rosenbaum
Final Exam Review
Since we have covered a multitude of poems, dramas, and short stories this semester, I thought it might be
helpful to give a specific study guide to help you out. You should understand that most of these clues will
help you find the real answer on the test, but are not the way they are worded on the test.
Part I: Short Story Section- will be matching (sometimes you will match a description of the story,
sometimes you will need to match a quote from the story with its title), multiple choice and true/false and
will cover:
From Literature book:
A Clean Well-Lighted Place p. 152
-Who the story is sympathetic toward—the older or younger
generation?
-How can you tell?
-How is insomnia significant to the story?
-How is the story reflective of Hemingway’s style?
A Rose for Emily p. 29
-What did Emily kill Homer with?
-What did she do with the body after his death?
A Good Man is Hard to Find p. 369
-How is the mother treated by her son Bailey?
-by her grandchildren?
-by the Misfit?
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings p. 352
-What is the author’s name?
-What is magic realism?
-How is the angel treated?
The Yellow Wallpaper p. 436
-Does the narrator ask her husband John if she can leave the wallpapered
room? How does he respond?
The Rich Brother p. 613
-What does Peter realize he will go back and do at the end of the story?
From Elements of Literature book:
A Modest Proposal p. 581
-Remember what the proposal is
-Remember how people who did not understand satire reacted to this
proposal
Part II: Poetry Section- will be matching, multiple choice, true/false and will cover:
From Literature book:
For the following poems, a quote from the poem will be listed and you will need to match it to the
correct poem title.
Silence (p. 676)
Grass (p. 681)
Jabberwocky (p. 693)
next to of course god america i (p. 703)
Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter (p. 721)
Recital (p. 774)
The Hippopotamus (p. 780)
We Real Cool (p. 793)
Do not go gentle into that good night (p. 824)
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (p. 838)
For the following poems, I will ask a question about the content or detail in the poem and you
will need to match it to the correct poem title.
White Lies (p. 651)
Monologue for an Onion (p. 654)
Comment (p. 663)
Making it in poetry (p. 663)
Dulce et Decorum Est (p. 667)
Birthday Cake (p. 721)
Metaphors (p. 735)
Richard Cory (p. 754)
Ballad of Birmingham (p. 759)
The Times They Are a-Changin (p. 764)
Concrete Cat p. 845
First Love: A Quiz p. 847
Snow White (p. 877)
Cinderella (p. 879)
How Do I Hate You? Let Me Count the Ways (p. 913)
From Elements of Literature book:
The Lamb p. 733
-What is the subject of the poem?
-What is the tone of the speaker?
A Poison Tree p. 743
-What does the speaker felt towards his friend and his foe?
-What tempts the foe?
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner p. 775
-Why does the Mariner travel from country to country?
-To whom does the Mariner tell his story?
-Does this person want to hear the story?
-What does the dead sailors who stare at the Mariner symbolize?
Ozymandias p. 820
-What has happened to the monument of Ozymandias?
-Ozymandias is a symbol of what?
-What literary technique is present in the last line of the poem?
To a Mouse p. 721
-How is the mouse luckier than a man?
Part III: Drama Section- will be multiple choice and true/false
From Literature book:
The Glass Menagerie p. 1612
-Where does Tom work?
-What was the name of Laura’s business college?
-What breaks of Laura’s and why is it significant?
-What does Tom plan to join as he leaves home?
-Who does he tell?
From Elements of Literature book:
Come and Go p. 1344*
-Why is it difficult to distinguish between Flo, Vi, and Ru?
That’s All p. 1353*
-What does Mrs. A not understand that Mrs. B does?
* Due to time constraints, we may run out of time to read this in-class; if this happens, you
are still responsible for reading these on your own.
The Importance of Being Earnest
-Why did Jack create Ernest?
-What is a Bunburyist?
-What is revealed at the end of the play?
The play is available online at: http://www.hoboes.com/FireBlade/Fiction/Wilde/earnest/
Questions on MLA—
You will have to answer three multiple choice questions on MLA style. Be sure to
remember:
-how to do a parenthetical citation for a book
-what punctuation mark to end a Works Cited entry with
-another question will also be asked that you will have to use your brain to
answer
Part IV: Essay- 30% of your final exam grade will come from an essay you write on The Glass Menagerie
or The Importance of Being Earnest. You must include at least two quotes from the play (with a citation),
plus at least one quote from the attached literary criticisms (with a citation). YOU MAY HAVE THIS
ESSAY WRITTEN BEFORE YOU TAKE THE EXAM, BUT IT MUST BE HANDWRITTEN!
The following are your choices of essays for The Glass Menagerie:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Analyze one of the main characters (Tom, Amanda, or Laura) from the play.
Analyze the importance of memory in the play.
Analyze the use of symbols in the play, such as the glass menagerie.
Analyze the relationship of two of the characters in the play, such as:
 Tom and Amanda
 Laura and Amanda
 or Laura and Jim.
5. Several themes are present in the play The Glass Menagerie, such as:
 the importance of duty to family
 the need for adventure
 the influence of memory
Pick one of these themes, or another significant theme, to analyze in your essay.
The following are your choices of quotes from the play:
Quote #1 (found on p. 1643)
Well, in the South we had so many servants. Gone, gone, gone. All vestige of gracious living! Gone
completely! I wasn’t prepared for what the future brought me. All of my gentlemen callers were sons of
planters and so of course I assumed that I would be married to one and raise my family on a large piece of
land with plenty of servants. But man proposes—and woman accepts the proposal! To vary that old, old
saying a bit—I married no planter! I married a man who worked for the telephone company! . . . A
telephone man who—fell in love with long-distance!- Amanda
Quote #2 (found on p. 1651)
LAURA: Little articles of [glass], they’re ornaments mostly! Most of them are little animals made out of
glass, the tiniest little animals in the world. Mother calls them a glass menagerie! Here’s an example of one,
if you’d like to see it! . . . Oh, be careful—if you breathe, it breaks! . . . You see how the light shines
through him?
JIM: It sure does shine!
LAURA: I shouldn’t be partial, but he is my favorite one.
JIM: What kind of a thing is this one supposed to be?
LAURA: Haven’t you noticed the single horn on his forehead?
JIM: A unicorn, huh? —aren’t they extinct in the modern world?
LAURA: I know!
JIM: Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome.
QUOTE #3 (FOUND ON P. 1653):
JIM: Aw, aw, aw. Is it broken?
LAURA: Now it is just like all the other horses.
JIM: It’s lost its—
LAURA: Horn! It doesn’t matter. . . . [smiling] I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was
removed to make him feel less—freakish!
