The Importance of Being Earnest

23 Feb 2023
Wilde

- Public personality
- Surrounded by innuendo and scandal (ie. homosexuality)

William Archer’s critical review of Earnest

- “Raises no principle”
o “No clear moral message, ambiguous”
o Suggests that Earnest defies traditional conceptions of Victorian art
o Art was meant to teach lessons and educate the audience
o
- “Creates its own canons and conventions”
- “Willful expression of an irrepressibly witty personality”
o Too much of Wilde in the play, egotistical
o Assumes that it is a failure of a work to reveal the author
o Celebrity grew because of technological developments (ie. photographs)

The Aesthetic Movement (‘Art for art’s sake’)

- Precursor of the Decadent movement

Specific Victorian social protocols presented in a comic light in Earnest

Characters speak in aphorisms, start with a hypothesis and end with conclusion

- Proverbial wisdom turned upside down

- “I never change except in my fashions.” Gwendolyn about losing influence from her mother at 3
y/o
- “I don’t like novels that end happily.” Cecily, turning convention on its head
- Domestic sphere for women, public sphere for men

Draws on the concept of “farce”

George Frederick Keller, ‘The Modern Messiah’, 1882
Suggests that an artist is values for their characters and personality instead of what they produce,
democratic model of aestheticism
Every individual has the potential to become an artist through their self-expression and behavior