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Victorian Earnestness

1‘The one thing, as Macaulay would have put it, which every schoolboy knows about the Victorians is that they were earnest’. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, that means they were ‘serious, not frivolous; showing sincere and intense feeling or conviction; lacking playfulness’.1 Earnestness is quintessentially Victorian. How could it not but be included in this glossary compiled by the editors of the Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens to celebrate the 100th issue? Of course, earnestness has already been thoroughly studied: the opening quotation here is taken from the beginning of Walter E. Houghton’s chapter on ‘Earnestness’ in his monograph The Victorian Frame of Mind (Houghton 218). His study of the moral attitudes of the Victorians had been preceded by Esmé Cecil Wingfield-Stratford’s social history of Those Earnest Victorians focusing on middle class supremacy, and was followed in 1961 by Robert A. Rosenbaum’s Earnest Victorians which, as its subtitle specifies, presents ‘six great Victorians in their own words and those of their contemporaries’: Lord Ashley, John Henry Newman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Charles Darwin and Charles George Gordon. Two more eminent Victorians deserve a place in that portrait gallery given their industry, self-denial and moral discipline: Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin. Earnestness rules their lives and dictates their work. Snippets from Carlyle’s biography of the author John Sterling (1806–1844) could even be mistaken as self-portraiture: ‘he read a good deal,—earnest books; the Bible, most earnest of books, his chief favourite’ (Carlyle 330‒31). John Ruskin’s advice to budding artists amounts to the injunction ‘be earnest’, as he writes that they should go to Nature in all singleness of heart, and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, and remember her instruction; rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing; believing all things to be right and good, and rejoicing always in the truth (Ruskin 624).

2My objective here is to return to the two authors I have written about in previous issues of the Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens—Charlotte Brontë and Oscar Wilde—to consider what they have to say about ‘earnestness’. Wingfield-Stratford refers to both of them in Those Earnest Victorians. He rejects the stereotyped image of the Victorian woman as ‘hopelessly inferior physically and intellectually, her status relatively servile, and her usefulness bounded by such futilities as working cross-stich’ (Wingfield-Stratford 174), citing Brontë’s name in what he considers ‘the most brilliant galaxy of feminine genius’ (Wingfield-Stratford 174). Brontë’s Jane Eyre portrays an independent woman, who rebels against Victorian earnestness from the first page of the novel onwards. As a spirited young girl, Jane is disciplined by her aunt who excludes her from the family circle until she is seen ‘endeavouring in good earnest to acquire a more sociable and childlike disposition’ (Brontë 5). Later in life, Jane is courted by her cousin St John Rivers whose ulterior motive is to make her a partner in his evangelical mission. Jane rejects his proposal, recognizing that his love of God is greater than his purported love for her. She realizes that for him, ‘Earnestness is ever deeply solemn’ (Brontë 356): when he reads from the book of Revelation, A calm, subdued triumph, blent with a longing earnestness, marked his enunciation of the last glorious verses of that chapter.’ (Brontë 355); when he prays ‘all his energy gathered—all his stern zeal woke: he was in deep earnest, wrestling with God, and resolved on a conquest’ (Brontë 355).

3Wilde figures in Wingfield-Stratford’s Those Earnest Victorians, amongst other writers who broke away from Victorian morality. He imagines Wilde with a ‘suppressed yawn’ (Wingfield-Stratford 325), expressing his mode of ennui and his sense of disenchantment. That characterises his attitude towards earnestness, which he associates with plainness and tedium in his fiction, for example in The Picture of Dorian Gray when he has Lord Henry Wotton sit next to:

one of his aunt’s oldest friends, a perfect saint amongst women, but so dreadfully dowdy that she reminded one of a badly bound hymn-book. Fortunately for him she had on the other side Lord Faudel, a most intelligent middle-aged mediocrity, as bald as a Ministerial statement in the House of Commons, with whom she was conversing in that intensely earnest manner which is the one unpardonable error, as he remarked once himself, that all really good people fall into, and from which none of them ever quite escape. (Wilde 1891, 35‒36)

4Lord Henry has a preconceived image of Dorian Gray, based on his aunt’s description of him: ‘She said that he was very earnest, and had a beautiful nature. I at once pictured to myself a creature with spectacles and lank hair, horribly freckled, and tramping about on huge feet’ (Wilde 16). Lord Henry has no interest in meeting this earnest man whom he pictures as ungainly. The narrative will reveal that his nature is far from beautiful, and the subtext will hint at his ‘earnestness’ used as a code-word to mean his attractiveness to men, in particular, and their ensuing homosexual relationships.

