The Importance of Being Earnest is a play with many tributes. One of these tributes are “That we should treat all the trivial things of life very seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.” In my opinion, this means that you shouldn’t take life as a joke. You should keep your life in a balance and know that there’s a time and place for everything. In the play (play,) Wilde considers marriage to be a serious issue. He feels that one should be faithful. He also feels that infidelity is wrong and trivial. In the play (play,) he also mentioned how having a double life and lying are trivials. Also, he feels that divorce is a serious issue because he feels that when a person gets married it should be because they are in love and not because they want to fit into their (whose?) social group.
Aestheticism is the approach to art exemplified by, but not stricted to the aesthetic movement. The aesthetic movement believed in art for art’s sake. In other words, art didn’t have to deal with specific social issues or have any type of value to society, instead, beauty and pleasure were the important values. Wilde was a leader of the aesthetic movement. He believed life should imitate art, rather than art imitate life. Wilde’s aesthetic beliefs affect act 1 because the characters were not being real. They had controversial opinions about everything. Some of the characters lived double lives, while others demoralized the meaning of marriage. A theme of this play is marriage. The reason for this is that in the play the two men talk about marriage and there opinions on it.
Finally, the theme relates a lot to the philosophy of treating serious things in a trivial way and trivial things in a serious way because the characters had their own opinions about different subjects. For example, while one character demoralizes marriage, the other character takes it very seriously. Also, Lady Bracknell expectations of her daughter’s future husband are pretty high. She didn’t even take in consideration what her daughter wanted. In my opinion, I don’t think I would be able to survive in that era. It would be hard for me to marry a person that my parents pick for me.
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References
- Shmoop – Themes in The Importance of Being Earnest
- Encyclopedia Britannica – The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: Themes and Analysis
- The Victorian Web – Aestheticism and Social Anxiety in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and “Hedda Gabler”
- Penguin – Oscar Wilde on Art and Life
