The Importance of Being Earnest

In The Importance of Being Earnest there are many recurring themes. One that stands out most is about dishonesty. I found that at some point in the play each character would be dishonest. They would mostly do this for the pursuit of pleasure. They knew what they wanted and didn't have enough patience to wait, they had to lie to get it as soon as possible. The epigrams that I found seemed to always contradict whatever the character was implying. They also almost always had little lies in them to spice it up. The main social institution in the book is marriage. There was a lot of satire showing how that in that time marriage was most like a business arrangement. There was obvious dishonesty when Jack and Algernon both claimed to be Ernest to their loved ones. You can see how in society men and women will go to great lengths, or lies for that matter, to marry the one they love.

Oscar Wilde was trying to show how extremely ridiculous the upper class was in that time. The way he shows this was through the name Ernest. The men and women in that period were so polite and had such strict customs that there were no true feelings involved in marriage. Wilde shows how marriage became an ordeal between parent and child and the amount of money. I never mattered the personality only how much they were worth. Since Algernon and Jack both told their girls their name was Ernest, Wilde stresses on how funny it was that the name could influence the girls so much. A man back then could be charming but it didn't matter, all that mattered to the family was social status. In this time I am glad to say we can marry for feelings not money or power.