Oscar Wilde's The Importance Of Being Earnest: Perspectives In Modern Context

The Importance of Being Earnest is the representative play of Oscar Wilde, the great English writer and the leading figure of aestheticism in 19th century. As a treasure in literature, this play has enduring attraction. It's a topic of interest among critics.As far as this play is concerned, sociological perspective is efficient, for there are many coincidences between the author's life and the characters'. Wilde's tragic life also leads us to think about a profound topic: the relationship between artist and society.To understand Wilde the playwright and The Importance of Being Earnest, a better way is to begin with his rhetoric. In some way, only when we. understand him as a rhetorician, can we better understand him as a writer, an aesthete, a thinker and a "revolutionary moralist".As a rhetorician, Wilde sticks to finding a still fresher way of expressing, which contributes very much to his accomplishment in writing. This can be best exemplified in the plot design of Earnest. Wildean language is lofty, graceful, formal, rhetorically polished and sometimes full of humorous and fanciful expressions. His characterization is efficient, impressive and outstanding. Earnest is a best specimen for us to understand Wilde's aesthetic pursuits of beauty, pleasure and "immoral" art.Earnest poignantly and devastatingly satirizes all sorts of hypocrisies in religion, love, marriage, education, politics, etc. In modern context, realism as a literary term has a different meaning from its counterpart in 19th century. In this sense, the play is a comedy of critical realism.Wilde's persistence to amount the peak of art makes him a great modernist. The use of paradox is his favorite, by which he subverts the dominant traditional binary oppositions. Therefore, he is also a postmodernist pioneer.Indeed, sociological, stylistic, aesthetic, realistic, modernist and postmodernist views all prove to be applicable approaches in interpreting The Importance of Being Earnest, hence the ways of understanding certain works are in fact various and inexhaustible.