Here is the contrarian take, and it is not the one people expect. The Importance of Being Earnest is not Wilde’s best play. It is not his second-best play. It is, however, his most often staged, his most often assigned, his most often quoted, and — because of all of those — the Wilde most readers think they have read when in fact they have read the one they could not avoid.
An Ideal Husband is a better play. Lady Windermere’s Fan is a better play. Salome is a harder and stranger play that would not have survived without him and would not have been attempted without the scandalous reputation Earnest had given him the cover to attempt. De Profundis, which is not a play but a letter from prison, is a better piece of writing than any of the plays, and the argument I would make — if Oscar permitted — is that the letter is where his intelligence finally found its form, after the plays had given him the fame and the plays’ success had given him the confidence to destroy himself in a libel suit.
The case for Earnest: the lines. “The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” “I can resist everything except temptation.” “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” These lines are now fossilized in the language. They have been absorbed into the ambient wit of three generations of English-speaking theater-goers who have never seen the play performed and who cannot remember which Wilde play the line came from. The play is, in that respect, a line-factory, and the lines it factoried are excellent.
The case against Earnest: the play knows it is a line-factory and structures itself around the lines. The plot is deliberately slight. The characters are deliberately paper-thin. The convention of the Victorian drawing-room comedy is the machinery, and Wilde is using the machinery as a delivery system for epigrams without trying to bend the machinery into anything it has not done before. An Ideal Husband bends the machinery. It is a comedy that is secretly a political play about blackmail and marriage and the impossibility of a clean public life. It has the Wilde wit plus an argument. Earnest has the Wilde wit without the argument. The argument is what makes a good play great, and its absence is why a reader who loves Wilde should, having read Earnest first, go read the others immediately and stop letting the one most often assigned stand in for the four.
The other contrarian note: the famous “Bunburying” device — Algernon’s invented invalid friend in the country who lets him escape social obligations in town — is often read, retroactively, as a coded reference to Wilde’s double life as a gay man in Victorian London. I do not buy it. I think the coded reading is the kind of retrofitting a later century does to earlier writers to make them into the kind of writers the later century knows how to honor. Wilde’s double life is all over his work. It is in the seriousness of Dorian Gray. It is in the agony of De Profundis. It is, arguably, in the plot-mechanics of An Ideal Husband. It is not the engine of Earnest. Earnest is a farce. Farces are about social convention, not about the soul. Reading Earnest as an encrypted gay manifesto is a way of taking the play too seriously, which is a way of not letting Wilde be the showman he was actually being when he wrote it.
None of this means you should not read Earnest. You should. It is funny. It is short. Students should encounter it, preferably in a staged version, preferably with a director who trusts the rhythms and does not try to update them. What I am arguing is that Earnest should be the Wilde you finish with, not the Wilde you start with. Start with Dorian Gray, the novel. Read An Ideal Husband second. Read Salome if you are feeling brave. Read De Profundis to understand how the man felt about the life the plays had given him the standing to live. Then read Earnest. It will be funnier. It will be sadder. It will be smaller, in the best way — a small perfect object on the far end of a very specific tragic arc.
The canon has it backward. Wilde’s easiest work is taught first, his hardest work is taught last, and by the time a reader gets to the hard work, the reader has already formed an opinion of Wilde as a wit and a fop. He was a wit and a fop. He was also something else, and the thing else is what makes the wit and the fop matter, and the order of reading is the way the thing else gets found or lost.
A related vagobond.com piece: On Translation and Survival.
Readers and fans of The Importance of Being Earnest will really enjoy Slackville Road — my comic novel about a man constructing a fictional double to escape the life his real one has locked him into. Not quite Bunburying. Same mechanism, different century, different consequences. Have a look and let me know what you think.
CD Damitio writes at indignified.substack.com — essays on utopias, dystopias, and the spaces between. Free to read. No algorithm, no sponsored content. His books can be found on Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/stores/CD-Damitio/author/B001JP7NWA
CD Damitio writes INDIGNIFIED — utopias and dystopias explored. Free to read.
