Gwendolen Fairfax Character Analysis in The Importance of Being Earnest | SparkNotes (2024)

Characters Gwendolen Fairfax

Previous Next

More than any other female character in the play, Gwendolensuggests the qualities of conventional Victorian womanhood. Shehas ideas and ideals, attends lectures, and is bent on self-improvement. Sheis also artificial and pretentious. Gwendolen is in love with Jack, whomshe knows as Ernest, and she is fixated on this name. This preoccupationserves as a metaphor for the preoccupation of the Victorian middle-and upper-middle classes with the appearance of virtue and honor.Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Ernest, whosename, she says, “inspires absolute confidence,” that she can’t evensee that the man calling himself Ernest is fooling her with an extensivedeception. In this way, her own image consciousness blurs her judgment.

Though more self-consciously intellectual than Lady Bracknell, Gwendolenis cut from very much the same cloth as her mother. She is similarlystrong-minded and speaks with unassailable authority on mattersof taste and morality, just as Lady Bracknell does. She is botha model and an arbiter of elegant fashion and sophistication, andnearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect. As Jackfears, Gwendolen does indeed show signs of becoming her mother “inabout a hundred and fifty years,” but she is likeable, as is LadyBracknell, because her pronouncements are so outrageous.

Previous section Algernon Moncrieff Next section Cecily Cardew

PLUS

NotesSee All Notes