"False impression[s]": Writing in The Importance of Being Earnest

This article looks at the proliferation of texts which sustain the action in The Importance of Being Earnest, and argues that Wilde's dramatic style of writing is central to both the play's aesthetics and politics. The many written texts in Earnest fail to perform their commonly assigned function of documenting reality. Rather, the play suggests that writing comes first and creates or, to use Wilde's preferred equivocal term, "produces" reality. Writing is thus implicitly endowed with a subversive, potentially emancipatory power. Unsurprisingly, Jack, who lacks a known parentage and writes himself into existence, attracts tie ire of Lady Bracknell, who stands in the place of the absent Father and embodies the Law. This paper suggests, however, that for all her averred conservatism, her discourse nourishes a double entendre which both disqualifies and, covertly, rehabilitates the power of writing and the practice of self-fictionalising, by accommodating the libertarian impulses of the young protagonists within the rigid structures of Victorian society.