December
2009
The Importance of Being Earnest: How the characters Gwendolyn and Cecily break gender roles?2
The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde, is a parody of Victorian upper-class families. The humoristic and ironical aspects are concerned with the issues of being sincere, earnest, trivial, worthy, stylish, and worried with appearance, worried with the society aims, the values of marriage, education and also with the role each one has to pretend in society. So the books criticize the superficiality of a group of people who stresses the appearance, the social rules, and the conventions. The people who put apart those ideals are considered nothing, no important, and they are criticize and ignored in society. One famous statement which represents those aims in society is: “Never speak disrespectfully of Society, Algernon” (Act III).
These principles and social rules are considered very important to young people, as Gwendolen and Cecily show us in the book. One good example is the name Earnest. Both women were worried in find a husband with that name, because according to Gwendolen this name “inspires absolute confidence” and Gwendolen, for example, try to find John, and said to her mother she wants to get married with him. Cecily, for example, make some comments in a conversation with Algy that his name, in her diary, is Earnest, so she dreamed of and made creations with someone called Earnest, their romance, their break up, and so on. For those reasons, Algy and John, who did not have this name, want to change their names quickly to get married with them. At this point, we can notice how the two women are manipulating them. In Victorian society, for instance, young ladies are governed by the gender rules which involve not only being innocent, pure, sweet, elegant but mainly submissive to the values and decisions imposed by their family. So they somehow transgress the role imposed on Victorian women.
Gwendolen does not want to wait for her mother’s permission to get engaged with her Earnest (Act II). So, she tries to find out him, she met Cecily and talk about their, possible relationship, and Cecily, for example, refuses to wait much time, going against what should be expected from an eighteen-year-old girl, and she says: “I don’t think I would care to catch a sensible man. I shouldn’t know what to talk to him about”.
In this way, it is clear that in this case people from society will expect a different behave because she is well educated, she should want to have a desire of having a sensible man by her side, which is the opposite as it is seen above (Act II). In act III, their to manipulate is clear when they said among them:
Gwendolen: The fact that they did not follow us at once into the house, as anyone else would have done, seems to me to show that they have some sense of shame left.
Cecily: They have been eating muffins. That looks like repentance.
Women at that time would be revolt, but they will not express this, they will suffer, cry, and do what the society expects from them. Throughout these manipulations, they achieve their goal, to get married with a man called Earnest.
Gwendolen tells Jack to propose to her, Cecily announces she is engaged to Ernest/Algernon. They make their own decisions within the rules of society.