In the late-nineteenth-century play, The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde satirizes the society in which he lived, which is now called the Victorian period. This period of the reign of Queen Victoria is characterized by British imperialism and growing power of its empire, extravagance in every aspect of life, aestheticism, and decadence. Society’s values were saturated with indulgence and exaggeration. It was a time of political upheaval, tension between the classes, and massive …showed first 75 words of 1477 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1477 total…Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy, but also a satirical commentary on the society of nineteenth-century Britain. It was a world obsessed with performance and flaunting. It was enveloped in hypocrisy and superficiality. The undermining of Victorian conventions in the play is achieved through the use of dialogue among characters, stereotyping, and discrepancies between appearances and reality. This facilitates the development of the serious observations within the play that Oscar Wilde attempts to deliver.