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.