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The Importance of Being Earnest
Characterization
Tools of Characterization
Habits
Algernon likes to play the piano inaccurately, eat compulsively, and then li e about how there were no cucumbers at the market. Oh, and he goes Bunburyin g. At times, Algernon can come across as selfish and insincere. In contrast, Dr. Chasuble gives sermons and performs baptisms. He might seem to be more responsible than Algernon, but he too has his faults. He spends a great deal of time flirting with Miss Prism, when his position as a cleric clearly ord ers him to be celibate. So Dr. Chasuble’s actions also reveal his hypocrisy. In fact, every character’s actions reveal that they can be frivolous or dis honest at certain moments. But since Wilde’s play is clearly a satire, it sh ould come as no surprise that there are no absolute good or evil characters. Each character’s virtues and flaws are indicative of a fairly corrupt socie ty; it is the reader’s job to differentiate just how hypocritical each character is.
Education
Ironically, the more educated a character is, the more pretentious and hyp ocritical he or she seems. Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble throw around big wo rds and discuss obscure theories. Their main function in the play is to pr ovide comic relief. Cecily (who is Miss Prism’s student) and Algernon (who describes himself as "immensely overeducated" [II.181]) both say one thin g and then do exactly the opposite. In contrast, Lady Bracknell comes from humble origins and makes no pretense about adoring ignorance. She conside rs "the whole theory of modern education…radically unsound" (I.184). Throu ghout the play, she is surprisingly consistent – standing by her statement that she will not let her daughter marry a commoner.
Family Life
Jack cares for his family out in his country estate, providing a luxurious l iving for his ward, Cecily, and making sure she gets the best education poss ible. By doing this, Jack honors his guardian’s will. By all accounts, he is a good ‘son’ – other than the whole Ernest-is-fake thing. Algernon, on the other hand, states outright he "love[s] hearing [his] relations abused" (I.
- and is constantly lying to avoid dining with them. Cecily seems to genui nely respect and love her Uncle Jack, while Gwendolen blatantly disobeys her mother. Gwendolen’s behavior reflects her mother’s disrespectful behavior t o her family; Lady Bracknell lies to her husband and even makes him eat in s olitude when he ruins her table arrangement at dinner. It seems that Wilde i s making subtle character distinctions according to social class. In the wor ld of Wilde, aristocrats tend to treat their close family and relatives poor ly, while the "lower classes" – like Jack and Cecily – have more trusting an d compassionate familial relationships.
Names
Many of the characters’ names reflect some aspect of their personality. La dy Augusta Bracknell’s name repeatedly emphasizes her nobility through the title of "Lady," and "Bracknell" which is the name of the land she owns. Miss Prism is a pun for misprision, which can mean either "neglect" (regar ding her abandonment of baby Ernest) or "a misunderstanding" (which highli ghts her lack of common sense). Dr. Chasuble’s name shows both that he is highly educated – having a doctorate in Divinity – and that he is a cleric
. Did you know that that a chasuble is "a sleeveless outer vestment worn b y the celebrant at Mass." (Thanks www.dictionary.com!) But Jack/Ernest Wor thing is not earnest and arguably not worthy of Gwendolen’s hand in marria ge. We’re thinking that name was both intentional and ironic of Wilde’s part.
Character List
John (Jack) Worthing A young, eligible bachelor about town. In the city he goes by the name Ernest, and in the country he is Jack — a local magistrate of the county with responsibilities. His family pedigree is a mystery, but his seriousness and sincerity are evident. He proposes to The Honorable Gw endolen Fairfax and, though leading a double life, eventually demonstrates his conformity to the Victorian moral and social standards.
Algernon Moncrieff A languid poser of the leisure class, bored by convention s and looking for excitement. He, too, leads a double life, being Algernon i n the city and Ernest in the country. Algernon, unlike Jack, is not serious and is generally out for his own gratification. He falls in love and propose s to Jack's ward, Cecily, while posing as Jack's wicked younger brother, Ern est.
Lady Bracknell The perfect symbol of Victorian earnestness — the belief that style is more important than substance and that social and class barriers a
d chaos undoubtedly made the upper-class audience laugh.
Additional Notes on Character List
1.John "Jack" Worthing
(a)...Jack is the play's protagonist and the play's most sympathetic charact er. He was found in a handbag on a railway line, and feels less at home in a ristocratic society than does Algernon. He lives in the country but has inve nted a wicked brother named "Ernest" whose scrapes require Jack's attendance in the city.
