by Oscar Wilde
Yet Wilde’s expansive prose introductions of him do bespeak in the playwright uncertainty as to the dandy’s exact role in the world in which he appears. He is at once an amused trifler, at a point of vantage, in direct relation to modern life and a maker and master of it. This spectrum of attributes may indeed reflect what Peter Raby has identified as the central critical problem of the Wildean dramaturgy when he writes ‘The difficulty of placing the dandy satisfactorily within the dramatic context remained Wilde’s most intractable aesthetic problem: it is the problem of “finding a world fit for the dandy to live in”.’ In the social comedies we are troubled by the undeniable fact that only the kind of world that the dandy inhabits, with its wealth-dependent elegance, could afford him or her the means (high fashion could not have come cheap in this moneyed world) and the manners which constitute the morally superior, self-conscious and therefore subversive identity dandyism represents. As Wilde’s plays can seem complicit with the audiences for whom they were written even as they seek to subvert their assumptions, so the dandy as moral presence can seem fatally compromised by the world which he or she so knowingly, so self-possessedly, so superbly dominates by apparently invincible conversational style. As Raby points out, the dandy’s mastery of all occasions cannot be sustained in the social comedies. So the plays seem to acknowledge that the social context which the dandy apparently can occupy with impunity in fact threatens his integrity of being.
It is in Wilde’s own master-work The Importance of Being Earnest or at least in some readings of it, some kinds of production, that this problem can perhaps be seen to undergo an ambiguous resolution. For in that work, the self-possession of the dandy in the social comedies becomes the wonderfully controlled, self-possessed artifice of the whole dramatic fabrication. It is a play that seems oddly transparent to itself, the actors playing parts that are manifestly in the control of a plot so patently absurd in its elaborate contrivance as to seem merely the occasion for a display of androgynous and therefore decadent mannerism. We enter a world where sexual roles are farcically reversed so as to drain the work of any credible erotic energy, where Gwendolin and even countrified Cecily display a masculine integrity of selfhood and purpose in the pursuit of matrimony while Jack and Algernon exhibit a vapid lack of secure personal identity and a willingness to be brought into being by circumstance, necessity and the sexual other, customarily reckoned to be the defining characteristics of the feminine gender. And the world in which this androgyne, asexual exchange takes place is one where paradox rules from an unassailable vantage point in the consistently epigrammatic scintillation of its dialogue. It is as if we enter a world of pure style – polished, glittering, glassy – the verbal equivalent of the ultimate, self-referential theatricality of Salome’s dance in her symbolically charged play. It is a world poised on the brink of modernist, Beckettian absurdity as the helter-skelter pace of the plot in performance renders ridiculous both the posed perfection of its various tableaux and the imperviousness of the players who must remain essentially unaffected by the lunacy they enact. For English sang froid it seems can take anything. We might equally be poised on the brink of a theatre of cruelty with Lady Bracknell as monstrous mistress of some Sadean madhouse where deed has been wholly disengaged from affect.
What we make of this unique theatrical creation is a matter for critical debate. A recent critic, Regenia Gagnier in her book Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (1986), reads the play as a consummate moment in a Wildean critique of the Victorian ruling classes. For her the play itself functioned in its primary context as a kind of fetished object, the heartlessness of which (about which Shaw originally complained) constituted an indictment of the world addressed in its cold, dispassionate brilliance. By contrast, for Camille Paglia in her Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) the play is that work in which Wilde sought to put the state of being of the androgyne of manners beyond the power of a philistine world. He does so by a ritual celebration of a hierarchical order in which the epigram of the epicene dandy is the basis of ‘the most dazzling burst of Apollonian poetry in English literature’. Contemplating such critical division one is reminded, to conclude of two things. First, Owen Dudley Edwards has alerted us to the fact that the final apparently banal words of the play employ the word ‘earnest’ as a coterie joke in which that term is close in import to our own ‘gay’. So perhaps we may never be able to pluck out the private mystery of a play that functions on so many levels and which may contain insider allusions lost to time. And secondly, one is reminded that Wilde himself in The Truth of Masks gave good warning to simple-minded critics who would seek to establish a unitary meaning for any work of art. For there he advised: ‘A Truth in art is that whose contradiction is also true.’
NOTE
In preparing this introduction I was particularly indebted to the following:
Owen Dudley Edwards, ed. The Fireworks of Oscar Wilde, (1989).
Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, (1988).
Richard Ellmann, ed. Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays, (1969).
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, (1986).
Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, (1990).
Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the theatre of the 1890s, (1990).
Peter Raby, Oscar Wilde, (1988).
Katherine Worth, Oscar Wilde, (1983).
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST
The persons of the play
JOHN WORTHING, J.P.
ALGERNON MONCRIEFF
REV. CANON CHASUBLE, D.D.
