Lady Bracknell In The Importance Of Being Earnest

People often try to justify their actions, it’s in their nature to provide a reason whether they are right or wrong, but sometimes their actions can cause them to become the victim. Shirley Jackson helps to convey this idea in her short story “The Possibility of Evil.” At the beginning of the short story readers are introduced to Miss Strangeworth, a highly respected elder in the town. As readers progress through the story they learn that Miss Strangeworth is trying to cleanse her town of the evil nature embedded within the townspeople by mailing hateful letters to each and every one of them, but her actions later end up causing her to become a victim of her decisions. Throughout the story Shirley Jackson suggests that revenge, self-righteousness

Elizabeth is the most critical of how marriages are carried out compared to all other family members and acquaintances; as a result of this, she contains prejudice towards others such as Darcy, which causes her to explode with fury when marriages have been unethically conducted. Elizabeth believes in the importance of having a deep and meaningful connection with the person whom you marry and that the wealth and power one has is too influential of a factor when considering marriage. Therefore, the most important quote in chapters 27 and 28 is “I am sick of them all. Thank Heaven! I am going tomorrow where I shall find a man who has not one agreeable quality, who has neither manner nor sense to recommend him. Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing, after all” (Austen, 105) because it conveys how Elizabeth’s anger towards this issue has built up over time while conveying how terribly senseless and materialistic she believes many of the men who surround her are.

Art, artifice and identity is the theme explored through the use of the two chosen stimulus texts Grayson Perry: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl and The Importance of Being Earnest, written by Wendy Jones and Oscar Wilde respectively. Art and artifice merge as Grayson Perry uses his alter-ego, Claire, to express his creativity and identity. Similarly, the artifice of an alter-ego is part of The Importance of Being Earnest, as the play's protagonists, Jack and Algernon, deceive family and friends by lying about their identity to suit them best.

He shows that people want to impress others so they lie regarding who they are, causing them to lose individuality. Since they couldn’t make their own decisions, they had to lie to exceed others expectations. Jack had to change his whole identity to fit in with two different types of society, “Jack in country and Ernest in the city” (33). Since the expectations in the city were so particular, people felt the need to change their whole identity to fit in with everyone. Jack didn’t have to change himself but he made the decision because no one who have liked him if they knew who he really was. Not only do individuals change to meet the higher class standards, but they also change to meet the needs of the average class. “You are my little cousin Cecily, I’m sure” (60). Algernon wanted to marry Cecily and the only way of doing that, he thought, was by making a second identity. The last example how Wilde used exaggeration to show individuals couldn’t make decisions without the impact of society is when Lady Bracknell constantly lied regarding Jack being apart her family. Jack has never known who his mother or father was. In act III, Lady Bracknell admitted to knowing Jack is Algernon's cousin:”Yes, I remember now that the general was called Ernest. I knew I had some particular reason for disliking the name” (108). Lady Bracknell had a sense

Lady Bracknell also refers to another characteristic of Victorian marriages, which was their establishment as a predestined business transaction. In Victorian society, arranged marriages were more often a rule than an exception, and children had little to no say about these matters. During the play, Gwendolen experiences this when Lady Bracknell denies her engagement to Jack, saying that “you are not engaged to anyone. When you become engaged to anyone, I will inform you of the

Wilde’s representation of the British upper class, its values and opinions, is presented most notably through Lady Augusta Bracknell. She is a dignified aristocratic residing fashionable London society circles. On the surface, she is very typical Victorian woman. As a mother to Gwendolen Fairfax, she has a great authority over her controlling her life. She has even a list of ”eligible young man” whom she is ready to interview in order to select a suitable partner for her daughter. In addition to this, the importance of marriage and its delicacy in the Victorian era is expressed through

What was Oscar Wilde most known for? Although he was raised in the upper-class of Victorian England, he often ridiculed the upper-class for their straitlaced customs through his plays using his brilliant wit and flamboyant style. The upper-class wasn’t the only thing criticised by Wilde, but also topics such as love and marriage. One of the most prominent points Wilde mocked the ideals of love was on the stage of his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest. In the three acts of this book, Wilde attempts to change the reader’s views and perceptions of the several different topics he criticises. Oscar Wilde satirizes love throughout the play using irony, diction, and farce.

In author Jane Austen 's 1813 romance novel Pride and Prejudice, social class stereotypes play a very key part when affecting the rolls of the Bennet sisters. Very clear distinctions between people who are grouped into classes are shown throughout the novel by characters of different classes stereotyping against others. This causes problems for many of the main characters who often fails to meet the social standards of others and stereotypes others themselves

Miss Brill is lonely, has a completely messed up mind, and tries to hide her true self by trying to live other people’s lives. Miss Brill views each person at the garden differently. The people who are mostly like her are the ones she judges the most, “Miss Brill had often noticed-there was something funny about nearly all of them. They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they’d just come from dark little rooms or even-even cupboards!” (Mansfield 185). She judges other people to make herself feel more superior and normal and to hide her true character. Later on as Miss Brill observes a young couple, “the hero and heroine, of course, just arrived from his father’s yacht” (p.188), she comes to the realization of who she truthfully is. This wholly destroys Miss Brill, causing her to change her typical plans and go home in grief, “But to-day she passed the baker’s by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room-her room like a cupboard… she unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying” (Mansfield 189). Terry White sums up the story of “Miss Brill” by writing, “Like the insidious illness that seems to be creeping to life inside her, Miss Brill is abruptly forced to confront the reality that her imagination seeks to escape”(White)

Jane Eyre is a novel where a modern view on gender roles get in the discourse of the traditional Victorian social hierarchy and patriarchal

Examine how either text represents either class or gender. Are these representations problematic or contradictory? How do they relate to the plot and structure of the novel?

D.H Lawrence, the author of “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter”, was married to a German wife during World War 1. He described his years living in England as “Miserable… because his wife was of German origin, and oppressed by disgust at what was happening to his country,” (Bausch 453). Lawrence’s wife making him feel oppressed caused him to write about women in a negative connotation. In “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” Lawrence writes about three brothers and a sister that were left in debt after the passing of their father. The daughter, Mabel, was expected to go live with her married sister. Mabel felt like her brothers were trying to control her life and attempted to drown herself in a pond. Her attempt was unsuccessful because the town 's doctor,

While many have been familiar with the title of the play The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, one should also pay attention to its subtitle, ‘trivial comedy for serious people’. The play is a satire that ridicules the upper class to point out its fault (Kreuz and Roberts 100).The aim is to ridicule the ‘serious people’, members of the upper class in Victorian society. The characters were too attentive to social propriety and etiquette, which were as trivial as the comedy suggests in the eyes of Wilde. As they were too stubborn to alter the behaviour, the propriety and etiquette became superficial and meaningless. Their idleness and hypocrisy are other points at which Wilde recurrently mock in the play. This essay illustrates how Wilde reinforce his criticism of the upper class at a satirical tone with his writing style at three levels: inter-scene, intra-scene, and within a word.

The end of the eighteenth - beginning of the nineteenth century England was characterized by the downfall of the revolutionary “Jacobin” movement which advocated for freedom and equality, and symbolizes a return to, as well as an empowerment of the conservative British patriarchal system. This was the context in which Amelia Anderson Opie wrote “her most political novel”(King and Pierce, viii) Adeline Mowbray, a tale which provides a case study about, as Roxane Eberle notes, “progressive ideas that heterosexual relationships can and should exist outside of marriage”(1994: 127). As a result the clash between these innovational type of relationships and the English legal and social norms collide in their representation of models of proper conduct

Comparing the novel Emma and its movie adaptation a striking difference is noticeable. Although most characters are maintained in the adaptation Jane Fairfax is left out. Jane Fairfax is a woman about the age of Emma, who passed most of her life in the company of Colonel Campbell (a friend of her father’s), his wife and his daughter. Colonel Campbell is described as a respectable man who decided to take care of the little girl after the death of her parents. Janes nearest of kin were her grandmother and her aunt, both of them lived a humble life and hardly had a sufficient income. Her aunt Miss Bates was a very popular and always welcomed person, although she was “neither young, handsome, rich nor married” (cf. Emma p.22). She cares for her mother, Jane’s grandmother, the widow of a former vicar of Highbury and together they live in a small and simple home.