(b)...Jack Worthing, the play’s protagonist, was discovered as an infant by the late Mr. Thomas Cardew in a handbag in the cloakroom of a railway stat ion in London. Jack has grown up to be a seemingly responsible and respecta ble young man, a major landowner and Justice of the Peace in Hertfordshire, where he has a country estate. In Hertfordshire, where he is known by what he imagines to be his real name, Jack, he is a pillar of the community. He is guardian to Mr. Cardew’s granddaughter, Cecily, and has other duties an d people who depend on him, including servants, tenants, farmers, and the l ocal clergyman. For years, he has also pretended to have an irresponsible y ounger brother named Ernest, whom he is always having to bail out of some m ischief. In fact, he himself is the reprobate brother Ernest. Ernest is the name Jack goes by in London, where he really goes on these occasions. The fictional brother is Jack’s alibi, his excuse for disappearing from Hertfor dshire and going off to London to escape his responsibilities and indulge i n exactly the sort of behavior he pretends to disapprove of in his brother.
More than any other character in the play, Jack Worthing represents convent ional Victorian values: he wants others to think he adheres to such notions as duty, honor, and respectability, but he hypocritically flouts those ver y notions. Indeed, what Wilde was actually satirizing through Jack was the general tolerance for hypocrisy in conventional Victorian morality. Jack us es his alter-ego Ernest to keep his honorable image intact. Ernest enables Jack to escape the boundaries of his real life and act as he wouldn’t dare to under his real identity. Ernest provides a convenient excuse and disguis e for Jack, and Jack feels no qualms about invoking Ernest whenever necessa ry. Jack wants to be seen as upright and moral, but he doesn’t care what li es he has to tell his loved ones in order to be able to misbehave. Though E
rnest has always been Jack’s unsavory alter ego, as the play progressesJack must aspire to become Ernest, in name if not behavior. Until he seeks to m arry Gwendolen, Jack has used Ernest as an escape from real life, but Gwend olen’s fixation on the name Ernest obligates Jack to embrace his deception in order to pursue the real life he desires. Jack has always managed to get what he wants by using Ernest as his fallback, and his lie eventually thre atens to undo him. Though Jack never really gets his comeuppance, he must s cramble to reconcile his two worlds in order to get what he ultimately desi res and to fully understand who he is.
(c)...John (Jack) Worthing, J.P., Algernon Moncrief’s friend, who poses as Ernest to win the hand of Algy’s cousin, the Honorable Gwendolyn Fairfax, Lady Bracknell’s daughter. Also a Bunburyist, he has invented a fictitiou s brother Ernest, a reprobate who is always getting into scrapes, as an ex cuse for his frequent visits to London. Jack is serious about most things, especially love. He was a foundling, brought up by a wealthy man who made Jack the guardian of his benefactor’s granddaughter, Cecily Cardew. When Jack proposes to Gwendolyn, he arouses Lady Bracknell’s displeasure becaus e he cannot trace his family..
2.Algernon Moncrieff
(a)...Algernon, the foil to Jack, is a hedonist who has created a friend nam ed Bunbury whose status as a permanent invalid allows Algernon to leave the city whenever he pleases. He believes this activity, "Bunburying," is necess ary, especially if one is going to get married-something he vows never to do .
(b...)Algernon Moncrieff is a member of the wealthy class, living a life of total bachelorhood in a fashionable part of London. He is younger than Jack, takes less responsibility, and is always frivolous and irreverent. As a sym bol, he is wittiness and aestheticism personified. He — like Jack — function s as a Victorian male with a life of deception. Unlike Jack, he is much more self-absorbed, allowing Wilde to discuss Victorian repression and guilt, wh ich often result in narcissism.
Along with Lady Bracknell, Algy is given witty lines and epigrams showing hi s humor and disrespect for the society he will inherit. In discussing the mu sic for Lady Bracknell's reception, Algernon says, "Of course the music is a great difficulty. You see, if one plays good music, people don't listen, an d if one plays bad music, people don't talk." This is Algernon's wit and wis
(d)...
i...Algy and Jack
Jack and Algernon certainly are a lot alike. So much so that it feels like we’ re writing a Siamese twin character analysis. Algernon-specific details.
ii...Algernon’s Dandy Ancestors
Algernon is a toned-down version of a character type Wilde enjoyed writing: the dandy. A dandy is an effeminate, educated, dedicated follower of fashion , and a flouter of conventional male duty. Today we call them metrosexuals. Appearances are very important to Algernon, especially neckties and buttonho le flowers. He doesn’t hide his vanity from Cecily, confiding that "I never have any appetite unless I have a buttonhole first" (II.71), and that Jack " has no taste in neckties at all" (II.57).