Quote #4 (found on p. 1657-1658):
I descended the steps of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps,
attempting to find in motion what was lost in space. . . . I would have stopped, but I was pursued by
something. . . . I pass the lighted window of a shop where perfume is sold. The window is filled with pieces
of colored glass, tiny transparent bottles in delicate colors, like bits of a shattered rainbow. Then all at once
my sister touches my shoulder. I turn around and look into her eyes. Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you
behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!- Tom
Quote #5 (found on p. 1623):
Listen! You think I’m crazy about the warehouse? You think I’m in love with the Continental
Shoemakers? You think I want to spend fifty-five years down there in that—celotex interior! with
flourescent tubes! Look! I’d rather somebody picked up a crowbar and battered out my brains—than go
back mornings! I go! Everytime you come in yelling that God-damn “Rise and shine!” “Rise and shine!” I
say to myself “How lucky dead people are!” But I get up. I go! For sixty-five dollars a month I give up all
that I dream of doing and being ever! And you say self—self’s all I ever think of. Why listen, if self is
what I thought of, Mother, I’d be where he is—GONE! (Pointing to father’s picture.) As far as the system
of transportation reaches!- Tom
Quote #6 (found on p. 1622):
I took that horrible novel back to the library—yes! That hideous book by that insane Mr. Lawrence. I
cannot control the output of diseased minds or the people who cater to them—BUT I WON’T ALLOW
SUCH FILTH BROUGHT INTO MY HOUSE! No, no, no, no, no!- Amanda
Quote #7 (found on p. 1628 ):
Man is by instinct a lover, a hunter, a fighter, and none of those instincts are given much play at the
warehouse!- Tom
Quote #8 (found on p. 1627):
Try and you will succeed! Why, you—you’re just full of natural endowments! Both of my children—
they’re unusual children! Don’t you think I know it? I’m so—proud! Happy and—feel I’ve—so much to
be thankful for…- Amanda
Quote #9 (found on p. 1634):
Mother, you musn’t expect too much of Laura…Laura seems all those things to you and me because she’s
ours and we love her. We don’t even notice she’s crippled anymore…she’s terribly shy and lives in a
world of her own and those things make her seem a little peculiar to people outside the house.- Tom
The following are your choices of literary criticisms:
Literary Criticism #1: “Williams's The Glass Menagerie” by Preston Fambrough
Although Amanda Wingfield, the embattled mother of Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie,
possesses admirable qualities, her personality is a formidable obstacle to sympathy. In Nancy Tischler's
words, Amanda is "a disillusioned romantic turned evangelical realist" (32). Although endlessly elegizing
the neiges d'antan of her Mississippi girlhood--with its seventeen gentleman callers--she labors grotesquely
to mold the lives of her adult children into American success stories through nagging and moralizing, an
attempt epitomized by the unendurable cheery "Rise and shine!" with which she awakens her son Tom each
morning and which grates on our ears like fingernails on a chalkboard. Not content to carp on Tom's eating
habits, his smoking, his lack of interest in his job, his late hours, and his insatiable appetite for movies, she
tries to impose her Puritan morality on him by censoring his reading of D. H. Lawrence (one of Williams's
own favorite novelists). Further, as Signi Falk observes, Amanda is unjust to Tom in blaming him for the
failure of her ham-handed campaign to ensnare a suitable husband for daughter Laura, unreasonably
faulting him for not knowing that the gentleman caller was engaged to be married and forgetting that Tom
tried to dissuade her from the ill-fated scheme in the first place. Amanda is no less overbearing and illadvised in her attempts to manage her daughter's life, and although her disappointment upon learning that
Laura has stopped attending business college is understandable, the lugubriousness of her dismay and
recriminations neutralize the compassion we might otherwise have felt for her plight.
That such compassion is in fact an element of the play's vision is clear from Williams's opening directions:
"There is much to admire in Amanda, and as much to love and pity as to laugh at. Certainly she has
endurance and a kind of heroism, and though her foolishness makes her unwittingly cruel at times, there is
tenderness in her slight person" (1065). But arbitrarily declaring such an inherently annoying character to
be worthy of sympathy and respect is one thing; imposing such a vision artistically within the fabric of a
play is another. In The Glass Menagerie, Williams banks largely on a peculiar stage effect, the illusion of a
wall of soundproof glass intervening between the audience and the action, to extend our sympathy to
Amanda. When at the end of the play the Gentleman Caller departs, mother and son quarrel violently and
Tom storms out of the apartment, smashing a glass on the floor. Tom's subsequent monologue, recounting
his wanderings since abandoning the family, coincides with a final scene in pantomime inside the
apartment:
We see, as though through soundproof glass, that Amanda appears to
be making a comforting speech to Laura, who is huddled upon the
sofa. Now that we cannot hear the mother's speech, her silliness is
gone and she has dignity and tragic beauty. Laura's hair hides her
face until at the end of the speech, she lifts her head to smile at
her mother. Amanda's gestures are slow and graceful, almost
dance-like, as she comforts her daughter. At the end of the speech
she glances a moment at the father's picture--then withdraws
through the portieres. (1114)
It seems likely that the illusion of a soundproof glass wall in this scene is part of what Williams has in mind
when he refers in the production notes to the "unconventional techniques" we can expect to find in a
memory play, techniques whose "one valid aim [...] is a closer approach to the truth" (1065). "We
remember Tom's promise that 'I am the opposite of a stage magician.' "He gives you illusion that has the
appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion" (1068). Jo Mielziner, who designed
the broadway set for the play, understood that the "truth" Williams sought to reveal through illusion was the
essential truth of the characters: "My use of translucent and transparent scenic interior walls," writes
Mielziner, "was not just another trick. It was a true reflection of the contemporary playwright's interest in
[...] the exploration of the inner man" (qtd. in Bigsby 96).
To lament that Williams, "in relegating this scene to background silence while Tom makes a self-conscious
statement about drifting about like a dead leaf [...], has substituted a painfully pretentious narration for what
could have been an intense and luminous moment between the two women" (Nelson 93) is to miss the point
of Williams's art of compassion. For what could be more intense and luminous--more illuminating--than
this silent dialogue, in which Amanda herself exemplifies compassion in ministering to her daughter? The
dignity and tragic beauty that the "unconventional technique" of the scene uncovers in Amanda are no
transient illusions but the true essence of her character. Amanda's voice is a metaphor for the human
personality--which, as Dostoevsky remarked, so often poses an insuperable obstacle to love--while her
mysteriously lovely silent gestures symbolize the person hidden behind the personality.