A Play on the Word ‘Earnest’

5Wilde’s last comedy, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), resonates with several meanings of the word ‘earnest’. A few months before finishing the script, on 25 October 1894, Wilde wrote to George Alexander ‘When you read the play, you will see the punning title’s meaning’ (Wilde 2000, 620). It plays on the homophony of the adjective ‘earnest’ and the Christian name Ernest. In the subtitle of the play, Wilde hints at the etymology of the English adjective ‘earnest’, derived from the German ernst, meaning ‘serious’: ‘A trivial comedy for serious people’. The two lead male characters—Jack and Algernon—both adopt the name of Ernest, masking their identity behind a name which seduces the two main female characters, Gwendolen and Cecily. Even though Gwendolen has only a superficial acquaintance with ‘Ernest’ (Jack) Worthing, the name she knows him under ‘inspires absolute confidence’ (Wilde 1895, 15). She draws the conclusion from his name alone that he embodies earnestness: ‘Ernest has a strong upright nature. He is the very soul of truth and honour. Disloyalty would be as impossible to him as deception’ (Wilde 1895, 39). Somewhat less Victorian is the sensuous pleasure both girls derive from the deceptively ‘safe’ name of Ernest (Wilde 1895, 15), which has a ‘music of its own’ and even produces ‘vibrations’ (Wilde 1895, 15). The crux of the comedy is that both girls are duped: neither suitor is named Ernest, at least until the concluding deus ex machina reveals that it is in fact Jack’s real name.

6The comedy’s encoded subtext further mocks the way the young ladies sanctify the name of ‘Ernest’, which invokes for them a male ideal. It is plausible that Wilde was also playing on the phonic resemblance of ‘earnest’ and ‘uranist’, meaning homosexual. The term ‘Urning’, coined by the Austrian sexologist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in 1864, derives from Plato’s Symposium in which Pausanias argues that celestial love—protected by the goddess Aphrodite Urania—is of a higher order than ordinary heterosexuality. ‘Urning’ was first used in English in 1883, followed notably in 1892 in Charles Gilbert Chaddock’s translation of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis: ‘The urning loves and deifies the male object of his affections’ (Krafft-Ebing 255).Uranist’ and ‘Uranian’ were used in the 1890s to refer to homosexuality, by Wilde himself in a letter written after his release from prison, in reference to his resumed love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas whom he nicknamed Bosie:

It is very unfair of people being horrid to me about Bosie and Naples. A patriot put in prison for loving his country loves his country, and a poet put in prison for loving boys loves boys. To have altered my life would have been to have admitted that Uranian love is ignoble. I hold it to be noble—more noble than other forms. (Wilde 2000, 1019)

  • 2 Timothy d’Arch Smith uses Nicholson’s title for his monograph Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Li (...)

7Wilde was not the first to use the paronym earnest/uranist: credit goes to G. F. Nicholson who in 1892 had published a collection of poems entitled Love in Earnest.2 Wilde knew Nicholson, a recognised gay author, as he contributed to the one and only issue of The Chameleon, a forum for homosexual writing published two years later, in 1894. The ballad entitled ‘Of Boys’ Names’ in Nicholson’s Love in Earnest is dedicated to ‘W. E. M.’, the initials of the flaxen-haired, blue-eyed William Ernest Mather, son of a liberal MP, and a pupil of Nicholson’s at Rydal Mount School from 1888–90. The closing quatrain leaves little doubt about the poet’s homoerotic intent:

My little Prince, Love’s mystic spell
Light all the letters of your name,
And you, if no one else, can tell
Why Ernest sets my heart a-flame.
(Nicholson 62)

  • 3 Quoted by Christopher Craft in ‘Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Ea (...)
  • 4 See The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. IX : Plays 2. Ed. Joseph Donohue. Oxford : OUP, 2019, p (...)

