Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Topic 2 - The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde - Coggle Diagram
Topic 2 - The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde
Plot structure
Initial Situation
For the young Victorian man, the double life is the good life. Jack and Algernon both have secret identities and activities. Up until now, they have both seamlessly gone from city life to country life, using their double identities to make things more convenient. Jack’s life is about to get a lot more difficult.
Conflict
When Lady Bracknell finds out Jack is an orphan, she sets up the challenge of the play for Jack: find a family and a good one or lose Gwendolen. In the meantime, Algernon prepares to come to Cecily as the man of her dreams, Ernest.
Complication
To make his life easier, Jack kills off Ernest and comes home announcing that his unfortunate brother has died in Paris of a severe chill. Interestingly, Ernest has just come home. We find out that it's really Algernon and he’s come to court Cecily. Enraged, Jack tries to make Algernon leave, but Algy won't leave until he has Cecily's hand in marriage.
Climax
Gwendolen’s arrival makes the façade harder and harder to maintain. After a jealous spat over tea, Gwendolen and Cecily discover the truth: there is no Ernest. One Ernest is actually Jack, and the other is actually Algernon. The women’s indignation is short-lived, especially when they learn their men only lied out of love for them.
Suspense
Everything’s fine and dandy until Lady Bracknell arrives on the scene. She’s still all high-and-mighty about Jack’s "terminus" of a family . But little Cecily? Worth a million bucks? Of course she’s the perfect girl for Algy. Unluckily, Jack, Cecily's legal guardian, is having none of it. And guess what? Cecily doesn’t come of age until she’s thirty-five.
Denouement
Miss Prism has deep, dark secrets. Her novel-and-handbag switch has caused all this trouble. Almost thirty years ago during her daily walk, she mistakenly put baby Jack in her handbag and the novel in the stroller. She dropped off the handbag at Victoria Station. So Jack does have a younger brother, Algernon!
Conclusion
So we know Jack’s real last name is Moncrieff, but what about his first name? Oh, named after his father? Doesn’t help that everyone just called him the General. Consulting the Army List of registered Generals confirms that Jack's real name is Ernest! Everyone can get married now.
Setting
London and Hertfordshire, England, in the Late 19th Century
The Victorian Era
Characterisation
John (Jack/Ernest) Worthing, J.P.
• protagonist.
• responsible and respectable young man who leads a double life.
• In Hertfordshire, where he has a country estate, Jack is known as Jack.
• In London he is known as Ernest.
• Jack was discovered in a handbag in the cloakroom of Victoria Station by an old man who adopted him and subsequently made Jack guardian to his granddaughter, Cecily Cardew.
• Jack is in love with his friend Algernon’s cousin, Gwendolen Fairfax.
Algernon Moncrieff
• secondary hero.
• charming, idle, decorative bachelor,
• nephew of Lady Bracknell,
• cousin of Gwendolen Fairfax,
• best friend of Jack Worthing, whom he has known for years as Ernest.
• brilliant, witty, selfish, amoral, and given to making delightful paradoxical and epigrammatic pronouncements.
Gwendolen Fairfax
• Algernon’s cousin and Lady Bracknell’s daughter.
• Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest.
• She is sophisticated, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and utterly pretentious.
• Gwendolen is fixated on the name Ernest and says she will not marry a man without that name.
Cecily Cardew
• Jack’s ward
• the granddaughter of the old gentlemen who found and adopted Jack when Jack was a baby.
• Like Gwendolen, she is obsessed with the name Ernest, but she is even more intrigued by the idea of wickedness.
• fall in love with Jack’s brother Ernest in her imagination and to invent an elaborate romance and courtship between them.
Lady Bracknell
• Algernon’s aunt and Gwendolen’s mother.
• She is married well, and her primary goal in life is to see her daughter do the same.
• She has a list of “eligible young men” and a prepared interview she gives to potential suitors.
• values ignorance, which she sees as “a delicate exotic fruit.”
• She is cunning, narrow-minded, authoritarian, and possibly the most quotable character in the play.
Miss Prism
• Cecily’s governess.
• an endless source of pedantic bromides and clichés.
• She highly approves of Jack’s presumed respectability and harshly criticizes his “unfortunate” brother.
• once written a novel whose manuscript was “lost” or “abandoned.”
• entertains romantic feelings for Dr. Chasuble.
Canon Chasuble, D.D.
• The rector on Jack’s estate.
• Both Jack and Algernon approach Dr. Chasuble to request that they be christened “Ernest.”
• Dr. Chasuble entertains secret romantic feelings for Miss Prism.
Comic techniques/moments
References
The importance of being earnest plot analysis. (n.d.). Homework Help & Study Guides For Students | Shmoop.
https://www.shmoop.com/study-guides/literature/importance-of-being-earnest/analysis/plot-analysis
SparkNotes Editors. (2005). A Doll's House - Characters.
https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/dollhouse/characters/