That the pantomime between Amanda and Laura takes place simultaneously with Tom's narrative imparts a
sense of timelessness to the scene, a timelessness which, as C. W. E. Bigsby points out (92), is crucial to
the playwright's concept of compassion. Williams believed that it is the "continual rush of time [...] that
deprives our lives of so much dignity and meaning, and it is, perhaps, more than anything else, the arrest of
time [...] that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance ("Timeless World" 129, Williams's
emphasis). And he insists that could we meet Willy Loman in a world outside of time, "we would receive
him with concern and kindness and even with respect" ("Timeless World" 130). Through the illusion of a
sound-proof glass wall in the final scene of The Glass Menagerie, Williams creates a luminous world of
compassion from which the distractions of time and personality have been banished, revealing to the
audience that "[m]en pity and love each other more deeply than they permit each other to know" ("Timeless
World" 131-32).
Source Citation
Fambrough, Preston. "Williams's The Glass Menagerie." The Explicator 63.2 (2005): 100+. General
OneFile. Web. 12 May 2010.
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&userGroupName=sebr13597&version=1.0
Literary Criticism #2: “Through the Looking Glass: The Role of Memory in The Glass Menagerie”
by Bert Cadullo
Laura Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie (1944) hardly qualifies as a romantic superwoman, a majestic ego
eager to transcend the "mereness" of mundane human existence. In his narration of the drama at the same
time as he plays a part in it, together with his final, self-centered leavetaking from the domestic miserycum-menage of his mother and sister for ocean going as well as artistic adventure, Tom Wingfield owns
that distinction. (See Harold Bloom's discussion of Tom as a romantic figure, and of Tennessee Williams's
American as well as English romantic precursors, in his Introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations:
Tennessee Williams [NY: Chelsea House, 1987], pp. 3-5.)
But Tom's romantic lineage as a lone, visionary quester, as opposed to his realistic-naturalistic role as a
clear-sighted, participatory narrator, might have been clearer had Williams taken himself at his word in the
Production Notes to The Glass Menagerie:
Expressionism and all other unconventional techniques in
drama have only one valid aim, and that is a closer
approach to truth. When a play employs unconventional
techniques, it is not, or certainly shouldn't be, trying to
escape its responsibility of dealing with reality, or
interpreting experience, but is actually or should be
attempting to find a closer approach, a more penetrating
and vivid expression of things as they are.... Everyone
should know nowadays the unimportance of the
photographic in art: that truth, life, or reality is an organic
thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest,
in essence, only through transformation, through changing
into other forms than those which were merely present in
appearance.... [A] new, plastic theatre ... must take the
place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the
theatre is to resume vitality as a part of our culture. (The
Glass Menagerie [NY: New Directions, 1966])
If the playwright had heeded these words, he would have made his alter ego, Tom Wingfield, a genuine
expressionistic protagonist, with American antecedents in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones (1920),
Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923), and Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928), together with German
precedents stretching from the quintessential expressionist Georg Kaiser all the way back to such late, even
ironic romantic relatives of his as Heinrich von Kleist and Georg Buchner. That is, Tom would have
become a protagonist whose remembrance of familial things past was truly subjective: distorted, dreamlike
or even nightmarish, and totally self-generated, a fantastic journey through the mind's inner reaches as well
as the world's outer ones.
As it stands, however, Tom's memories are not expressionistic, but impressionistic: they are his
impressions of his former domestic life, the veracity or accuracy of which is never placed in doubt by
Tennessee Williams. The Glass Menagerie may be a memory play, then, but it does not question the
reliability of memory, as do such plays as Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (1921) and
Pinter's Old Times (1971), and as does a film like Kurosawa's Rashomon (1951). Instead, Tom's memories
(like those of his Irish "offspring," the young narrator of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa [1990]) are very
much in the Hollywood tradition of flashback films, whose flashbacks are set in a representational world
we all recognize and accept. (Not by accident, The Glass Menagerie's earlier, 1943 incarnation was a
screenplay, titled The Gentleman Caller but never produced.)
The opening stage directions of The Glass Menagerie suggest just such a flashback when they describe the
theatrical equivalent of a cinematic "dissolve":
At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the
dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement.... At the
end of Tom's opening commentary, the dark tenement wall
slowly becomes transparent and reveals the interior of the
ground-floor Wingfield apartment... Nearest the audience is
the living room ... Just beyond, separated from the living
room by a wide arch or second proscenium with
transparent faded portieres (or second curtain), is the dining
room.... The audience hears and sees the opening scene in
the dining room through both the transparent fourth wall of
the building and the transparent gauze portieres of the
dining-room arch. It is during this revealing scene that the
fourth wall slowly ascends, out of sight. This transparent
exterior wall is not brought down again until the very end
of the play, during Tom's final speech. (The Glass Menagerie,
pp. 21-22)
After this, Tom steps onstage and begins his narration--the very kind we would hear in voice-over in a
flashback film. He should remain onstage throughout, even when he does not appear in a scene (as he
doesn't in Scene 2), as the play's one concession to Tom's "subjective" point of view. (Even as it would be a
concession to Tom's choral function, though, unlike the choruses of ancient Greek tragedy, Tom is a chorus
of one; and, at the end of The Glass Menagerie, the individualistic Tom abandons the stage, or his family,
whereas the socially-minded Greek chorus never deserted the stage and its fellow citizens.) But the fact that
Williams never indicates in the stage directions that Tom is present at all times suggests that he was really
writing what he decries in his Production Notes: a "straight realistic play with its genuine Frigidaire and
authentic ice-cubes, its characters who speak exactly as its audience speaks ..." (p. 7). What we see onstage
may be dimly or poetically lit; a screen device (on which images and titles are projected) may be used as
the mind's eye of the narrator; a single recurring tune may "weave in and out of [a] preoccupied
consciousness" (p. 9); and eating and drinking may be mimed instead of literally carried out--in other
words, the action may appear to be impressionistic or "non-realistic" (though hardly expressionistic--but
this is realism by any other name. And all the more so because, like undisguised realism and naturalism,
The Glass Menagerie never questions its own.
Source Citation
Cadullo, Bert. "Through the looking glass: the role of memory in The Glass Menagerie." Notes on
Contemporary Literature 38.4 (2008): 5. Academic OneFile. Web. 12 May 2010.
Document URL
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E&userGroupName=sebr13597&version=1.0
The following are your choices for the play The Importance of Being Earnest:
1. Wilde suggests that his Victorian contemporaries should treat trivial matters with greater respect and
pay less attention to what society then regarded as serious. Discuss how Wilde expresses this philosophy
and comment on the effectiveness with which he has communicated his “message” with reference to ONE
of the following in the play: death, politics, money, property, food, or marriage.
2. How does Wilde portray food as both a weapon and a means of demonstrating one's power? Discuss
three examples from the play to demonstrate how Wilde uses food.
