We see in the play that family life is in no way your
conventional ideal of what we would call a nuclear family today. There are seldom any
mentions of a "normal" family in the play.
We know that
Lady Bracknell despises her husband in how she continuously puns at not having space for
him at the dinner table, but that it would not matter to him whether to be there or
not.
We also know that Gwendolyn hardly mentions her
father but once (when she met Cecily) and then she shun him off in the conversation as
someone not worthy talking about.
Lady Bracknell and
Gwendolyn are the closest sample of "natural" family, and still what we see is that
theirs is a relationship in which the mother controls the daughter for the purpose of
grooming her for a rich marriage.
Ernest is a ward to
Cecily Cardew. Since he was found inside a bag at Victoria Station by Cecily's rich
grandfather, this man raised Ernest as his own child, and left him in charge of Cecily
and the estate after he died. Here we also see a rare family circle composed of a man
who was once found and abandoned taking care of a girl whose parents are also
unmentioned in the play.
Finally, we have the actual
Worthing family. We know that Miss Prism used to be Jack's governess when he was a baby
and worked for his family. We know that she took him in a perambulator down to Victoria
Station and "accidentally" left the baby, and not her manuscript, inside the back she
checked in. We assume that Prism had gone to the Station to escape and publish her
manuscript, leaving the baby behind. Yet, as she was confronted years later about the
whereabouts of the baby, she could not answer. We do not know either what was the
reaction of Jack's parents upon the loss of the baby. Another odd family practice in the
play.
In the end, we know that Lady Bracknell was the
sister of Jack's mother (and Jack's aunt), that Algernon is then Jack's brother, and
that Jack's father's real name was Ernest and that he was a soldier at one point. Yet,
still nothing else remains to be said about family in general: Other that, In
the Importance of Being Earnest a family is as functional as its members.
Hence, there are no functional families in the play.
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