Language and Lying
- For example, the name E(a)rnest and its obvious pun gives an absurd double meaning to both the name and the word. Another pun is on the agricultural depression, which Cecily describes as “the condition of aristocrats who find themselves depressed by country life” (337). The name of Bunbury can lead to a new verb, ‘bunburying’ or to an epithet ‘bunburist’; “now that I know you to be a confirmed Bunburist I naturally want to talk to you about Bunburying” (302) as Algy says. When Lady Bracknell hears that the fictitious Bunbury is dead, that he ‘quite exploded’, there is “a linguistic play on the double sense of ‘exploded’” (Lalonde 672): Algy uses the word figuratively but Lady Bracknell interprets it literally. Wilde was also fond of using the rhetorical
- device of inversions for comic effect.Furthermore, there are many conflicts, verbal fights, double interests, between the characters. The conflicts are enhanced by the dualistic structure, the doubling of scenes and the repeating of dialogue, even talking in unison. The play opens with a verbal conflict between Algy and Lane. It is a conflict of class between master and servant; the upper and lower orders; of dominators and dominated. Algy, polite and civil, fights verbally with Lane about Lane listening to Algy’s playing and Lane’s stealing champagne, but he loses every exchange (Stone 32).
- The play then moves to conflicts within one social class. In the relationship between Jack and Algy, Algy is the clear dominator. He makes most of the jokes and forces Jack to tell the truth about his double life (Stone 33). The conflict is indeed very often about food, a general feature of Victorian farce. The characters are both eating and arranging to dine, or emphasizing the moral importance of being serious about meals; “I hate people who are not serious about meals” (303). Furthermore, the food is “always used as a weapon of domination” (Stone 38) in the play, just like the champagne mentioned above
- At the end of act two, Jack morally reproaches Algy for eating muffins: “I say it’s perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances”, but he is defeated by Algy: “At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy. Besides, I am particularly fond of muffins” (341), and Algy moreover denies him any of the muffins. Arguing over muffins may seem trivial but here it comes to symbolize Algy’s advantage on the social ladder.
- Their tea-party conflict has a neat structure. They both refer to the engagement in their respective diaries. Cecily’s diary is earlier described as “a very young girl’s record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication” (329) while Gwendolen refers to her diary in a more superior way; “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train” (336). Cecily states that the engagement shall be announced shortly; “Our little country newspaper is sure to chronicle the fact next week”; Gwendolen counters that “the announcement will appear in the Morning Post on Saturday” (335). The ‘Morning Post’ is superior in terms of class and sophistication over Cecily’s ‘little country newspaper’ and Gwendolen’s ‘Saturday’ is more precise than Cecily’s ‘next week’ (Stone 34). The argument ends with yet another class-reference when Cecily says, “This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade” and Gwendolen answers “I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different” (336). ). On the whole, the conflicts follow a neat dualistic pattern and the weapons used are words and/or food. Remarks about food can be seen as a symbol of class-bound superiority and withholding food as a counterattack.
- Lady Bracknell is in conflict with Jack and gives many examples of verbal description or distortions of reality. She talks about Jack’s smoking as an ‘occupation’ and that “A man should always have an occupation of some kind. There are too many idle men in London as it is” (308). She approves of something she calls a ‘natural ignorance’ and disapproves of education; “education is radically unsound” (309). When Jack states that he has lost both his parents, she talks about them as things: “Both? To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” (310) and her “refusal to allow Gwendolen to ‘marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a parcel’ is a perfect formulation of the upper order’s habit of treating people like things” (Stone 36)
- Dr Chasuble, representing the church, has one sermon which “can be adapted to almost any occasion” (324). But Jack and Algy’s baptisms have lost their meaning as a religious rite in the play and are reduced to an act of changing one’s name. The institution of marriage and family life is mocked foremost by Algy: “If I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact” (297), but yet they all strive to become married. If one defies the rules of family life it might lead to socialism as Lady Bracknell believes: “To be born, or at any rate, bred in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that remind one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to?” (311).
