Performative space - The Rover

• The setting of carnival time in Naples in Aphra Behn’s play The Rover allows two sets of characters to explore their sexual desires in a “performative space” that grants them an unusual amount of freedom from external constraint, from public view, and from suffering the consequences of their actions. The term “performative space” refers to the way that characters on and off the stage respond to differing expectations that are associated with place and dress. The Rover explores three performative spaces: the carnival world, the theater, and London society. Carnival time is the epitome of a special performative space. Carnival goers for various reasons take advantage of the anonymity of this masked affair to engage in relationships that would otherwise be denied to them, because of their class or gender. Since the carnival represents the world turned upside down, carnival time in Naples is a time for experimenting with role reversals. 

•  During carnival time, a mood of licentiousness descends upon Naples, a city that in the seventeenth century was not known for its prudishness in the first place. Wearing costumes and masks to hide their identities, the participants are free to act on impulses they would otherwise suppress. The carnival offers a perfect opportunity for two unmarried sisters, according to critic Heidi Hutner in “Revisioning the Female Boyd,” to “ramble: to leave the house, to speak their minds, to approach men of their choice.” Going against her brother’s command that she be locked up in the house until Lent, Hellena goes to the carnival to find a man and feel “the vanity and power” of being desirable to him. Dressed as a gypsy, she acts like one, displaying her body provocatively and pretending to read Willmore’s palm, while hiding behind her mask. The freedom of carnival time lets her act upon impulses that a young lady would not normally indulge.

• For the male characters, too, carnival time gives people license to act out sexual desires. As Willmore exclaims to his fellow cavaliers, “’tis a kind of legal authorized fornication, where the men are not chid for’t, nor the women despised, as among our dull English.” They, too, wear masks to avoid being held accountable for the consequences of their dallying. Captain Willmore and his friends plan to take advantage of the sexual freedoms of young ladies in a carnival mood. The men drink, too, and drunkenness opens up a performative space that excuses swinish behavior. When Willmore blames his attempted rape of Florinda on the “influence” of the “cursed sack” he had been drinking, the others readily accept this excuse. But it is not just drink that influences Willmore: he responds to the influence of the performative space he occupies. The setting of the carnival is a catalyst that compels the characters to act compulsively. 

Behn fashioned her Hellena after Shakespeare’s Helena, not the Hellena from Thomas Killigrew’s play Thomaso; or, The Wanderer, the play she adapted. Behn replaced Killigrew’s Hellena, “an old decayed blind, out of fashion whore... that has neither teeth nor eyes,” with a young miss who knows herself to be “well shaped,” “clean-limbed,” and “sweet-breathed.” The playwright also reversed the old Hellena’s fortune so that the young noblewoman could express what Behn (and the aging prostitute) knew to be true: that “a handsome woman has a great deal to do while her face is good.” Therefore, Behn’s Hellena dons the costume and inhabits the performative space of a prostitute, pinning advertisements to her clothing to underscore her purpose, in case anyone missed it. To all eyes, Hellena is a whore. From the perspective of the viewer, the “play-acting... and reality... collapse into each other, and the boundaries of performative and essential self becomes indistinct,” as Derek Hughes explains in his work The Theatre of Aphra Behn. To Willmore, Hellena really is his “gipsie girl,” and he does not comprehend that she is a titled lady until he hears it twice.



For Hellena’s part, performance and reality have merged, for she continues the relationship as a hybrid of her gypsy persona with her identity of a mischievous nun-to-be. She has merged the two identities by enacting the gypsy part in the performative space of the carnival, and the resultant woman is equal to the challenge of taming the Rover’s wandering habits. Although, as Heidi Hutner points out, she is “brought back into the patriarchal fold,” when she requires and gets her brother’s approval, she occupies her own performative space within the marriage. In The Rover, Behn raises significant questions about the extent to which the social/sexual self truly represents the essential self. In seventeenth-century London, the traditional performative space for marriageable women was confining; even a gypsy, common prostitute, or high-priced courtesan had more freedom. Behn also,

“THE SETTING OF CARNIVAL TIME IN NAPLES IN APHRA BEHN’S PLAY THE ROVER ALLOWS TWO SETS OF CHARACTERS TO EXPLORE THEIR SEXUAL DESIRES IN A ‘PERFORMATIVE SPACE’ THAT GRANTS THEM AN UNUSUAL AMOUNT OF FREEDOM FROM EXTERNAL CONSTRAINT, FROM PUBLIC VIEW, AND FROM SUFFERING THE CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR ACTIONS.”

 demonstrated that in the courtship marketplace it was often difficult to distinguish one mode of performance from the other, for the lady and the prostitute had to employ similar tactics to get by in life.

As in the carnival, within the performative space of the theater itself, it was also often difficult to distinguish between prostitute and lady of quality. The theater was the other public forum where masked prostitutes masqueraded as ladies of quality. In the theater, they could rub shoulders with women of quality, some of whom wore masks to playact as prostitutes. Thus, the audience was, in some ways, another world turned upside down. Charles II had reinstated the theater after twenty years of grim Puritan suppression, and here he wanted to celebrate his triumph over them. Many of the plays he supported legitimized his own licentious behavior by staging it for the audience to celebrate with him. His interest in theater created a new performative space for women, too, one that was both liberating and problematic. He had proclaimed through an act of Parliament that women must play women’s roles, thus inventing the career of the actress. However, by putting themselves on display in this fashion, they were instantly considered prostitutes, and the treatment they received at the hands of gentlemen at the back door of the theater usually succeeded in transforming them into such. Meanwhile, in the audience, prostitutes wearing masks were easily confused with ladies of quality, also wearing masks. The mask lent the woman an air of mystery and sophistication that was useful to prostitutes and ladies alike. However, as Anne Russell points out in her introduction to the Broadview edition of The Rover, “the distinctions between prostitutes and ‘respectable women’ became blurred. The mask became a sign of the prostitute but a sign which, with its offer of anonymity, could offer some freedom from conventional roles for any woman who wore it.” That inveterate playgoer of the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys, frequently observed the confusion. In one diary entry, he records his reaction to a lovely woman in a mask, saying that “one of the ladies would, and did, sit with her mask on all the play; and being exceedingly witty as ever I heard a woman, did talk most pleasantly with him; but was, I believe, a virtuous woman and of quality.... A more pleasant rencontre I never heard. But by that means lost the pleasure of the play wholly.” He was more entertained by the masked audience member than he was by the play, and it would have been difficult for him to ignore her, since the Restoration theater was lit uniformly, such that the audience was as visible as the play. Sophisticated banter and sexually provocative behavior being in fashion at this time, the theater was itself a performative space for enacting, watching, and practicing the sophisticated actions of the royal court. Prostitutes could learn to be witty, like the lady Pepys observed, and ladies could learn how to display themselves, like—and not like—prostitutes.

