The Importance of Being Earnest: Drama of Self Assessment

Categories: The Importance of being Earnest

Assessment, Pages 8 (1989 words)

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In this extract from The Importance of Being Earnest, Cecily and Gwendolen realise that they both think they are engaged to Mr Ernest Worthing. They then become embroiled in an argument as to who has the greater claim to being Ernest's fiancée. There is a considerable amount of tension between the two women as they get progressively angrier and angrier with each other. However, being bound by the polite social conventions of polite Victorian England, neither Cecily nor Gwendolen feel able to express their irritation directly.

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As a result of this, the characters engage is a superficially polite conversational encounter, conveying their anger at one another indirectly.

Much of the humour in the passage comes about from the way in which Cecily and Gwendolen remain superficially polite to one another despite their intense dislike of one another. Instead of being openly rude to one another, they flagrantly flout the Gricean maxims, thus maintaining surface-level politeness while being rude below the surface (through the implicatures which follow in context from the maxim flouts - see 4 below).

The servant Merriman is by far the least powerful participant in the extract, since he has only one turn. However, his question about where to put the tea in turn 12 is important as it prompts the change in conversational topic that Cecily and Gwendolen make following that question. This, in turn, (again via Gricean implicature) suggests that Wilde is making fun of the way the two women feel they have to behave in front of a servant (i.

e. with decorum [cf the well-know phrase 'not in front of the servants'], hence their change to the fairly innocuous topic of walking in the country).

Cecily and Gwendolen each have 13 turns, though little can be gleaned from this about their relative power, since they are the only two characters involved in the conversation (Merriman's turn is not directly related to the conversational topic) and it is thus inevitable that they have a roughly equal number of turns each. Their average number of words per turn suggests that they are fairly equally matched in their struggle, there being little significant difference between the two. Cecily speaks 19.5 words per turn whilst Gwendolen has 21.3. Cecily does initiate a new topic twice (in turns 1 and 22) whereas Gwendolen only does this once (turn 13), but this small difference is hardly significant.

What is significant, though, are the terms of address that the characters use when talking to each other. Cecily begins in turn 1 with 'Dearest Gwendolen', whilst Gwendolen addresses Cecily as 'My darling Cecily' in turn 2. The use of a term of endearment + first name typically signals a close relationship, here indicating that the two women are close friends. However, claiming a close social relationship seems rather odd since (a) Cecily and Gwendolen have only just met, and (b) they are clearly at odds with one another (cf. their disagreement over which one of them Ernest is actually engaged to). It would seem that the characters' use of proximal socially deictic terms is just to maintain a superficial air of politeness.

This interpretation is upheld when further on in the extract Gwendolen changes to addressing Cecily as 'Miss Cardew' (turn 8), with Cecily responding in kind and referring to Gwendolen in turn 9 as 'Miss Fairfax' Although title + surname is prototypically a respectful way of addressing someone, the change from the earlier endearment + first name formula indicates a widening distance between the two characters, and is clearly motivated by Cecily's and Gwendolen's increased irritation with one another. The characters' impoliteness, then, is veiled, and to uncover this we need to consider the implicatures that are being generated by the two women's utterances. Before doing that, however, it is worth considering in more detail the face-threatening acts that the characters perform and how the mitigation of these gradually becomes less and less as the scene develops.

As we noted in section 1, Cecily and Gwendolen start their conversation in a relatively polite manner. The terms of address they use for each other indicate a close social relationship, and are also used to show consideration for the other's positive face wants and to mitigate any threat to the other's positive face. For example, turn 2 constitutes a face-threatening act on the part of Gwendolen when she tells Cecily that she is wrong in thinking that Ernest is engaged to her. In order to mitigate this, Gwendolen begins by appealing to Cecily's desire to be liked and approved of, referring to her as 'My darling Cecily'. Gwendolen also mitigates the threat to Cecily's positive face by saying only that there is a 'slight' error. It is also significant that she does not ascribe the error to Cecily (she doesn't openly say 'you are wrong'), but just declares the existence of an unattributed error.

Cecily responds in turn 3 by saying 'I am afraid you must be under some misconception', the apology mitigating the positive face threat of telling Gwendolen in turn that she is wrong, by putting the information inside a nested/embedded Noun Clause, using complex Latinate lexis (cf. 'misconception' vs. 'wrong') and using the semantically more indirect 'are under' rather than 'are'. This mitigation continues in turns 4 and 5, but becomes less veiled in turn 6 when Gwendolen says 'If the poor fellow has been entrapped into any foolish promise I will consider it my duty to rescue him at once'. The presuppositions in Gwendolen's utterance are (a) that marrying Cecily would be a foolish act on Ernest's part and (b) that someone un-named (though the only conceivable candidate is Cecily) must have entrapped him - though all this is made indirect (and so less impolite) through the use of the sentence's conditional structure.

