Dishonesty

Lying is one of the hardest habits to break. The characters in The Importance of Being Earnest have an especially difficult time being honest, but I don't think they mind it at all. The dishonesty of the characters adds a lot of humor to the book. When the characters dislike each other they pretend as if they do, being so overly polite that it is repulsive, but funny! The characters believe that marriage is something that is to be very sudden, and that you are not supposed to get to know your partner very much before you are tied together. The characters know nothing about the ones they love, mostly because they are always lying about everything. Jack, the main character, lies about his name being Earnest, which is funny because an earnest person would never lie about a thing like that.

Wilde is making fun of the people in the upper class during the Victorian Era. Though they are always lying, they are all too superficial to look into the lies. Wilde uses humor to portray a more serious matter, that lying was a huge issue then. No one cared about the real personalities of others, they just based all their views on what they saw on the outside, without putting a second thought into it.