3. Are the characters in this play realistic or unrealistic? Compare and contrast two major characters,
analyzing their “realistic” and “unrealistic” natures.
4. A critic once described that one of the keys to Oscar Wilde’s comic technique in this play is the way he
“pokes fun at conventional Victorian seriousness by fitting solemn moral language to frivolous and
ridiculous action.” Write an essay in which you locate and examine several moments in the play when this
technique can be seen to operate. Can you find any moments when this technique seems to be reversed—
when frivolous and ridiculous language is fitted to solemn moral action?
5. Why is Oscar Wilde’s play funny? Analyze Wilde’s humor using examples from the play.
(NOTE: If you choose to do an essay on this play, you are responsible for finding quotes you find
significant.)
Criticism
Arnold Schmidt
Schmidt holds a Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University and specializes in literature and drama. In this essay, he
examines Wilde’s play in the context of Victorian concepts of “earnestness.”
To modern theatre audiences, the title of Oscar Wilde’s most popular play, The Importance of Being
Earnest, seems a clever play on words. After all, the plot hinges on the telling of little — and not so little
— white lies, while the title suggests that honesty (earnestness) will be the rule of the day. The title also
implies a connection between the name and the concept, between a person named Earnest and that person
being earnest. The narrative action does not bear out this assumption but rather its opposite. Audiences who
saw the play when it opened in London in 1895 would have brought to it more complex associations with
“earnestness,” a word which historians, sociologists, and literary critics alike see as, at least in part,
typifying the Victorian mindset.
The word “earnest” has three related meanings: to be eager or zealous; to be sincere, serious, and
determined; and to be important, not trivial. During Queen Victoria’s more than half-century reign,
tremendous economic, social, and political changes rocked Great Britain. These were caused by earnest
actions and their consequences required, indeed demanded, earnest responses. The Agricultural Revolution
dislocated rural populations, forcing people to leave the countryside for cities. There, those people became
workers in the factories created by the Industrial Revolution. While, over the long term, the British nation
as a whole benefited from these changes, individuals often suffered greatly.
Even the wealthy were not immune to the changing economy’s negative impact on land values. In The
Importance of Being Earnest, this becomes clear when Lady Bracknell inquires into the finances of Jack
Worthing, Gwendolen’s choice for a husband. When Jack indicates that he has suitable income, she is
pleased it comes from stock rather than land, for the declining value of “land. . . gives one position, and
prevents one from keeping it up.”
By the mid-nineteenth century, discussions concerning issues of economic disparity came to be known as
the “two Englands” debate. People considered what would happen to Britain if economic trends continued
to enrich the few while the majority of the population worked long hours in dangerous factories, underpaid
and living in squalor.
Writers and intellectuals as well as evangelicals and politicians earnestly engaged in this debate. Poets and
novelists such as Elizabeth Barrett, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, created literary works which
portrayed the lives of the underprivileged. Writings such as these ultimately contributed to changing public
attitudes — and more importantly — public policy toward practices like child labor and public executions.
Reforms in hospitals and orphanages, prisons and workhouses, schools and factories can all be traced to
debates initiated or fueled by writers. The earnestness of all these reformers — artistic, intellectual,
religious, and political — improved the quality of the life in Victorian Britain.
Earnestness did not characterize only those who addressed social evils, however, but also those whose
activities created social problems in the first place. The farmers, investors, and manufacturers whose
actions dislocated rural populations and resulted in the squalor of factory towns like Manchester, were also
“earnest” about their actions. They believed they were improving the quality of peoples’ lives and, in some
ways, they were.
Overall, the country produced more abundant, cheaper food and better quality, affordable mass produced
goods like clothing. Indeed, historian Asa Briggs termed the middle of the nineteenth century “The Age of
Improvement” (a phrase he employed as the title of his book on the subject), because of the rising living
conditions but also because of the concern to improve the quality of life, to ensure that each generation
lived better than the last.
Like British farmers and industrialists, British colonial administrators also justified the nation’s imperial
ambitions because they “improved” the lives of “uncivilized” peoples, giving them Christianity, British
cultural values, and higher living standards. This attitude came to be know as, in author Rudyard Kipling’s
words, “the white man’s burden.”
Many of those enriching themselves in this way would acknowledge that their actions caused suffering as
well as benefits. They justified their actions based on the utilitarianism of thinkers like John Stewart Mill.
Utilitarians determine the rightness of an action by asking if certain actions produce the most good for the
most people. If people in general benefited, the suffering of a few specific people could be tolerated as the
price paid for progress. While this approach may seem callous and self-serving, these thinkers and tycoons
were also “earnest” in their actions.
Yet the characters in Wilde’s play are not earnest in this sense. Their actions satirize popular notions of the
idle rich but also poke fun at Utilitarianism as well. When Jack admits to Lady Bracknell that he smokes,
she replies that “a man should have an occupation.” Later, Algernon admits that he doesn’t “mind hard
work where there is no definite object of any kind.” Jack and Algernon have no real occupations or
professions; their purposelessness critiques the “earnest” nature of Utilitarian activities.
Now we can see that Wilde’s use of “earnestness” is more complex than it may first appear to modern
audiences. Indeed, his play offers rather biting, if understated, criticism of the institutions and values that
had, by the end of the nineteenth century, made Britain the world’s greatest colonial power. Ironically, it is
exactly the earnestness exhibited by Britain’s exploitative class, industrial, and colonial systems that
enables the life of leisure enjoyed by the play’s main characters. When asked about his politics, Jack
replies, “Well, I am afraid I really have none,” though the Liberal Unionist party with which he identifies
supports the continued colonial status of Ireland.
Britain’s colonial system comes up again when Algernon jokes about sending Jack to Australia, emigration
then being a common way to prevent excess population from causing unemployment and lower wages.
Investment in stocks — the source of Jack’s wealth — provided economic support for Britain’s expanding
economy, and by the play’s end, we learn that his father served as a general in colonial India, a common
road to personal enrichment during the Victorian age.
The rich are not the only targets of Wilde’s wit, for the playwright satirizes earnestness and reformers of all
kinds, in morality, education, women’s rights, and marriage.
Reformers religious and secular alike expended much energy on improving the morals of the working
classes, particularly in regard to family life, procreation, and child-rearing. In this regard reformers often
emphasized the importance of the positive example to be set by upper class behavior. The servant Lane
tells Algernon he had “only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between
myself and a young person.” Algernon turns the reformers’ ideas on their heads, observing “Lane’s views
on marriage seem somewhat lax. Really if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is
the use of them.” The comedy comes by satirizing the serious ideas of earnest critics of the class system
(particularly communist thinkers such as Karl Marx), who wondered exactly what the purpose of the
wealthy might be. Finally, Miss Prism’s conversation about christening the poor reveals an underlying
anxiety about the sexuality and population growth of the working classes.
