Fact vs. Fiction in Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest"

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Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Drama em Língua Inglesa
Professora: Michela Rosa Di Candia 
Aluno: Marcelo Ferreira de Sá Freire 
Fact vs. fiction in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest
The Importance of Being Earnest is a fictional play written by the British author Oscar Wilde in 1894. The play was written during the intellectual movement of the Aestheticism (being Oscar Wilde one of the leaders of that movement), which opposed the Victorian view of art that believed that art should have a moralizing positive influence. The Aesthetic movement proposed that art should be valued for its beauty alone – art for art’s sake. The play’s script explored different themes that relate to this mantra, and one of them is the relationship between art and life – Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Wilde approached this relationship through the conflict that arises when fact collides with fiction. All of this can be seen when the fictional personas created by Jack and Algernon begin to have a huge influence on the events that are going to take place in the play. Therefore, in the present paper, I intend to briefly analyze how these characters blend fact and fiction together by creating the personas of “Earnest” and “Bunbury”. 
Following the plot of the play, we see that Jack creates his fictional brother Earnest so that he could leave the country, where he was Cecily’s guardian. Under the excuse that he had to take care of his sick brother, he can escape to town, where he can seduce Gwendolen and entertain himself with the extravagant city life. Similarly to Jack, Algernon creates his fictional invalid friend Bunbury so that he can have an excuse to escape from the city when he does not want to follow the social expectations of that kind of life. Referring to Jack’s double identity, Algernon mentions: “Besides, now that I know you to be a confirmed Bunburyist I naturally want to talk to you about Bunburying. I want to tell you the rules” (p.56). The fact that Algernon coined the terms “Bunburying” and “Bunburyist” after his invented friend to describe such impersonations reveals the dishonest, as well as the fictive quality of Jack and Algernon’s actions. 
One scene that is interesting to analyze happens in the second act when Algernon – pretending to be Earnest – goes for a visit to Jack’s country house, and there, he first meets Cecily. 
ALGERNON (Raising his hat)
You are my little cousin Cecily, I’m sure. 
CECILY
You are under some strange mistake. I am not little. In fact, I believe I am more than usually tall for my age (ALGERNON is rather taken aback). But I am your cousin Cecily. You, I see from your card, are Uncle Jack’s brother, my cousin Ernest, my wicked cousin Ernest. (p.86) 
Algernon uses the tools of Jack’s deception – he presents his business card; it is the same card Jack stored in his cigarette case – to assume “Ernest’s” identity. Algernon brings this fictional persona into reality, showing the fluid borders between fact and fiction. After that, the plot begins to curl as Jack tells Miss Prism that his brother Earnest was dead and just a few moments after that Cecily appears telling that Earnest (being impersonated by Algernon) was actually at their house. Algernon, playing the role of Ernest, demonstrates the collision between fact and fiction. Jack must confront a real-life Ernest, distorting the truth even more and blurring the contours of his double identity.
By the conclusion of the play, after all the truth about Jack’s real identity and family is revealed the line between fact and fiction become even more fluid than before. When they discover that Jack’s name was actually Earnest, it is mentioned: 
GWENDOLEN
Ernest! My own Ernest! I felt from the first that you could have no other name!
JACK
Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me? (p.146)
The verification of Jack’s lies with concrete proof of their legitimacy makes his fictional life a genuine reality. By pretending to be “Ernest,” Jack’s art of deception has actually become “earnest,” or a sincere depiction of his real life as it is. His life is his fiction; his fiction is his life. Ultimately, the play’s main characters engage in the attractive art of fabrication not just to live their fantasies, but also to try create a reality that is more like fiction. The boundaries between fact and fiction blurs when the name of the invented persona “Ernest” turns out to be Jack’s real birth name. In this way, Wilde does not just question whether art imitates life, or life imitates art, but suggests that life itself is an artifice, quite literally a making of art.