Volume 49, Number 15 · October 10, 2002
The Two Oscar Wildes
By Daniel Mendelsohn
The Importance of Being Earnest
a film written and directed by Oliver Parker, based on the play by Oscar Wilde
At the climax of Oscar Wilde's comic masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, we learn that a baby has been mistaken for a book. Until that improbable revelation, however, the play—Wilde's wicked exposé of the artificiality of conventional morality, and his one unequivocally great work—is concerned less with procreation than with recreation. Earnest follows two fashionable young heroes, Algernon Moncrieff and Jack Worthing, as they lead elaborate double lives, complete with false identities and imaginary friends, that allow them to seek unrespectable pleasures while presenting a respectable face to their local societies: London for Algy, whose fictional invalid friend, Bunbury, provides frequent excuses to escape to the countryside; Hertfordshire for Jack, whose assumption of a fictional identity of his own (that of a ne'er-do-well brother named Ernest) allows him to misbehave in town.
Review, 5414 words
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