Dishonesty in The Importance of Being Earnest

Disohonesty is a large part in the play The Importance of Being Earnest  by Oscar Wilde. It ties in with satire and humor when people are telling lies in a humorous manner. An example being the pursuit of pleasure. John/Jack lies to everyone by saying he has a wicked brother name Ernest who always gets into trouble in the city. When "Ernest" gets into trouble, Jack goes and "helps him out". Truth be told, Jack has no brother and he is actually the make believe Ernest. He does this so that he can go out in the city and get away from his dull life without anyone knowing.This is also expressed through the satire of marriage. Cecily and Gwendolyn both think that they are going to be married to Ernest. The truth is that Ernest is made up person from a result that Algernon calls Bunbuying. Both Jack and Algernon get into a twist from lying to Cecily and Gwedolyn about "Ernest". Humour is also shown in the play through epigrams. For example, "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his" (pg.28). This is basically saying that women she be less like their mothers and men should be more like their mothers. This is quite contradictary due to the time period. Men were supposed to be these strong and fearless characters while women were weak and emotional. Satire of education also takes part in the play. For example, "Dr. Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows." (pg. 56). Jack and Algernon are both very dishonest when they pretend to be Earnest  and decide to marry Gwendolen and Cecily with that lie. By this, they were  not being very earnest by pretending to be "Ernest". It is very funny when Gwedolyn says "He is the very soul of truth and honour." (pg.59) because he's lying to her about who he is and she is blind to it.


I think that Wilde used dishonesty through the characters in the play to sort of poke fun at this society in their time period and particularly the upper class. Dishonesty is not necissarily seen as a good thing but in the end everything seems to work out because of it. Jack turns out to find out more about his family and the couples become engaged. He was making fun of all of these "serious" ideas that were going on at the time and really made a point about how ridiculous all of it was. Another humorous part of his play, because they were dishonest...everything seemed to turn out alright.