8Nicholson’s volume caught the attention of the fin-de-siècle homosexual community in London. John Addington Symonds clearly understood the poet’s punning intention, as shortly after its publication, on 2 July 1892, he wrote to a friend: ‘Have you read a volume of sonnets called “Love in Earnest”? It is written by a Schoolmaster in love with a boy called Ernest’.3 Wilde also picked up on the poem’s homophilic tenor, as Christopher Craft persuasively argues in his article ‘Alias Bunbury’. He suggests that Wilde is alluding to Nicholson’s poem in The Importance of Being Earnest when he scripts Algernon’s quip about ‘these chaps, the minor poets [who] are never even quoted’, though Wilde deletes the reference from the final version of the play.4

9Wilde’s play parodying Victorian earnestness thus resonates with an uranist subtext. It also contrasts English earnestness with French licentiousness and immorality, associating France and things French with sexual inversion.

Encoded in French

10Using French as a code language is the focus of several articles in Foreign Words in Victorian and Edwardian Literature/Emprunts et empreintes de la langue étrangère dans la littérature victorienne et édouardienne (Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 78, 2013). It included my article ‘The French “aire” in Jane Eyre’, in which I consider Adèle as the embodiment of things French. She is diametrically opposed to the values of earnestness: the fruit of an illicit love affair which took place in Paris, she has inherited a frivolous interest in her appearance. In the following passage, Jane witnesses how Adèle flouts Victorian earnestness in the way she favours the trivial:

‘What is it, Adèle?’
‘Est-ce que je ne puis pas prendre une seule de ces fleurs magnifiques, mademoiselle? Seulement pour compléter ma toilette.’
‘You think too much of your “toilette,” Adèle: but you may have a flower.’ And I took a rose from a vase and fastened it in her sash. She sighed a sigh of ineffable satisfaction, as if her cup of happiness were now full. I turned my face away to conceal a smile I could not suppress: there was something ludicrous as well as painful in the little Parisienne’s earnest and innate devotion to matters of dress. (Brontë 145)

11Adèle’s superficiality exemplifies Lady Bracknell’s pronouncement in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces’. (Wilde 1895, 51). Lady Bracknell equates that superficiality with the French in her comment on how Cecily’s natural appearance could be altered: ‘A thoroughly experienced French maid produces a really marvellous result in a very brief space of time’. (Wilde 1895, 51). In Wilde’s books, French and things French are the very contrary of earnest.

12My article ‘Wilde’s French Salomé’ (Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens 72, 2010) puts forward the argument that Wilde wrote the play directly in French because the linguistic distancing enabled him to broach such immoral subjects as incest, necrophilia and encrypted homoeroticism in the praise of the male body. Wilde’s play corresponds to the moment when Victorian earnestness was undermined by French decadence, defined in these terms by Esmé Wingfield-Stratford:

With the Victorian faith went the Victorian morality. A wind blew from France, heavy with strange passions, and it wakened the lyre of Swinburne. The spade that every one had agreed to call an agricultural implement, was now a bloody shovel. Solemn and scarlet sins were trumpeted with evangelical fervour. (Wingfield-Stratford 325)

  • 5 Reported by André Gide in ‘In Memoriam’, 1910. André Gide. Oscar Wilde. Paris: La République des Le (...)

13French granted Wilde the impunity to draw a blasphemous parallel between divine and artistic creation, for example in the following phrase which he formulated in French: ‘Dieu invente l’homme, et l’homme invente l’œuvre d’Art’.5 His statement opposes the view Ruskin expresses in Modern Painters where he writes of young artists that: ‘Their duty is neither to choose, nor compose, nor imagine, nor experimentalize; but to be humble and earnest in following the steps of nature, and tracing the finger of God’. (Ruskin 623)

  • 6 The French is from Algernon Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, p. 50. A facsim (...)