Earnest reformers engaged in the public debate about education, which expected to “improve” the middle
and working classes and enhance the “culture,” as Matthew Arnold wrote, of the country in general. One
forum for popular education, begun during the eighteenth century, was public lectures, and Wilde satirizes
the earnest, if misdirected, efforts of educational societies whose talks have titles like “Society for the
Prevention of Discontent among the Upper Orders” and a “Lecture by the University Extension Scheme on
the Influence of a Permanent Income on Thought.”
Wilde also satirizes the ineffectiveness of the education for the privileged in the scenes between Miss Prism
and her reluctant student Cecily. More generally, though, Lady Bracknell proclaims: “The whole theory of
modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately in England, at any rate, education produces no effect
whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes and probably lead to acts of
violence.” Lady Bracknell links education of the poor with social unrest, fearing that the educated masses
might forget their place and reject hierarchical class structure.
The independence and audacity of Wilde’s female characters reflects the changing status of Victorian
women, part of a public debate known as “The Women Question.” It was only with the passage of a series
of Married Women’s Property Acts (1870-1908) that women could hold property in their own names. The
opinions of Queen Victoria herself, who opposed women’s suffrage but advocated women’s education,
including college, exemplified the ambiguous situation of women in England during this period.
Cecily and Gwendolen discuss changing gender roles in their conversation about male domesticity,
indicating their belief that “home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man.” Marriage, however,
remained most women’s primary goal and occupation. Arranged marriages had been on the decline since
the late-eighteenth century but were not unknown among the Victorian era’s upper classes. This may have
made economic sense, but it did not always create domestic harmony. Consider Algernon’s lament about
the low quality of champagne in the homes of married men and his belief in the necessity of adultery, “for
in marriage, three is company and two is none.” Both comments highlight the lack of companionship
resulting from marriage without compatibility and love, suggesting that the Victorian husband requires
alcohol and a mistress to be happy.
Wilde describes the situation for married women in equally depressing terms. When Lady Bracknell tells of
her visit with the recently widowed Lady Harbury, Algernon remarks that he’s heard that “her hair has
turned quite gold from grief.” The audience anticipates the cliched response, that her hair turned gray or
white from sorrow, but Wilde turns the phrase around.
Why might her hair have turned gold instead? Like many Victorian women, Lady Harbury seems to have
been trapped in a loveless marriage, the kind Lady Bracknell proposes to arrange for Gwendolen. Now that
Lady Harbury’s husband is dead, she is finally free to become who and do what she wants. She feels
younger, more attractive and changes her hair color. While the joke requires that we associate aging and
grief, Wilde turns that around, associating widowhood instead with gold hair and joy. Algernon’s statement
could also be an indication of the new wealth and independence Lady Harbury gained in inheriting her
husband’s money. The simple turn of a phrase communicates a complex reality, in this case, about
economic, social, and sexual politics.
The status of the nineteenth century’s educated women remained grim, however, with few occupational
outlets other than teaching. Miss Prism, Cecily’s governess, combines two common female occupations,
teaching and novel writing, another activity at which women flourished (and for which they were
criticized). Prism’s confusion between a baby and a manuscript pokes fun at changing ideas about
parenthood and child-rearing. The misplaced baby symbolizes what critics saw as a confusion of gender
roles, when women entered the traditionally masculine world of the mind. The plight of orphaned baby
Jack illustrates the destabilization of family ties, which in his case are sequentially lost, invented, changed,
and discovered.
As Lady Bracknell says, “we live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces,” a position echoed by her
daughter’s comment that “in matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity is the vital thing.” To many,
Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest may seem a work of “surface” and “style,” but further
examination shows it to have depth and substance as well as humor.
Source: Arnold Schmidt, for Drama for Students, Gale, 1998.
Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest
Clifton Snider
English Department, Emeritus
California State University, Long Beach
Synchronicity and the Trickster in
The Importance of Being Earnest
The idea that Wilde wrote to subvert received ideas--the zeitgeist or spirit of the age--is not new. Jack
Zipes asserts, for example, Wilde's "purpose" in writing his fairy tales was "subversion": "He clearly
wanted to subvert the messages conveyed by [Hans] Andersen's tales, but more important his poetical style
recalled the rhythms and language of the Bible in order to counter the stringent Christian code" (114). In
Wilde's masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, Christianity is certainly one of the prevailing ideas
Wilde subverts, but I contend that the entire play is a subversion of prevailing scientific ideas about how
the universe works, the Newtonian notion that the universe is governed by immutable laws of cause and
effect. As Allan Combs and Mark Holland maintain, "the mechanistic mythos of the Newtonian cosmos . . .
presents itself in awesome and austere beauty, but at the same time robs us of a sense of wonder about the
small events of everyday life. Improbable coincidences are diminished to the trivial" (xxix). Perhaps Wilde
had something like this idea in mind when he subtitled his play, "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." In
any event, the subtitle, like the play itself, is an elegant joke.
Wilde, of course, was not the first Victorian writer to make havoc with a rigid world view. Before him,
and certainly influencing him, came Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and W. S. Gilbert. As the editors of The
Oxford Anthology of English Literature put it, the world of Earnest is "the world of nonsense" (Trilling and
Bloom 1130). And, as I have shown in my study of the work of Lear, the world of nonsense is the world of
the Trickster archetype (Snider, "Victorian Trickster"). Furthermore, "Of all mythological characters," as
Combs and Holland write, "it is the Trickster who is most associated with chance and synchronicity. . ."
(xxxix). Synchronicity, a word coined by C. G. Jung, refers to "meaningful coincidence[s]" that have an
"acausal connection," yet are "numinous" (Jung, "Synchronicity" 426; emphasis Jung's). One method of
making sense of the nonsense of Wilde's great play is to examine the subversive ways Wilde uses,
consciously or not, synchronicity and the Trickster to create a pleasing psychic wholeness at the play's
conclusion.
The Importance of Being Earnest is most obviously a comic critique of late Victorian values. Some sixty
years ago, Eric Bentley wrote that the play "is about earnestness, that is, Victorian solemnity, that kind of
false seriousness which means priggishness, hypocrisy, and lack of irony" (111; emphasis Bentley's). 1 As a
work of art, Wilde's last play has been recognized from its first performance on 14 February 1895 as a
masterpiece of comedy,2 one of the supreme examples in English of the genre, and consequently it has been
interpreted from a variety of critical points of view. Although Richard Aldington, writing about the same
time as Bentley, claimed the play "is a comedy-farce without a moral, and it is a masterpiece" (40),
Katherine Worth does see a moral in her Freudian/existential/New Critical analysis. In Earnest, she writes,
"the pleasure principle at last enjoys complete triumph" (153; this triumph is an aspect of the Trickster
archetype). Worth continues: "As well as being an existential farce, The Importance of Being Earnest is . . .