MR. GRIBSBY, Solicitor
MERRIMAN, Butler
LANE, Manservant
MOULTON, Gardener
LADY BRACKNELL
HON. GWENDOLEN FAIRFAX
CECILY CARDEW
MISS PRISM, Governess
ACT ONE
SCENE: Morning-room in Algernon’s flat in Half-Moon Street, London, W. TIME: The present. The room is luxuriously and artistically furnished. The sound of a piano is heard in the adjoining room.
LANE is arranging afternoon tea on the table, and after the music has ceased, ALGERNON enters.
ALGERNON: Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?
LANE: I didn’t think it polite to listen, sir.
ALGERNON: I’m sorry for that, for your sake. I don’t play accurately – any one can play accurately – but I play with wonderful expression. As far as the piano is concerned, sentiment is my forte. I keep science for Life.
LANE: Yes, sir.
ALGERNON: And, speaking of the science of Life, have you got the cucumber sandwiches cut for Lady Bracknell?
LANE: Yes, sir.
ALGERNON: Ahem! Where are they?
LANE: Here, sir. (Shows plate.)
ALGERNON (inspects them, takes two, and sits down on the sofa): Oh!…by the way, Lane, I see from your book that on Thursday night, when Lord Shoreman and Mr. Worthing were dining with me, eight bottles of champagne are entered as having been consumed.
LANE: Yes, sir; eight bottles and a pint.
ALGERNON: Why is it that at a bachelor’s establishment the servants invariably drink the champagne? I ask merely for information.
LANE: I attribute it to the superior quality of the wine, sir. I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand.
ALGERNON: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?
LANE: I believe it is a very pleasant state, sir. I have had very little experience of it myself up to the present. I have only been married once. That was in consequence of a misunderstanding between myself and a young person.
ALGERNON (languidly): I don’t know that I am much interested in your family life, Lane.
LANE: No, sir; it is not a very interesting subject. I never think of it myself.
ALGERNON: Very natural, I am sure. That will do, Lane, thank you.
/> LANE: Thank you, sir (LANE moves to go out.)
ALGERNON: Ah!…just give me another cucumber sandwich.
LANE: Yes, sir. (Returns and hands plate.)
LANE goes out.
ALGERNON: Lane’s views on marriage seem somewhat lax. Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.
Enter LANE.
LANE: Mr. Ernest Worthing.
Enter JACK. LANE goes out.
ALGERNON: How are you, my dear Ernest? What brings you up to town?
JACK: Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere? Eating as usual, I see, Algy!
ALGERNON (stiffly): I believe it is customary in good society to take some slight refreshment at five o’clock. Where have you been since last Thursday?
JACK (sitting down on the sofa): Oh! in the country.
ALGERNON: What on earth do you do there?
JACK (pulling off his gloves): When one is in town one amuses oneself. When one is in the country one amuses other people. It is excessively boring.
ALGERNON: And who are the people you amuse?
JACK: (airily): Oh, neighbours, neighbours.
ALGERNON: Got nice neighbours in your part of Shropshire?
JACK: Perfectly horrid! Never speak to one of them.
ALGERNON: How immensely you must amuse them! (Goes over and takes a sandwich.) By the way, Shropshire is your county, is it not?
JACK: Eh? Shropshire? Yes, of course. Hallo! Why all these cups? Why cucumber sandwiches? Why such reckless extravagance in one so young? Who is coming to tea?
ALGERNON: Oh! merely Aunt Augusta and Gwendolen.
JACK: How perfectly delightful!
ALGERNON: Yes, that is all very well; but I am afraid Aunt Augusta won’t quite approve of your being here.
JACK: May 1 ask why?
ALGERNON: My dear fellow, the way you flirt with Gwendolen is perfectly disgraceful. It is almost as bad as the way Gwendolen flirts with you.
JACK: I am in love with Gwendolen. I have come up to town expressly to propose to her.
ALGERNON: I thought you had come up for pleasure?…I call that business.
JACK: How utterly unromantic you are!
ALGERNON: I really don’t see anything romantic in proposing. It is very romantic to be in love. But there is nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one may be accepted. One usually is, I believe. Then the excitement is all over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty. If ever I get married, I’ll certainly try to forget the fact.
JACK: I have no doubt about that, dear Algy. The Divorce Court was specially invented for people whose memories are so curiously constituted.
ALGERNON: Oh! there is no use speculating on that subject. Divorces are made in heaven – (JACK puts out his hand to take a sandwich. ALGERNON at once interferes.) Please don’t touch the cucumber sandwiches. They are ordered specially for Aunt Augusta. (Takes one and eats it.)
JACK: Well, you have been eating them all the time.
ALGERNON: That is quite a different matter. She is my aunt. (Takes plate from below.) Have some bread and butter. The bread and butter is for Gwendolen. Gwendolen is devoted to bread and butter.
JACK: (advancing to table and helping himself): And very good bread and butter it is too.
