Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest demonstrates the overemphasis society places on women being in love through exaggerating “girlish” silliness to an extreme.
The play’s two young women, Gwendolyn and Cecily, are depicted as very emotionally fickle. Algy and Jack joke that soon after the two meet they will already be calling each other sisters (though not without calling each other a few names first). Of course, their prediction comes true. The girls become incredibly passive aggressive towards one another when they believe they are both marrying “Ernest,” but consider one another sisters minutes later when Algy and Jack admit their lies. This behavior implies that women fluctuate from emotional extremes, these emotions often revolving around the behavior and attention of men. Further, their quickly changing emotions suggest that their emotions are surface-level and shallow (despite them taking them very seriously). As Gwendolyn says, “I never change, except in my affections” (306).
Their obsession with the name Ernest further contributes to this idea that their feelings of “love” are actual love (though they take these feelings very seriously). Both like their male suitors based on something as simple as their name, even saying that they would not love their husbands if their names weren’t Ernest. Ironically, both girls seem to love the name Ernest so much because it holds connotations of earnest and honestness, which Jack and Algy are the opposite of (nevertheless, they happily marry Jack and Algy). Their belief that a person’s character is defined by their name and the changeability of their opinions highlight their lack of emotional intelligence. Cecily even creates a whole love story between her and an “Ernest” she has never met, going so far as to write letters from him to her, and feeling she has been engaged and in love with him before even meeting him. Hilariously, Jack says “Cecily is not a silly romantic girl, I am glad to say,” ridiculously normalizing this behavior, and Algy doesn’t even bat an eye when being told by Cecily that she has mentally been in a relationship with him for months (269).
Their emotionally changeable if not delusional behavior (that is treated with total normalcy), suggests that Victorian societal ideals of love, and the expectation for women to be in love, were placed so overwhelmingly on women that often times their understandings of love became entirely superficial rather than genuine. Similar patterns of falling in love with an idea of love rather than actually being in love continue to today with the overwhelming amount of love/relationship content presented on social media.
WomanInTheWallpaper, your post is very interesting! I love how you point out Cecily and Gwendolyn’s extreme behaviors. You suggest that their silliness demonstrates their inability to recognize real love because of the Victorian ideals surrounding love. I wonder if perhaps Wilde is drawing attention to the women’s silliness in order to also suggest that perhaps everything that they are doing is simply a performance. They perform for the men in their lives so they can attract a husband. Maybe Wilde also offers up a critique of this sort of performance through the satirical and silly way he presents Cecily and Gwendolyn.
Your post brings to mind many interesting thoughts about Victorian society. I wonder if the play’s depiction of women’s “superficial” and “silly” understanding of love has to do with their lack of autonomy over their love lives. For example, in Laura Fairlie is infantalized by those around her and not permitted to choose her first husband. Instead, her understanding of and feelings about love are blatantly ignored. Because many Victorian women were forced into marriages they did not choose, they were expected to put on a performance of genuine affection towards their husbands. their feelings and emotions were not taken into account in these cases, because it was more important to make an advantageous match.
This challenge of the heteronormative timeline that The Importance of Being Earnest is one that is a lot more shocking than it seems. Any challenge to the idea of the order of things or any assertion of the fact that human love is complicated and not always everlasting is incredibly subversive in a world that pushes the idea that one must be married by twenty and stay that way for the rest of their lives. It’s a challenge to the world from a gay author who was never going to lead that normal life.
Dear womaninthewallpaper,
Yes! Someone else is calling them out. Gwendolyn and Cecily are most certainly just girls, and very much just Victorian girls at that. I agree on your point about how “both girls seem to love the name Ernest so much because it holds connotations of earnest and honestness”. I would like to bring the Male Conduct manuals into this interpretation. Men during this time period were expected to act courteous and with honesty which I see connecting with the connotations of the name Ernest. So I believe the girls were in love for not only the name but also with society’s expectations of men. To clarify, even though there Algy and Jack were anything but earnest and honest, they got luck that Jack was really Earnest all along so I feel like for the women, that truth excused everything dishonest the men did.
Sincerely,
Alucard