If an element of seriousness can be identified in this play, it may be what Eric Bentley in The Playwright as Thinker called “a pseudo-irresponsible jabbing at all the great problems.”
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscars Wilde’s main goal is seemingly to make a great deal of trivial matters and vastly overlook great matters. I do believe Wilde wrote the play as a mockery of Victorian society and its inhabitants. People of the era had rigid values and beliefs – those clearly Wilde disagreed with.
Eric Bentley declared that Wilde’s play presents “a pseudo-irresponsible jabbing at all the great problems.” Wilde manages to take matters of great importance, but present them in a way that they seem frivolous. Wilde toys with the concept of marriage. The play itself is one of pairs; every character has a partner. While the plot seems to run around in circles, in the end each character gets their happy ending, eventually marrying their aforementioned partner.
While marriage would have been a serious matter in the era – resembling something closer to a business proposal than the eternal unification of two lovers – Wilde manages to make a practical joke of it, insulting the themes behind marriage without letting the audience detect it. The characters in the play fall in love in a matter of seconds. There does not seem to be any legitimate emotional connection between them, aside from the fact that they merely decided they wanted each other, and will now stop at nothing to get what they want. Perhaps Wilde jabs at marriage in this way because marriage for the sake of love itself is not something he will ever be able to experience, with his own sexual preferences being shunned in society.
On this note, Wilde does manage to cleverly hide themes in the play that would have repulsed the Victorian audience – like a personal disguised rebellion against society and their views. While the play and the interactions between its characters are outwardly heterosexual, there does seem to be a certain ‘gayness’ to the play. Algernon and Jack have a persistent physical intimacy – chasing each other, and playfully snatching things from one another. They take rather feminine roles (by the standards of that era), lacking the air of formality and purpose men of those times adopted, and discussed rather trivial matters instead, as women were expected to.