ALGERNON: Well, my dear fellow, you need not eat as if you were going to eat it all. You behave as if you were married to her already. You are not married to her already, and I don’t think you ever will be.
JACK: Why on earth do you say that?
ALGERNON: Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right.
JACK: Oh, that is nonsense!
ALGERNON: It isn’t. It is a great truth. It accounts for the extraordinary number of bachelors that one sees all over the place. In the second place, I don’t give my consent.
JACK: Your consent! What utter nonsense you talk!
ALGERNON: My dear fellow, Gwendolen is my first cousin. And before I allow you to marry her, you will have to clear up the whole question of Cecily.
JACK: Cecily! What on earth do you mean? (ALGERNON goes to the bell and rings it. Then returns to tea-table and eats another sandwich.) What do you mean, Algy, by Cecily! I don’t know any one of the name of Cecily…as far as I remember.
Enter LANE.
ALGERNON: Bring me that cigarette case Mr. Worthing left in the smoking-room the last time he dined here.
LANE: Yes, sir.
LANE goes out.
JACK: Do you mean to say you have had my cigarette case all this time? I wish to goodness you had let me know. I have been writing frantic letters to Scotland Yard about it. I was very nearly offering a large reward.
ALGERNON: Well, I wish you would offer one. I happen to be more than usually hard up.
JACK: There is no good offering a large reward now that the thing is found.
Enter LANE with the cigarette case on a salver. ALGERNON takes it at once. LANE goes out.
ALGERNON: I think that is rather mean of you, Ernest, I must say. (Opens case and examines it.) However, it makes no matter, for, now that I look at the inscription inside, I find that the thing isn’t yours after all.
JACK: Of course it’s mine. (Moving to him.) You have seen me with it a hundred times, and you have no right whatsoever to read what is written inside. It is a very ungentlemanly thing to read a private cigarette case.
ALGERNON: Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule about what one should read and what one shouldn’t. One should read everything. More than half of modern culture depends on what one shouldn’t read.
JACK: I am quite aware of the fact, and I don’t propose to discuss modern culture. It isn’t the sort of thing one should talk of in private. I simply want my cigarette case back.
ALGERNON: Yes; but this isn’t your cigarette case. This cigarette case is a present from some one of the name of Cecily, and you said you didn’t know any one of that name.
JACK: Well, if you want to know, Cecily happens to be my aunt.
ALGERNON: Your aunt!
JACK: Yes. Charming old lady she is, too. Lives at Tunbridge Wells. Just give it back to me, Algy.
ALGERNON (retreating to back of sofa): But why does she call herself little Cecily if she is your aunt and lives at Tunbridge Wells? (Reading.) ‘From little Cecily with her fondest love.’
JACK (moving to sofa and kneeling upon it): My dear fellow, what on earth is there in that? Some aunts are tall, some aunts are not tall. That is a matter that surely an aunt may be allowed to decide for herself. You seem to think that every aunt should be exactly like your aunt! That is absurd! For Heaven’s sake give me back my cigarette case. (Follows ALGERNON round the room.)
ALGERNON: Yes. But why does your aunt call you her uncle? ‘From little Cecily, with her fondest love to her dear Uncle Jack.’ There is no objection, I admit, to an aunt being a small aunt, but why an aunt, no matter what her size may be, should call her own nephew her uncle, I can’t quite make out. Besides, your name isn’t Jack at all; it is Ernest.
JACK: It isn’t Ernest; it’s Jack.
ALGERNON: You have always told me it was Ernest. I have introduced you to every one as Ernest. You answer to the name of Ernest. You look as if your name was Ernest. You are the most earnest-looking person I ever saw in my life. It is perfectly absurd your saying that your name isn’t Ernest. It’s on your cards. Here is one of them. (Taking it from case.) ‘Mr. Ernest Worthing, B.4, The Albany, W.’ I’ll keep this as a proof that your name is Ernest if ever you attempt to deny it to me, or to Gwendolen, or to any one else. (Puts the card in his pocket.)
JACK: Well, my name is Ernest in town and Jack in the country, and the cigarette case was given to me in the country.
ALGERNON: Yes, but that does not account for the fact that your small Aunt Cecily, who lives at Tunbridge Wells, calls you her dear Uncle. Come, old
boy, you had much better have the thing out at once.
JACK: My dear Algy, you talk exactly as if you were a dentist. It is very vulgar to talk like a dentist when one isn’t a dentist. It produces a false impression.
ALGERNON: Well, that is exactly what dentists always do. Now, go on! Tell me the whole thing. I may mention that I have always suspected you of being a confirmed and secret Bunburyist; and I am quite sure of it now.
JACK: Bunburyist? What on earth do you mean by a Bunburyist?
ALGERNON: I’ll reveal to you the meaning of that incomparable expression as soon as you are kind enough to inform me why you are Ernest in town and Jack in the country.