Preview

Explore the Dramatic Significane of Lady Bracknell in Act 1

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
410 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Explore the Dramatic Significane of Lady Bracknell in Act 1
Explore the dramatic significance of Lady Bracknell in Act 1
Throughout Act 1, Oscar Wilde uses the character of Lady Bracknell as a highly comedic character who causes the entire play to come together by unknowingly creating a calamitous chain of events to occur by her refusal to let her daughter Gwendolyn marry to Jack Worthing. She is presented as strict, uptight woman who is very much the Matriarch of the family. One way Wilde presents this idea is when Lady Bracknell is interviewing Jack on whether he should be allowed to marry Gwendolyn. In the interview Lady Bracknell is seen asking Jack questions such as “Do you smoke” this could indicate the void of old London society where more important issues weren’t considered as important in an world of extravagance, wealth and luxury such as the one they were living in.
Lady Bracknell is first and foremost a symbol of Victorian seriousness and the unhappiness it brings as a result. She is powerful, arrogant, ruthless to the extreme, conservative, and proper. In many ways, she represents Wilde's opinion of Victorian upper-class negativity, conservative values, and power it is also thought that Wilde had fashioned Lady Bracknell by basing her on the hierarchy within it. Her overshadowing presence in act one tells us how the mood and tone dramatically changes when she is in and out of the room, for example when she is not in the room Jack is relaxed and at ease with Gwendolyn, but when she returns and tells Jack to “rise from this semi-recumbent posture, it is most indecorous” he instantaneously stumbles to get up.
It is her question on Jacks parents which eventually leads to the rest of the play falling together when she asks where his parents are, which he replies to that he was abandoned as a child, she comes up with a witty, hilarious remark of “to lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune. To lose both looks like carelessness.” The idea of this statement is so ridiculous it is regarded as

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    In the Victorian age, family was a major influence in choosing one’s offspring’s mate. Lady Bracknell accepted all Jack’s characteristics except the fact, he had inconsiderate parents. “To lose one parent, Mr.Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness (1.1.1421). Gwendolen was willing to marry Jack regardless of his social class, the lack of being named Earnest and accept his multitude of lies. Wilde also displayed how both gentlemen was willing to be born again to receive the name Earnest to give pleasure to Gwendolen and Cecily.…

    • 490 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Gwendolen tells Cecily that ‘outside the family circle’ he is ‘entirely unknown’ and thinks ‘that is quite as it should be’. The image of the offstage Lord Bracknell, faint though it is, seems in keeping with the play’s depiction of gender roles, which posit a reversal of the Victorian expectations of the two sexes:…

    • 595 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    She is depicted as a wealthy, snobbish society matron who places much importance on station. “Do not speak ill of society,” Lady Bracknell says, “…only those who cannot get into it do that.” This quote provides a brief summation of her entire value system. Twice in the story, she is shown interviewing prospective matches for her relatives to determine their suitability. The questions are entirely concerned with wealth and status. She automatically rules Jack unsuitable for her daughter when he is unable to answer inquiries about his background to her satisfaction, chastising him for losing both his parents, then reacting in disgust when he relates how he was found in a handbag at a train station. “You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloakroom, and form an alliance with a parcel?” she protests. Tellingly, she also asks Jack about his politics, but only questions Cecily about her financial prospects for a potential match. The assertions Lady Bracknell makes throughout this work seem ridiculous. She prioritizes a person’s standing over their substance, and that’s the point Wilde is trying to make about the society she…

    • 836 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In addition to allusions, Wilde uses connections to the Victorian upper class negativity and repressive values to illustrate Lady Bracknell’s strong character. Lady Bracknell can be said that she is Wilde’s invention to present his satire on upper class of Victorian Era. Wilde satirizes the hypocrisy and…

    • 1149 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Examples Of Social Norms