In "An Ideal Husband", the play Wilde wrote just before this one, a similar character (with a similar girlfriend) appears. This character, Lord Goring, even has a scene with his butler that resembles Algernon's first scene with his butler, Lane. Wilde wrote that Lord Goring "plays with life," and the sa me can be said of Algernon. He is full of mischief. He loves champagne and h e’s bad with money. His glee in finding out Jack’s country address is irrepr essible. He falls in love with a girl and proposes to her within ten minutes
. And even when things get messy, Algernon can’t stop excitedly eating muffi ns. Algy treats life like a game, which makes reading The Importance of Bein g Earnest all the more fun for us.
iii...Algernon and Fiction
Algernon’s not one to lecture about the status quo, but he seems aware of th e absurdities of Victorian high society. He responds by taking absolutely no thing seriously.
JACK...Oh that’s nonsense Algy, you never talk anything but nonsense. ALGERNON...Nobody ever does. (I.299-300)
Like many of the characters in the play, Algernon embraces fiction in his da ily life. He creates "the invalid," Bunbury, with flair, and clearly enjoys reporting on the imaginary invalid’s health to Lady Bracknell (who we suspec t knows he’s full of it). Algernon argues passionately for the existence of
Bunbury:
Nothing will induce me to part with Bunbury, and if you ever get married, which seems to me extremely problematic, you will be very glad to know B unbury. A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it. (I.94)
For Algernon, creating fictions is a necessity in this society. But it doesn’ t have to be unpleasant. It’s this perspective that makes him such a good mat ch for Cecily, who is equally whimsical. Think about it: you meet this girl f or the first time, and five minutes later she’s reading from her diary about your whole romantic history together. This might seem just a bit strange. But in the world of this play, and particularly for Algernon, this fantastical a pproach to life is just what he needs. He "buys in" to her fiction, getting u pset when she comes to the part about breaking up. When we finish The Importa nce of Being Earnest, we get the sense that Algernon could not have written a better ending himself.
(e)Algernon Moncrieff
Algernon, the play’s secondary hero, is closer to the figure of the dandy t han any other character in the play. A charming, idle, decorative bachelor, Algernon is brilliant, witty, selfish, amoral, and given to making delight ful paradoxical and epigrammatic pronouncements that either make no sense a t all or touch on something profound. Like Jack, Algernon has invented a fi ctional character, a chronic invalid named Bunbury, to give him a reprieve from his real life. Algernon is constantly being summoned to Bunbury’s deat hbed, which conveniently draws him away from tiresome or distasteful social obligations. Like Jack’s fictional brother Ernest, Bunbury provides Algern on with a way of indulging himself while also suggesting great seriousness and sense of duty. However, a salient difference exists between Jack and Al gernon. Jack does not admit to being a “Bunburyist,” even after he’s been c alled on it, while Algernon not only acknowledges his wrongdoing but also r evels in it. Algernon’s delight in his own cleverness and ingenuity has lit tle to do with a contempt for others. Rather, his personal philosophy puts a higher value on artistry and genius than on almost anything else, and he regards living as a kind of art form and life as a work of art—something on e creates oneself.
Algernon is a proponent of aestheticism and a stand-in for Wilde himself, as are all Wilde’s dandified characters, including Lord Goring in An Ide al Husband, Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Illingworth in
4.Gwendolen Fairfax
(a)...Gwendolen is Lady Bracknell's daughter, and is the object of Jack's r omantic attention. Though she returns his love, Gwendolen appears self-cent ered and flighty. Like Cecily, she desires nothing but to marry someone nam ed Ernest.
(b)...More than any other female character in the play, Gwendolen suggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood. She has ideas and ideals , attends lectures, and is bent on self-improvement. She is also artificial and pretentious. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest, and she is fixated on this name. This preoccupation serves as a metaphor f or the preoccupation of the Victorian middle- and upper-middle classes with the appearance of virtue and honor. Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Ernest, whose name, she says, “inspires absolute confidence, ” that she can’t even see that the man calling himself Ernest is fooling he r with an extensive deception. In this way, her own image consciousness blu rs her judgment.
