Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Drama em Língua Inglesa

Professora: Michela Rosa Di Candia
Aluno: Marcelo Ferreira de Sá Freire

Fact vs. fiction in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest is a fictional play written by the British author Oscar
Wilde in 1894. The play was written during the intellectual movement of the Aestheticism
(being Oscar Wilde one of the leaders of that movement), which opposed the Victorian view of
art that believed that art should have a moralizing positive influence. The Aesthetic movement
proposed that art should be valued for its beauty alone – art for art’s sake. The play’s script
explored different themes that relate to this mantra, and one of them is the relationship between
art and life – Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Wilde approached this relationship
through the conflict that arises when fact collides with fiction. All of this can be seen when the
fictional personas created by Jack and Algernon begin to have a huge influence on the events
that are going to take place in the play. Therefore, in the present paper, I intend to briefly analyze
how these characters blend fact and fiction together by creating the personas of “Earnest” and
“Bunbury”.

Following the plot of the play, we see that Jack creates his fictional brother Earnest so
that he could leave the country, where he was Cecily’s guardian. Under the excuse that he had
to take care of his sick brother, he can escape to town, where he can seduce Gwendolen and
entertain himself with the extravagant city life. Similarly to Jack, Algernon creates his fictional
invalid friend Bunbury so that he can have an excuse to escape from the city when he does not
want to follow the social expectations of that kind of life. Referring to Jack’s double identity,
Algernon mentions: “Besides, now that I know you to be a confirmed Bunburyist I naturally
want to talk to you about Bunburying. I want to tell you the rules” (p.56). The fact that Algernon
coined the terms “Bunburying” and “Bunburyist” after his invented friend to describe such
impersonations reveals the dishonest, as well as the fictive quality of Jack and Algernon’s
actions.
 One scene that is interesting to analyze happens in the second act when Algernon –
pretending to be Earnest – goes for a visit to Jack’s country house, and there, he first meets
Cecily.

ALGERNON (Raising his hat)

You are my little cousin Cecily, I’m sure.
CECILY
You are under some strange mistake. I am not little. In fact, I believe I am
more than usually tall for my age (ALGERNON is rather taken aback). But I
am your cousin Cecily. You, I see from your card, are Uncle Jack’s brother,
my cousin Ernest, my wicked cousin Ernest. (p.86)

Algernon uses the tools of Jack’s deception – he presents his business card; it is the same card
Jack stored in his cigarette case – to assume “Ernest’s” identity. Algernon brings this fictional
persona into reality, showing the fluid borders between fact and fiction. After that, the plot
begins to curl as Jack tells Miss Prism that his brother Earnest was dead and just a few moments
after that Cecily appears telling that Earnest (being impersonated by Algernon) was actually at
their house. Algernon, playing the role of Ernest, demonstrates the collision between fact and
fiction. Jack must confront a real-life Ernest, distorting the truth even more and blurring the
contours of his double identity.

By the conclusion of the play, after all the truth about Jack’s real identity and family is
revealed the line between fact and fiction become even more fluid than before. When they
discover that Jack’s name was actually Earnest, it is mentioned:

GWENDOLEN
Ernest! My own Ernest! I felt from the first that you could have no other name!
JACK
Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life
he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? (p.146)

The verification of Jack’s lies with concrete proof of their legitimacy makes his fictional life a
genuine reality. By pretending to be “Ernest,” Jack’s art of deception has actually become
“earnest,” or a sincere depiction of his real life as it is. His life is his fiction; his fiction is his
life. Ultimately, the play’s main characters engage in the attractive art of fabrication not just to
live their fantasies, but also to try create a reality that is more like fiction. The boundaries
between fact and fiction blurs when the name of the invented persona “Ernest” turns out to be
Jack’s real birth name. In this way, Wilde does not just question whether art imitates life, or life
imitates art, but suggests that life itself is an artifice, quite literally a making of art.