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The Importance of Being Earnest: Characters - Online Term Paper

The Importance of Being Earnest: Characters

Gwendolen Fairfax - Algernon's cousin and Lady Bracknell's daughter. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whom she knows as Ernest. A model and arbiter of high fashion and society, Gwendolen speaks with unassailable authority on matters of taste and morality. She is sophisticated, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and utterly pretentious. Gwendolen is fixated on the name Ernest and says she will not marry a man without that name.

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Cecily Cardew - Jack's ward, the granddaughter of the old gentlemen who found and adopted Jack when Jack was a baby. Cecily is probably the most realistically drawn character in the play. Like Gwendolen, she is ...

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do the same. She has a list of ��eligible young men�� and a prepared interview she gives to potential suitors. Like her nephew, Lady Bracknell is given to making hilarious pronouncements, but where Algernon means to be witty, the humor in Lady Bracknell's speeches is unintentional. Through the figure of Lady Bracknell, Wilde manages to satirize the hypocrisy and stupidity of the British aristocracy. Lady Bracknell values ignorance, which she sees as ��a delicate exotic fruit.�� When she gives a dinner party, she prefers her husband to eat downstairs with the servants. She is cunning, narrow-minded, authoritarian, and possibly the most quotable character in the play.

Miss Prism - Cecily's governess. Miss Prism is an endless source of pedantic bromides and cliches. She highly approves of Jack's presumed respectability and harshly criticizes his ��unfortunate�� brother. Puritan though she is, Miss Prism's severe pronouncements have a way of going so far over the top that they ...

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The Importance of Being Earnest: Characters. (2011, March 7). Retrieved November 28, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Importance-of-Being-Earnest-Characters/95638

"The Importance of Being Earnest: Characters." Essayworld.com. Essayworld.com, 7 Mar. 2011. Web. 28 Nov. 2024. <http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Importance-of-Being-Earnest-Characters/95638>

"The Importance of Being Earnest: Characters." Essayworld.com. March 7, 2011. Accessed November 28, 2024. http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Importance-of-Being-Earnest-Characters/95638.

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 3/7/2011 11:13:02 AM
Submitted By: taaaaaaaammy
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 497
Pages: 2

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