The Triviality and Nonsense Dealt by the Subtitle in The Importance of Being Earnest, a Play by Oscar Wilde

The subtitle to The Importance of Being Earnest is ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’. This is an appropriate subtitle as the play deals with a great deal of triviality and nonsense throughout the play. Wilde seeks to mock many aspects of Victorian society in this play. He is parodying the normal views of people in the Victorian era, as they focus more on very minor and unimportant things, highlighting their superficiality. Wilde wanted to make people more aware of the more important things in life, which he does by parodying the Victorian society’s views and ideals such as things like religion and marriage. Religion and marriage are usually two things that are held in very high regards by others, but by mocking them, Wilde is making people aware of how nonsensical they are acting and how stupid they look at times. This is done by the clever usage of epigrams, paradoxes, irony and sarcasm.

One main idea that Wilde constantly voices throughout the play is the superficiality of the upper classes, mainly the women. Lady Bracknell, a main female character in the play, is the caricature of the upper classes. She focuses mainly on things that are trivial, and does not show too much interest in things that are important. For example, when she is interviewing Jack, to see if he is fit to wed her daughter, Gwendolen, the first question she asks is not something essential, such as a political view or a question about his employment. She starts the interview with a completely trifling question by asking whether Jack smokes or not. The last question she poses to him is of his birth and family. Once she learns that Jack was found in a bag at a train station, she immediately refuses to give her daughter’s hand in marriage to Jack, as she feels that the way he was found was not fitting and immoral. Wilde uses Lady Bracknell to promote societal ignorance and to show that they are happy living their own aimless, stupid life.

A vital theme of the play is the fact that nothing really matters at all, and that everything is on social pretenses. The title of the play is a pun, as the entire play revolves around the fact that two men are anything but earnest, and will go to great lengths and do deceitful things to ensure that others think that they are earnest and wholesome. Even the subtitle is a parody as serious people often do not deal with things that are considered trivial. However, since Wilde is trying to expose the ignorance of society, he uses this piece of wit to parody the nature of the people in the Victorian era, showing that there are hardly any truly serious people in society and most people only deal with things that are trivial and not important. Wilde uses the double identities of Jack and Algernon to mock how the society cannot understand what is truly good and what is truly bad, and how they are confused as to what honesty and responsibilities really are. One identity that is taken is a very polite and honest one, while the other is deceitful and manipulative. Wilde shows how the people are confused by showing how the people living double lives constantly fluctuate between the two identities. In conclusion, the subtitle for this play is an extremely apt one as it truly shows the ignorance of the upper classes and spreads Wilde’s intended messages of awareness.

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