What is epigram? Discuss the epigrams used in The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

Epigram is a brief and witty statement which is apparently self-contradictory. For example, ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’ (Shelley: “To a Skylark”). Also, ‘I can resist everything except temptation’ – (Oscar Wilde). S.T. Coleridge defined epigram as he wrote one:
“What is an Epigram? a dwarfish whole,
Its body brevity, and wit its soul”

            The Importance of Being Earnest is Oscar Wilde’s most enduringly popular play which is full of epigrams and through these epigrams, Wilde satirizes upper Victorian society. In this play, Wilde touches on many things like women’s education, inheritance of property, marriage, illegitimacy, class distinctions in society, the role of the aristocracy, baptism, food, money etc. and makes fun of almost everything that the society of his time regarded as sacrosanct. It should, however, be conceded that the success of this play is not because of its plot or theme but because of its brilliant and sparkling dialogues, its witticisms, its amazing variety of epigrams and paradoxes.
            Epigrams and aphorisms such as, ‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple’; ‘The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her, if she is pretty, and to someone else, if she is plain’ shock us out of complacency. Sometimes, a profusion of them tire us particularly when all the characters speak in an identical language.
            For instance, Algernon gives a witty turn to some of the well-known sayings – ‘marriages are made in heaven’ is amended by him as: ‘Divorces are made in heaven’.  The saying that ‘two is company and three is none’ undergoes a change and takes the following shape: ‘In married life three is company and two is none’, which has a naughty implication. Algernon shows his talent for paradox when, instead of using the phrase ‘washing one’s dirty linen in public,’ he speaks of ‘washing one’s clean linen in public’. Conversation with Jack, he says – ‘The very essence of romance is uncertainty’; ‘girls never marry the men they flirt with. Girls don’t think it right’; ‘the amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous’.
Conversation with Lady Bracknell, Algernon says, ‘if one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk’. Algernon says to Jack in the reference of the chance of Gwendolen becoming like her mother – ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his’ is also very epigrammatic. In the dispute with Jack about Bunburist, he says – ‘one must be serious about something, if one wants to have any amusement in life’.
            Jack is also a witty man. When Jack meets Algernon, he answers Jack in his question that why he is in town, ‘When one is in town one amuses one’s self. When one is in country one amuses other people’.  On inquiries of Algy about ‘From little Cecily with her fondest love’ – he answers to Algernon – ‘Some aunts are tall, some aunts are not tall... You seem to think that every aunt should be exactly like your aunt’. In the observation of civilized life, Jack says to Algy, ‘I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays… I wish to goodness we had a few fools left’ is also interesting. He also says to Gwendolen and Cecily – ‘it is very painful for me to be forced to speak the truth. It is the first time in my life that I have ever been reduced to such a painful position, and I am really quite inexperienced in doing anything of the kind’.
            Gwendolen contributes to the play a fair number of remarks which are paradoxical and witty. Here are some of those remarks: ‘The old-fashioned respect for the young is fast dying out’; ‘Algy, you always adopt a strictly immoral attitude towards life. You are not old enough to do that’; ‘If you are not too long, I will wait here for you all my life’. She says Cecily in the reference of the duties of man and women – ‘The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man. And certainly once a man begins to neglect his domestic duties he becomes painfully effeminate’. Moreover, she says to Cecily – ‘In matter of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing’.

            Cecily makes a witty and paradoxical remark when she says: ‘Whenever one has anything unpleasant to say, one should always be candid’. Here is another such remark from her: ‘When one is going to lead an entirely new life, one requires regular and wholesome meals’.

            Lady Bracknell too overflows with wit. Examples of her wit are her remarks about Mr. Bunbury, her disapproval of the modern sympathy with invalids in this line – ‘Health is the primary duty of life’ and her description of Jack’s ignorance during her interrogation in ‘Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone’. In case of the female’s age, Lady Bracknell says – ‘no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age’; ‘thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years’.

            Miss Prism, too, gives evidence of a sense of humour and a capacity to make witty observations. In the discussion of literature, she says to Cecily – ‘The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means’ bears the paradoxical meaning. Her remarks to Rev. Chasuble prove her wit: ‘No married man is ever attractive except to his wife’; ‘young woman are green’. She draws the latter metaphor from fruits.

            The characters of this drama display their mental ingenuity in making remarks by a witty and epigrammatic style of expression which makes an audience roar with laughter and Oscar Wilde is an acknowledged master in this field.

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