[In the following essay, Stone examines the metalinguistic aspects of Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.]

A meta-language is a language you use to deal with given statements and their relations with actual facts. ‘In order to speak about the correspondence between a statement S and a fact F, we need a language (a metalanguage) in which we can speak about the statement S and state the fact F’ (Popper, Objective Knowledge, p. 316). Analogically the concept of meta-language can be extended into literature by differentiating between an actual and an implied statement or word-set. Meta-activity is occurring when actual and implied word-sets and the reality they both claim to relate to are being dealt with together. The concept is not empty; some examples may make its usefulness clearer.

The old ‘New Criticism’, for example, tended not to be metalinguistic, because it concentrated on the word-set (typically a poem) alone and often excluded any facts the ‘statement’ related to. It was a reaction against earlier criticism, which had decayed into total attention to supposedly related facts and almost complete inattention to the literary ‘statement’. The most valuable modern criticism (e.g., in the ‘New Criticism’, that of I. A. Richards and Empson) must, it seems clear, always be concerned with both the literary work and the aspects of life it is related to—and so must be inherently metalinguistic. Works of literature overtly metalinguistic are not uncommon, frequently in the specialized metalinguistic form of self-reference.

Tristram Shandy is wholly metalinguistic. Fielding started as a novelist in the metalinguistic form of parody and continued it in the ‘commentary’ chapters of Tom Jones. Jane Austen's characters, notably in Pride and Prejudice, discuss the novelistic propriety and convincingness of their own conduct and characterization (and, by logical inversion, the propriety of the contemporary novel). In a wonderful phrase I borrow from an excellent work on ethics, all metalinguistic works are full of ‘overt or covert inverted commas’.

Oscar Wilde, in his earlier 90s plays, which are not metalinguistic, is compelled to write in a spokesman, usually an Intelligent Bad Man, for the views and wit his chosen form must otherwise exclude. A Woman of No Importance shows the clash between his genre, Strong Society Drama as we may call it, and much of what he really wants to deal with and do. Indeed, Wilde's struggles with his awful plots are extremely like Dickens's in his early novels—and for the same reason. They even fall into the same stagy bombast at the points of greatest strain.