To a large extent, Aphra Behn produced exactly what Charles II and his audience wanted: an erotic and sophisticated entertainment. Yet, because of the social bias against female playwrights, she could not at first take credit for her achievement. She, too, was “masked,” for in her prologue she refers to the playwright as an anonymous “he,” and she refuses to identify herself as the author of her work. Nevertheless, Behn opened up a new performative space for women writers, not just as “the professional woman writer as a new fangled kind of whore,” as Catherine Gallagher claims in her essay “Who Was That Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn,” but as a woman writer with, like her heroine, Hellena, the wit and power to control the theatrical performative space through establishing her own ground rules. She created this space, and by doing so, she invited other female writers to populate it.




Work Citation

The Rover. (2020, April 23). Retrieved from https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/rover

Time representation in Hard Time

In Hard Times both city and citizen are bound by Time. Coketown with its 'interminable serpents of smoke' and its elephant-machines moving 'in a state of melancholy madness' is fettered by Time. It is inhabited by people 'who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.' Many of its effects are apparent. In Coketown, like its machines, 'Time, with his innumerable horse-power, worked away,… and presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller than when his father had last taken particular notice of him.' After passing 'Thomas on in the mill,' Time 'passed him on into Bounderby's Bank, made him an inmate of Bounderby's house….' Likewise,'the same great manufacturer… passed Sissy onward in his mill, and worked her up into a very pretty article indeed.'

A second force in the novel, more frequently noted and dramatically more powerful than Time, is that which views life as governed by Fact. This force, too, is connected with Time.
In Hard Times to act as one would in (according to) Fact is—of necessity—to bind one's self to the present, to be one of those 'to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.'
Two of the children who offer illustrative contrast are Sissy and Louisa. In Chapter 9 of Book the First, whose title 'Sissy's Progress' connotes movement and change, the narrator suggests that, even though Sissy grows and develops through the years, life at Stone Lodge, going 'monotonously round like a piece of machinery which discouraged human interference,' is not in its essentials changed by Time. Positions shift—Gradgrind, for example, becomes a member of Parliament—but Time in Stone Lodge remains benumbed in the Present, turning seldom backward or forward. What sustains Sissy Jupe is a belief that amounts to religious faith, and a hope that keeps open the curtains of the Future: 'the girl believed that her father had not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she was.' Sissy's belief keeps her from running away. Her memories of her father and Merrylegs, though not exclusively happy ones, fortify her affection for him and strengthen her hope. She tells Louisa: 'I keep the nine oils ready for him, and I know he will come back. Every letter that I see in Mr Gradgrind's hand takes my breath away and blinds my eyes, for I think it comes from father, or from Mr Sleary about father.' Although Mr Gradgrind does not approve of such 'fantastic hopes,' the narrator comments that 'it did seem… as if fantastic hope could take as strong a hold as Fact.'
Louisa has no such sustenance. Others look to her future—her father with a well-intentioned but matter-of-fact plan for her marriage, her brother with his own selfish plan for helping his situation with Bounderby. Louisa has little to hope for. She cannot imagine ways of doing for Tom what other girls might do for those they love. 'I can't play to you, or sing to you,' she says, 'I can't talk to you so as to lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when you are tired.' Such feelings of helplessness are not expressed only to Tom. In talking to her father Louisa says, 'Father, I have often thought that life is very short'; she wishes 'to do the little I can, and the little I am fit for.' If the second statement expresses a hope, it is a short-term, highly limited one, so hesitant a step along that avenue to the future as scarcely to offer any glimpse at all. Indeed, her statement, 'What does it matter!' repeated twice during the conversation, suggests more of despair than hope, of drawing in than moving out.
When she sits before her fire watching the dying sparks, Louisa embodies the situation of the person closed solely within the present, the person without hope. The red sparks 'made me think… how short my life would be,' she tells her mother, 'and how little I could hope to do in it.' Although a personal outburst appears to threaten when she later tells her father that 'when the night comes, Fire bursts out,' her own bursting-out—i.e., the temptation to run away with Harthouse—is severely contained. As a rebellion against her restrictive background, it appears weak because she overcomes it without significant difficulty (although it does bring her and her father to an important point of conciliation and understanding); as a moral victory, it appears weak because Harthouse is too much of a dandy to be a very strong temptation for a woman of her temperament and (presumed) intelligence—whatever kind of husband Bounderby is. But even more, by this time the fires of Louisa's spirit have faded and are not to be stoked by a shabby and illicit romance. When she stood at the door of Stone Lodge earlier as her father listened to Mr Bounderby's offer of marriage to his daughter, Louisa found little to look forward to. References to Time and fire come together:
It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the fiery haze without she tried to discover what kind of wool Old Time, that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from the threads he had already spun into a woman. But his factory is a secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.
Louisa does not look toward the future with hope, but simply speculates, quietly and passively.

2 Interview and 2 protagonist connection - Hard Time

• Other parallels also connect Stephen and Louisa. The watchful Mrs. Sparsit first sees Black-pool lurking near the bank, an observation that leads to his unjustly falling under suspicion of theft, and Mrs. Sparsit subsequently, after extensive spying on Louisa, wrongly accuses her of adultery. During the rainstorm, Louisa has fled to her father and avoided misconduct, and we may recall the earlier rainstorm during which Stephen, with Rachael's assistance, escapes from the temptation to commit murder.

• When the distressed Louisa asks Gradgrind to shelter her, the meeting provides an ironic contrast with the prior scene between father and daughter in the same room, at the time that they discussed Bounderby's marriage proposal. These two highly significant interviews between Louisa and her father seem balanced by the two climatic confrontations between Stephen and his employer: during the first meeting Blackpool is told there is no help for his marital problems, and during the second he is dismissed from his job. Although Stephen requests the first meeting, he is summoned to the second, a pattern that is reversed in Louisa's two interviews with her father. For each protagonist—Stephen and Louisa—the second meeting leads to a separation from Bounderby. During Stephen's first interview, Bounderby's callous indication that the law cannot help a poor man seeking divorce leads the weaver to remark several times "'tis a muddle," an assessment that he restates during the second meeting with Bounderby and reiterates when dying. Louisa's first long discussion with her father leads the young woman to a comparable expression of moral confusion, her repeated query, "What does it matter?" a question to which she returns when she afterwards wonders how to respond to Hart-house's overtures. Of course, Blackpool's view of life as a "muddle" gives way to his dying affirmation of faith in a guiding star, while Louisa eventually finds strength and comfort in the love offered by Sissy.

• These two sets of interviews are also connected by a few other features. Stephen's initial meeting with Bounderby takes place during a rainstorm, as does Louisa's second interview with her father. Stephen's temptation to murder occurs on a night soon after the first discussion with his employer, while Louisa's near-seduction directly precedes her second climactic scene with Gradgrind.

• During this second meeting, Gradgrind experiences a conversion, a change that leads him to acknowledge the inadequacy of his prior philosophy. Shaken and sorrowful, he seeks to offer reparation to Louisa, beseeching her, "What can I do, child? Ask me what you will," and then arranging for her to stay in his home and be cared for by Sissy. Similarly, Gradgrind is later the one to whom the dying Stephen turns for reparation: "Sir, yo will clear me an' mak my name good wi' aw men. This I leave to yo."

