Lady Augusta Bracknell in the Importance of Being Ernest

Lady Augusta Bracknell In The Importance of Being Ernest The most memorable character and one who has a tremendous impact on the audience is Lady Augusta Bracknell. Wilde’s audience would have identified most with her titled position and bearing. Wilde humorously makes her the tool of the conflict, and much of the satire. She serves well the plot and the theme of the play. She is the strong hand who forces the whole play to move forward with a happy ending. . Generally, Lady Bracknell is first and foremost a symbol of Victorian earnestness and the unhappiness it brings as a result. She is powerful, arrogant, ruthless to the extreme, conservative, and proper. In many ways, she represents Wilde’s opinion of Victorian upper-class†¦show more content†¦Such as, Marriage, class discrimination, manners and sincerity. Those themes are presented with the Lady Bracknell’s help. Wilde has created, with Augusta Bracknell, a memorable instrument of his satiric wit, questioning all he sees in Victorian upper-class society. With her power and weakness shown, she, as an upper class lady, connects and presents the themes in the play. Following Lines is a general view of Lady Bracknell’s importance for representing the upper class. The line is immaterial. Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a hand-bag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion - has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now-but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognised position in good society. Wilde packed into this speech Lady Bracknell’s basic social assumptions(‘the ordinary decencies of family life†¦.social indiscretion†¦a recognized positionShow MoreRelatedHw Oscar Wilde Pokes Fun at the Attitudes and Etiquette of the British Aristocracy1671 Words   |  7 Pagesvalues in The Importance of Being Earnest. The title itself represents the irony of the play. The word earnest works on two levels - first the name Ernest, which is the main focus of the play, and also it sounds like honest which is exactly what Jack and Algernon - the two main characters of the play - are not. 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