THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

* CHARACTERISTICS OF GWENDOLEN FAIRFAX.....

                    The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations.

Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian ways.

                      Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour and the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make The Importance of Being Earnest  Wilde's most enduringly popular play.

              Gwendolen Fairfax

                       Algernon’s cousin and Lady Bracknell’s daughter. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest. A model and arbiter of high fashion and society, Gwendolen speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and morality. She is sophisticated, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and utterly pretentious. Gwendolen is fixated on the name Ernest and says she will not marry a man without that name.

                     More than any other female character in the play, Gwendolen suggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood. She has ideas and ideals, attends lectures, and is bent on self-improvement. She is also artificial and pretentious. 

                      Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest, and she is fixated on this name. This preoccupation serves as a metaphor for the preoccupation of the Victorian middle- and upper-middle classes with the appearance of virtue and honor. 

                      Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Ernest, whose name, she says, “inspires absolute confidence,” that she can’t even see that the man calling himself Ernest is fooling her with an extensive deception. In this way, her own image consciousness blurs her judgment.

                      Though more self-consciously intellectual than Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen is cut from very much the same cloth as her mother. She is similarly strong-minded and speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and morality, just as Lady Bracknell does. 

                      She is both a model and an arbiter of elegant fashion and sophistication, and nearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect. As Jack fears, Gwendolen does indeed show signs of becoming her mother “in about a hundred and fifty years,” but she is likeable, as is Lady Bracknell, because her pronouncements are so outrageous.

                         Gwendolen Fairfax is Lady Bracknell's daughter and the object of Jack Worthing's affections. She is a young attractive woman who is eminently marriageable, despite her resemblance to her formidable mother; she will clearly grow more and more like her as the years go by. 

                     She is chafing under the tight control over her life that is exercised by Lady Bracknell, imaged in her minor acts of disobedience to her mother, such as her refusal to leave the room or her reluctance to go to the carriage in Act I,  or her flight to Jack's country house in Act II.

                          The difference between men and women in the play is one of social freedom; the men are able to make alternative lives for themselves, but Gwendolen is closely chaperoned, and is seldom able to escape. Like the two men, Gwendolen leads an idle life, made up of socialising, paying visits and involving herself in minor cultural events. 

                      Also, like Algy, she is very cynical about social life, and a very accomplished performer on the social scene. It is clear that her projected marriage to Jack will see him as a hen-pecked husband, just as we may assume that her unseen father, Lord Bracknell, is ruled by his wife. 

                         Gwendolen dramatises the extent to which this is a world without serious principles, her only ideal being that her husband must bear the name of Ernest. Even romantic love, traditionally a serious motivation, even in comedy, is an insincere performance in this play.

                       This cute little girl (well, not so little she was old enough to fall in love, but her mother perceive her as a little girl saying all the time about things that have and haven’t to be done), is a daughter of tyrant mother Lady Bracknell and Algernon’s cousin. 

                          She is submissive to her mother in public but rebels in private. Also, in the book, she appears as a big love for Jack. She is the hugest object of Jack’s attention and desire. 

                              But as she is in love with someone else (as she thinks), she refuses his love that is why we see her as self-centered and flighty. She leads herself like Cecily; she also wants nothing else but to marry a man named Ernest. 

                          It sounds strange, but after reading the text, you will get it even more clearly. It would be funny if not so sad; she is totally I love with a man called Ernest, who in reality is Jack.  

                           Gwendolen is a model of what is a high fashion in the society of that times. She is demonstrative of some sophistication and confidence which existed in London socialite. That socialite believed that style is the most important thing, not sincerity or intellect.  

                        She leads herself like a very important person (maybe her mother’s influence was too big to understand it). Gwendolen speaks with a tone of authority. But it changes when she sees someone else, so her attitude changes on matters of taste and morality.

                          Though, nothing could be so bad. She is intellectual, cosmopolitan, even kind and utterly pretentious (we find it an advantage rather than disadvantage). Gwendolen is totally fixated on the name Ernest. 

                           After the meeting with him, she keeps saying that she will not marry anyone else, especially if the person has any other name as Ernest. She is totally obsessed with that name.

                          By the way, she changes her mind and agrees to marry Jack even despite her mother’s disapproval of his origin. 

                           Like the two male leads, Gwendolen and Cecily also have a lot in common. There’s the Ernest thing: marrying a man named Ernest seems to be the founding principal of their lives. The two women even say it in unison: "Your Christian names are still an insuperable barrier. That is all!" (III.29).

                         Gwendolen and Cecily both keep a diary, which they believe would pretty much stand up in a court of law as proof of whatever they say. And both are willing to fight tooth and nail to get what they want... though not in front of the servants. 

                           Neither Cecily nor Gwendolen has much of a character arc, because the absurd plot simply unfolds to their advantage. In the end, Cecily does have to make do with an "Algernon." So we guess Gwendolen wins since she alone ends up marrying an "Ernest."