“We live, I regret to say, in the age of surfaces” (2257). This is what the character Lady Bracknell observes at the conclusion of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. The play as a whole is firmly concerned with the idea of ​​surfaces and their importance in Victorian society, where it must often have seemed (especially to someone as flamboyant as Wilde) that appearance mattered more than anything else. thing. Wilde uses this play to expose some of the flaws of a superficial society - by first exaggerating the influence of frivolity, then making it absurd, and finally unfolding some of its logic to make it both more understandable and more reprehensible. In doing so, he exposes the unnaturalness, even the danger, of a world where exteriors have completely replaced interiors and the surface is all that remains – which is as much a threat today as it was then. Wilde's era. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Lady Bracknell's inquisition on Jack, her daughter's suitor, in Act I, serves as a revealing prototype. Having already questioned Jack about his income, his knowledge and his personal habits, Lady Bracknell now addresses “minor questions”: his background (2232). His first of many criticisms on this subject is a fine example of the baseless social evaluation that Wilde so intelligently criticizes throughout the play. When Jack informs Lady Bracknell that he has "lost" both of his parents, her reaction is not one of sympathy or even curiosity, but rather one of dismay. "Both?" she said. “Losing a parent can be considered a misfortune; losing both feels like negligence” (2232). Lady Bracknell shamelessly blames Jack not for being a smoker, not having politics or knowing nothing, as her interrogation just before this passage revealed, but for having lost his parents - a fault which, unlike all others, appeared entirely. by chance and through no fault of Jack. It is significant that Lady Bracknell uses the word "look" to say that not having parents "looks like carelessness" (in some editions the word is "seems"), because she literally emphasizes the idea of ​​superficial appearances. The Victorian tendency to judge a person's worth based on their lineage was perhaps ostensibly based on a vague idea of ​​inner worth as hereditary, but Wilde here exposes this convention as being based solely on outward presentation. For as Lady Bracknell's order for Jack to produce parents - or rather, she implies, any parents - later shows, she is only interested in someone worth having, based on arbitrary standards that can be met while completely ignoring a person's actual character. . She wants Jack to be someone like her nephew Algernon – who, as she says later in the play, “has nothing, but he has everything.” What more could you want? (2258). If this seems ridiculous, Lady Bracknell's next accusation is even more so. Ernest reveals that he is not only a foundling, but that he was found in a handbag - to which Lady Bracknell responds that "to be born, or at least to have grown up in a handbag, that 'whether it has handles or not, it seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary proprieties of family life which recalls one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution' (2233). Obviously her blaming Jack for being "raised" in a handbag is completely ridiculous, in some ways even more so than her disdain.