The Importance of Being Earnest clearly bears the status of being a comedic throughout the play. There is nothing earnest about this play, at least on the surface. It’s a satire of the Victorian era, when a complicated code of behavior governed everything from communication to sexuality. It was really complicated to comprehend the role of characters in The Importance of Being Earnest, who do they want to be, and how does the identity they choose affect their choice of love? It seems from the character’s description and way of talking that they are young, unattached people looking for the future. They have the ability to define themselves. For example, Jack knows nothing about his past. Algernon cannot remember what his father looked like and says they weren’t on speaking terms. Jack and Algernon are ready to change their names. Only Gwendolen has a strong link to the past, to Lady Bracknell. With perhaps the exception of Gwendolen, these characters could choose to recreate themselves in a unique way.
One thing I noticed in The Importance of Being Earnest was the significance of inversion and how inversion takes many forms. There are several places where we see inversions of thought, situation, and character, as well as inversions of common notions of morality. For instance when Algernon states that, “Divorces are made in Heaven,” it is surely the inversion of 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 conquests 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. I think it would be interesting to see the inversion in modern plays where characters are formed according the modern social norms. Also, the inversion will allow the characters to depict the harsh reality with less burden.