[Wilde's] supreme demolition of late nineteenth-century social and moral attitudes, the triumphal
conclusion to his career as revolutionary moralist" (155).
Various deconstructionists and Lacanians have dismantled the play, and perhaps the foremost queer
critic, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, tackles the play in a piece called, "Tales of the Avunculate: Queer Tutelage
in The Importance of Being Earnest." After covering the deconstructionist and Lacanian territory as
explored by Christopher Craft, Joel Fineman, and Jonathan Dollimore, Sedgwick, in one of her more lucid
pronouncements, declares:
As we have seen, the indispensable--but, I am arguing insufficient-- deconstructive reading of
Earnest always seems, like the play's hero, to have its origin in a terminus. It doesn't pass Go; it
doesn't collect $200; it heads straight for the end-of-the-third-act anagnorisis (recognition or deforgetting) of the Name of the Father. (195)
Instead of the Name of the Father, Sedgwick would have us consider the aunts and uncles (the "avunculate"
of her title). Leaving aside the fact that her discussion of the "family" as an issue in current politics (and in
Wilde's play) is already dated (same-sex marriage is on the political menu now), Sedgwick's article, while
providing certainly a legitimate approach to the play, alas vacillates between diction that is clear and semicolloquial (such as the allusion to Monopoly above) and hyper-academic diction that violates the spirit of
Wilde's comedy (besides "anagnorisis," for which she feels she must provide a definition, consider
"avunculosuppressive" (199) or "Uncle is very different [from "Aunt"], not a persona or type but a relation,
relying on a pederastic/pedagogical model of male filiation to which also . . . the modern rationalized
inversion and 'homo-' models answer only incompletely and very distortingly" (197; emphasis Sedgwick's).
Personally, until I noticed the predominance of the Trickster in The Importance of Being Earnest, I found
myself agreeing with Peter Raby: "The play's success and originality do not make it easier to discuss"
(120). The comic social satire is obvious; so are the many examples of Wilde's masterful use of language,
from paradox and parallelism to litotes and understatement. As for the homosexual subtext, it is not
immediately easy to uncover any more than a traditional Jungian discussion of archetypes is easy. Yes, we
have the Great Mother archetype, embodied by Lady Bracknell, but to uncover Jung's concept of
Individuation is more difficult. However, I believe I have found a way (not the way) to unravel the
nonsense of the play, at least so that the nonsense itself is meaningful.
One of the problems of an archetypal interpretation of Earnest which is at the same time informed by
contemporary queer criticism is that the play is so much of its time and place (if you consider time to
include the previous hundred or more years and the following more than a hundred years). I tend to agree
with Camille Paglia: "Lord Henry [of The Picture of Dorian Gray], with the four young lovers of The
Importance of Being Earnest, belongs to a category of sexual personae that I call the androgyne of
manners, one of the most western of types" (531). Lady Bracknell is also "an androgyne, a 'Gorgon' with
(in the original script) a 'masculine mind'" (535). A western type is not in itself an archetype; an androgyne
is. Androgyny ought to imply psychic wholeness, what Jung calls the Self, yet despite the allusion to a
character from Greek myth, among these specific characters we have at best shallow images of traditional
archetypes, a wholeness only latent until the play concludes. They are indeed universal beneath the surface,
but a more insightful method of viewing them is to explore how the Jungian concept of synchronicity and
the archetypal Trickster work in the play to bring about a kind of wholeness at the play's end.
"Synchronicity," Jung says, "tells us something about the nature of . . . the psychoid factor, i.e., the
unconscious archetype (not its conscious representation!)" (Letter to Michael Fordham 508; emphasis
Jung's). Moreover, as Combs and Holland note, "Synchronicity itself implies wholeness and, therefore,
meaningful relationships between causally unconnected events" (xxxi). As well, Jungian therapist and
author Robert H. Hopcke maintains that synchronistic "events" have four aspects:
First, such events are acausally connected, rather than connected through a chain of cause and
effect that an individual can discern as intentional and deliberate on
her or his own part. Second, such
events always occur with an accompaniment of
deep emotional experience . . . Third, the content of the synchronistic experience,
what the event actually is, is always symbolic in nature, and almost always, I have
found, related specifically to the fourth aspect of the synchronistic event, namely,
that such coincidences occur at points of important transitions in our life. A
synchronistic event very often becomes a turning point in the stories of our lives.
(23; emphasis Hopcke's)
Jung's comment, cited above, that synchronistic events are "numinous" is what Hopcke means by "deep
emotional experience."3 Archetypes (universal ideas, themes, patterns, characters, etc., that reside in and
whose images stem from the collective unconscious), Jung maintained, are "the sources of synchronicity"
(Combs and Holland 57). The archetype most closely related to synchronicity is the Trickster, and the
Trickster Combs and Holland see as the best example of this relationship is Hermes. 4 Among many other
attributes, Hermes "symbolizes the penetration of boundaries--boundaries between villages, boundaries
between people, boundaries between consciousness and unconsciousness" (61-62). These boundaries are
analogous to the transitions Hopcke refers to, and they are keys to the appearances of the Trickster in
Wilde's Earnest.
Two important boundaries in the play are those between Algernon and Cecily and Jack/Ernest and
Gwendolen. One of the most amusing scenes in the play is that in which Cecily reveals to Algernon, just
after they've met, that they have been engaged "for the last three months" (Wilde 395). One might say that
the Trickster, Hermes, "who personifies the imagination" (Combs and Holland 88), has been the catalyst for
the synchronistic event taking place here: the actual appearance of the man Cecily has imagined as her
fiancé and who, subsequently, becomes in fact her fiancé. In a less dramatic fashion, Gwendolen too has
imagined before meeting him her engagement to Jack, who she believes is really named Ernest. She tells
him: "The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined
to love you" (Wilde 362). Although logic suggests that the meetings of the two couples are not accidental
(and therefore not synchronistic), their mutual attraction is both intentional and acausal, one of the play's
paradoxes. In a Newtonian cosmos, one can not force love. In a Looking-Glass world, love flowers for the
most superficial reasons even before the lovers meet. We have here a pair of, to use Jung's words about
synchronicity in another context, "parallel events," which are "utter nonsense . . . looked at from the causal
point of view" (C. G. Jung Speaking 314). The world Wilde has created is a world of nonsense.
Synchronicity gives meaning to the nonsense of these crazy, child-like characters to whom love and
marriage depend on the name of the men and the physical attributes of the women. Their comical meetings
and engagements are as numinous they can be in their Looking-Glass world.
