Marriage

Marriage

1. Lane: I have often observed that in married households the champagne is rarely of a first-rate brand. Algernon: Good heavens! Is marriage so demoralising as that?

   • pg 11-12
   • first mention of marriage in the play
     • shows the audience that this play isn't going to have any deeper meaning than simply surface level comedy
   • Marriage is typically thought of morally upright, with either partner in the marriage becoming more restrained and morally right than they were when single
     • the use of the adjective 'demoralising' contrasts yet again to the audiences initial presumption
   • presentation of the themes: triviality vs seriousness and food
     • Algernon treats the trivial matter of food as the most serious thing throughout the play
       • comedic effect is created through the ridiculousness of his question
       • perhaps to emphasise his lack of anything truly important in his life e.g a job and that instead he spends all his time socialising
       • could also demonstrate the greed and hedonistic lives of the upperclass
         • as a member of the aesthetic movement Wilde would have socialised a lot with the wealthy upperclass who liked pleasure for being pleasurable

2. Jack: I have come up to town expressly to propose to her. Algernon: I thought you had come up for pleasure? ... I call that business.

3. Algernon: Divorces are made in Heaven -

4. Algernon: She will place me next Mary Farquhar, who always flirts with her own husband across the dinner table. That is not very pleasant. Indeed, it is not even decent ... and that sort of thing is enormously on the rise. The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public.

   • pg 19
   • hyperbolic
     • shows that he has no understanding of marriage
   • misuses a popular colloquialism 'washing one's dirty linen in public' verb 'clean' has connotations of pure, plain and perfect
     • there is nothing to gossip about: suggests that gossiping is the main past time of the upper classes

5. Algernon: in married life three is company and two is none.

   • pg 20
   • theme: trivialising serious matters
   • Algernon has no moral stance
     • seems to suffer very little from the consequences of his actions
       • Wilde may be arguing that the upper classes can afford to not be subject to morality as they cannot be touched by gossip (newspapers would never report on their activities) and they won't be arrested (they would bribe people)
   • Algernon: A man who marries without knowing Bunbury has a very tedious time of it.
     • pg 20
     • veiled reference to Homosexuality
     • alliteration 'tedious time of it' cold, harsh sound
       • emphasises how marriage can be harsh, so a person needs an escape from their spouse, often in the form of another secret life
   • monosyllabic ending emphasises the lack of people in a marriage with two people
     • affairs and mistresses were incredibly common and ordinary within this period

6. Lady Bracknell: I was obliged to call on dear Lady Harbury. I hadn't been there since her poor husband's death. I never saw a woman so altered; she looks quite twenty years younger.

   • pg 21
   • the verb 'obliged' has connotations of duty, service and self-sacrifice
     • this demonstrates the duty she has as a powerful and high status woman in the upperclass, because she's expected to know everything and everyone
       • perhaps also the expected maternal duty to be loving and caring, although she subverts this
   • the use of the hyperbole with the verb 'altered' has connotations of a huge change, tailoring
     • by having it be objective and give no opinion the audience are allowed to follow their normal beliefs that she'd be devastated
       • emphasises the contrast between the audiences expectations and the positive connotations of 'twenty years younger' e.g youth, beauty
         • youth has always been a desired quality and closely linked with beauty
       • thus creating comedic effect

7. Lady Bracknell: Your uncle would have to dine upstairs. Fortunately he is accustomed to that.

   • pg 22
   • Lord Bracknell is presented as an invalid through the use of the verb 'accustomed' which has connotations of regular, normal and unsurprising
     • Victorian fiction abounds with invalid women, as in victorian Britain where upper and middle class women had relatively little autonomy and independence, one way they were able to assert control over their lives was to retire into the life of an invalid.
       • Lord Bracknell's ill health therefore represents a comic reversal of the presumption of feminine invalidity and implies his emasculation by his formidable wife.

8. Lady Bracknell: to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel.

   • pg 32
   • noun 'alliance' has connotations of military, power and importance. Completely juxtaposed by the mundaneness of the noun 'parcel'
     • emphasises the ridiculousness of the situation to her
     • highlights that marriages were frequently for unromantic reasons e.g money, power, status within the victorian period (Lady Bracknell herself is an example of the new social climbing marriages)
       • was becoming increasingly common for rich american heiresses to marry english aristocrats in order to gain a title and lands, whilst their money was used to maintain everything
         • many aristocrats had no liquidated wealth

9. Miss Prism: No married man is ever attractive except to his wife. Chasuble: And often, I've been told, not even to her.

   • pg 46
   • predominantly monosyllabic sentence highlights adverb 'even'
     • emphasises the ridiculousness of the statement and how unusual the revelation is
   • Wilde himself, as a gay man, had strained relations with his wife therefore would have had little intimacy with her. Also would have been very social and likely to have met such couples, particularly if they didn't marry for romantic reasons

10. Lady Bracknell: When I married Lord Bracknell I had no fortune of any kind. But i never dreamed for a moment of allowing that to stand in my way.

    • Act 3
    • clearly presents fin de siecle juxtaposition: she is a perfect example of people marrying to raise their social status enabled by the increasingly liberal society, but also is very traditional and wants to maintain societal order for fear of too great a change
    • refers to her husband by his title
      • shows the lack of intimacy between them
      • shows what his most important feature is to her
    • portrays her as being quite masculine: determined, aggressive, not only equal but superior to men in the play who fear her