14A ‘Commonplace’ notebook he kept as a student in Oxford contains one of the earliest examples of Wilde’s use of French. He heads one folio with the title in English—‘Beauty’6—and then uses French to frame his reflections on the subject, beginning with the assertion: ‘Rien n’est vrai que le beau’. He is in fact echoing Swinburne’s reformulation of Nicolas Boileau’s aphorism ‘Rien n’est beau que le vrai’ (Épître IX), which inverts the original word order. Wilde thus follows Swinburne in transforming the reasoned realms of philosophy into a definition of art for art’s sake when he concludes his reflections, again using French, at the foot of the page. The last four lines can be deciphered thus:

La beauté est parfaite
La beauté peut toute chose
La beauté est la seule chos
au monde qui n’existe pas a demi [
sic]

15He is again quoting Swinburne (Swinburne 50‒51), who is himself quoting Notre-Dame de Paris, formulating what Stefano Evangelista refers to as ‘the Symbolist gospel mouthed by Victor Hugo’ (Evangelista 175).

16French grants Wilde freedom of speech, which is why he chooses to praise the aesthetic reward of immorality using French. The phrase in question is a hitherto unidentified quotation he jotted down in the same ‘Commonplace’ notebook he kept as a student:

  • 7 Transcribed in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, p. 115.

Fo 37 ro l. 1 ‘dans la vie morale il est beau de quelquefois faire naufrage’.7 (life of earnestness)

17The line sounds a proleptic note anticipating Wilde’s future moral shipwreck, even celebrating it as a thing of beauty. Wilde is in fact rewriting the concluding refrain of Joseph de La Font’s comedy, Le Naufrage ou la pompe funèbre de Crispin. Its penultimate stanza conflates the sense of beauty and going astray:

Si vous voulez, malgré l’orage,
Voguer encore en ce beau jour,
Que ce soit sur la mer d’Amour :
Il est beau d’y faire naufrage.

18I have not been able to ascertain whether Wilde knew more than the last line of the play, which was first performed in 1710; he may have come across it when it was republished in September 1884. The fact that he replaced ‘la mer d’Amour’ with the phrase ‘dans la vie morale’ signals his own departure from the conventional love of the original French, as he drifted towards the moral complexities he would face in his life as a homosexual.

  • 8 First published in the Court and Society Review on 13 December 1887, as ‘Un Amant de nos jours’. Th (...)

19Wilde relies on the distancing effect of the foreign language when he uses French to portray homosexuality. He initially gave the French title ‘Un amant de nos jours’ to one of his first homoerotic poems, written in 1887, though he subsequently changed the title to ‘The New Remorse’ when the poem was reissued five years later in The Spirit Lamp.8 Aligning himself with French writers appears to have instilled in him the courage he needed at first to write about homosexuality.

20The French language and France are branded as decadent in The Importance of Being Earnest. Wilde undoubtedly had vaudeville in mind when he has Jack respond to Algy’s remark ‘You don’t seem to realize, that in married life three is company and two is none’ with the comment ‘That, my dear young friend, is the theory that the corrupt French Drama has been propounding for the last fifty years.’ (Wilde 1895, 12) When it comes to choosing music for Lady Bracknell’s reception, French songs are dismissed as ‘improper’ in contrast to German which ‘sounds a thoroughly respectable language’ (Wilde 1895, 14). In this play, Reverend Chasuble stigmatizes the French capital with loose morals in his comment on Ernest Worthing’s desire to be buried there, that it ‘hardly points to any very serious state of mind’ (Wilde 1895, 30).

  • 9 The Chameleon, December 1894, 1.

21Wilde introduces the French name Maréchal Niel to point to Algernon’s frivolous preoccupation with his buttonhole. It refers to a variety of climbing rose with large, fragrant, yellow flowers. The French rose is associated with the dandy’s superficiality, echoing Adèle’s concern with her ‘toilette’. It also recalls how, in Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, Wilde used the buttonhole in a witty aphorism about the relationship between artistic representation and reality: ‘A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature’.9

  • 10 Bunbury, trans. Felix Paul Greve, 1903.
  • 11 For a discussion of the various translations of the title, see Xavier Giudicelli, ‘Jouer sur les mo (...)

