THE PARADOX OF VICTORIAN ENGLAND Throughout The Importance of Being Earnest, the characters construct a world that is filled with exaggeration, irony, and absurdity; this world’s humor casts a spell on the audience, which paradoxically is created through an exaggeration of the very world the Victorian audience lives in. Thus, Oscar Wilde’s social criticism is made doubly ironic; his criticisms include those of the Victorian ideas of marriage, class, morality, and the appearance …showed first 75 words of 896 total…

…showed last 75 words of 896 total…Importance of Being Earnest depicts a world that satirizes Victorian England; a world in which the best kept secrets are the ones that everyone knows; a world in which everyone knows very well that their world is not as stable, as exclusive, or as moral as it pretends to be; and a world in which everyone appreciates the vital importance of maintaining at all cost what they know to be the fictions of everyday life.