Response to The Importance of Being Earnest Author: Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest is very comical play that satirises the conventions and ideals of 18th century society. The characters were all societal cliché's defined by their status and revealed in their relations throughout the play. The comical conventions, which Oscar Wilde uses in the play, are neat epigrams. Either a character's very short statement that pointedly mocks a certain moral or social attitude or a simple paradox that associates …

…her music with vital importance. I also noticed the hypocrisy that is quite evident when she says that Bunbury's shillyshallying is quite absurd yet she finds it hard to organise her table for dinner. And then the irony that really all this about Bunbury is quite irrelevant because he doesn't exist and Algy has again shown 'the vital importance of maintaining at all cost what they (the characters) know to be fictions of everyday life."