The Importance of Being Earnest

The entire plot of the play revolves around social obligations, marriage in particular, and the complications that arise from Jack and Algernon’s attempts to avoid theirs. At the start of the play Jack’s use of the pseudonym Ernest in London has allowed him to act poorly in town while simultaneously maintaining his obligation to present an upright character to Cecily. By “Bunburying,” Algernon has managed to avoid his own familial obligations, which seem to consist mostly of attending Lady ‘s dinner parties.

Young, wealthy bachelors such as Jack and Algernon would have been under tremendous pressure to find a good (i.e. rich) match to buttress their own family’s fortunes. Marriage, however, substantially increased the social expectations for men of this class. The time of their bachelorhood was one in which they were free to enjoy their free time and easy access to wealth to the fullest; and many would have been prolonged this period for as long as possible. 

The class background of the play’s main characters has significant impact on the concerns around marriage and identity which they express. The main characters all belong to the upper class, but their sources of income are quite different. Jack and Cecily’s money comes from their investments in commercial concerns, whereas Algernon and Lady Bracknell belong to the landed aristocracy. Algernon and Lady Bracknell are, in fact, very cash poor–Algernon jokes that “half the chaps in the Bankruptcy Court are called Algernon” (56), and Lady Bracknell laments that “land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure” (25). Their class status is dependent on the centuries-long connections of their family to power and wealth. Jack and Cecily, on the other hand, belong to the ascendant class of factory owners and merchants whose economic and political power is rapidly eclipsing the old aristocracy.

As elsewhere, members of Britain’s landed aristocracy felt intense status anxiety in this period, as the old prerogatives of the feudal aristocracy faded away in the face of their increasing irrelevancy. By the late nineteenth century, the center of economic growth had definitively moved from the agricultural base which had provided the aristocracy their wealth to an urban, industrial base. Lady Bracknell’s sneering condescension towards Jack when he tells her that he was found in a handbag is representative of this status anxiety. As the landed aristocracy’s power declines, they cling more tightly to those things which distinguish them from the “nouveau riche” represented by Jack, namely family background and manners.

In the play, some of the stereotypes associated with these groups are inverted. Jack and Cecily live in the country, despite receiving their money from business concerns in the city; and Lady Bracknell and Algernon reside in the city instead of the country as might be expected. This reversal is also at play when Gwendolen and Cecily make jabs at each other about country and city life.