1140 Wilde, Oscar
recognizes “it was as though Juliek’s soul were the
bow. He was playing his life.” While the Nazis are
able to imprison and torture Juliek’s body, Wiesel
finds this memory worth keeping purposely because
it demonstrates their inability to imprison the power
of Juliek’s human spirit.
Many years after his imprisonment, Wiesel has
an encounter in Aden that actually enables him to
take control over a previously oppressive Holocaust
memory. While he is in this city, he witnesses an
aristocratic Parisienne take pleasure in watching
“ ‘natives’ ” fight over coins that she throws at them.
This triggers Wiesel’s memory of German workers
throwing pieces of bread into a roofless cattle car
in which he and other starving Jews were forced to
ride. While he was in the car, he witnessed a Jewish
father and son fight to the death over some of this
bread. He lacked the ability to do anything about the
situation then in the cattle car, but by confronting a
similar insult to humanity now in Aden, Wiesel is
able to transcend some of the damaging effects of
this painful memory.
Russell Nurick
wiLDE, oSCar The Importance of
Being Earnest (1895)
Written for the stage and first played in 1895, The
Importance of Being Earnest was the most successful
of Oscar Wilde’s plays, and it was the most popu-
larly produced of his works throughout the 20th
century. A stage play in three acts, featuring nine
speaking roles, it is, from a staging perspective, a
straightforward comedy of manners with simple
identifiable sets (townhouse, garden, drawing room)
and simple, unadorned entrances and exits. In short,
the form of the play is not so very complex, unlike
the plays of William Shakespeare, J. M. Barrie, or
George Bernard Shaw. What makes Earnest unique,
like much of Wilde’s work, is its biting dialogue and
social satire.
The play itself is amusing (if a bit plot-light),
and revolves around the romantic encounters of two
couples, Jack with Gwendolen and Algernon with
Cecily. Like all comedies of this sort, the relation-
ships are intentionally crossed: Cecily is Jack’s ward
and Gwendolen is Algy’s first cousin; Gwendolen is
forbidden to marry Jack because of his indetermi-
nate breeding (a convention of the times), and Algy
is barred from Cecily because he is a spendthrift and
Jack knows it. To add to the confusion, throughout
the play, both Jack and Algy pretend to be Jack’s
fictional brother, Ernest. In an intentional nod to
Renaissance traditions of comedy, it ends with a
triple marriage, and there is a rather sideways reso-
lution to Jack’s problem of social lineage. However,
like most Wilde endeavors, Earnest is as much a
venue for Wilde’s unique wit as it is for the artistry
of stagecraft. Each scene is framed by witty con-
structions, usually ending with clever punctuations
of social criticism.Jack: I am sick to death of cleverness. Every-
body is clever nowadays. You can’t go any-
where without meeting clever people. The
thing has become an absolute public nui-
sance. I wish we had a few fools left.
Algernon: We have.
Jack: I should like to meet them. What do
they talk about?
Algernon: The fools? Oh! About the
clever people, of course.
Jack: What fools.Of course, Jack and Algy are just the fools they
themselves are criticizing. How could they not be?
They are the main protagonists in a play by Oscar
Wilde (1854–1900).
Aaron DruckerFate in The Importance of Being Earnest
The plot of The Importance of Being Earnest rests
on the arbitrary fate caused by a name. “We live, as
I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ide-
als. The fact is constantly mentioned in the more
expensive monthly magazines, and has reached the
provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always
been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is
something in that name that inspires absolute confi-
dence,” Gwendolen explains to her would-be fiancé.
She is sure that a life of happiness and fulfillment
are in a name, and that the man who will be hers
would bear the fated mark of this peculiar appella-
tion: “The moment Algernon first mentioned to me