In The Importance of
Being Earnest, physical movement influences the character development and
relationships of the work. Through their travels between the city and country,
Algernon and Jack have been able to establish and maintain functional “secret identities.”
Using these identities, they form relationships with other characters;
undoubtedly, those relationships would have evolved differently if the other
person had known the other identities.
One of the most prominent examples is Jack’s relationship
with Gwendolen. He goes by Ernest when in the city, which is where Gwendolen
lives. She insists that one of the key elements in her love for him is the fact
that his name is Ernest which, as the audience knows, is not the truth. This
paints her character as shallow, as she puts far too much stock in aspects of a
person that should not be important. Her disposition toward him would have been
entirely different if she’d met him elsewhere and his name was Jack. She even
goes so far as to say that she would not love him if his name were anything but
Ernest, as well as that she believed Jack to be a very bland name. Therefore,
Jack’s constant relocations impact his relationship with the woman he hopes to
marry, even though she has a rather pathetic intelligence that does not
compliment Jack’s apparent type of cleverness. This cleverness, of course,
stems from his ability to keep a strong secret identity which fools everyone
until Algernon interrupts his plans in Act II.
Lady Bracknell is another example of the results of Jack’s
physical movements. After Jack proposes to Gwendolen, Lady Bracknell tells him
that she will not permit the marriage due to his origins, which were allegedly
not of a respectable nature. Physical movement plays a very large role in this
component of the story: if Jack hadn’t been misplaced as an infant, he would
have been perfectly eligible to marry Gwendolen, and the main conflict wouldn’t
have come to fruition, let alone the character development on its own. There
was a series of conflicts in this story, the primary one being Jack’s origins. The
imbecility of Miss Prism was what caused this specific issue; if she hadn’t
left him in the cloakroom, he wouldn’t have been mistakenly adopted by someone
else, and everyone would know who his parents were. This conflict ties directly
into the establishment of the other characters in the story, not only Jack.
Lady Bracknell is rather obsessed with Jack’s origins, displaying her character
as superficial and distracted by societal norms, precisely what Wilde was
mocking in the creation of the story.
Yet another impacted character is Cecily Cardew. It is more
a combination of Algernon’s and Jack’s movements than one of them in particular
that affect her; Jack’s movements cause him to be proclaimed her legal
guardian, and Algernon’s result in a romance forming between himself and the
girl. Her story is similar to Gwendolen’s in that she wouldn’t have met either man
if they hadn’t been toying with fake identities in different areas. One of the
primary occurrences involving her character and Gwendolen’s was their exchange
about their love lives. Both of them claimed to be marrying Ernest, and a bit
of an argument ensued. What they didn’t realize was that Gwendolen was marrying
Jack, who went by the name of Ernest in the city, and Cecily was marrying
Algernon, who had assumed the identity of Ernest as Jack’s wastrel brother. If
it hadn’t been for Jack’s determination to keep up his false identity for such
a long time, the encounter would not have happened nor would it have unfolded
the way it did.
Physical movement assists in forming the meaning of the work
as a whole of The Importance of Being Earnest.
Oscar Wilde wrote it as a parody of the society in which he lived, and by
utilizing locations and the travels of characters between those locations,
specifically those of Jack Worthing. Through these movements, aspects of the
characters are developed to mimic and insult the society of which Wilde was a
part of.
