Dualism in character's in Importance of being Earnest.

Dualism in characters

Jack

• Thereby, Jack can disappear for days and do as he likes. In London, Jack goes under the name of Ernest; “My name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country” (300), and can live the life he pretends to disapprove of. He thus uses Ernest, his alter-ego, both as an excuse and a disguise to keep his honourable image intact. Jack does, in fact, not know his real name and who he is for as a baby he was found in a hand-bag in the cloak-room at Victoria Station.

          John Worthing, called Jack, is the protagonist of the play. Jack has a country estate in Hertfordshire where he is the Justice of Peace. He is a serious, responsible guardian to his adoptive father’s granddaughter Cecily and he stands for all the Victorian values of morality: duty, honour and respectability; “When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so” (Wilde 301). However, he pretends to have an irresponsible brother, named Ernest, who lives a scandalous life and always gets into trouble, which requires Jack to rush off to London to his assistance; “In order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes” (301).

Title of the play

• The name Ernest had previously appeared in one of Wilde’s comedies of society, A Woman of No Importance, in which Mrs Allonby mocks her absent husband Ernest. Russell Jackson admits in his essay “The Importance of Being Earnest” that ‘earnest’ in some circles was a code-word for homosexuals, but claims that it first and foremost had connotations of ‘probity’ and ‘high-mindedness’ and that “The claims that Wilde was writing out his Irishness in the double selves of his protagonists are more convincing than the argument for The Importance of Being Earnest as a specifically gay play” (Jackson 173). In The Importance of being Earnest, the characters are more occupied with the name Ernest than the fact of actually being earnest. Marrying a man called Ernest can be a goal in life; Gwendolen exclaims: “my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence. The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you” (306), and Cecily is of the same opinion “it had always been a girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest… There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest” (332). At the end of the play Jack has to reconcile his two names and identities and then he finally understands who he really is.

Algernon

• Algernon Moncrieff, Algy, is the other main principal character of the play and he invents an imaginary friend to conceal his double life as well as borrow Jack’s alias Ernest to impose on Cecily. Algernon Moncrieff’s name is Scottish and aristocratic in sound; “It is not at all a bad name. In fact, it is an aristocratic name. Half of the chaps who get in to bankruptcy Court is called Algernon” (332). He is the charming, idle, selfish, witty dandy of the play, Wilde’s alter-ego, just as Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband, Lord Darlington in Lady Windermere’s Fan, Lord Illingworth in A Woman of No Importance and Lord Henry Wotton in The Picture of Dorian Gray. While the latter two are evil and the two former are good, Algy has no moral convictions other than to live beautifully. To be able to escape dull social obligations: “in order that I can go down into the country whenever I choose” (301), he has invented an imaginary invalid friend called Bunbury who lives in the country and constantly summons Algy to his deathbed. In that way Algy can indulge himself while suggesting seriousness and duty. Further in the play he impersonates Jack’s invented brother, Ernest, to approach Cecily. Consequently, in spite of his high position in the aristocracy, Algy employs Bunbury as an alibi and Ernest as a double character in order to escape society and improve his prospects.

 Lady Bracknell,

• Another example of dualism in the characters’ behaviours is found in Lady Bracknell, Algy’s aunt and Gwendolen’s mother, who sets herself up as guardian of the morality of the society and implying that she is the only reliable source of taste and probity. She is found to be a parvenu, a social climber, and not an aristocrat at all; “When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind. But I never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way” (349). Lady Bracknell’s name is derived from a place in Berkshire where Lord Alfred Douglas’s mother had a summer home, which Wilde had visited.The two young ladies of the play, Gwendolen and Cecily, represent the city and the country and both of them have secret lives. The names of the two young ladies are differentiated in a way that: “Gwendolen Fairfax carries a certain weight and crisp urbanity, appropriate for Lady Bracknell’s daughter”, whereas the name“Cecily Cardew, has a musical lightness about it” (Raby 145). Gwendolen, the sophisticated city lady, leads a ‘double life’ in the sense that she pretends to go to a lecture but instead runs away to Ernest in the country.Cecily Cardew, Jack’s ward, is a natural girl, almost a child of nature and she is just as imaginative, enthusiastic and as capable as Jack and Algy to invent a fantasy life. She lives a ‘double life’ in her diary where she invents a romance and even an engagement to Jack’s wicked brother, Ernest. The diary becomes her fantasy world; “I keep a diary in order to enter the wonderful secrets of my life” (318). She even buys herself a ring and writes letters from him, “The three you wrote me after I had broken off the engagement are so beautiful, and so badly spelled, that even now I can hardly read them without crying a little” (331)

Miss Prism

• Miss Prism, in comparison, has two very different sides: one rigid and prude puritan side where she highly approves of respectability; “As a man sows, so shall he reap” (323), and harshly criticizes people who live for pleasure only, and one more soft romantic side where she talks about having written a novel. What is more, she has romantic feelings for Chasuble, the vicar. Her dark secret is that she confused a baby and a manuscript twenty-eight years ago and placed the baby by mistake in her handbag, which she deposited at Victoria Station. Chasuble, ever so fond of metaphors, calls Miss Prism ‘Egeria’, which is the name of the Roman nymph who taught the Roman king judicial responsibility and self-discipline and her name is as a consequence an epithet for a woman who provides guidance. Yet Miss Prism’s real name is Laeticia, which means ‘joy’ and ‘delight’ and shows .

Chasuble D.D.

• Canon Chasuble D.D. is aptly and properly named after the ecclesiastical canon and a liturgical vestment; a chasuble is an ornament garment worn by priests. D.D. stands for Doctor of Divinity and he is constantly carrying out christenings; it is as Miss Prism says: “one of the Rector’s most constant duties in this parish” (324). Even Jack and Algy request christenings, and Chasuble can thereby be seen as highly connected to the notion of giving a name.

  postcolonial point-of-view

• There is thus a theme of christenings in the play and when Jack and Algy ask to be christened it is as if they want to go back to childhood and change their identity. To change one’s name and identity is an important concern from a postcolonial point-of-view where one can be almost doomed by a name since a name might reveal your nationality or your otherness: To change one’s name and to gain a new identity is a device to fit in better and to get better prospects. Jack is not allowed to get married when he is Jack Worthing. However, his new identity in the end as Ernest Moncrieff gives him better prospects; a name is therefore of great importance.Raby argues that Wilde used names in his plays as an act of revenge. In 1894

he was in a dispute with his publishers, Lane and Matthews, so he used their names as the manservant and butler in The Importance of Being Earnest. He relented in the case of Matthews, though, and changed it to Merriman (Raby 145). In the play, even the seemingly unimpeachable Lane turns out to have led a double life when he lets slip that he has been married: “I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young lady” (296). It is, in short, not only the upper-class that is forced to lead a double life; the entire society seems to be constrained to the same device.





Work Citation




1].وبث بطه. (n.d.). Dualism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/24961497/Dualism_in_Oscar_Wildes_The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest