The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays

"The ‘butterfly for butterflies’ fits in with Wilde’s self-image as an intellectual aesthete. But actually, I think that it is an anarchic play. In some ways it conforms to a conventional farce structure. Most farces start with somebody lying, committing a crime, or making a mistake. Then they lie to cover it up. From that lie, more and more complications emerge. At the end of most farces, the original lie or sin is revealed and forgiven. Authority is re-imposed. People go back into their proper place. However, in The Importance of Being Earnest , the lies turn out to be truths. Everybody is allowed to keep lying. In fact, it’s impossible to separate lies and truth in any meaningful way. The characters get to be who they were pretending to be. While Lady Bracknell is an embodiment of society’s authority and etiquette, she wields no power by the end. Yes. Some of it is in the puns, but also in the way that language in that play means whatever you want it to mean. One of my favourite bits is when Algernon is pretending to be Ernest. Jack enters in mourning for his brother Ernest, his alter-ego whom he has decided to kill off. At this point Cecily runs in and says you’ll never guess who has come to visit—your brother Ernest! Jack says, ‘I haven’t got a brother’, to which Cecily replies: ‘Oh don’t say that! However badly he may have behaved to you in the past he is still your brother’. Jack has inadvertently blurted out the truth—that he hasn’t actually got a brother—but that magically turns into something else, and the scheming continues. That happens all the way through: whatever somebody says can be manipulated. Language becomes a means of creation. For example, Cecily writes in her diary that she is engaged to Ernest, at which point she co-opts Algernon to become Ernest and announces that they are engaged. And by the end of the play, that has become true. There is a sense in which words are infinitely adaptable to any occasion. There is an elasticity and playfulness to language. Consider Dr Chasuble’s sermon on the meaning of the manna in the wilderness, which can be preached at funerals, harvest celebrations, christenings, confirmations or indeed any kind of religious festival. “There is a linguistic surface of puns, witticisms, epigrams and paradoxes that is sometimes dismissed by critics as absurd. But underneath, there is a phenomenal analysis of power” But conversely, the play reveals how society controls the individual. When Lady Bracknell interviews Jack, she uses etiquette to exert complete control. The play is full of rules, which range from rules on how to eat a muffin correctly, to rules about old and new money and having to have parents to prove your family lineage. Years ago, my college tutor Christopher Butler talked about the play as a matriarchy, and that was the starting point of my work on Wilde. It is not just Lady Bracknell who is in charge, but also Cecily and Gwendolen. They take the lead in their relationships, and do the proposing. So yes, in this play it is the women who are the ones with the real power and authority. In Wilde’s plays, there is a linguistic surface of puns, witticisms, epigrams and paradoxes that is sometimes dismissed by critics as absurd. But underneath, there is a phenomenal analysis of power—of who has economic power, and of how morality is embedded in power systems that control how people behave and police admission to society. Women are very clearly subject to these forms of power. They don’t have independent economic means: it depends on whom they marry and what kind of power they hold within that marriage. Morality is both a system used against women and a system that certain women know how to use. Indeed, some plays are about women who are clever enough to play the game, and to get around that system. Mrs Erlynne in Lady Windermere’s Fan and Mrs Allonby in A Woman of No Importance are women who very consciously play the system. There’s a wonderful line in A Woman of No Importance about how it is essential to play with fire because it is those who play with fire that never get burnt. Again, there is a point where Mrs Allonby talks about how life is so much better for women than men because there are so many more rules imposed on them, so there are so many more rules they can break. Mrs Allonby is a character who is able to stand above the system and work her way around it. Wilde also depicts the lives of people who have accepted conventional morality, and shows how those lives are in danger of being wrecked. Mrs Arbuthnot in A Woman of No Importance is a fascinating study of a woman whose instincts are very clearly contrary to the morality she believes in. She is tortured by guilt, but that guilt becomes a type of power. As a victimised single mother, the role of the victim or martyr becomes her means of resisting Lord Illingworth, and his desire to take charge of their son."