Literature: Sentences

Gwen Harwood

Gwen Harwood's "Suburban Sonnet" reveals a poignant critique of the societal expectations placed on women in 1960s Australia. Harwood, writing under the pseudonym Miriam Stone, explores the suffocating domestic roles that trap women, stripping them of their individuality and ambitions. The poem reflects the broader cultural and historical context of the time, when women were often confined to the roles of wife and mother, with limited opportunities for personal or professional fulfillment. 

Dandy

The character of the dandy was heavily autobiographical and often a stand-in for Wilde himself, a witty, overdressed, self-styled philosopher who speaks in epigrams and paradoxes, ridicules the cant and hypocrisy of society’s moral arbiters, and self-deprecatingly presents himself as trivial, shallow, and ineffectual. 

Lady Bracknell

Lady Bracknell is a character who serves as the embodiment of the rigid, hypocritical social mores of the Victorian upper class. Portrayed with a delightful blend of imperious condescension and caustic wit, Lady Bracknell portrays the quintessential aristocratic respectability, her very utterance a scathing indictment of the perceived moral and social transgressions of those around her. 

Lady Bracknell class

Wilde’s masterful characterisation of Lady Bracknell allows the audience to glimpse the insecurities and anxieties that drive her relentless pursuit of social dominance, revealing the profound hollowness at the heart of the Victorian aristocratic ideal. 

Algernon character

Algernon is intricately crafted by Oscar Wilde to serve as a vehicle for satirising both the frivolity and entrapment within the upper class of Victorian society. On one hand, Algernon embodies the frivolous and hedonistic tendencies often associated with the upper class. However, beneath Algernon’s facade of carefree indulgence lies a deeper sense of entrapment within the constraints of social convention. This is satirised by the farcical epigram of “Bunburying.”   

Algernon

Algernon is a stereotypical dandy, serving as a complex and multifaceted representation of the Victorian era, embodying its superficiality, hedonism, social critique and penchant for deception. 

Jack Worthing

Jack Worthing, the play’s ostensible protagonist, appears to embody the quintessential Victorian gentleman; firmly committed to the rituals and social mores of the aristocratic elite. However, as the plot unfolds, Worthing’s carefully cultivated facade reveals a more complex and multifaceted individual.   

Lady Bracknell facade

Yet, beneath Lady Bracknell’s imperious veneer lies a deeply conflicted individual, one who is haunted by the spectre of her own murky, lower-class status as cracks in her facade of respectability that she so zealously guards as she does "not approve of mercenary marriages,” despite once having “no fortune of any kind.” 

Class critique Wilde

At the core of Wilde’s scathing satire lies a profound challenge to the rigid moral code and sanctimonious social pretensions of the Victorian bourgeoisie and blatantly disregard the conventional virtues. Wilde subverts the status quo and lays bare the inherent contradictions of Victorian bourgeois morality.