• The vulnerability of each protagonist—Stephen and Louisa—is increased because of affection for another person. Since Stephen adores Rachael, he promises her not rejoin the union, a promise that results in his being ostracized, while Louisa's love for her brother Tom induces her to marry Bounderby.

Hard Time - The ending explanation

• The ending of Hard Times resembles in a general way these sensation novel's endings. Both Louisa and Stephen end badly, arguably Stephen worse than Louisa though her brother Tom's rejection of her compounds her lonely future. Louisa, even though she has not fully acted on her desires—she has not run away with Harthouse—lives unpartnered, a guest at the banquet of Sissy's domestic happiness, doing her father's work, atoning for his sins. Stephen dies painfully by falling down a mine-shaft.

• The gratuitousness of Stephen's death and the underexplained events that lead up to it suggest how difficult it is in the end to integrate the gender and class issues involved in the divorce plot into the conventional father's story which dominates the last pages of Hard Times. In his final words, Stephen seems to lay the blame for his death on the misunderstandings between capital and labor—fathers and children—but actually his death has come about because of his terrible marriage and frustrated relationship with Rachael. The focal point for both this relationship and his death is his promise to Rachael. As many critics have pointed out, this promise is inexplicable, but even more puzzling is why Rachael does not release him from it when she sees what the result of his adhering to it is. And why does Stephen, whose refusal to join his fellow workers is based on this promise to Rachael to avoid trouble with the masters, then insist on justifying his colleagues to Bounderby, thereby essentially provoking his master into dismissing him, thus achieving precisely what Rachael made him promise to avoid? And most importantly, why are these actions followed by such a painful and gratuitous death?

• Stephen's death has been justified as Dickens' recognition that there is no way out of the class war. Nicholas Coles says "Stephen is killed off by the combined forces of both classes… and there is no manner of hope in either of them." However, if we think of Stephen's story as it connects to Louisa's through the marriage and divorce plot, we may see an additional reason for his death. Though overtly Stephen is the only one whose miserable marriage seems to call for divorce, the linking of Louisa and Stephen has opened a crack through which we see that for women much less dramatic situations than Stephen's make marriage a repressive institution. Though intermittently in evidence, this insight has been downplayed through laughter at Mrs. Sparsit and Mrs. Gradgrind and through narrative silence about Louisa. But in order to completely erase this story so the father's story can dominate the closure, the divorce issue must be killed in Stephen, who has been its overt spokesman.

• This is Louisa Gradgrind's secret: she killed Stephen Blackpool, though unlike Lady Audley she did not personally push him down the well. Louisa's action of seeking Stephen out in his home, accompanied by her brother as an escort, has led to the suspicion of Stephen's robbing the bank, his hurried return, and ultimately his death. Further, Louisa also narratively necessitates Stephen's death. Though she is the embodiment of the sensation heroine's story of repression and lack of fulfillment in marriage, Stephen has carried the weight of her story. So even as she cannot remarry, though the healthy Bounderby dies five years after the separation, Stephen cannot live to marry Rachael. The sick Mrs. Blackpool survives, the healthy Stephen dies, thereby removing the last vestige of the divorce plot. The novel ends where it began—with the now-chastened father and sacrificed daughter together again, and for all time.

Similarity between Louisa and Stephen

• The issue of divorce concern Louisa. Most of Louisa's story is unnarrated, but one possible version is suggested, nonetheless, through the systematic analogy drawn between her and Stephen. In the structure of the novel her story alternates and contrasts with Stephen's. Louisa's questions to Sissy about Sissy's parents and their marriage were answered not only by the young girl's description of their compatible and happy marriage but also both by contrast and repetition in the two following chapters in which Stephen tells Bounderby about his own miserable marriage and wish for a divorce and then fantasizes about an ideal marriage with Rachael. More metaphorically, Stephen's subsequent murderous thoughts about his wife are followed by Louisa's capitulation to Bounderby's "criminal" proposal. Another contrast represents the emotions that bring both Louisa and Stephen to the brink of disaster: Louisa's assertion of herself in intimate, dangerous, but under-represented conversations with Harthouse are followed by Stephen's equally dangerous self-assertions to Slackbridge and Bounderby. Louisa has two important scenes with her father; Stephen has two with his "father" Bounderby. Louisa's aborted "fall" from the bottom of Mrs. Sparsit's staircase into "a dark pit" is completed by Stephen's fall into the dark Old Hell Mine shaft. Finally, Louisa's leaving her husband and "dying" to the story is followed by Stephen's actual death.

• Louisa and Stephen are further linked to Tom's betrayal of them both, while Tom's robbery of the bank acts out retribution on Bounderby for him, his sister, and Stephen (and also substitutes for Harthouse's intent to "rob" Bounderby of his wife). However, in a crucial scene in which the three are brought together by Louisa, Tom displaces his guilt and perhaps his sister's, too, onto Stephen. (Certainly both Stephen and Rachael initially think that Louisa is as guilty of using Stephen as Tom is.)

• The most telling connection between Stephen and Louisa is in their equally dreadful if quite different marriages. Stephen and Louisa's responses to their bad marriages are similar: both turn to sympathetic others though they both resist acting on the needs and desires released in them by these others. The four illustrations for the novel reflect this linking of Louisa and Stephen in their responses to their marriages: two are of Harthouse, Louisa's would be lover; a third is of Stephen and Rachael with Stephen's wife, who is reaching out from the bed curtains for the poison. The fourth is of Stephen rescued from the Old Hell Mine Shaft, Rachel's hand in his while he delivers his unlikely speech on class relations. The first three point to Louisa's and Stephen's failed marriages; only the fourth relates to the industrial theme, though as we shall see, that theme is integrated with the marriage question as well.

• But this parallelism between Louisa and Stephen is broken at a crucial point; Stephen's desire to end his marriage is sympathetically treated, but not achieved. On the other hand, Louisa's marital situation, while it is never narrated directly and poses a number of unanswered questions, actually ends in a permanent separation.

Marginalized characters marriage life - Hard Time

The Matrimonial Causes Bill, as it was officially called, had a large element of bad faith in them. For example, efforts to scuttle the Bill entirely were cynically based on arguments that it did nothing for the poor or to equalize the position of women. In the end, divorce law reform essentially continued the status of divorce as an instrument primarily for well-off men to assure that, as Lord Cranworth put it, women not be able to "palm spurious offspring upon their husbands.

• Mrs. Sparsit

Take Mrs. Sparsit, for example. The novel's plot would work as well, in fact better because more consistently, if she had been a social-climbing, money-grubbing husband hunter. Such bad behavior would justify Bounderby's humiliating treatment of her. But in fact, she was manipulated into a marriage with a boy fifteen years her junior by Lady Scadgers, probably because she thought he was a good match. In the event he is a very bad husband: he spent all his money and "when he died, at twenty-four… he did not leave his widow, from whom he had been separated after the honeymoon, in affluent circumstances." If Mrs. Sparsit were not so much in Bounderby's camp and so hostile to Louisa, we might notice how badly she has been treated.

• Mrs. Gradgrind

More troubling, however, is Mrs. Gradgrind. Though she is generally represented dismissively throughout the novel (the list of characters refers to her as "feeble-minded"), it takes very little to see that she is in a terrible marriage. Her imbecility in fact appears to be a product of her marriage. Gradgrind chose her because "she was most satisfactory as a question of figures" and "she had 'no nonsense' about her." Though she may have been weak-minded to start with, she was presumably not at the time of her marriage an "absolute idiot." When we meet her later in her life with five children, she is close to being one. How did that happen? She herself describes the process by which she has been turned into an idiot as "never hearing the last of it," that is, when she ventures to say anything she is instantly and abruptly put down. So that "the simple circumstance of being left alone with her husband and Mr. Bounderby, was sufficient to stun this admirable lady… so, she once more died away, and nobody minded her." The repeated use of the word "died" in connection with Mrs. Gradgrind's ceasing to talk throughout the novel indicates the brutality of her suppression. When she is literally dying she tells Louisa "'You want to hear of me, my dear? That's something new, I am sure, when anybody wants to hear of me'" and later "'You must remember, my dear, that whenever I have said anything, on any subject, I have never heard the last of it; and consequently, that I have long left off saying anything.'"

 Mrs. Gradgrind is a particularly troubling character because her brutalization is articulated (if never actually represented), but her story, like Mrs. Sparsit's, is systematically undercut by laughter, and both are meted out punishment: Mrs. Sparsit has to go live with the woman who made her marriage, Mrs. Gradgrind dies without even a claim to her own pain. While for the most part we think Mrs. Sparsit more than deserves her blighted life, the discomfort in our responses to Mrs. Gradgrind is a sign of a disruption in the narrative that is the result, I would argue, of the interrogation of marriage introduced by the divorce plot.

Louisa's marriage, there are a number of puzzling gaps in the story

• One such gap, though a common one in Victorian fiction, is the configuration of the sexual nature of Louisa's marriage. There has been vigorous critical controversy over this subject. Louisa's physical repugnance for Bounderby (as in the scene where she tells Tom she wouldn't mind if he cut out the place on her cheek where Bounderby kissed her) and the clear sexual desire that motivates him suggests there might be some sexual trouble between them from the start. But when we meet them months after the honeymoon, Louisa and her husband appear to live calmly together, which suggests to me that, however unsatisfactory, there has been conjugal sex.

• Does it matter? We know that no Victorian novel could directly depict the sexual nature of human experience even in marriage. Why should we care whether or not Louisa and Bounderby have had sex? It matters because the uncertainty about Louisa's sexual knowledge is one of a number of puzzling elements about her marriage. Her sexual experience or lack of it certainly would help us understand her feelings for Harthouse, which are rather mystified in the text. Why do her feelings for Harthouse result in her leaving her husband and returning to her father? Further, what does she have in mind in that return, and what does her father intend when he asks Bounderby to permit her to stay in her father's house "on a visit"? Finally, why does Louisa not remarry after Bounderby's death, that is, why does Bounderby die if by that Louisa is not freed to find happiness and fulfillment?

Father and daughter plot in Hard Time

• The father-daughter plot in these two works is archetypal—present in Western culture from the Old Testament Jeptha, Lot, and Dinah to Iphigenia in Aulis to King Lear to Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres. There is a conflict in all these stories between social needs and private desires that usually surface—indeed usually generate narrative—at the point of the daughter's marriage. Daughters must move out of the family and make new alliances through marriage to keep the biological, political, and economic health of the community, but the dynamics, particularly the sexual dynamics, within the family itself resist the moving out of the daughter. Sometimes the desire to keep the daughter grows out of the father's romantic attachment to her as she supplants the woman he first loved, who has dwindled into a wife, a fictional pattern seen in Oedipus at Colonus, in King Lear, and in "Rappacini's Daughter" and Hard Times (Louisa is her father's "favorite child" and "the pride of his heart"). The father of Western father-daughter narratives frequently tries to negotiate his desire to keep the daughter by selecting the man she marries (not uncommonly she is given to his relative or friend), thus giving an additional turn to Eve Sedgwick's thesis of homosocial desire. But there is another reason the daughter needs to stay within the family in these narratives. She is also needed to serve, save, redeem, ultimately to sacrifice herself for the father, as does Iphigenia, Cordelia, Florence Dombey, or Louisa Gradgrind. To the degree that the Western narrative of the father-daughter concerns the redemption of the patriarch, the daughter's continued presence in the family is essential. So, as Fred Kaplan in his biography of Dickens states, Louisa's return to her father's house is the means of redeeming him even as the patriarchy in general in that novel is redeemed by sisterhood.

• This benign thesis places the center of interest in Hard Times, as in most Western narrative, in the development of the father's story. But there is another story possible, that of the daughter. From her point of view, the sacrifice that might redeem the father can be fatal, as with Iphigenia or Cordelia. The daughter's story is not frequent in Western narrative, but "Rappacini's Daughter" suggests where we might find it, that is, in the gothic. For though Hawthorne's gothic story is centered on a representation of male abuse of knowledge and power, the daughter's story—the conflict between her desire for her father's love and her desire for self-fulfillment and autonomy—vies for center stage with the father's, particularly at closure, as it does in many gothic novels. In that most ungothic novel, Hard Times, Louisa's story is less visible and more problematic, but it is present intermittently, injected into the narrative not through the gothic but through the 1860s version of the gothic, the sensation novel and its interrogation of the institution of marriage.

The Rape of the Lock . Explanation

The rape of the lock. brief explanation from Goswami Mahirpari





Work Citation

Palma, A. (n.d.). THE RAPE OF THE LOCK reading guide. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/20795927/THE_RAPE_OF_THE_LOCK_reading_guide

The Rape of the lock and Themes

•  Sexuality & materialism

The other flaw of that 18th Century’s society was sexuality & materialism that Pope is trying to depict in his poem. It's fairly obvious to us that if you put a bunch of attractive, well-off, and bored young men and women together, sparks are bound to fly in one way or another. They'll get attracted to one another, feel desire for one another, have dreams about one another, maybe even fall in love. That's the trouble with the society Pope depicts in The Rape of the Lock: there's absolutely no way for anyone in it to safely express or act on his or her sexuality, desire, lust, or love. The rules forbid it. And so, instead, sexuality gets warped and twisted into materiality and narcissism: Belinda's love of her own face; the Baron's desire for her locks; Sir Plume's love of his cane and snuffbox. Even when Ariel finds "an Earthly Lover" in Belinda's heart, that fact only serves to put her more in danger of losing her hair to the Baron.

•  Lacking of real manhood

In one angle Pope is showing the lacking of real manhood in 18th century society. Those Greek and Roman guys; Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, Aeneas, and all of their ilk were heroes. They all were Armor-wearing, battle-tested, honorable men. So many of the hip men of the upper classes in Pope's era seemed to have fallen woefully short of that heroic & manly traits. They drank tea. They took snuff. They wore silk and satin. They wore wigs as well. And as for honor—they seemed to care more about gossip, backstabbing, and personal gain than the good of society, or of their country. In the Rape of the Lock, Pope juxtaposes the heroic classical ideal of manhood from the ancient epics, with the reality of the beaus (admirers/lovers) who moved through his own society, that he found the latter sadly lacking. 

