The Importance of Being Earnest

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.