My UWCSEA Learning Journey

By reading The Importance Of Being Earnest, we can fully visualise how Wilde’s satirical criticism of love in society and representation of human desires and pretences are paralleled, exemplified and emphasised by Alison Bechdel’s representation of her parents and their marriage in Fun Home.

Wilde’s key critiques of of love and society are isolated and drawn out by Bechdel in Fun Home when she illustrates the time she helped her mother, Helen, in revising her lines as Lady Bracknell in the play. Bechdel depicts the superficial and insubstantial relationships of love and marriage when Helen quotes Lady Bracknell’s statement ‘engagements should come on young girls as a surprise’ and Alison adds ‘pleasant or unpleasant as that may be’. Through this statement, Wilde comments on the fake nature of marriage in society as they are built on duty and force rather being being ‘true love’, and, the gender-biased subjection of women into marital commitments with or without their approval of it. By knowing Wilde’s deeper message in this statement, and the context in which is used in his play, we can see how Bechdel’s parents exemplify this sadly realistic issue of commitment as Helen did not know of Bruce’s homosexuality before they were engaged, yet because of duty, she married him. 

In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde normalises living in a ‘facade’ as seen by Jack leading a dual-life by being ‘Earnest in the city, Jack in the town’ and Algernon being a ‘bunburyist’ to escape his family. In Fun Home, Bechdel describes how her mother was so dishevelled that she was ‘literally holding herself together’, however, in her publicity shots ‘she was a Victorian dominatrix to rival Wilde himself’. This drastic contrast in the portrayal of her mother in private and public enhances Wilde’s comment on living or projecting a ‘facade’ of oneself and we are able to see the parallels Helen has with Jack and Algernon when she is off and on the stage. Furthermore, Bechdel’s portrayal of her mother’s change in character shows that Helen uses the role of Lady Bracknell to feel like someone that she is not, but wants to be, just like Jack calling himself ‘Ernest’ to seem more morally superior. Lady Bracknell is a matriarch who controls her family, she decides who marries who, and upholds everyone to behave in a ‘socially acceptable’ manner. Bechdel’s mother on the other hand, has power under the dominant rule of Bruce, who controls every aspect of living in the house. As Bechdel narrated that she loved ‘seeing her’ mother ‘in character’ and describes how family friends mentioned how she was ‘perfect for the role’, it could be understood that, through playing the role of Lady Bracknell, we can see how her mother wanted to take back her life, family and home again, using the role of Lady Bracknell to help her feel in charge of her dire and hopeless situation. 

Another implicit undertone in Wilde’s work is the references to homosexuality or desire. In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde depicts Algernon’s intense ‘gluttony’ in the instance when Algernon selfishly eats all ‘cucumber sandwiches’ he was supposedly ‘saving’ for Lady Bracknell. In fun home, Bechdel mentions how ‘illicit desire’ (presumably homosexuality) ‘is encoded’ as Algernon’s gluttony by Wilde. She later reveals that in the process of finding ‘a prop sandwich’ to use in the play, her father, Bruce, ate the cucumber sandwiches ‘faster than’ they could ‘be made’ in a similar manner to Algernon. By portraying Bruce in a gluttonous light, his insatiable appetite could be compared and inferred to be his consuming desire to romance young boys. (A question that could be asked here from a queer theorist point on view is why these works both represent homosexuality as a ‘dark desire’). Interestingly, Bechdel presents another parallel between Bruce’s homosexual life at the time of Helen’s production and Wilde’s homosexual life at the time The Importance of Being Earnest opened. During this period, Bruce’s ‘secret’ (of being a homosexual) ‘had almost surfaced’ as he was investigated by the police and the court for ‘picking up and offering a young boy beer’, whilst, Wilde, during his opening, was when ‘Wilde’s trial begun’ for ‘disporting himself with the local boys’. Without knowing the contextual details of Wilde’s life and the implicit nature of homosexuality in The Importance of Being Earnest, the parallels Bechdel draws out with regards to homosexuality in the work and in her own life would not be seen.

Satire is the use of humour, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticise group’s stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues.

• Exaggeration
• Caricatures
• Irony
• Incongruity
• Reversal
• Parody

• Reversal seen when Algernon states that the lower class should be ‘role models’ to the upper class of society.

Feminist gender theory is postmodern in that it challenges the paradigms and intellectual premises of western thought, but also takes an activist stance by proposing frequent interventions meant to change the social order. Masculine gender theory as a focuses largely on social, literary, and historical accounts of the construction of male gender identities, tending to serve primarily as an indictment rather than a validation of male gender practices and masculinity.

“Queer theory” questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generated by normative (that is, what is considered “normal”) sexual ideology. To “queer” becomes an act by which stable boundaries of sexual identity are transgressed, reversed, mimicked, or otherwise critiqued.