For commercial reasons A Woman of No Importance is (i) a ‘well-made play’ with a strong plot, strong situations and powerful curtain-lines and (ii) one possessing (subject to (i)) social verisimilitude. But (iii), as one would expect from a First in Greats writing for commercial success, there is also an agreeably large quantity of Aristotelian irony, peripeteia and both literal and moral anagnorisis—Gerald's reversals, Hester's reversals, Lord Illingworth's unmasking, to name but a few. They give pleasure at both levels of audience awareness. It has too (iv) wit, but almost disconnected from the plot and held down by the requirements of verisimilitude and the necessity of not frightening the audience, and (v) a very funny running joke of savagely black humour about the Archdeacon's offstage wife, who we learn is ‘wonderfully cheerful’ though a martyr to headaches (Act I), stone-deaf (Act II) and rapidly going blind (Act II), her hands immobilized for the last ten years by gout (Act III), her memory gone ‘since her last attack’ (Act III), and her food entirely limited to jellies (Act III); ‘she has nothing to complain of’ are the Archdeacon's last words. This almost Swiftian attack upon God's arrangements and man's complacency contradicts the genre's premises, but is accidentally made possible by the theatrical convention of the comic clergyman. However, the other aspects of reality which Wilde evidently wants to deal with have no accidental convention to help them and get into the play either in a distorted form or, when in, threaten to break it up completely and have to be suppressed again. Attacks on contemporary class and sexual exploitation have to be assigned to the outsider American girl Hester Worsley, and consequently overstated and (as a result, metalinguistically considered) understated simultaneously. The treatment of women is at least relevant to the plot, but that of the poor, though an obsessive recurrent theme (‘The problem of slavery’, says Lord Illingworth; ‘And we are trying to solve it by amusing the slaves’), has no relevance at all. Besides unpleasant social realities, unpleasant psychological ones are buzzing in the play; what is and will be the relationship between a bastard son and a mother who deliberately keeps him to herself in mediocrity? The plot, and Wilde's intelligence, are compelled to raise the theme, but since it has no place in the genre it is bundled away again as soon as raised. (In this and several other ways one is reminded of Shaw's early plays; a comparison of Shaw's and Wilde's different methods of half-solving similar problems would be of interest.) As the play proceeds, it devolops an enormous and comic gap between the characters' situation and their language. This culminates in the uproarious but unintended comedy of the curtain-scene of Act III and all Act IV (‘Gerald, no! He is your father!’) in which the Fallen Mother is revealed, the Seducer is unmasked, the True Love (with a large fortune) is discovered, and the Son's determination to force the Seducer into Atonement and Justice (Gerald, Act IV) by marrying the Betrayed Mother is thwarted only by the Mother's spirited moral and personal objection to doing anything of the sort (‘What son has ever asked his mother to make so hideous a sacrifice?’). We are here dealing with perfectly serious matters, but the characters Wilde has attempting it are quite incapable of it; they are trapped by their nature, their idiom, the very conditions of their existence—the Strong Society Drama. Now if this gap is accepted and exploited, these masks become (so to speak) not characters but meta-characters; they relate indirectly to life, and directly to a certain representation of life—that acceptable to the 90s theatre audience, or loose sentimentalists anywhere anytime. A play containing them then becomes a criticism of, or a set of variations upon, that particular mode of inadequacy to life and its highly complex relations to reality. Further, being a meta-play, a work of art whose subject is art (literally art for art's sake, in fact), many things cease to be a temptation and become an artistic necessity; for example, perfect phrasing and epigram, the greatest possible elegance of expression, of plot, of situation. The author can legitimately aim at a perfection of form usually found only in music or mathematics. At the same time, by having its roots deep in the rich manure of the 90s commercial drama and reality, the work is preserved from abstraction or triviality. Anyone can be elegant trivially (Wilde himself in his earlier works); it is, for example, the multiple reality it embraces that gives Old Bill's phlegmatic explanation of the shell-hole (‘Mice’) its intense punch. In fact, if Wilde is going to write a genuinely good play it must relate to at least some of the 90s otherwise unmanageable realities, it must allow his wit to work with not against his art, it must also be produceable in the 90s commercial theatre and consequently relate to the established form as well as the facts that form pretended to correspond with. It must therefore be inherently and essentially metalinguistic, a special and powerful sort of verbal structure; must be, in fact, the meta-play The Importance of Being Earnest. Hence its anti-natural yet legitimate stylization, its otherwise baffling combination of perfect seriousness in its internal structure with (ostensibly) perfect frivolity in its apparent structure (‘a trivial comedy for serious people’ is Wilde's own definition), and its numerous outcrops of granite-hard sense. These assertions will perhaps become plausible, indeed comprehensible, by a close examination of the play itself.

The people of the play are Mr. Worthing (Ernest in town, Jack in the country), his ward Cecily Cardew, his fiancée Gwendolen Fairfax (daughter of Lady Bracknell), and his friend Algernon Montcrieff (nephew of Lady Bracknell); the plot is that Algernon, as her guardian's fictitious younger brother Ernest, becomes engaged to Cecily, so both girls are engaged to ‘Ernest’ but neither to Ernest; more detail is unneeded. The play opens with a passage exhibiting, and implicitly commenting upon, the simple theme of master-servant relations and, by implication, those of the upper and lower orders. The social reality of the 90s was peculiarly one of power, of dominators and dominated, and in every passage of The Importance there is continuous conflict. Just as Byron boxed with his valet to reach physical grace-with-power, so Algernon spars verbally with his manservant. This is sporting of Algernon, and helps set the tone of civil decency that characterizes the play, because he loses every exchange. The opening question and answer (‘Did you hear what I was playing, Lane?’ ‘I didn't think it polite to listen, sir’) carry a number of elements; (a) regulative social conventions, (i) the upper order's access to art, and the lower orders' lack of it (cf. Yeats), (ii) the lower orders' ‘knowing their place’; and (b) Lane's implied comments on the conventions and related facts. (i) Since society exacts deference, this exempts Lane from the duty of listening; indeed, since (ii) Algernon has no access to genuine art, it is personally polite not to have listened. In ‘polite’ sense (i), as a servant, Lane is outside the ‘polis’ or civilized group (in Athens he would have been a slave); in sense (ii), he is, as an independent intelligence, exquisitely within it. If this and the following exchanges were cruder in feeling, they would exhibit the covert insolence generated when an upper order character is attempting fraternity but being denied it; if they were coarsened the other way, by making Algernon's wit superior to Lane's, we would have the familiar figure of the comic but fundamentally inferior servant. The next exchange—on the champagne—deals with the expropriation of the expropriators, or—in the language of the time—the servant problem. Lane assumes and establishes his right to steal as much as he pleases, counters Algernon's probe with successive flank attacks on the upper order's taste, competence, major regulating social conventions (marriage, and a respectful attitude to it), and finally defeats Algernon's desperate but unsporting attempt at a snub by (judo-like) completely agreeing with him and consequently exposing a total complicity on Algernon's part with Lane's social subversion. Algernon's direct speech to the audience then points out (i) that they live off the lower orders, (ii) cant about them in several different ways at once, and (iii) their listening to and laughing at his speech shows they have publicly agreed to all that is entailed. The audience, like Algernon with Lane, has been trapped by entering the dialogue. (In Aristotelian terms, the one page of dialogue so far has supplied five peripeteias and two anagnorises. In its speed and veracity it is a little like Shaw's message to Archer about their joint play; ‘Have finished plot and first Act; send more plot’.) Finally, although it apparently abandons the exposition usually the business of a play's first moments, it is actually carrying out the very necessary business of training the audience in the kind of social and linguistic relations that will compose the play. We should not deny to Wilde, any more than to Marvell, that well-known ‘tough reasonableness beneath the slight lyric grace’.

