I found the character of miss prism as the most attractive female character among all, because the way she reacting on every situation is commendable as it also generates comedy.Miss Prism is Cecily's governess at Jack's house in the country. As such, her position is that of a social anomaly in that her status is greater than that of an ordinary servant, but less than that of a member of her employer's family. On the .
The governess was generally a middle-class woman whose class status was called into question by the fact that she had to earn her own living instead of being supported financially by either her husband or her father. On the other hand, whilst teaching as a governess in a private home was a low-paid occupation, it was at least respectable.
In this context, however, Miss Prism is a comic figure blissfully unaware of her own comic potential. Like Lady Bracknell, she is past the age when women have traditionally been viewed as sexually attractive: as Lady Bracknell puts it, Miss Prism is
'a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education'
Oscar Wilde has created coincidence for which she is responsible, along with her absurd three-volume novel, constitute Oscar Wilde's attack on the Victorian tradition in fiction and drama, in which literary texts were supposed to be accurate reflections of real life, to encompass complex moral problems, and to be based on a belief in cause and effect in narrative lines rather than coincidence.
☞The play repeatedly mocks victorian tradition and social customns marriage and the pursuit of love in particular through which situations and characters is this happening in the play?
The play repeatedly mocks Victorian traditions and social customs, marriage and the pursuit of love in particular. In victorian times earnestness was considered to be the over-riding societal value, originating in religious attempts to reform the lower classes, it spread to the upper ones too throughout the century.
The play mocks marriage ,
“I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief,”
Algernon says of a recently widowed woman ,satirizes shallowness, and reveals as its happy ending an impending marriage between two first cousins—a subtle dig at the inbred nature of the upper class.
Again there is a description of a double standard of Victorian people. e.g. Jack has invented a complex double identity for himself, he is Jack in the country where he has a house, ward and her responsibilities.
And in the city, he pretends to be Ernest in order to win the love of Gwendolen as she says
“my idea has always been to love someone of the names of Ernest…The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he has a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you.”
Similarly, Algernon pretends as earnest and goes to the village for Cecily whom he is in love with. He had known that Cecily loves Jack’s pretend brother Earnest. So he goes to meet her as the brother of Jack.
☞The play exhibits "a flickering absence-presence of homosexual desire"
Importance of Being Earnestis straight farce, conversely it has never been said that the object of Wilde’s derision is heterosexual representation itself, which is first taken hostage and then subjected to a fierce, irrecuperable, but almost invisible transvaluation. Positioned at the latter end of a great tradition and written (1894–95) during the apex of Wilde’s joint career as heterosexual dramatist and sodomitical poseur, written, that is, on the precipice of what Yeats called “the catastrophe,” Earnest is a self-consciously belated text in which the venerable topoi of comedy—the dispersion of lovers and their ultimate distribution into cross-gender couples, the confusion and then the restoration of identities, the confrontation with and the expulsion of errant desire, the closural wedding under the aegis of the Name of the Father (here, specifically, Ernest John Moncrieff—are repeated, inverted, finely perverted, set finally to spin. In the revolving door of Wildean desire, the counters of comedic representation are disclosed as formal ciphers, the arbitrarily empowered terms whose distribution schedules and enforces heterosexual diegesis.
As Wilde stages it, this narrative entails not just points of departure (a “social indiscretion” in “a cloak-room at a railway station”) and termination (heterosexual conjunction under the paternal signifier), but also the irreducible necessity of preposterous excurses, sidelines of pseudonymous desire, here farcically dubbed “serious Bunburyism.” Bunbury, to be sure, will be “quite exploded” by play’s end, but this “revolutionary outrage,” as Lady Bracknell calls it, will have only ensured his fragmented dissemination throughout the text. In a complete and completely parodic submission to heterosexist teleology, Wilde does indeed formally dismiss his lovers to the presumptive closure of marital bliss, but not until he has insinuated into his play what should, by law and convention, have been exiled as non nominandum: not merely a jubilant celebration of male homosexual desire, not merely a trenchant dissection of the duplicities that constitute the “legitimate” male heterosexual subject, but a withering critique of the political idea, exigent in the 1890s, that anyone’s sexuality, inverted or otherwise, could be natural or unnatural at all.
That Wilde achieves these critical effects without the slightest breach in heterosexual decorum—that Earnest remains for “our” critical tradition a readily consumable straight play—is not the least measure of a genius whose wile it was to broadcast homosexual critique into the gay interspace of a pun. Here the play of occultation and display, slippage and spillage, could be conveniently housed, as is Ernest John, in two oppositional domiciles—or, as in a bedroom farce, two closets—between which a great deal of shuttling would be required. Wilde understood with a criminal clairvoyance that the inscription of the emergent binarism heterosexual/homosexual would ensure that, as in the inversion metaphor, homosexual desire would stand as the secondary, punning other of a dominant signification, thereby alternately boosting and subverting the authority of the norm.