A distinct change in the characters' behaviour towards one another occurs in turns 6 and 7, and is signalled by the change in terms of address we discussed in 2 above. The use of endearment + first name is replaced by title + surname to indicate increasing social distance and to signal their increasing irritation with each other. The entrance of the servant, Merriman, in turn 11 forces the two women to change topic, but despite this they still manage to convey an impolite 'subtext' (Stanislavski 1950: 113) in their conversation. For example, in turn 21 when Gwendolen says, 'Personally, I cannot understand how anybody manages to exist in the country, if anybody who is anybody does', her use of the indefinite pronoun 'anybody' constitutes a flout of the maxim of manner. In saying 'anybody', she is actually referring to Cecily, and suggesting that she is not socially important because she lives outside of London. After al;l, Gwendolen knows no-one who lives in the country, apart from Cecily.

To refer directly to Cecily, though, would be impolite, and by using the indefinite form, Gwendolen can always claim, if challenged, not to have intended the implicature that is generated (this kind of 'social get out' use of the indirect formulae associated with polite linguistic behaviour is common in English). Gricean implicature can thus be used as a 'dagger in a jewelled case'. The behaviour of the characters becomes increasingly impolite throughout the scene, yet the veneer of politeness remains throughout. Turn 25 provides a good example of this. Gwendolen suggests (i.e. implicates - see 4 below) that Cecily is unfashionable by declining her offer of sugar, saying that 'is not fashionable any more'.

Considering how important being seen as fashionable would be to Cecily, this is a huge threat to her positive face. Nonetheless, Gwendolen's rejection is polite on the surface, as her use of the 'No thank you' formula in the same turn indicates. In order to uncover the source of the impoliteness, it becomes necessary to consider the flouts of the Gricean maxims that the characters are making, and we turn to this below. It is the underlying meanings in the conversation between Cecily and Gwendolen that convey the characters' impoliteness towards each other, and these underlying meanings - or implicatures, as Grice (1975) would call them - are generated by the characters flouting the four Gricean maxims of Quality, Quantity, Relation and Manner. In turn 4, for example, Gwendolen flouts the maxim of quality to implicate how exceptional and independent-minded she is when she says that she never travels without her diary because 'one should always have something sensational to read on a train'.

However sensational the contents of her diary might be, they can hardly be sensational to her, as she write them. This flout of the quality maxim also prompts us to smile at her over-inflated view of her own significance and independence. Turn 10 ('It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different'), is a good example of Gwendolen flouting the maxims of manner (she could easily have said what she says more directly and simply) and quantity (it must be obvious to them both that they come from different social spheres as one of them lives in London, and the other in the country) to implicate the fact that her upbringing was socially superior to Cecily's. Also in turn 10, Gwendolen wilfully interprets Cecily's metaphorical expression from turn 9 ('When I see a spade I call it a spade') as literal, but then in turn flouts the maxim of quality in her put down of Cecily.

Cecily also flouts the Gricean maxims to insult Gwendolen surreptitiously. In turn 18, for example, she responds to Gwendolen's supposed surprise at the number of flowers in the countryside by saying 'Oh, flowers are as common here, Miss Fairfax, as people are in London'. This flout of the maxims of manner and quantity implicates that people who live in London are less interesting than people who live in the country, because there are so many of them. The flout also plays on the word 'common'; Cecily's intended meaning is likely to be that people who live in London are 'common' in the social sense of being unrefined and ill-mannered.

In turns 25 and 27, Gwendolen implicates that Cecily is not as stylish as her, by telling her that sugar is no longer fashionable and that cake 'is rarely seen at the best houses nowadays'. This flout of the maxim of manner clearly arises because Gwendolen is trying to veil her comments with surface level politeness, in order to maintain the manner of a 'lady'. The implicature, though, is recoverable by Cecily, but by flouting the maxim of manner Gwendolen would be able to deny the implicature, should Cecily accuse her of making it.

Although the two young women seem equally matched in terms of their terms-of-address, their turn-taking patterns and their attempt to be 'politely rude' to one another, it is arguable that Gwendolen wins the linguistic contest in this extract 'on points'. Towards the end, the stage directions suggest that Cecily probably feels she in losing. Otherwise she would not have had to resort to rather crude, non-linguistic means of annoying Gwendolen, by over-sugaring her tea when she indicates in a slighting way that she doesn't want any sugar, and by giving her cake when she indicates, again in a slighting way, that she wants bread and butter. This is hardly polite social behaviour, whatever the flavour of the conversation!

Although we have not had the space to provide a detailed politeness and implicature analysis of each turn, a stylistic analysis of salient and typical parts of Cecily's and Gwendolen's conversation in this extract from The Importance of Being Earnest shows how the characters are able to retain a superficial air of politeness whilst conveying an extremely impolite subtext. Their flouts of the Gricean maxims are used to avoid direct impoliteness, whilst their exploitation of face-saving strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987) maintains the illusion of polite, socially acceptable dialogue. Nevertheless, the characters' use of socially distant terms of address and non-linguistic actions (e.g. Cecily's over-sugaring of Gwendolen's tea) indicate their increasing annoyance with each other, but it is Cecily and Gwendolen's underhand methods of conveying impoliteness that contribute to much of the humour of the scene.