The Importance of Being Earnest then moves to conflict and pretence within one social class, a theme necessarily shading into raw-material human conduct. As the play and characters must be convincing to the audience at the object-level, providing them with a fixed base on which they can rely, this is convenient. Jack and Gwendolen are the most simply presented (in technical terms, Jack despite his duplicity is Algernon's straight man, as Gwendolen is Cecily's); Algernon plays a much larger part in the meta-activity; and Lady Bracknell, ruthlessly accurate about the real world in every way, with almost every word exists fully, indeed irresistibly, at both meta- and object-level. In Jack's beautifully exact terminology, she is a monster without being a myth, which is rather unfair. Psychic energy is obtained by abandoning lies, and identifying with such liberated persons; what the audience gets indirectly through the rest of the play it gets directly from Lady Bracknell—just as Lady Bracknell's standards of fact-facing would shatter any conventional ‘strong drama’ she was placed in. The Jack-Algernon relationship is clearly one of conflict, in which Algernon is the dominator. He makes most of the jokes and even forces Jack into telling the truth, despite Jack's powerful defences—simple mendacity, convincing detail, accusation of class impropriety in reading a private cigarette-case, the symmetry that complements Algernon's real argument with Jack's fictitious one, and the Carrollian logic of country presents carrying country names. When Gwendolen and Cecily meet the dramatic conflict is so rooted is reality that it emerges not only in dialogue but virtually at the animal level; in half a page of dialogue Cecily has not only withstood, sometimes snubbed, Gwendolen's verbal overtures four times, but Gwendolen has delayed sitting down, though asked, until her first friendship-assault (as we may call it) is completed and there is a tiny armistice. ‘A pause. They both sit down together.’ Gwendolen moves to open aggression by formally announcing her intention of looking fixedly at Cecily and demanding Cecily's acquiescence on meta-linguistic class grounds: ‘Mamma, whose views on education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely short-sighted; it is part of her system; so do you mind my looking at you through my glasses’—an elegant combination of upper order and animal behaviour. This is equally elegantly countered by Cecily on equally good social grounds with, in the circumstances, a strongly aggressive social implication—‘Oh, not at all, Gwendolen. I am very fond of being looked at.’ The struggle shifts—temporarily—to the purely verbal level; a meta-reference to sentimental drama—‘Dearest Gwendolen, there is no reason why I should make a secret of it to you’—introduces a passage of conflict in which, with neat structure and rising complexity, Cecily's ‘little country newspaper’ and ‘next week’ are countered by Gwendolen's Morning Post (class and sophistication superiority) and ‘Saturday’ (time), Cecily's ‘ten minutes ago’ by ‘yesterday afternoon at five-thirty’, Cecily's diary by Gwendolen's diary, and the struggle shifts implicitly to the metalinguistic question of the logical category of a proposal of marriage. Is it a letter of intent, when the most recent one is valid, or a contract, when the earliest is the only valid one? Gwendolen brings a new rhetorical form into play, but her soliloquy is overcome by Cecily's stronger one, which uses metaphor—‘entanglement’—to beat mere literalism. Since both speeches are delicately sentimental and ‘out of character’, the play is here metalinguistic in relating to the forms and content of ‘strong drama’, where maidens make and exchange just such innocent confidences. The sequence closes in yet another class-reference—‘I am happy to say I have never seen a spade’—used as attack and self-assertion. The society of The Importance is an intensely class-based one, but it is also extremely dynamic. Considering human capabilities, while we watch the meta-characters Gwendolen and Cecily we are seeing real tigers pretending to be cats in contrast to the ‘strong drama’ the play relates to, where we see cats roaring.

