Products of the Environment

The trials of Oscar Wilde’s personal life did little to hamper the humor and wit of his writing. True, he composed some darker pieces, but his plays stand the test of time thanks to their comedic value and universal themes. One such play is The Importance of Being Earnest.

The Importance of Being Earnest follows the occurrences in the lives of young people living in Victorian England. Two of the main characters, Cecily Cardew and Gwendolen Fairfax, present a unique theme as relates to Victorian women.

Gwendolen speaks as if she has been highly educated, using high-register words and phrases such as “demonstrative” and “provincial pulpits” (1.1.10). She rarely repeats herself in any extensive manner, and she enjoys witty back-and-forth with other characters. An example of this can be found in Act 1, scene 1, when she and Jack (Earnest) are sitting together and having a conversation. “I adore you,” says Gwendolen, “But you haven’t proposed to me yet. Nothing has been said at all about marriage. The subject has not even been touched on.” “Well…” replies Jack, “May I propose to you now?” Gwendolen replies with what one can likely assume is a smirk: “I think it would be an admirable opportunity” (1.1.11). Gwendolen is also able to change how she acts and speaks depending on who she is speaking to. When she is speaking to her mother, for example, she uses much gentler and less roundabout language than when she speaks to Jack.

Cecily, on the other hand, speaks mainly using short, clipped sentences and sometimes even repeating herself. When we first meet Cecily, she is in a garden with her teacher, complaining about how she “[looks] quite plain after [her] German lesson,” and therefore does not want to study it (2.1.19). In her interactions with others, she asks many questions, rather than having well-balanced and back-and-forth conversations. Cecily is much more childlike in her speech than is Gwendolen, which could be attributed to the fact that she is indeed much younger.

Gwendolen and Cecily do have some similarities, however. Both of them fall in love with a man simply because his name is “Ernest.” Gwendolen, when talking to Jack (whom she believes is named Ernest) says of the name, “It suits you perfectly. It is a divine name. It has a music of its own. It produces vibrations” (1.1.11). Rather than calling him divine, musical, or capable of producing vibrations, Gwendolen is applying more value to the name than to the man she believes is in possessions of it.

Cecily is guilty of the same shallowness. Upon deciding with Algernon, a friend of Jack’s, that he and she are to be married because they have suddenly and miraculously fallen passionately in love, Cecily confesses to Algernon (whom she thinks is named Ernest) that “it [had] always been a girlish dream of [hers] to love someone whose name was Ernest. There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence. [She pities] any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest” (2.1.31). One could suppose that judging someone based on their name is a bit better than judging someone based on their looks but looks tend to give away at least some aspect of character. For example, if a man or woman is unkempt and slovenly, it is likely that they do not value personal hygiene and therefore live in a mess. Names, however, are something that a person has no control over without going through extensive paperwork. To judge someone based on their name is to judge them based on a factor out of their control.

Gwendolen and Cecily both put value on themselves according to the men they spend time around. While this may seem a bit extreme to more modern readers, in Victorian times is was fairly normal - as also exemplified in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. Under Victorian law and custom, women had no status or identity aside from that of their husbands (Stetz 521). Perhaps they felt that a man named Ernest had to be earnest is character, and that by marrying him they too would become “earnest.” The difference between the two women is that Gwendolen tends to understand the ways of the world and Cecily is naïve. Upon meeting Algernon, whom she thinks is Jack’s brother named Ernest, she says “Uncle Jack […] has gone up to buy your new outfit […] he said at dinner on Wednesday night, that you would have to choose between this world, the next world, and Australia” (2.1.22). Cecily is under the impression that Algernon (Ernest) is being sent to Australia on a sort of business trip, or perhaps even a vacation. What she does not understand is that at the time period this play takes place, Australia was a penal colony where the Victorians sent the convicts they no longer wanted to deal with.

The fact that Gwendolen does understand the ways of the world could have been seen as dangerous to some Victorians, as being “worldly” was often equated with being a “loose woman.” The nineteenth century had a fear of sex, especially when women were involved (Landale 14). Sex equaled power, as sex led to babies, and allowing women to have power in a society dominated by the patriarchy was a fairly new and frightening concept.

While one might expect two women to ally themselves with one another when men dominated the world around them, Gwendolen and Cecily initially do not get along as well as might be beneficial to them. When speaking for the first time, they discover that each of them is supposedly engaged to a man (whom they assume is the same man) names Ernest. The discovery does not go over well for either of them:

Gwendolen: If the poor fellow has been entrapped into any foolish promise I shall consider it my duty to rescue him at once, and with a firm hand.

Cecily: Whatever unfortunate entanglement my dear boy may have got into, I will never reproach him with it after we are married.

Gwendolen: Do you allude to me, Miss Cardew, as an entanglement? You are presumptuous. On an occasion of this kind it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one’s mind. It becomes a pleasure.

Cecily: Do you suggest, Miss Fairfax, that I trapped Ernest into an engagement? How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade, I call it a spade.

Gwendolen: I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

(2.1.34). Rather than suspecting that their fiancées may have duped both of them, they immediately ally themselves with the men, despite the men being the ones that have carried out a deception. This tendency of Victorian women to ally themselves with their male counterparts shows how the patriarchy of Victorian society had a stronghold on the survival and social instinct of all of the citizens of the time period.