• Religious piety 

The Rape of the Lock demonstrates Pope’s anxieties concerning the state of religious piety during the early eighteenth century. Pope was Catholic, and in the poem, he indicates his concern that society has embraced objects of worship (beauty) rather than God. His use of religious imagery reveals this perversion. The rituals he depicts in the first and second cantos equate religion with secular love. During Belinda’s toilette, the poem imbues the Bibles and love letters on her dressing table with equal significance. The Baron’s altar to Love in the second canto echoes this scene. On the altar itself an integral part of Christian worship. Pope symbolizes this equation of religious and erotic love in the cross that Belinda wears. This central symbol of Christianity serves an ornamental, not religious function, adorning Belinda’s “white breast”. The cross remains sufficiently secular that “Jews might kiss” it and “infidels adore” it. Of course, Pope leaves ambiguous the implication that the Jews and infidels are admiring Belinda’s breasts and not the cross. This subversion of established principles of Christian worship critiques the laxity of early eighteenth-century attitudes towards religion and morality.

• vanity

The poem is perhaps the most outstanding example in the English language of the genre of mock-epic. One of the main themes of The Rape of the Lock is “vanity”(Self-admiration), specifically the vanity of upper-class English society during the early eighteenth century. Belinda, the glamorous society lady, is an exemplar of this. Each day upon rising, she enters the inner sanctum of her boudoir (a private room) where she proceeds to get dressed, taking great pains to ensure that she is as beautiful and as ravishing as any woman could possibly be. The enormous effort she expends during this elaborate ritual proves well worth it, as admiring heads turn in her direction as she embarks upon her stately journey up the Thames toward Hampton Court Palace.
In fact, Belinda moves in a world that is completely lifeless and shallow, where personal appearance is everything. Her reaction to the Baron's theft of a relatively small piece of her hair may seem a trifle excessive, but her implacable wrath is a satirical reflection on just how vain Belinda and the society she inhabits really is.
The theme of vanity spills over into how the esoteric social elite treats religion. The upper classes of early eighteenth-century England clearly pay nothing more than lip-service to prevailing religious beliefs. Faith, like everything else, is something to be shown off, paraded in front of others as a means of securing their approval and admiration. The juxtaposition of faith and vanity is epitomized by Belinda. She keeps a copy of the Bible on her dressing table, which squats uncomfortably next to all her various accoutrements (additional items) of vanity: hairbrushes, powders, and—appropriately enough—vanity cream.
The Baron also has nothing more than a superficial attachment to religious faith. He wakes up at the crack of dawn to pray for the success of his forthcoming plan to steal a lock of Belinda's hair. But it is all just a sham; he is no more religious than Belinda. His prayers are simply a rather cynical attempt to put a pious gloss upon an act of common thievery. Once again, the motivation for action is vanity; the Baron wants to steal some of Belinda's hair so he can boast of its possession, making him an object of admiration among the smart set.

Work Citation

 Anjum, Arslan. “Rape of the Lock Themes.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/39289782/Rape_of_the_Lock_Themes.

mock-heroic- poem The Rape of the lock

mock-heroic- poem
Satire is a literary form that uses exaggerations and ridicules to expose truths about society.

• Epic poem:
• Devided in 5 cantos
• Written in heroic couplets (rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter), they confer a melodious form to the poem
• Based on real events 
• Contains all the standard features of the epic genre: a dream message from the gods, arming the heroes, sacrifice to the gods, exhortation to the troops, single combat, epic feast, journey to the underworld, general combat, intervention of the gods

• The rendering of the card game as a battle constitutes an amusing and deft narrative feat. By parodying the battle scenes of the great epic poems, Pope is suggesting that the energy and passion once applied to brave and serious purposes is now expended on such insignificant trials as games and gambling, which often become a mere front for flirtation. The structure of “the three attempts” by which the lock is cut is a convention of heroic challenges, particularly in the romance genre.

1. In Canto IV, Umbrio unleashes the bag of “[s]ighs, sobs, and passions” over Belinda increasing her anger and despair. Afterwards, Thalestris, her friend, (In Greek mythology, Thalestris is the name of one of the Amazons, a race of warrior women who excluded men from their society) tries to convince Belinda, holding a long speech, to revenge herself, and so she demands “her beau”, Sir Plume, to challenge in defense the Baron for Belinda’s honor. The Baron refuses to give back the lock of hair, for as Sir Plume’s speech is clumsy and does not compare with any of the way, in which a true knight should act. Pope emphasizes here the fall of chivalrous acts and behavior of the courtly men.

• At that moment, the Gnome unlashes the remaining vial of sorrows causing Belinda to overreact. She starts to cry, cursing her life at the Court and the day she had ignored the dream-warning. The drama she creates for the stealth of her lock of hair has nothing to do with the branch of chastity but more with her public reputation. Belinda’s appearance seems to matter more for her than her inner self. She would have rather been made fun of her personality/integrity than her appearance, “Oh hadst thou, cruel! Been content seize/ Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!”

• The Vth Canto consists of, the end of the course of actions, and the moral conclusion of the mock-heroic poem from the eyes of Clarissa, the one that handed out the scissors to the Baron.  Clarissa, the voice of the poet in this part of the poem, underlines the true important things in life, what lies within the inner of a person, the beauty inside, not the one outside oneself.

The mock-heroic conclusion of the poem is designed to compliment the lady it alludes to (Arabella Fermor), while also giving the poet himself due credit for being the instrument of her immortality. This ending effectively indulges the heroine’s vanity, even though the poem has functioned throughout as a critique of that vanity. No real moral development has taken place: Belinda is asked to come to terms with her loss through a kind of bribe or distraction that reinforces her basically frivolous outlook. But even in its most mocking moments, this poem is a gentle one, in which Pope shows a basic sympathy with the social world in spite of its folly and foibles. The searing critiques of his later satires would be much more stringent and less forgiving.


Work Citation


Csécsi, Petra. “The Rape of the Lock-Analysis.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/38450422/The_Rape_of_the_Lock-analysis.

Supernatural element in The Rape of the lock

Supernatural element in the rape of the lock from Goswami Mahirpari




Work Citation

Shah, Umama. “Supernatural Elements in Rape of Lock.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/8949130/Supernatural_elements_in_Rape_of_lock.