The most obvious cluster of synchronistic events comes in the final act with the appearances of Miss
Prism (the dark side of the Great Mother archetype, for unlike Lady Bracknell she has not only committed a
serious crime but also moralizes in a way foreign to the aristocratic Aunt Augusta), Lady Bracknell, and the
famous handbag. That Miss Prism, of all people, should be the tutor of Cecily, ward of the grown-up baby
Prism had abandoned, is in itself a synchronistic event. The discovery of her identity and of the handbag
that solves the mystery of Jack/Ernest's identity coming at the same time is, of course, a brilliant theatrical
device. Lady Bracknell tells Dr. Chasuble, "in families of high social position [such] strange coincidences
are not supposed to occur" (428). But of course they do occur, and collectively they make a splendid
example of synchronicity. Together, these events symbolize the wholeness of Jack/Ernest's life story (as
well as the life stories of the other lovers, including those of Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble). Coupled with
the confirmation of his real given name, these events confirm and give meaning to his personal myth.
The trickster myths of native North America, as recounted by Paul Radin, fit Wilde's play as much as the
myth of Hermes does (in fact, being an archetypal trickster, Hermes is not unlike native North American
tricksters himself):
The overwhelming majority of all so-called trickster myths in North America . . .
have a hero who is always wandering, who is always hungry, who is not guided
by normal conceptions of good or evil, who is either playing tricks on people
or having them played on him and who is highly sexed. Almost everywhere
he has some divine traits. (155)
Both Algernon and Jack use their fictitious friend or brother, Bunbury and Ernest, to wander from the city
to the country and vice versa. Algernon, for instance, declares he has "Bunburyed all over Shropshire on
two separate occasions" (355). And, of course, he, among the several tricksters in the play, is the one with
the unquenchable appetite.
None of the major characters is governed by conventional morality. Indeed, part of the humor--the play,
as it were--of Earnest is the inversion of conventional morality. "Divorces are made in Heaven," says Algy
(350). Both he and Jack are ready to be christened, not on grounds of faith but on their perceived need to
change their names to Ernest. One of the chief reasons Cecily is enamored with Algernon/Ernest is that she
thinks he is leading an evil life: "I hope you have not been leading a double life," she says to him,
"pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy" (382). And Lady
Bracknell, who views christening as a "luxury" (431), also views Cecily as a suitable bride for Algernon
only after she learns how much money Cecily has.
As for the sexual aspect of the trickster, this is a vital subtext of the play. More so than he does in The
Picture of Dorian Gray or Salomé, Wilde keeps sex implicit in Earnest. His characters are too child-like for
readers or audiences to imagine them actually having sex. And it should be said that the child-like
playfulness of the Trickster is part of the action, appealing to the reader/viewer's inner child. Such play,
Jung found, is necessary for wholeness and psychic healing (see Rosen 128-132). For queer critics the most
obvious example of the embedded sexuality is Bunbury, a play on various dimensions of homosexuality in
Britain, including sodomy, male bordellos, and Wilde's own sexual practices (see Craft 28 and Fineman
89). Craft asserts that
serious Bunburyism releases a polytropic sexuality so mobile, so evanescent
in speed and turn, that it traverses, Ariel-like, a fugitive path through oral,
genital, and anal ports until it expends itself in and as the displacements of
language. It was Wilde's extraordinary gift to return this vertigo of substitution
and repetition to his audience. (29)
If Craft's assertions seem too broad, one should recall the unrestrained sexuality of the Trickster, whose
"unbridled sexuality" is one of his chief traits (Radin 167). Remember that one of Hermes's functions is that
of boundary marker, and "boundary marking," according to Jungian analyst Eugene Monick, "is itself a
phallic expression" (78), to which the ancient Grecian herms attest. 5 Bunburyism allows Algy to cross
boundaries and thus free himself to pursue his pleasures, just as Jack's invention of a brother does for him.
Bunburyism is, then, tricking par excellence.
By necessity Wilde had to dress his characters up as heterosexuals; hence a great deal of the sexual
comedy at least seems heterosexual. Surely the humor of Gwendolen's comment to Jack about her being
"quite perfect" depends on its sexual connotations:
JACK: You're quite perfect, Miss Fairfax.
GWENDOLEN: Oh! I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for
developments, and I intend to develop in many directions.
(Wilde 358; emphasis Wilde's)
During her mock tea table battle with Cecily, Gwendolen declares: "I never travel without my diary. One
should always have something sensational to read in the train" (403). Of this passage, Paglia writes: "The
life recorded by her diary is, says Gwendolen, 'sensational,' a source of public scandal and eroticized
fascination. To find one's life sensational is to be aroused by oneself" (540). Again the Trickster is at play,
for few if any in Wilde's initial audience would have recognized the erotic humor here.
Lady Bracknell, whose knowledge of the world befits her role as matriarch of the play, responds to Jack's
revelation of the place the handbag in which he was found was located thus:
As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a
cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social
indiscretion--has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before
now. . . . (Wilde 368)
Clearly for "social" we can read "sexual" here and, more specifically, "heterosexual," albeit homosexual
indiscretions are surely hinted at as well. Miss Prism, perhaps the chief moralizer and hypocrite of the play,
ironically responds "bitterly" to Jack's admission that his brother Ernest was unmarried: "People who live
entirely for pleasure usually are" (387). The bitterness of her reply is no doubt due to the fact that she, an
unmarried woman, has been not able to live for pleasure. That the pleasure is at least in part of a sexual
nature we can take for granted.
The Importance of Being Earnest has been performed by all-male casts, a kind of conscious "trick" on
the audience, who would be well aware of the casting. Paglia declares: "The play's hieratic purity could
best be appreciated if all the women's roles were taken by female impersonators" (535). I maintain another
purpose would be served, and that is to reinforce the shape-changing aspect of the Trickster. Will Roscoe
discusses this aspect of the Scandinavian trickster, Loki, who, among other shapes, changes himself into a
woman in several stories (184). While having female impersonators play the women's roles would reinforce
Paglia's thesis about the androgynous nature of the characters, it would also bring to the surface the
homosexual subtext of the play and the corresponding Trickster role. In fact, dual identity is a Trickster
theme throughout the play, with Jack/Ernest, Algernon/Bunbury, and even with Gribsby/Parker in the
excised "Gribsby Episode" (Wilde 440). The idea is played with in Act I when Jack and Algernon argue
about the identity of Cecily.
One more aspect of the Trickster needs to be mentioned: his "divine" aspect (Radin 155). The "divine"
nature of The Importance of Being Earnest derives from its numinous quality, the satisfaction the
characters, along with the reader/audience, receive when, at the play's conclusion, three couples are united.