Though more self-consciously intellectual than Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen is cut from very much the same cloth as her mother. She is similarly strong-m inded and speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and morali ty, just as Lady Bracknell does. She is both a model and an arbiter of eleg ant fashion and sophistication, and nearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect. As Jack fears, Gwendolen does indeed show signs of b ecoming her mother “in about a hundred and fifty years,” but she is likeabl e, as is Lady Bracknell, because her pronouncements are so outrageous.
5.Cecily Cardew
(a)...Cecily is Jack's ward and lives with him in the country. Young and p retty, she is favored by Algernon, who pretends to be Jack's brother Ernes t. Cecily has heard about this brother, and has written correspondences be tween the two of them for months by the time she meets Algernon/Ernest. Li ke Gwendolen, she is only interested in marrying a man named Ernest.
(b)...Cecily Cardew
If Gwendolen is a product of London high society, Cecily is its antithesis. She is a child of nature, as ingenuous and unspoiled as a pink rose, to whic h Algernon compares her in Act II. However, her ingenuity is belied by her f
ascination with wickedness. She is obsessed with the name Ernest just as Gwe ndolen is, but wickedness is primarily what leads her to fall in love with “ Uncle Jack’s brother,” whose reputation is wayward enough to intrigue her. L ike Algernon and Jack, she is a fantasist. She has invented her romance with Ernest and elaborated it with as much artistry and enthusiasm as the men ha ve their spurious obligations and secret identities. Though she does not hav e an alter-ego as vivid or developed as Bunbury or Ernest, her claim that sh e and Algernon/Ernest are already engaged is rooted in the fantasy world she ’s created around Ernest. Cecily is probably the most realistically drawn ch aracter in the play, and she is the only character who does not speak in epi grams. Her charm lies in her idiosyncratic cast of mind and her imaginative capacity, qualities that derive from Wilde’s notion of life as a work of art
. These elements of her personality make her a perfect mate for Algernon.
(c) Cecily and Gwen
Yes, they’re so much alike they could be sisters – and now they will be. You might want to check out "Gwen and Cecily" in Gwendolen's "Character Analysis" for more information on what the two women have in common. Cecily the Country Girl
Part of what makes Cecily attractive to Algernon is her seeming simplicity. She’s not intellectual like Gwendolen, who very early on scolds Jack, "Ah! t hat is clearly a metaphysical speculation, and like most metaphysical specul ations has very little reference at all to the actual facts of real life, as we know them" (I.149). We can’t really imagine Cecily talking about metaphy sics – or facts, for that matter. Cecily does everything she can to vigorous ly avoid Miss Prism’s attempts to educate her. She’s innocent – Gwendolen mi ght say ignorant. She waters the plants, writes in her diary, and waits for the day that Ernest will come and propose. Cecily and Fiction
Cecily may hate German diction, but she loves stories. She gets so excited when Miss Prism reveals that she has written a three-volume novel. And Ceci ly describes Algernon’s desires to reform himself as "Quixotic," indicating that she’s read the novel by Cervantes in which a man with delusions of gr andeur has numerous adventures. Like Algernon, Cecily loves a good bit of f iction – and her favorite writer is herself.
In her diary, she makes long entries recording romantic events that are entire ly fictional. We love this one:
ce the scratching and hair-pulling in front of him. But Cecily proves that, though she may have been raised in the country, she’s primed to enter Lond on society as Algernon’s wife. She’s quick-witted and determined, and with the guidance of her new sister-in-law, Gwendolen, she’ll be formidable. In time, we can almost see her taking on Lady Bracknell.
6.Miss Prism Miss Prism is the Cecily's governess. She obviously loves Chasuble, though th e fact that he is a priest prohibits her from telling him so directly.
7.Lane Algernon's butler delivers a number of droll lines which show that he is far from a passive servant.
8.Chasuble A rector, Chasuble frequently visits Jack's country house to see Miss Prism
. Though he is celibate, he seems well matched for the educated Miss Prism.
9.Merriman Jack's butler, Merriman has a less significant role than Lane has, but in o ne scene he and another servant force the bickering Gwendolen and Cecily to maintain supposedly polite conversation.