Pope’s portrayal of women in The Rape of the Lock

From the story, one may gather that the aristocracy at this time lived a rather frivolous life. Women spent much of their day preparing themselves for social functions (5.19). Beauty becomes very important, as do appearances- both physical and social. The virtue of beauty in this poem can not be overstated. Pope writes, "If to her share some female errors fall,/ Look on her face, and you’ll forget ‘em all" (2.17-8). The beautiful woman Belinda is seen as more virtuous than others simply because of her physical features. Showing social grace and charm is more important for women than anything intellectual they could say. Despite our readiness to dismiss this life as useless and worthless, it is possible to see that these women took their roles and duties very seriously. It is also quite obvious that these types of behavior were expected of women and that a woman who did not conform would be an unwelcomed outcast. For example, the Sylphs are ready to go to war for Belinda to preserve her beauty and chastity, and great punishment is threatened for any fairy that does not protect these virtues (2.91-136).

A female’s self-worth and means of social freedom are to be found through the fulfillment of a culturally desirable social life, fraught with rituals and mores for behavior between the sexes. When describing Belinda’s beauty routine, Pope writes, "The inferior priestess, at her altar’s side,/ Trembling begins the sacred rites of Pride" (1.127-8). For women, pride is to be attained through the rituals of beauty. When Belinda is forced to deal with her sudden hair loss, she experiences a great deal of shame and public humiliation. She exclaims, "Oh, had I rather unadmired remained/ In some love isle, or distant northern land. . . There kept my charms concealed from mortal eye,/ Like roses that in deserts bloom and die" (4.153-158). She wishes she had been concealed from society and wants to hide her face in shame.

• Belinda’s priorities might be out of whack with today’s society; however, the fact remains that this was the type of lifestyle afforded to her by her status. As a woman, the courtly lifestyle was the best opportunity for a happy life. Of course Belinda would and should be upset by such a "trivial" matter. Her sole means of livelihood and success has been shattered by the "rape of the lock." Like many rape victims and women socialized into society today, Belinda tries to rationalize this incident by blaming herself. She remembers how she was forewarned about her fate, but she chose to ignore reason. She says she should have known better (4.165-166). Here, the woman is not only blaming herself, but professing her own internalized stupidity and implying her inferior status. She cries out from the pain she is experiencing and shouts, "Oh hadst thou, cruel! Been content to seize/ Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!" (4.175-6). The sexual undertones here are not very difficult to see. It appears that Belinda would have preferred to be raped sexually, where she would have suffered only private humiliation, than to have a precious lock of her hair cut off publicly. By this incident, Belinda is defaced not only privately but also publicly. Everyone can plainly see that Belinda has this major defect. It is as though the Scarlet "A" has been branded on her chest. Her "flaw" has become obvious to everyone; hence, the victim is victimized again by society.

• Thaletris-an Amazonian type woman who enjoys fighting. It is interesting that even Thaletris experiences some doubts about whether or not she should help Belinda who "burns with more than mortal ire" (4.93). Thaletris exclaims that she can already see that Belinda’s honor is lost and that she has become instantly defamed and deflowered by this act (4.105-116). To preserve their own social appearances, her friends must desert her or face this same type of degradation. Thaletris must examine whether helping Belinda is worth her while.
• Thaletris tends to hold male characteristics and subscribe to some male-dictated norms, while rejecting males and other male-determined mores; therefore, she is the form of woman that is to be most feared and scorned by men. Thaletris, while not presented as such, represents the truly free female and is an early feminist character. Thatletris’ personality is divided among the other female characters and is used simply to portray the supposed vengeful, spiteful, and wholly illogical character of women. Her feminist standards may be rejected today, as she seems to reject femininity and scorns "feminine" females; however she represents the sole strong female role in the story. Thaletris’ militaristic notions about life and her unbridled sexuality lead her to consider Belinda a "prude" (5.36). She can not accept Belinda as a fellow sister, free to make her own personal choices, but must still reject her on certain grounds.  

Work Citation

Csécsi, Petra. “The Rape of the Lock-Analysis.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/38450422/The_Rape_of_the_Lock-analysis.

The Rape of the Lock and Satier.

Society in the Poem

• Indeed, Pope succeeded to treat the social customs of the age with an assumed epic seriousness. The poem is all about "Lords" and "Belles" of the 18th c. London. We see here the elegance and emptiness; the meanness and vanity; the jealousies, treacheries and intrigues of the then society. Both the sexes of the aristocratic society led voluptuous, materialistic life. Pope has shown himself as the spokes-person of his age.

Trivialities in Social Life

• Pope is making fun of a certain lifestyle-culture where people have nothing serious in their life. So they make up their time with silly, trivial matters. They only play with silly emotion. They are pre-occupied with flirtation, envy, vulgar jokes, dressing up, mundane pleasure, cheap poetry, card-play, coffee drinking, balls and masquerades.
• Pope uses dignified style of epic to exaggerate those trivialities; hence satirizes the aristocracy of the 18th c. He shuns  the silly matters of the society, where lords and ladies quarrel about some nasty things. He directs his satiric weapon against self-love and self-interest of the Augustan society.

Subjects of Satire

• It is clear that, the Lord and Baron represent male aristocrats and the Belle represents female aristocrats and the Hampton Court is for the meeting place of the 18th c. aristocratic society. Thus, the satire is confined to a certain section of the English society. A wider satire field is introduced with the ridicule of judges and jury who care more for their belly than for judging. So, the poem satirizes not the whole contemporary society of the 18th century.

Feminine Frivolity

• Belinda wakes up at noon, dreams of a Beau-lover, keeps lap-dogs, desires to be sought after, wastes time beautifying herself, loves to ride gilded chariots and to dress lavishly for the parties. Ladies of the age, learn early in their life how to roll their eyes and to blush in an intriguing manner. Their hearts are like 'toy-shops'.
• The poets satirical vision does not spare Queen Anne, who "Does sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea" at the Hampton court. It shows that even for the Queen the counseling and drinking tea is the same trivial matter. With Belinda, the follies and frivolities of the whole sex are satirized.

Satire of Contemporary Fashion-culture

• Belinda wakes up late and her eyes first open on Billet-doux. The poet laughs at the conventional vocabulary of those letters. He ridicules excessive attention to self-decoration and -appearance.
• Belinda is described as commencing her toilette operations with a prayers to the cosmetic powers. At her dressing table is "the various offerings of the world"- Indian diamonds, Arabian perfumes, and African white comb of Ivory. Bible is a dressing table element like pins, puffs, powders and Billet-doux. Her honor is less valuable than 'her new brocade'; her necklace is more precious than her heart. She may forget a prayer, but not a masquerade. Such witty and humorous comparison and details show that, Pope censures the fashionable ladies of the century.

work Citation

Csécsi, Petra. “The Rape of the Lock-Analysis.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/38450422/The_Rape_of_the_Lock-analysis.

Gothic and Ungothic Novels

Rappacini's Daughter" (1844)

• In Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic story "Rappacini's Daughter" (1844), a brilliant scientist "instruct[s his daughter] deeply in his science, [so] that, as young and beautiful as fame reports her, she is already qualified to fill a professor's chair" as her would-be lover Giovanni learns. But the father has done more: in a diabolical experiment he has had his daughter tend poisonous flowers through which she, Beatrice, becomes literally lethal: her kiss, her very breath kills. Though he has also arranged to give her a lover by infecting Giovanni with the poison, Beatrice, knowing that the antidote will be fatal to her, both sacrifices herself for her unworthy lover and rejects her father's gifts by killing herself.

