Discussion Topic
Social expectations and the opposition between town and country in Act II of The Importance of Being Earnest
Summary:
In Act II of The Importance of Being Earnest, social expectations and the opposition between town and country are highlighted through the characters' behaviors and attitudes. The town represents sophistication and deception, while the country symbolizes simplicity and honesty. The characters navigate these contrasting environments, often revealing their true selves and challenging societal norms and expectations.
Does Act II of The Importance of Being Earnest present an opposition between town and country?
The inclusion of the country side as a setting for the play serves a few reason. First, it is the place from which Jack escapes under his fake persona, Ernest, to go into the city to cause havoc and live like a libertine. In the country, his serious side of "Uncle Jack" is methodological, responsible, even fatherly. Hence, the city represents the pleasures of life while the country is a representation of the bucolic, quiet, and peaceful in Jack's personality. We know, however, that Jack can only take so much of the country before escaping to the city. Much like him, Algernon runs away from the city to find his true love in Jack's estate in the country.
The second instance showing the marked different between town and country is on Act II when Cecily and Gwendolen have their famous showdown. As part of their tag-team style insults Cecily does...
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what it takes to make Gwendolen look silly when the latter points out the silly life in the country.
GWENDOLEN:Five counties! I don't think I should like that. I hate crowds.CECILY:[Sweetly.] I suppose that is why you live in town? [GWENDOLEN bites her lip, and beats her foot nervously with her parasol.]
Moreover, Gwendolen "kindly" points out to Cecily that it is "unfashionable" to use sugar on tea, or to serve cake at teatime. In summary, the fact that Cecily is a country girl makes her automatically inferior.
Gwendolen
Personally I cannot understand how anybody manages to exist in the country, if anybody who is anybody does. The country always bores me to death.CECILY:Ah! This is what the newspapers call agricultural depression, is it not? I believe the aristocracy are suffering very much from it just at present. It is almost an epidemic amongst them, I have been told. May I offer you some tea, Miss Fairfax?
The women declare war on each other until their issue is resolved. However, they made it clear that there is a very big gap in terms of their social standing based on their origin.
References
What are the social expectations differences between city and country in Act 2 of The Importance of Being Earnest?
In act 1, Jack suggests that the city is a place for immoral behaviors which are unacceptable in the country. Jack describes the country as "excessively boring" because one only "amuses other people," but in the city, he says, "one amuses oneself." He has told Algernon that he came up to the city for "pleasure." Finally, once Algernon produces Jack's missing cigarette case, Jack reveals the truth about his life. He says,
When one is placed in the position of guardian, one has to adopt a very high moral tone on all subjects. It’s one’s duty to do so. And as a high moral tone can hardly be said to conduce very much to either one’s health or one’s happiness, in order to get up to town I have always pretended to have a younger brother of the name of Ernest, who lives in the Albany, and gets into the most dreadful scrapes.
Then, when we meet Cecily and Miss Prism, Cecily wishes that her Uncle Jack would allow his "brother" Ernest to come to the country, saying,
We might have a good influence over him, Miss Prism. I am sure you certainly would.
She also seems to believe that her home in the country is a pretty boring and moral place, as it might help to reform Jack's errant brother. Cecily is very romantic—she keeps a diary, she says, "in order to enter the wonderful secrets of [her] life." Further, when the opportunity arises for her to push Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble together, she does so; she clearly wants to see them become a couple. She is also rather "inattentive" to her lessons and prefers to daydream.
Wilde seems to have included the budding romance between Dr. Chasuble and Miss Prism in order to continue the motif of triviality. It is not simply the young and in love who are trivial in this play. The vicar is clearly in love, or lust, with Miss Prism, despite his vows and his claims to moral rectitude. Likewise, Miss Prism claims the moral high road as well, and yet her attitude is hardly Christian. Of the fictitious Ernest, she says,
Indeed I am not sure that I would desire to reclaim him. I am not in favour of this modern mania for turning bad people into good people at a moment’s notice. As a man sows so let him reap.
Having never met Ernest, she has proclaimed him hopeless and beyond reach, washing her hands of him. This is hardly loving. Though she lectures Cecily about writing in a diary, she herself wrote a three-volume novel—a type of romance novel notorious for having little literary merit—in her younger years.