22The title of the play—The Importance of Beint Earnest—proved to be a challenge to translate. The Germans recognized the coded reference in ‘earnest’ and immediately hit on Bunbury for their title10: it refers to the invention of a fictitious identity, with Bunbury serving as an alibi and Ernest as a double. It also resonates with the encoded homosexual overtones of the slang phrase ‘to bury in the bun, or in the bum’. The French were moralistic when in 1911 they first translated the title on the play: ‘De l’importance du sérieux’.11 It was not until 1942 that Léon Guillot de Saix came up with Il importe d’être constant for a performance of the play directed by Paul Raynal, who was also a member of the cast. Guillot de Saix’s phrasing and choice of adjectival Christian name echo back to 18th century French comedy of manners, and has, in a slightly reworded version, become the accepted French title: ‘L’importance d’être constant’; used in publication of the Guillot de Saix translation.

  • 12 The Times, 15 February 1895, 5.
  • 13 Honoré de Balzac, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847). La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Geor (...)
  • 14 See Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe, ed. Antoine Compagnon. À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves (...)
  • 15 Nikolai Endres underscores the overtones of the expression ‘chevaliers de la manchette’ in connecti (...)

23A reviewer in The Times had a point when he claimed that translation into French might uncover the hidden meaning of The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘there is now little prospect of its true nature being discovered until some one attempts to translate it into French.’12 The French version of the script unintentionally brings out its homosexual subtext, making up for what is lost in the translation of the title. Aunt Augusta—who is aunt to most of the characters on stage at the end—is called ‘tante’ in French: the word is freighted with homoerotic significance derived from Balzac’s definition of ‘la tante’ as ‘le troisième sexe13 and Proust’s essay on homosexuality which he originally titled ‘la race des tantes’.14 That significance is frequently enacted by casting a male actor in the role, for example when David Suchet played Lady Bracknell in drag in Adrian Noble’s production of the play in 2015. As for the prominence Wilde gives to Algernon’s cuffs, or manchettes in French15: they provide him with a place where he can note down an address, and later dictate the manner in which he eats muffins (quite calmly, to avoid getting butter on them), it is tempting to speculate that Wilde knew that the term chevaliers de la manchette had been forged to refer to homosexuality.

  • 16 Oscar Wilde, Interview with Robert Ross published in the St. James Gazette, 18 January 1895, quoted (...)

24In this comedy where ‘to be earnest’ means to lead a double life, Wilde stands Victorian values on their heads. In his words, the play is ‘exquisitely trivial, a delicate bubble of fancy, and it has its philosophy. . . . That we should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality’.16 He pops the cork to create the ‘bubble of fancy’ and a sense of light-headedness, starting with the opening scene when Algernon’s butler admits that the servants in a bachelor’s establishment drink the champagne because it is of better quality than that to be found in married households, through to the closing scene where Jack criticizes Algernon for drinking an entire pint of his Perrier-Jouet, Brut, ’89 (Wilde 1895, 52). From beginning to end, the play celebrates The Importance of Being Earnest with effervescent exuberance which subverts the very qualities of Victorian earnestness: moral rectitude, sexual probity and dour seriousness.

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Bibliographie

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. 1847. Ed. Richard J. Dunn. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

Carlyle, Thomas. The Life of John Sterling. London: Chapman and Hall, 1851.

craft, Christopher. ‘Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest’. Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 19‒46.

Evangelista, Stefano. ‘Swinburne’s Galleries’. The Yearbook of English Studies 40: 1 (2010): 160‒79.

Gide, André. Oscar Wilde. Paris: La République des lettres, 2023.

Houghton, Walter E. The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830‒1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1957.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia sexualis. Trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock. Philadelphia and London: F. A. Davis, 1892.

Nicholson, John Gambril Francis. Love in Earnest: Sonnets, Ballades, and Lyrics. London: Elliot Stock, 1892.

Rosenbaum, Robert A. Earnest Victorians: Six Great Victorians as portrayed in their own words and those of their contemporaries. London: Heinemann, 1961.