• The parallel between Hawthorne's gothic story and Dickens' most ungothic novel of hard facts is close. Louisa Gradgrind, like Beatrice, is the victim of a terrible fatherly experiment that the fathers justify in the same way: they intend to make their daughters more powerful. The experiments, however, are fatal both to the women and to others. Louisa's equally insufficient lover Harthouse is humiliated by his contact with her and disappears into Egypt, and though the sudden and untimely deaths of her husband and her brother are not her doing directly, they are at least metaphorically the result of their relationship with her. And in the most resonant connection, the innocent and idealized working-class hero, Stephen Blackpool, dies painfully as a result of two brief encounters with her. In a further parallel, Louisa's failure to remarry after Bounderby's death is a kind of death; like Beatrice's suicidal rejection of her father's gifts, Louisa, though she had accepted the husband her father gave her, lives out her life in the shadow of other people's happiness and fulfillment. 

Divorce laws in Hard Time

• In the midst of his satiric attack on the philosophy of the utilitarians, Dickens found space in Hard Times to take aim at another target: the highly restrictive divorce laws that operated in England at the time.
• The institution of marriage does not emerge from Hard Times with any credit. Three marriages are presented: the Gradgrinds, the Bounderbys, and Stephen Blackpool and his unnamed wife. Not one of these marriages is a good one (and that is not even to mention the allusions to the disastrous marriage of Mrs. Sparsit many years earlier). The worst marriage by far is between Stephen and his drunken wife.

•  The matter of the divorce laws was a highly topical one at the time Dickens was writing Hard Times. There was widespread agreement amongst the educated classes that the divorce laws were badly in need of reform.
•  In 1853, a Royal Commission had been appointed to investigate the matter, and the following year the commission recommended that divorce be made a matter for the civil courts rather than the ecclesiastical courts. A bill incorporating the recommended changes was introduced into the House of Lords in 1854, but it faced powerful opposition and was quickly withdrawn.

•  The Murdered Person"

appeared in October 1856. It was a comment on the trial, a few months earlier, of a working-class man who was convicted and hanged for murdering his wife. Dickens used the case to attack the divorce laws. He pointed out that there was no escape from a bad marriage except in certain very restricted circumstances and then "only on payment of an enormous sum of money."

•  A wealthy couple trapped in a bad marriage could arrange to inhabit separate quarters in a large house and live virtually independent lives (a point that Stephen makes to Bounderby in the novel).    But this was not possible for working-class couples who lived in cramped conditions, often a single room, as Stephen and his wife do.

•  These courts would grant an absolute divorce (as opposed to a judicial separation, without the right to remarry) only in cases in which the marriage was found to be invalid due to age, mental incompetence, sexual impotence, or fraud. The only other way a complete divorce might be obtained was through a private act of Parliament. During the nineteenth century, there were usually about ten such acts passed each year, but they were not for the likes of Stephen Blackpool, because the procedure was extremely expensive. Only the wealthy could afford it.

• Divorce Act

 A civil court with jurisdiction over divorce was established, and the number of reasons for which a divorce might be obtained was increased. There was little comfort for the working classes, however. Although one of the stated aims of the reformers was to remove the perception that there was one law for the rich and another for the poor, the new act made it no easier for people from the lower classes to divorce, since there was only one court, in London, authorized to deal with such matters.

Language and Lying in Importance of being Earnest

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

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

Importance of being Earnest illustration on gay and homosexual

Importance of being Earnest illustration on gay and homosexual from Goswami Mahirpari




Work Citation


1].    Hunter, W. (n.d.). A Wilde Coincidence: Gay Theory and The Importance of Being Earnest. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/31944435/A_Wilde_Coincidence_Gay_Theory_and_The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest

Critique of The Victorian Society by study "The importance of being Earnest

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: A Critique of The Victorian Society

• The plot of the play is overwhelmingly funny: Algernon Mon￾crieff creates a fictitious sick friend named “Bunbury” whose name and condition he uses to leave London when he finds his aunt, Lady Bracknell, too domineering. On the other hand, Algernon’s friend, John (Jack) Worthing, also invents an equally fictitious brother, Ernest, a reprobate who always goes into some scrapes. Jack poses as Ernest to win the hand of Algernon’s cousin, Miss Gwendolen Fairfax. Later, in the country house of Jack, Algernon impersonates the non￾existent Ernest, in order to woo Cecily Cardew, Jack’s ward. Thus the lynchpin of the plot is Bunburyism—an ingenious technique for impersonating false identities.

• The sub-title of the play, “A Trivial Comedy for Serious Peo￾ple”, captures the essence of the play is a nutshell. Here Wilde plays with the words, “trivial” and “serious” which be￾come complimentary to each other in the play. Truly, it is the trivialization of earnestness that Wilde actually celebrates in this play. 

• LANE: I believe it is a very pleasant state, Sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunder￾standing between myself and a young person. (pp.1-2)

• The concept of marriage as an ideal institution is mocked in good humour in the above conversation between Algernon and his manservant Lane. Marriage is conceived as a mis￾understanding between the young couple and the first mar￾riage cannot provide any experience! When Jack arrives, Al￾gernon comments that women never marry the men they flirt with. Like all other issues, marriage too is treated paradoxi￾cally in this play. Algernon’s remark that divorces are made in heaven, directly contradicts the divine saying, “Marriages are made in heaven.” All these comments hint at the moral laxity of the time. 

• Next, the class issue. Victorian period saw the rise of the mid￾dle class which often posed a threat to the aristocrats. The exploitation of the poor in this age of industrialization became a serious concern for the social reformers and some legal ac￾tions were taken to protect the lower class. This lower class often features is the contemporary literary works. Wilde’s dra￾mas are no exceptions. After discussing with Lane the views on marriage, Algernon comments:

• ALGERNON: 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? They seem, as a class, to have
absolutely no sense of moral responsibility. (p.2)

• Without any harsh satire, by using the device of paradox, Wilde pinpoints the irresponsibility and lasciviousness of the upper class.

• Both the young ladies, Gwendolen and Cecily are interested in the name “Ernest” which Wilde uses as a pun on “earnest”. Gwendolen reveals that her “ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest” (p.13). To love a person named Ernest is the “girlish dream” of Cecily too. They are not interested in the quality of earnestness but the name Ernest. This highlights their reliance on superficiality and artificiality. They are guided by “first impressions”. They fall in love, make engagements, break off form that relation and again fall in love with the same person. Their “first impressions” change in no time.

• Wilde also captures the contemporary vogue of sentimental novels in this play. The young ladies of the time were ob￾sessed with the three-volume novels. Miss Prism, the prude lady, was so engrossed in composing such a novel in her younger days that she had forgotten the baby (later Jack) which was in her charge and put the manuscript of the novel in the perambulator and the baby in a large hand bag and left it (the baby) in the cloak-room of a station! Gwendolen and Cecily are also interested in the tear-jerking novels full of excessive emotion. Regarding this, we may quote Algernon’s words: “More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read” (p.5).