- Lady Bracknell again has the strongest opinions about the educational system: “education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes” (309) and Gwendolen further explains Lady Bracknell’s opinions: “mamma, whose views of education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely short-sighted” (334). Jeremy Lalonde claims in “A ‘Revolutional Outrage’: The Importance of Being Earnest as Social Criticism” that these observations are true from a Marxist outlook since “educational institutions serve the interests of the ruling class” (Lalonde 670). First and foremost it is the legal system that is deconstructed: Jack is a justice of peace, representing the judiciary system, and as a justice of peace he should speak nothing but the truth but in maintaining his identity as Ernest he is depicted as a liar and a lawbreaker.
- Despite the fact that all the characters have secret lives and constantly lie, they all claim to be speakers of truth. Almost all the characters are “Truth-speakers,” often brutally so. The characters not only state truths conveying their morality, they also emphasize truthfulness, which runs as a theme through the play. Algy is the first to claim to be a speaker of truth when accused of talking nonsense in act one: “It isn’t [nonsense]. It is a great truth” (298). He also accuses Jack of untruthfulness, when he thinks Jack speaks like a dentist, which is vulgar “when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression” (300). Jack tells Algy “candidly” that he does not live in Shropshire and after telling him about his double identities states: “That, my dear Algy, is the whole truth pure and simple” .
- Gwendolen ask if she may “speak candidly,’ which Cecily encourages since “whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid,” and Gwendolen asserts that she will “speak with perfect candour” (334). Later during their argument, Gwendolen is of the opinion that it is not only “a moral duty to speak one’s mind” but a pleasure and Cecily agrees that they should not wear “the shallow mask of manners” but “call a spade a spade”
- Jack completes the theme of truthfulness after he has found out that his real name is Ernest after all: “It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?” (357). In conclusion, the theme of truthfulness illuminates the contrasted concept of lying; the characters often lie when they claim to speak the truth, but they also call attention to the fact that style and credulity is more important than actually speaking the truth. In the end of the play, the lies are revealed as the truths, which suggest a complementary relation between the two concepts.
- Wilde grew up in a British colony, a colony where the peasants were forced to mirror their masters when they spoke. Wilde had witnessed this and had therefore learned how to ‘speak double’: he employed wit and irony as a counter-speech; he “turned the double-speak of the Empire back on itself
- Wilde also lived in an age when philosophers were coming to the conclusion that language itself was “a dubious, slippery commodity and that to talk is to learn how to tell lies” (Kiberd 276). Fluency and eloquence were distrusted and hesitation and inarticulacy admired and regarded as honesty. An Irish person often used English with a hesitation, ‘a charming tilt.’ Certain words and phrases could have one meaning in Ireland and another in England and the result could be that they were saying something they never intended.
- But in the play the truthseventually conforms to the lies: Jack is Ernest and he has a brother, and Cecily becomes engaged just as she fabricated in her diary; she lies herself into an engagement.
- The conclusion is that the opposite of truth can also be true, like in the case of Jack, who really is both Jack and Ernest. Furthermore, if lies are a higher truth, truths might be lower lies. In The Importance of Being Earnest, everybody commits a lie or falsehood at some point which seems to reveal a society unable to function without them. Wilde creates a world of opposites and doubles where the self and the doppelgänger could be seen as creating a whole person and where truths and lies could create a higher truth.
- In short, the duplicity in the language consists of wordplay with double meanings and epigrams with double meanings. The duplicity is also revealed in the double characters and in the conflicts, which include double interests. Above all, embedded in wit and double language, the play consists of lying. The lying is enhanced and illuminated by the contrasted theme of truth-speaking and is employed ,
- to deconstruct sociocultural issues like gender, church, education, family and legal system. The double identities and the double language of the play are related to the lying since Wilde seems to suggest that lying is double and that the duplicity of lying is a useful as well as moralistic tool to reveal the truth of a repressive Imperialistic society. In order to fully understand the wit in Wilde’s play, manifested in the language and lying, we might in part assume a colonial perspective where the comic rhetoric could be seen as an effect of Wilde’s colonial position and of speaking double.
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
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