    • 1456 Words
    • 6 Pages

    The play begins with a criminal investigation taking place at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Wright. Mr. Wright was found dead in their bed with a rope around his neck, with his wife being the largest suspect. Mr. Henderson, the county attorney, Mr. Peters, the sheriff, and Mr. Hale, a neighbor and friend to Mr. Wright, gather around discussing the matter, while Mrs. Peters and Mrs. Hale stand off to the side, patiently waiting to be a help to personal connection if the men see fit (1362). Throughout the story, the men make light of any problem or important matter that the women may have, or have to offer. They initially notice how dirty and untidy Mrs. Wrights home is, and because this is very unordinary for the women of that time period, 1916, that made Mrs. Wright that much more suspicious. The men also bring up that though Mrs. Wright is held for murder, she is too busy worrying about her perseveres, an unimportant matter to any of the men (1365). Glaspell connected her title with the theme of her story with a comment made by one of her male characters, Mr. Hale, "Well, women are used to worrying over trifles". As though any problem, or worry a women may have is unimportant and exaggerated compared to any "real" issue, that a man might have. Near the end of the story, the women feel sympathetic towards Mrs. Wright for they know how it feels to be a women and they feel that perhaps her actions were justified, for her husband did strangle her beloved bird. Though they have gathered much evidence to close the case, the men do not feel as if their input will be worthy of solving the…

    • 1456 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Through the play, “we are made to share Wilde’s view of the ludicrous and sinister realities behind the fashionable façade of an over-civilized society where nothing serious is considered serious and nothing trivial trivial” (Reinert 17). In the interactions between people who subscribe to Victorianism, such as Gwendolen and Cecily, the trivial matter of addressing each other while having a conversation is turned into a manner of enormous social importance. In contrast, in the interactions between people who subscribe to Bunburyism, or the total rejection of Victorianism, matters as serious as pretending to have a dead brother Ernest or sick friend Bunbury are treated lightly. Gwendolen and Cecily’s Victorianism leads them to become enraged at each other without reason, while Jack and Algernon’s Bunburyism very nearly leads to their mutual loss of the women whom they love. In this way, Wilde shows that moral ideals should lie in the middle between Bunburyism and Victorianism because of the consequences of taking both ideas of extremes (Reinert 18). Jack sums up the moral best in the last line of the play when he proclaims that he has “now realized the vital Importance of Being Earnest” (Earnest 313). Through this play, Wilde states that the key to success is to simply behave without thought for social…

    • 995 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Chapter seven sees Jane slightly more experienced to the ways of Lowood School. She has come to accept the poor conditions laid down by Mr. Brocklehurst, however has not yet learnt to ignore them and Bronte describes Jane suffering a lot in this chapter. This lack of food and appalling living conditions are down to the head of the school, Mr. Brocklehurst. This man uses his apparent strong beliefs in Christianity as an excuse to provide the children of Lowood with the absolute bare minimum. Brocklehurst claims his "mission is to mortify in these girls the lusts of the flesh", presenting the idea that perhaps Brocklehurst is simply a man that has a immensely firm grasp of his beliefs and has made it his "mission" in life to enlighten others into the ways of christianity.…

    • 1677 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The two women in the story are Mrs Johnston and Mrs Lyons. Mrs Johnston is a lower class single mother living in a council house in the centre of Liverpool. Her husband has left her, while she is pregnant, for a younger woman after she had given birth to 7 children. Willy Russell portrays her as a superstitious and lonely woman. ‘Oh God. Never put new shoes on a table Mrs Lyons.’ At the beginning of the play, I feel sorry for Mrs Johnston because she has lots of children and loves them all equally but she simply cannot support them financially as a cleaner. How she has let herself get into this position is extremely sad but is also a social comment by Willy Russell on society today. Russell sets Mrs Johnston up as the extreme example of the benefit living, single parent family who live with and by the hand of the social. ‘The welfare’s already been onto me. They say I’m incapable of controlling the kids I got.’ I do feel a bit angry at Mrs Johnston when she gave Eddie away to Mrs Lyons but when I see how Mrs Lyons manipulated her and made her think that she was doing the right thing, I feel sorry for her. The picture is quite complicated; Russell is testing the moral ethics of the audience.…

    • 789 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Act 1 Scene 1 Homework

    • 606 Words
    • 3 Pages

    (towards the six). Enter each value in the tinted boxes in the Grapher tool and it will…

    • 606 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    A way that Wilde challenges the typical Victorian society is by the way he presents women similarly to men. The female characters in ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, Lady Bracknell in particular, are much more dominant than expected for the time and tend to take control over most situations. Within the Bracknell household, Lord Bracknell is known to be ‘under the thumb’ of the women and Gwendolen even remarks that “Outside the family circle, papa, I am glad to say, is entirely unknown. I think that is quite as it should be” (Act 2). Here, Gwendolen shows reversing the traditional roles of men and women. Gwendolen challenges the conventional idea that women should be the ones at home cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Wilde overtly shows that woman can occupy positions of power and usurp the traditional gender roles. He uses the comedic device of role reversal to highlight the importance of traditional roles in Victorian society. The humour comes from the ridiculousness of women being the dominant gender and taking charge of others, when it is well known this was not the case at the time.…