Since the characters are firmly established in the audience's minds as acceptable and consistent at the object- and meta-level, and the necessary exposition is unobtrusively inserted, the play can afford to carry a great deal of comment by the characters about reality, both direct and in the metalinguistic form of combined reference to reality and to what people say about it—pretence. Lady Bracknell is notoriously the most copious source of examples, as in her examination of Jack's eligibility. It opens metalinguistically with the minor themes of upper order parasitism—Jack's smoking as ‘an occupation. … There are far too many idle men in London as it is’—and the double-standard sexuality central to the 90s self-concern: ‘a man who desires to get married should know either everything or nothing. … Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone.’ The technique of comparison by substitution—‘ignorance’ for ‘innocence’, application to Jack instead of Gwendolen—is a Wildean favourite, often exasperating elsewhere; here it can work with the play, not just as external decoration. Lady Bracknell's beautiful aria on education is a direct comment on social reality, rising to the (fulfilled) prophecy of ‘acts of violence in Grosvenor Square’, and is followed by an equally accurate and prophetic aria upon land ownership. (It is directly no part of an artist's business either to prophesy or literally describe actuality; but the better grasp he has of what is the case, however he chooses to work from it, the longer his product will last and the more strikingly the world will move to conform to it.) The point about changing the fashion and the side of Berkeley Square is a joke about fact and quasi-linguistic behaviour—a metalinguistic joke, in fact. Jack's income is naturally the major point and is the only one actually noted in Lady Bracknell's book. ‘Now to minor matters. Are your parents living?’ is direct in form and metalinguistic in its play of actual fact against conventional utterance. The audience is also naturally pleased to find Lady Bracknell is wrong, since it is this ‘minor matter’ which, she finds, forbids the engagement. Her description of Jack as ‘born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag’ derives from the phrase ‘born and bred’, and consequently Lady Bracknell is modifying a reality to suit a language-structure, a rather nice inversion of normal metalinguistic procedure. Her refusal to allow Gwendolen to ‘marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a parcel’ is a perfect verbal formulation of the upper order's habit of treating people as things, in accordance with her and their highly material mode of existence. When informed of Cecily's fortune, she continues ‘A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! And in the Funds! Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her. Few girls of the present day have any really solid qualities, any of the qualities that last, and improve with time. We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces’. Elsewhere in the play, too, Lady Bracknell is a fountain of good, often brutal, sense: feeling well opposed to behaving well, the Lady Harbury sequence, illness in others not a thing to be encouraged, the upper order's reaction to French and German (the play has a high proportion of jokes about language), ‘the Influence of a permanent income on Thought’, arguments regrettable as always vulgar and often convincing, and ‘the General was essentially a man of peace, except in his domestic life’. Lady Bracknell is not of course the only truth-speaker. Algernon warns us ‘the truth is rarely pure and never simple’, Jack that a high moral tone is bad for health and happiness, and Gwendolen produces that poignantly exact definition of tension (‘this suspense is terrible, I hope it will last’), and even Miss Prism regards the death of a black sheep as ‘a blessing of an extremely obvious kind’. The play continually illustrates the observation (through Gwendolen, truly her mother's daughter) that ‘it becomes more than a moral duty to speak one's mind; it becomes a pleasure’.

