The decline of Victorian morality described in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

ABSTRACT

Victorian age is a period during Queen Victoria’s reign from her accession to the throne in 1837 until her death in 1901. The age, then, is recognized as the age of change, a change that brought England to its highest point of development as a world power. The material success embodied a formal manner and strict moral code. The moral standard then, called as Victorian morality. Unfortunately, the honored morality became to be declined by the younger generation of late Victorian age. The peak of the phenomenon is found in Victorian nineties which is called as the bridge between the two centuries.

Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy drama which premiered in 1895.The story within the play takes place in elite urban area of London and country house at 1890sVictorian. It tells about Jack Worthing search of identity as the consequence of his proposal to an aristocrat girl, Gwendolen Fairfax. The drama also tells about Jack and Algy who admitted to be named Ernest, a name having similar phonetically to earnest, one of Victorian morality. Not only that, other declining Victorian moralities are also described along the drama. The drama also reflects the real condition of Victorian society and satirizes the declining moralities through mild satire and witty language. Then, the study is aimed to find out the declining Victorian morality in the drama and exploring the satire on real social condition in nineties Victorian.

To achieve those objectives of the study, the researcher applies sociological approach which insists on linking the drama to the social phenomena of Victorian England. Since this study is emphasized on the analysis of a literary work, then, it is classified as literary criticism. The primary data of the study are collected from Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and the secondary data gathered from England’s history in Victorian age in related anthologies of English literature.

Based on the researcher’s analysis, declining Victorian moralities in the drama are: earnestness, responsibility, hard work, and respectability. The decline can be seen through dialogue along the play. From the dialogue, the researcher notices several phenomenons that describe the declining moralities. Not only the major character’s dialogue, Jack, but also the minor character’s dialogue shows the decline, they are: Algy, Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen, and Cecily. Then, the satire on Victorian morality decline is described through the drama’s characterization, plot, and theme of the drama. The characters that represent the morality decline are: Jack, Algy, Lady Bracknell, Cecily, and Gwendolen; mostly from the higher society rank. Meanwhile, the other characters of the drama, Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble, represent the dissimilar view on Victorian morality. The satire then compared to Victorian social condition reflects through 1890s Victorian.