Ruskin, John. Modern Painters, volume 1. 1843. The Complete Works of John Ruskin, volume 3. Ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen, 1903.

Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868 (part 2). London: John Camden Hotten, 31‒51.

Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. 1895. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. New York: Norton, 2006.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. New York: Norton, 2020.

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Fourth Estate, 2000.

Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. IX : Plays 2. Ed. Joseph Donohue. Oxford : OUP, 2019.

Wilde, Oscar. Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks. Ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand. Oxford: OUP, 1989.

Wingfield-Stratford, Esmé Cecil. Those Earnest Victorians. London: William Morrow, 1930.

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Notes

1 https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=earnest. Accessed 2 May 2024.

2 Timothy d’Arch Smith uses Nicholson’s title for his monograph Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English ‘Uranian’ Poets from 1889‒1930. London: Routedge & Kegan Paul, 1970.

3 Quoted by Christopher Craft in ‘Alias Bunbury: Desire and Termination in The Importance of Being Earnest’. Representations 31 (Summer 1990): 19‒46, p. 48 note 46.

4 See The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. IX : Plays 2. Ed. Joseph Donohue. Oxford : OUP, 2019, p. 222.

5 Reported by André Gide in ‘In Memoriam’, 1910. André Gide. Oscar Wilde. Paris: La République des Lettres, 2023, p. 21.

6 The French is from Algernon Swinburne, Notes on the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1868, p. 50. A facsimile of the manuscript page is reproduced on page 63 of Wilde’s Complete Letters. See also Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, Ed. Philip E. Smith II and Michael S. Helfand. Oxford: OUP, 1989, p. 145.

7 Transcribed in Oscar Wilde’s Oxford Notebooks, p. 115.

8 First published in the Court and Society Review on 13 December 1887, as ‘Un Amant de nos jours’. The poem was reprinted in The Spirit Lamp, vol. 1 no 4 (6 December 1892), under the English title ‘The New Remorse’.

9 The Chameleon, December 1894, 1.

10 Bunbury, trans. Felix Paul Greve, 1903.

11 For a discussion of the various translations of the title, see Xavier Giudicelli, ‘Jouer sur les mots et les noms : les traductions françaises de The Importance of Being Earnest d’Oscar Wilde’, in Du jeu dans la langue : Traduire le jeu de mots, ed. Frédérique Brisset, Audrey Coussy, Ronald Jenn and Julie Loison-Charles, Lille: PU Septentrion, 2019, 169‒83.

12 The Times, 15 February 1895, 5.

13 Honoré de Balzac, Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847). La Comédie humaine, ed. Pierre-Georges Castex, Paris, Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, 1977, vol. VI, p. 840.

14 See Proust, Sodome et Gomorrhe, ed. Antoine Compagnon. À la recherche du temps perdu, ed. Jean-Yves Tadié, Paris, Gallimard, ‘Bibliothèque de la Pléiade’, vol. III, 1988, p. 919.

15 Nikolai Endres underscores the overtones of the expression ‘chevaliers de la manchette’ in connection with Algernon’s cuffs. See his article ‘Cherchez la tante: The Queerness of The Importance of Being Earnest’ in Wilde in Earnest, ed. Emily Eells, Nanterre : Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2015: 177-190, 182.

16 Oscar Wilde, Interview with Robert Ross published in the St. James Gazette, 18 January 1895, quoted in Robert Tanitch, Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen, London, Methuen, 1999, p. 256.

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Emily Eells, « Earnest »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 100 Automne | 2024, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 15 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/15130 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/132r4

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Auteur

Emily Eells

Emily Eells is emeritus professor of 19th century British literature and the visual arts at the University of Paris at Nanterre. Her research focuses on Franco-British cultural exchange in the fin-de-siècle period and she has published widely on Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, John Ruskin and Marcel Proust.
Emily Eells est professeure émérite de littérature et des arts visuels du xixe siècle à l’Université Paris Nanterre. Ses recherches se concentrent sur les échanges culturels franco-britanniques de la fin de siècle et ses publications portent principalement sur Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, John Ruskin et Marcel Proust.

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