Since The Importance of Being Earnest is itself so completely structured, there is an added elegance in the presence within it of smaller structures which by their formal quality or reversal of expectations or both operate as a kind of model of the play itself—that is, as yet another meta-level above the ostensible one. Very few works of literature are of such formal complexity. There are the traditional, the classic ironies of plot—foreshadowings and echoes; Lady Bracknell's ‘the line is immaterial’, ‘try and acquire some relations as soon as possible’ (she is addressing her nephew in his brother's flat); the prophecy ‘Half an hour after they've met, they will be calling each other sister’—‘Women only do that when they have called each other a lot of other things first’; and Algernon's masquerade as the younger brother he actually but unknowingly is. There is the very simple structure of the offstage running joke—Lady Harbury, Lord Bracknell; the more complex one of the onstage wit-combat, itself full of language-devices (inversion, category and subject-shift, and even points of pure logic—‘There is no good offering a large reward now that the thing is found’)—the battle of the cigarette-case, of Algernon-as-Ernest rebuked by Jack, of who has the right to be christened; and most complex of all, the circular sequence early in the play about the ‘clever people’ and the fools, which is funny at the simplest level (‘What fools’), funnier when one realizes Jack has been defined as one of the fools whose non-existence he has been lamenting, and funniest when one realizes that the fool's cap also fits the audience and oneself—any critic of the play, in fact—since its characters are eminently ‘clever people’, and the whole audience has come to the theatre solely to meet and talk about them. So—for a second—the level-above-level structure has reached out and pulled, not this listener and that, or this common pretender and that, but the—any—audience, purely qua audience, inside the play—a very metalinguistic effect indeed.

The characters of The Importance are often seriously, even passionately, concerned about food. They are equally serious about property (preferably in its most ‘real’ form, money or its equivalent the Funds); and they are all, as we have seen, incessantly engaged in struggles for power. We can in fact take these as equivalents, whether we follow the Freudian judgment which makes food the reality and property and power its masks, or our metalinguistic interpretation which would make property and power the realities, ‘good taste’, ‘civilized values’, etc., the normal language about them, and ‘food’ the metalanguage Wilde employs to deal with the facts and the normal language simultaneously. Certainly Algernon has an exactly Freudian passage on food—‘When I am in really great trouble, as anyone who knows me intimately will tell you, I refuse everything except food and drink. At the present moment I am eating muffins because I am unhappy’—another example of very hard sense. (The play clearly is the most centrally Wildean thing its author ever wrote—his getting so fat, that curious phrase about ‘feasting with panthers’, all those suppers at Willis's, the sinister foreshadowing of Carson's cross-examination by the cigarette-case scene—but unless we regard Wilde as the inventor of the non-fiction play seventy years before the non-fiction novel we had better stick to the literature.) The characters are surprisingly often engaged in unashamed, overt, onstage eating—cucumber sandwiches and bread and butter in town, cake, bread and butter, tea, sugar, muffins and tea-cake in the country. When not conspicuously consuming they are arranging to dine at Willis's, emphazing the moral importance of being serious about meals, the necessity of ‘regular and wholesome meals’ when one is going to lead an entirely new life, or the social impropriety of ever going without one's dinner. The food is always used as a weapon of domination; as in Act I, when Algernon, whose food it is, directs Jack's choice, or Act II, where Gwendolen employs it for social domination (‘No, thank you. Sugar is not fashionable any more’) and Cecily in turn uses it for physical revenge (‘Gwendolen drinks the tea and makes a grimace. Puts down cup at once, reaches out her hand to the bread and butter, looks at it, and finds it is cake. Rises in indignation’), or later in Act II, when Jack attempts to dominate Algernon morally (‘I say it's perfectly heartless your eating muffins at all, under the circumstances’), then, abandoning his moral position, is completely defeated by Algernon, who denies Jack the slightest share of his own muffins. The quasi-omnipresence of food is meta-significant; the ‘strong drama’ of the 90s seldom shows its characters coarse (or real) enough to take food and yet the actual 90s, like the following Edwardian era are notorious for the gross appetities of its upper orders. The literal food on stage acts as a sharp contradiction to the audience's favourite lies-in-art. Further, it acts as literal though trivial property, which can be struggled for, and also as representative of more substantial power; Algernon is entitled to eat sandwiches specially ordered for Lady Bracknell since ‘she is my aunt’; Jack eats the bread and butter intended for Gwendolen ‘as if you were going to eat it all. You behave as if you were married to her already’. Algernon's attitude to his aunt's sandwiches and Jack's muffins exactly parallels his aunt's attitude to Cecily's £130,000—which Algernon will also get. It is interesting to note that Algernon and Lady Bracknell, the two dominant, even predatory, characters of the play, are or were acquisitive by necessity; Algernon has nothing but his debts, and Lady Bracknell before her marriage ‘had no fortune of any kind’. Lady Bracknell's attitude to Cecily's money is, however, deeper and more poetic than mere greed. When she refers to ‘qualities that last, and improve with time’, and later, when it is found Cecily can't get it until she is thirty-five, asserts that ‘Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton … has been thirty-five ever she arrived at the age of forty, which was many years ago. … There will be a large accumulation of property’, there is the distinct intimation of the themes of Eternity against Time, the Unchanging against human ageing and mortality, of Hamlet with Yorick and of Keats's Grecian Urn. To put it another way, Lady Bracknell's imagination, like a good poet's, reverses the poles of reality, makes the abstract concrete, and looks through the mere shows of being—eighteen-year-old Cecily—to the unchanging Gold.

