An Examination of the Satire i

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…Importance of Being Earnest is a comedy, but also a satirical commentary on the society of nineteenth-century Britain. It was a world obsessed with performance and flaunting. It was enveloped in hypocrisy and superficiality. The undermining of Victorian conventions in the play is achieved through the use of dialogue among characters, stereotyping, and discrepancies between appearances and reality. This facilitates the development of the serious observations within the play that Oscar Wilde attempts to deliver.