The Importance of Being Earnest Love Quotes

Thought: To Algernon, a key ingredient in love is uncertainty. This is why he considers a marriage proposal business instead of pleasure.

Thought: Gwendolen’s love is conditional, based on something silly like what her lover’s name is. She makes it clear that if his name were not Ernest, she could never love Jack. This shows that she is might be mixing up real love, which is often messy, with the idealistic romances of books.

Thought: Here, Gwendolen declares her eternal love of and devotion to Ernest. Usually, it is a male character who swears his love to a girl, but in a moment of gender role reversal, Gwendolen takes on task.

Thought: Algernon bases his declaration of love for Cecily on her looks. This reiterates the idea that a man’s love for a woman can be based initially on her physical beauty.

Thought: Cecily, like Gwendolen, bases her love on something silly. Because of this, readers also question Cecily’s love for Algernon, as they do Gwendolen’s love for Jack. We wonder whether or not their love is really just adolescent infatuation.

Thought: Both Jack and Algernon confess that they practiced their deceit and briefly betrayed each other’s trust simply to meet and spend time with the woman they love.

Thought: To modern eyes, Algernon’s professed love is insincere because he could not possibly have loved Cecily before he met her. But his answer to Cecily’s question is simple, elegant, and appeals to her romantic nature, so it is accepted as a definitive declaration of true love.

Thought: Jack’s professed love for Gwendolen is a little more believable. He had actually met Gwendolen before making up his younger brother, Ernest. Where he conjured up a fictional Ernest to see her as often as possible, she deliberately disobeyed her mother and traveled all the way out into the country to see him.

Thought: The fact that Lady Bracknell promptly passes up such a worthy candidate as Cecily – rich, beautiful, educated, and charming – as a wife for Algernon, simply because she doesn’t want her daughter to marry Jack, shows that Lady Bracknell scoffs at love as a legitimate reason for marriage.