    • 1509 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    When dealing with Lady Bracknell it is important to realise that her intellectually farcical dialogue makes her character the quintessence of the book’s title; she creates ‘trivial comedy’ yet is one of the ‘serious people’. From this simple observation we can infer that Wilde wants us to watch Lady Bracknell as she represent the book as a while in character form. An example of her character’s nature is when she makes a remark about the ‘unfashionable’ side of the street upon which Mr Worthing lives. She then says that they can change ‘both’ the fashion and the side. Upon the surface Lady Bracknell takes something as trivial as which side of the street he lives on and talks about it in such a serious tone that it creates humour. This also displays her use of witty dialogue as her quick yet humours reply helps Wilde to create a base for much of the fast paced intellectually comedy in the rest of the play. Therefore this analysis shows that she does create comedy via her use of tone and amusing dialogue. However, on a deeper level, the nonsensical dialogue takes away from the character’s realism. Then she is creating comedy exempt from the context of the play as people laugh at her unrealistic nature suggesting that she doesn’t create comedy within the play. A similar comment about Bunbury making up his mind ‘whether he will live or die’ can be analysed in the same way but it also provides yet another layer. It…

    • 1400 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    This extract is about Lord Illingworth attempting to make Gerald his heir and offering to marry Mrs Arbuthnot. Lord Illingworth is at a disadvantage from the beginning, he has had to sneak past the maid, only to be spotted in the mirror. Mrs Arbuthnot even speaks with her back to him, a significant violation of etiquette and this shows her power over the situation. Wilde uses many dramatic effects throughout the play to shock and amuse the audience and many of them can be seen in this final scene. The fact that this conversation between Mrs Arbuthnot and Lord Illingworth takes place in Mrs Arbuthnot’s house, her personal space and territory puts her at an advantage and it shows that Lord Illingworth is surrendering his usual control over his situations By Lord Illingworth referring to Mrs Arbuthnot as ‘Rachel’ we are again made aware that we are listening to two people who have a strong past relationship. She calls him ‘George Harford’ while he uses her name far less often that in the persuasive Act 2. During this scene, Lord Illingworth speaks with awareness of the legal situation, he knows he can never make Gerald legitimate but he is willing to leave him property “What more can a gentleman desire in this world?” and Mrs Arbuthnot’s response of “Nothing more, I am quite sure” turns this in to a class confrontation. When Mrs Arbuthnot says “I told you I was not interested, and I beg you to go.” this is a threat to conventional society and the audience would have been shocked by this. She treats Lord Illingworth as he once treated her, in purely financial terms and she tells him that Gerald no longer needs his money, “You come too late. My son has no need of you. You are not necessary.” She then goes on to explain to him that…

    • 1266 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Lady Bracknell afraid if Jack maybe a butler (like maid) in disguise who will wasting her daughter Gwendolen’s wealth. But after several question her fear about that is gone. Only one that disturb her. It’s about Jack class or status. Because Jack was found in the handbag that entrusted in the cloakroom at Victoria Station and was adopted. After Lady Bracknell hear that she immediately rings her bell that made Jack out of the Gwendolen candidate.…

    • 292 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    character in which most of the social norms and values are criticized, this can be seen in Act I where Lady Bracknell has a conversation with Jack to determine whether he is eligible enough to marry Gwendolyn.…

    • 1487 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    "The tone says life is fun. The undertone suggests life is a catastrophe. " How far do you agree with this model of comedy in relation for The Importance of Being Earnest?- Edward Braddock. The Importance of Being Earnest has been described in many ways, some believing that its dialogue is "wittily allusive and understated rather than downright comic" , whereas others believe it is simply a narrative driven by Wilde's deep roots in the Aestheticism movement. Despite the play being a comedy where the status quo remains when the curtain falls, the jovial and fun tones the play appears to have are paralleled by dark undertones- some more subtle than others.…

    • 1579 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Powerful Essays