Work Citation

1].    Worth, K. (1983). ‘The Importance of Being Earnest.’ Oscar Wilde, 152–182. doi: 10.1007/978-1-349-17157-6_8

Criticism on Important of being Ernest

Criticism Concerning the Title:

The satire starts with the title of the Drama. The title of Oscar Wilde's most successful
play “The Importance of Being Earnest” features a salient pun in the form of the word "earnest", which means "honest" and "truthful" and the name "Ernest" which is the name of the alter ego that main character Jack Worthing uses to slide away from responsibilities and do as he pleases.
The reality is, however, that nobody in the play seems to be very earnest.


Dualism:

In The Importance of Being Earnest, there are two principal male characters, Jack and
Algy, who have invented aliases that enable them to lead a double life. The dualistic
theme is not only displayed in the characters use of double identities but in the language of the play and the play as a whole.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, honor 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).Wilde used the concepts of double identity as well as a dualistic theme in the play, revealed in the language and in the lying, in order to exploit the hypocrisy of the society, i.e. the ruling class, and in doing so he deconstructed Englishness. There is a
deconstruction of gender roles, the church, the family, the education and the legal
system in the play and these are exposed through the characters and their lying.
Wilde depicts a society 16 with manners and morals used as a façade, a society where people try to conceal their secret lives with the use of language itself as a mask.



Wilde’s Main Criticism in the Play Is with the Institution of Marriage:



The Importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde uses satire to ridicule the cultural
norms of marriage love and mind-set which were very rigid during the Victorian Age.
Because it uses satire to ridicule these institutions, it shows the deviance from the social order by making ridiculous the ideas of standards, morals and manners. By trying to correct the flaws of the characters in this play, this piece also serves as a great form of criticism."The play really owes something to the restoration comic tradition."Again, Wilde is satirizing the institution of marriage, as it is not based on love, but on more vain superficial criteria. Although in this case there is exaggeration used to satirize the vanity of the aristocrats, Wilde still brings across the point that both Gwendolen and Cecily may have refused to marry the 'men of their dreams' if their names weren't 'Ernest.'Furthermore, Algernon’s negative views on marriage in the opening scene, where he refers to it as 'demoralizing' seem to suddenly change when he meets Cecily.Gwendolen and Cecily both appear as ladies when they first meet, calling each other sisters, "My first impressions of people are never wrong." Yet when they believe that they're engaged to the same "Ernest”, there is immediate coldness between them. Gwendolen satirically says to Cecily, "I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different." (Wilde, 559) .This is called 'dissembling' as the characters aren't literally wearing masks, but metaphorically they are all pretending to be someone they aren't. There is the division between truth and identity and it shows that sometimes certain laws in society force people to lead double lives.Lady Bracknell is the driving force behind the plot of The Importance of Being Earnest.
She represents women of the Victorian upper class society and believes that those
of high class should be the ones in power. She has very little opinion of those with no
title, or money and views the upper class society as being a 'closed club'. In other words, most people don't deserve to be in it unless they were born into it. She appears
as a guardian of society in that she forcefully dictates who should marry who in the play. In the first scene, Gwendolen is unable to defend herself from wanting to marry Jack when he proposes to her. Lady Bracknell firmly steps in saying, "Pardon me, you are not engaged to anyone. When you do become engaged to someone, I, or your father, will inform you." Lady Bracknell is portrayed as a forceful character who leaves no room for opposition. Even though Gwendolen wants to oppose her, she hasn't the strength to do so. Wilde uses Lady Bracknell to show a typical aristocrat who bends no
rules of the upper class society. One example where he shows how values are inverted and emphasis is placed on more trivial matters is the scene where Lady Bracknell meets with Jack to discuss Gwendolen. In this scene we see that instead of asking Jack
if he loves Gwendolen (which would seem to be the most important question); Lady
Bracknell focuses on the materialistic side of it. She questions Jack about his money,
land, house and the area in which he lives. She makes it clear that it's important for
Jack to have a house in the town because Gwendolen cannot live in a country house. It is also seen here that Lady Bracknell treats the trivial things seriously, even though she's supposed to be an upholder of the values of society. However, little attention is paid to moral values. Instead, Lady Bracknell is displeased with the side of which Jack's town house is located- the unfashionable side. She thinks that
everyone's interest will be similar to hers and subtly tells him, "The unfashionable side. I thought there was something. However that could easily be altered." The entire way in which Lady Bracknell meets with Jack as though she is of a superior being than him. She takes down his answers to her questions in a notepad, as though it's an interview rather than a personal meeting with her daughter's love. The setting of the meeting reflects how Lady Bracknell views marriage. It's more like interviewing someone for the job of being Gwendolen's husband rather than getting to know the man her daughter is
interested in. Upon the shock that Jack was found and he doesn't know who his real
parents are, Lady Bracknell immediately dismisses him, especially when she finds out that he was found in a handbag. The farce continues when she tells Jack,
“I would strongly advise you, Mr. Worthing, to try and acquire some relations as
soon as possible, and make a definite effort to produce at any rate one parent, of
either sex, before the season is quite over.”
This is an extremely impossible request of Lady Bracknell, as it is obvious that Jack has no knowledge about his real parents. Although he knows that he desperately wants to marry Gwendolen, he doesn't hide his amazement upon Lady Bracknell's request, "Well I don't see how I could possibly manage to do that. I can produce the hand-bag at any moment." This simply highlights how trivial the important things are to Lady Bracknell and how important the trivial things are to her. This is a major point Oscar Wilde focuses on, in this comedy of manners, values are totally reversed.Another example of Lady Bracknell's ignorance of the non-aristocrats is seen where she is ready to turn a blind eye to Cecily, when she hears that Algernon is engaged to her.

She immediately judges Cecily based on the fact that Jack is her guardian. However,
her views instantly change when Jack tells her that Cecily has a hundred and thirty
thousand pounds in funds, "A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! Miss.Cardew
seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her." Once again
emphasis is placed on a person's wealth rather than their personality, sincerity, or
compassion for the other. Marriage is viewed as an economic factor, whereby people marry for wealth or to conserve wealth in their families, especially Lady Bracknell who represents the guardian of an upper class society. She is however a hypocrite and uses social morals to her convenience. For example, she refuses to let Jack marry Gwendolen because of his social background, yet she tries to justify a broke Algernon marrying the wealthy Cecily. Her social hypocrisy is highlighted when she also confesses that she was not rich when she married her husband. "Never speak
disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that.
When I married to Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind." She furthermore thinks that her status gives her the right to approve of the marriage between Cecily and Algernon without asking Jack what he thinks. Eventually, both sides come to an
agreement and Jack's name turns out to really be Ernest and he's really Lady
Bracknell's nephew. Wilde gives the typical happy ending where everyone lives happily ever after and the stern mask that Lady Bracknell wears slowly turns into a smile.

Work Citation


1].     Ahmed, M. (n.d.). " Criticism in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest ". Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/34774153/_Criticism_in_Oscar_Wildes_The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest_