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The Importance Of Being Earnest Double Life

684 Words3 Pages

Maria Pascual
English 112: Reading Response #3 “The Importance of Being Earnest” is a comedic play by Oscar Wilde about a man named Jack Worthing and his best friend Algernon. In this play, both characters are leading a double life because they want to escape from the responsibilities and be true to their own impulses. Ernest is the name which Jack goes by in London where he is in love with Gwendolen Fairfax; Algernon cousin and she is love with him because his name is Earnest and she thinks, “it is a divine name.” Jack says in the country that “Ernest” is his brother and he has to go and visit him to make sure that he is doing good because he is troublesome. This way nobody in the country can suspect about his fake identity. Algernon, Jack’s …show more content…

Algernon does not feel surprised about it since he also has a double life. Algernon also discovers that Jack has a beautiful guard named Cecily and she is in love with Jack’s imaginary brother Ernest, and he decided to go and visit her pretending to be named Ernest. In this play both women Gwendolen and Cecily think that Jack and Algernon are the perfect man to live for the rest of their life with, because of their supposedly name “Ernest,” what means someone who is seems to show only uprightness and honesty with “absolute confidence,” what is ironic because the author uses the title of this story to communicate a meaning that is opposite of its real meaning. The name Earnest in this comedic play did not really means the meaning of “Ernest” because the two characters Jack Worthing and Algernon are using the meaning of Ernest in diverse ways; due to the fact that they are lying their identity and their real common name; to make these women fall in love with them and marry them; what makes them being hypocritical, liar and dishonest. In this play, Gwendolen and Cecily are superficial because they refuse to marry a man whose name is not Ernest, which discloses in act I and act II that these two women are not in love with these men, they only are in love and obsessed with the name …show more content…

Both character Jack and Algernon reveals that their life is just full of lies and dishonesty what go against their morality. Gwendolen and Cecily seen marriage as a fantasy led by the triviality of a first name, demonstrating that they are in love with them in act I and ac II because of their name. This play gives the readers to known the real image about the upper-class in Britain during the Victoria Era, revealing that everything is not what it seems and they are ridiculous of what they are supposed to

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