If they are, in Lady Bracknell's words, "displaying signs of triviality," the signs are psychologically
meaningful. For the moment at least, each couple forms a psychic whole, a fulfillment of their personal
myths, wrought by synchronicity and the Trickster archetype. Indeed, the entire play can be viewed as a
performance of the Trickster, the masterwork of the last great Victorian Trickster himself.
Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory in The Importance of Being Earnest
Sometimes, there’s more to Lit than meets the eye.
From http://www.shmoop.com/importance-of-being-earnest/symbolism-imagery.html (for your citation, go
by the first two words of the title)
Ernest and Bunbury
The two imaginary people created by Jack and Algernon might symbolize the empty promises or deceit of
the Victorian era. Not only is the character Ernest anything but earnest for the majority of the play, but he
also doesn’t even really exist. This makes Jack’s creation of him doubly deceitful. Bunbury sounds as
ridiculous and fictional as he actually is. Both of them allow Jack and Algernon to live a lie – seeming to
uphold the highest moral standards, while really misbehaving without suffering any consequences. Jack
takes it a bit farther since he actually impersonates his so-called good-for-nothing brother.
Even when Jack and Algernon are caught in their lies, they never suffer any real punishment. That they can
both kill off their imaginary alter egos or friends without much to-do, shows Victorian society’s real values.
The Victorian era did not value honesty, responsibility, or compassion for the under-privileged (neither
Lady Bracknell or Algernon exhibit much pity for Bunbury when he "dies"), but only style, money, and
aristocracy. It is appropriate that the nonexistent characters of Ernest and Bunbury show how shallow are
the Victorians’ real concerns.
The handbag in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, the Brighton line
The circumstances of Jack’s abandonment symbolize both his ambiguous social status during the play, and
the possibility of his upward social mobility. Interestingly, the scene has both aristocratic and common
elements in it. The handbag that baby Jack was placed in is – as Miss Prism describes it – completely
ordinary. Like any other well-used purse, it is worn from overuse:
MISS PRISM
Yes, here is the injury it received through the upsetting of a Gower Street omnibus in younger and happier
days. Here is the stain on the lining caused by the explosion of a temperance beverage, an incident that
occurred in Leamington. And here, on the lock, are my initials. (III.145)
Thus, this commonplace container contains a baby of uncommon origin. Continuing this theme of disguise,
it is no coincidence that this ordinary-handbag-containing-a-baby is discovered in a cloakroom – a place
where outer garments like cloaks, coats, wraps, and scarves may be hung. These pieces of apparel can all
be worn to conceal one’s true form, face, or identity. In the murderer-in-a-trench-coat kind of way.
Let’s move onto Victoria Station. According to www.networkrail.co.uk, there were two train stations at the
same site in Wilde’s day – leading to two different sites. The western trail, including the Brighton line, led
to the wealthier parts of London while the eastern road led to places like Chatham and Dover, which were
more impoverished. The fact that baby Jack is at the intersection of these two lines literally puts him in an
identity crisis. Does he come from a poor common family or a rich aristocratic one? Lady Bracknell tends
to look on the negative side and judge him as common until proven noble.
But there is another, more positive way to interpret his discovery at Victoria Station. Trains are all about
moving people to the places where they need to be. If we take Jack’s presence at Victoria Station to be a
comment on his social life, it might suggest that he will have great social mobility – have success in
climbing up the social ladder to a prestigious position. This is foreshadowed by the fact that he’s found
specifically on the Brighton line, the road that leads to the richer parts of town. And indeed the story of
Earnest is about Jack’s social advancement. In fact, he’s revealed at the end to be a true member of the
aristocracy – part of the Moncrieff family – which makes him a worthy husband for another aristocrat,
Gwendolen.
So the scene of Jack’s orphaning contains aspects – like the ordinary handbag and the cloakroom – that
make him seem common, but also hints of aristocracy – like the Brighton line – which reveal his true social
identity.
Diaries and Miss Prism’s Three-Volume Novel
You might wonder what the heck do Cecily’s and Gwendolen’s diaries have in common with Miss Prism’s
three-volume novel – other than the writing part. Well, the writing part is actually important. Think about
what you do when you write. It’s always a very personal activity, because the way you string the words
together is completely your creation. It’s your thoughts that are put down onto paper. Your writing is an
expression of yourself. So it’s no surprise that some people want to keep their personal thoughts private.
Hence, you have a diary. Many people’s thoughts and desires are irrational; instead they’re very idealistic.
This is the point in The Importance of Being Earnest. Almost any type of book or writing, with the sole
exception of Jack’s Army Lists, reveals someone’s wishes or dreams. Cecily’s diary meticulously
documents her desire for a lover and future husband named Ernest. It even includes imaginary love letters.
Gwendolen’s diary does the same, minus the letters. Lady Bracknell’s notebook keeps tabs on men who
have the potential to become worthy suitors for Gwendolen’s hand. Most of the content in these pieces of
writing is unrealistic at best or fantastic (in the fairy-tale sense) at worst. But these thoughts are kept
private.
Miss Prism’s three-volume novel, on the other hand, reveals what happens when one tries to impose an
impossibly idealized world onto gritty reality. Miss Prism probably wrote her novel in her younger days,
when she was dazzled by other romantic and sentimental stories published in the same "triple decker"
genre. Thus, her writing could have been a sort of diary, a projection of a perfect inner world – her deepest
desire – put into words. But everything fell apart when she tried to publish it – pushing it into the public
sphere. It caused her to forget her real responsibility – baby Ernest – while she was daydreaming about
future success. She lost her job over it and was pursued by Scotland Yard. Her actions made her a criminal.
And Lady Bracknell returns years later to haunt her about it.
So the diaries and three-volume novel of our female characters represent the innermost fantasies of
idealistic young girls, dreams that clash directly with reality. Miss Prism puts it best with her quote: "The
good end[s] happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means" (II.15). You might want to
counter, that very few things actually end happily-ever-after in the real world.
Food
Every instance where food is mentioned – from the Algernon’s opening discussion of wine with his
servant, Lane, to the girls’ insults over tea and the guys’ climactic fight over muffins – is fraught with
conflict. The fight over something as basic as food – something that every human being has a carnal need
for– might represents another carnal desire: sex. Because the men fight over food the most (Algernon’s
wolfing down of the cucumber sandwiches to Lady Bracknell’s distress, Jack’s settling for bread and
butter, Algernon’s consumption of Jack’s wine and muffins), we suspect that food fights are their way of
expressing their sexual frustration in the face of unusually domineering women. You can’t deny that Lady
Bracknell exerts a tremendous amount of power. Even Gwendolen and Cecily put their male lovers in
compromising positions and dictate the terms of their marriages.