Indeed, The Importance of Being Earnest is sufficiently related to the world as it is to touch the great standard themes of art—Love and Marriage, Death and Rebirth, and Appearance and Reality—though they indeed occur very obliquely. Love and Marriage is of course used structurally rather than emotionally, and the crucial insistence is not on the fact—lovers' earnestness—but the word—their Ernest-ness, so to speak. The theme arises in the play's first minute, and runs through to the traditional Triumph of Hymen in the last one, with such occasional strokes of appalling human truth as Gwendolen's ‘I never change, except in my affections’, or metalinguistic improvements on sentimental drama as ‘though I may marry someone else, and marry often, nothing … can alter my eternal devotion to you’. Death and spiritual or nominal Rebirth are nearly as omnipresent. Quite early in Act I Jack anounces ‘I am going to kill my brother’ (Jack is totally his ‘brother's’ keeper) … ‘I am going to get rid of Ernest. And I strongly advise you to do the same with … your invalid friend’, and accordingly in Act II he appears, a tall basalt column in ‘the deepest mourning, with crepe hatband and black gloves’ to announce that Ernest is ‘Dead! … Quite dead’. Algernon carries out a parallel phantom homicide: ‘Bunbury is dead … I killed Bunbury this afternoon … he was quite exploded’. The aggression usually underlying comedy, and peculiarly strongly in this play, is in these examples quite cheerfully open. And though it may be over-fussy, I cannot help feeling Lady Bracknell's phrase about persons whose origin is a Terminus, though directed against Jack's social misfortunes, both prefigures Beckett (‘We give birth astride a grave’) and plays on a reversal of the Christian view of death—that our end is our beginning. This is, spiritually speaking, what happens in the sacrament of baptism, in which the baptisant dies to the Old Man and regenerates as the New in his symbolic drowning and resurrection. It is again the underlying logical structure which makes Jack's diffident negotiations with Dr. Chasuble so funny (‘if you have nothing better to do … I might trot round about five if that would suit you’), and with Algernon (‘I have not been christened for years.’ ‘Yes, but you have been christened. That is the important thing’—as, theologically, it is. ‘Quite so. So I know my constitution can stand it.’). Lady Bracknell brings society and sacrament—Mammon and God—together in an explosion of short-circuits—‘grotesque and irreligious … I will not hear of such excesses. Lord Bracknell would be highly displeased if he learned that that was the way you wasted your time and money’, while at a proper age she includes christening among ‘every luxury that money could buy’. The Importance is closely if obliquely related to religion, or at least religion-in-society, even down to Gwendolen's determination to crush her doubts on Jack's sincerity—‘this is not the moment for German scepticism’.

Lastly, the theme of that age-old and ultimate pair, Appearance and Reality, is overtly with us from the cigarette-case, through all the metalinguistic truths and object-level deceptions, rising to the highest points of concentration in such scenes as Algernon's masquerade as Jack's brother (yet he is Jack's brother), his logic (‘it is perfectly childish to be in deep mourning for a man who is actually staying for a whole week with you in your house as your guest’), and the total disappearance of Ernest. The very basis of objective reality is subverted in the perfectly accurate account of Memory, which ‘usually chronicles all the things that have never happened, and couldn't possibly have happened’, and the proferred documentary alternative of the two diaries (respectively ‘a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication’, and ‘something sensational to read in the train’). The extreme difficulty of valid description is finally exampled explicity: ‘Is this Miss Prism a female of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education?’ ‘She is the most cultivated of ladies, and the very picture of respectability.’ ‘It is obviously the same person.’

If the metalinguistic structure of the play and the characters is not grasped, then not only is the nature of the play unrealized, but the play and characters look too fragile to handle, and consequently its beautiful substructures—social and general human satire on food and power, religion, death and resurrection, appearance and reality—have to be overlooked and ignored and criticism creeps away in a flurry of embarrassed and misdirected compliments. What a Theatre of Black Comedy and the Absurd we might have had in England under Victoria if only some enlightened lover of literature had saved Wilde for thirty years more playwriting by firmly propelling Bosie under a bus.