Oscar Wilde and the English Epicene

Camille E. Paglia’s critique on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is in depth and explores many unarticulated aspects of the main characters in the play. The 19th century play focuses on materialism and social acceptance. Elegance, glamour, smoothness, and elongation are many of the words Paglia uses to describe the characters in the play. She focuses especially on the sense that the men in the play take on a particularly feminine role and the women are definitely more masculine. “…the male feminine in his careless, lounging passivity, the female masculine in her brilliant, aggressive wit…” (116) This main focus of Wilde’s play shows a hermaphroditic idea of sleekness and polish in male characters and emotional sterility and coldness in the female characters. All of the characters (Algernon, Jack, Cecily, Gwendolen, and Lady Bracknell) focus only on the societal caste and turn the “internal world into the external.” (119)There is no real emotion in the play and all of the characters’ motives focus solely on what is expected of them or what is right in the caste system of the Victorian era.
Paglia returns again and again to the idea that Gwendolen and Cecily are not particularly feminine and are “creatures of indeterminate sex who take up the mast of femininity” (120), which after thinking about I do agree with. They are both virtually void of emotion which is especially shown in the scene where they argue about who is to marry Earnest. Both are outwardly polite because they care only on the public’s perception of them and neither gets particularly distraught with the other. “Each rhetorical movement is answered by a symmetrical countermovement of balletic grandeur.” (134) Neither characters even have actual feelings for the alleged same man that they are quarrelling over but they would never want to upset the social caste system or draw negative attention to themselves by not marrying into the right kind of family.
Paglia points out that Gwendolen’s diary “enables her to keep herself in a state of externalization” (125) which I find particularly ironic since one would assume that a diary is extremely personal and a place where one documents all their internal thoughts and feelings so it would be thought that a diary would be a form of internalization. The whole idea of the men and women in Wilde’s play is to externalize everything and that they seem transparent so that society can see through them. Their whole existence is to serve the purpose of pleasing society in a robot-like fashion. Paglia insinuates that Wilde didn’t merely write The Importance of Being Earnest for fun or following the guidelines of the Aesthetic Movement but that he had an underlying meaning of everything portrayed and that much of what he wrote about later surfaced in his own life and served as inspiration for him as an individual.

Thesis Statement

While many, if not all, of the characters' pasts affect their outlook on the war, Jimmy Cross' past experiences and love for Martha affect his capabilities as a leader in the war and eventually lead to his lapse in concentration and loss of a soldier which alters his perspective on the present war and on his future life.

Nostalgia pg. 192-193

I didn’t cry. In an odd way though, there were times when I missed the friends, even the family, of my real home out in the suburbs. It’s a hard emotion to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of cars and skyscrapers has a way of making you fully terrified. It makes things vivid. When you’re in the city, really in the city, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to everything. You ride the subway. You become part of the subway and you share the same space – you breath air together, you get off together. On the other hand, I’d already moved to the city; but I was nostalgic; I missed the suburbs with the same passion that Martin Luther King had once believed in peace, or the way Ghandi believed in the power of morals. I figured my life in the suburbs was over. If it hadn’t been for the constant ache in my heart, I’m sure things in the city would’ve worked out fine.

But it was loud.

At night I had to sleep with my ears plugged. That doesn’t sound so terrible until you consider that I’d slept in quiet all my life. I’d lie there with the traffic and sirens, then after a while I’d hear the rolling of a subway come on. I’d squirm around, covering my ears, half nuts with sleep deprivation, and pretty soon I’d start remembering how peaceful the suburbs had been at night. Quiet, I’d think – how could I get a little quiet? I’d remember how nice it was to hear the crickets, and how the bullfrogs were so natural and rhythmic, and the way the trees kept swaying with the breezy summery wind.

The nights were miserable. Sometimes I’d roam around my flat. I’d head down to the kitchen and stare out at the 7/11, out across the street, and think of how nice the country made me feel. I wanted to just sleep!