Eventually Cecily and Gwendolen do become friends, however. Algernon enters the garden once more, this time to kiss Cecily on the cheek. She asks him whether or not he is engaged to be married to Gwendolen, to which he replies, “Of course not! What could have put such an idea into your pretty little head?” Gwendolen clarifies this by saying, “The gentleman who is now embracing you is my cousin, Mr. Algernon Moncrieff” (2.1.36). This particular instance is what clears up the confusion of which fiancée is engaged to which woman, and the two women dissolve their short-lived rivalry. They even go so far as to embrace, declaring one another “poor” and “sweet, wronged” (2.1.36) when not an hour earlier they had been nearly ready to fight for the man they thought was rightfully theirs.

In /Victorian times, women had little to rely on besides one another (Stetz 534). While the suffragist movement was taking shape and women were beginning to take a stand on issues they felt were important, the fact still remained that men were the dominant force of society. Men and women were viewed not as equals, but as two opposite and mutually necessary social participants. Although women and men may have some fundamental differences, what affects men one way may very well affect women in the same way (Rothblatt 175).

This fact in particular brings to mind the question, But what about men being big and hairy and ugly and women being small, pretty, and dainty? While it may be true that some men are big, full of hair, and really not all that attractive, the same can be said of women. Men can also be small and dainty, just as women can be. Wilde’s work is significant in that his version of aestheticism “had involved a political dimension. It had embraced not only an abstract celebration of female appearance or an interest in women as decorative ornaments but also a wholehearted concern with the conditions and details of modern women’s lives” (Stetz 524).

Those conditions and details may include the level of education a woman had or did not have. While now in America and other developed countries a woman’s educational opportunities are just as plentiful as those available to men, the same cannot be said for all countries and time periods. Nancy S. Landale and Avery M. Guest point out in their article “Ideology and Sexuality among Victorian Women” that the less traditional social and family values are often promoted by those who live in urban areas and have high levels of education (Landale 155). This statistic implies that the more worldly experience someone has the more liberal their views may be. While this is not necessarily always true, there is some truth to it.

If someone is born and raised in a small town, grows up in that small town, gets married, has kids, maybe goes to a small college not far from where they grew up, they are less likely than someone from a bigger city or someone who branched out from home to know how to act around, say, minorities or those with alternative lifestyles. The more sheltered someone is, the less likely they are to be accepting of those who are different from them. It is not the fault of the person who has been sheltered; it is no one’s fault. What Landale and Guest were getting at in the passage mentioned above was that Victorian women who were well-traveled, educated, and had done something after childhood other than getting married and having children of their own tended to have views that the majority of people may not have agreed with.

The women’s suffrage movement is a good example of this concept. Not every woman was on board with what the suffragists were trying to accomplish. Some even opposed it, saying that these were “wild women” and that they were threatening the family dynamic by trying to usurp the power that men rightly held over them. A woman’s place is in the home, declared many proponents of traditionalism. Not only was this sexist towards women, it was sexist towards men. It was not with public opinion for men to be providers of childcare and the comforts of home while women were out earning money. Even if it had been acceptable to put this sort of system into place, the opportunities for women to earn a livable income were severely limited.

Due to the limitedness of opportunity, it is no wonder women turned to finding a suitable husband to provide them with a comfortable life. One cannot help but feel that if one was given the choice between marrying into comfort or working for poverty, a vast majority of people would choose to marry into comfort.

It is precisely for this reason we cannot find too much fault in Gwendolen or Cecily for trying very hard to secure a husband. If a woman was not married by a certain age, she was in danger of being considered a spinster. That age varied, of course, but it was typically much younger than what modern Western society considers old enough to have secured a husband.

The two women began as neutral towards one another, became rivals for a short while, and eventually allied themselves with one another. This could have been because they realized the error of their ways, but what likely happened was that they realized that the men in their lives (and the men who would be in their lives in the future) were not people they could trust or rely on. They realize that fighting over a man is silly, as men come and go but friends are loyal no matter what hardships life might throw at them.

Even so, these two women are right to have their guards up when they first meet. Blind trust is almost as bad as, if not worse than no trust at all. People have a tendency to look out for themselves, especially in Victorian England, when the main goal of almost everyone was to get a leg up on the social ladder.

Gwendolen and Cecily might, to modern readers of the text and viewers of the play, seem antifeminist, caring nearly exclusively about finding a husband, and in this case that husband is a particular man. However, one must consider that this practice was the norm in Victorian society, as without a husband it was much harder for a woman, especially one of high class, to survive. Gwendolen and Cecily were not allowing themselves to be seen as concerned primarily with matrimony; rather, they were showing what mentality women in Victorian England were forced to adopt in order to lead comfortable lives.

Works Cited

Landale, Nancy S., and Avery M. Guest. "Ideology and Sexuality Among Victorian Women." Social Science History 10.2 (1986): 147-70. JSTOR.

Rothblatt, Sheldon. "A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women by Martha Vicinus." Rev. of A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women. The Journal of Interdisciplinary History Summer 1979: 173-75. JSTOR.

Stetz, Margaret Diane. "The Bi-Social Oscar Wilde and "Modern" Women." Nineteenth Century Literature 55.4 (2001): 515-37. JSTOR.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Ernest. Ed. David Price. N.p.: Menthuen &, 1915.