Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Puns
In The Importance of Being Earnest, the
pun, widely considered to be the lowest form of verbal wit, is rarely
just a play on words. The pun in the title is a case in point. The
earnest/Ernest joke strikes at the very heart of Victorian notions
of respectability and duty. Gwendolen wants to marry a man called Ernest,
and she doesn’t care whether the man actually possesses the qualities
that comprise earnestness. She is, after all, quick to forgive Jack’s
deception. In embodying a man who is initially neither “earnest”
nor “Ernest,” and who, through forces beyond his control, subsequently becomes both
“earnest” and “Ernest,” Jack is a walking, breathing paradox and
a complex symbol of Victorian hypocrisy.
In Act III, when Lady Bracknell quips that until recently
she had no idea there were any persons “whose origin was a Terminus,”
she too is making an extremely complicated pun. The joke is that
a railway station is as far back as Jack can trace his identity
and therefore a railway station actually is his “origin,” hence
the pun. In Wilde’s day, as in the England of today, the first stop
on a railway line is known as the “origin” and the last stop as
the “terminus.” There’s also a whole series of implicit subsidiary
puns on words like line and connection that
can refer to either ancestry or travel. Wilde is poking fun at Lady
Bracknell’s snobbery. He depicts her as incapable of distinguishing
between a railway line and a family line, social
connections and railway connections, a
person’s ancestral origins and the place where
he chanced to be found. In general, puns add layers of meaning to
the characters’ lines and call into question the true or intended
meaning of what is being said.
Inversion
One of the most common motifs in The Importance
of Being Earnest is the notion of inversion, and inversion
takes many forms. The play contains inversions of thought, situation,
and character, as well as inversions of common notions of morality
or philosophical thought. When Algernon remarks, “Divorces are made
in Heaven,” he inverts the cliché about marriages being “made in
heaven.” Similarly, at the end of the play, when Jack calls it “a
terrible thing” for a man to discover that he’s been telling the
truth all his life, he inverts conventional morality. Most of the
women in the play represent an inversion of accepted Victorian practices
with regard to gender roles. Lady Bracknell usurps the role of the
father in interviewing Jack, since typically this was a father’s
task, and Gwendolen and Cecily take charge of their own romantic
lives, while the men stand by watching in a relatively passive role.
The trick that Wilde plays on Miss Prism at the end of the play
is also a kind of inversion: The trick projects onto the play’s
most fervently moralistic character the image of the “fallen woman”
of melodrama.
Death
Jokes about death appear frequently in The Importance
of Being Earnest. Lady Bracknell comes
onstage talking about death, and in one of the play’s many inversions,
she says her friend Lady Harbury looks twenty years younger since
the death of her husband. With respect to Bunbury, she suggests
that death is an inconvenience for others—she says Bunbury is “shilly-shallying”
over whether “to live or to die.” On being told in Act III that
Bunbury has died suddenly in accordance with his physicians’ predictions,
Lady Bracknell commends Bunbury for acting “under proper medical
advice.” Miss Prism speaks as though death were something from which
one could learn a moral lesson and piously says she hopes Ernest
will profit from having died. Jack and Algernon have several conversations
about how to “kill” Jack’s imaginary brother. Besides giving the
play a layer of dark humor, the death jokes also connect to the idea
of life being a work of art. Most of the characters discuss death as
something over which a person actually has control, as though death
is a final decision one can make about how to shape and color one’s
life.
The Dandy
To the form of Victorian melodrama, Wilde contributed
the figure of the dandy, a character who gave the form a moral texture
it had never before possessed. In Wilde’s works, the dandy is a
witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams
and paradoxes and ridicules the cant and hypocrisy of society’s
moral arbiters. To a very large extent, this figure was a self-portrait,
a stand-in for Wilde himself. The dandy isn’t always a comic figure
in Wilde’s work. In A Woman of No Importance and The
Picture of Dorian Gray, he takes the form of the villains
Lord Illingworth and Lord Henry Wootton, respectively. But in works
such as Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, and The
Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde seems
to be evolving a more positive and clearly defined moral position
on the figure of the dandy. The dandy pretends to be all about surface,
which makes him seem trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. Lord Darlington
and Lord Goring (in Lady Windermere’s Fan and An
Ideal Husband) both present themselves this way. In fact,
the dandy in both plays turns out to be something very close to
the real hero. He proves to be deeply moral and essential to the
happy resolution of the plot.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon
has many characteristics of the dandy, but he remains morally neutral
throughout the play. Many other characters also express dandiacal
sentiments and views. Gwendolen and Lady Bracknell are being dandiacal when
they assert the importance of surfaces, style, or “profile,” and even
Jack echoes the philosophy of the dandy when he comes onstage asserting
that “pleasure” is the only thing that should “bring one anywhere.”
For the most part, these utterances seem to be part of Wilde’s general
lampooning of the superficiality of the upper classes. The point
is that it’s the wrong sort of superficiality because it doesn’t
recognize and applaud its own triviality. In fact, Cecily, with
her impatience with self-improvement and conventional morality and
her curiosity about “wickedness,” is arguably the character who,
after Algernon, most closely resembles the dandy. Her dandiacal
qualities make her a perfect match for him.
