She is submissive to her mother in public but rebels in private. While demonstrating the absurdity of such ideals as only marrying a man named Ernest, she also agrees to marry Jack despite her mother's disapproval of his origins. She is of debutante age, 18, but she is being tutored at Jack's secluded country estate by Miss Prism, her governess.
She is romantic and imaginative, and feeling the repression of Prism's rules. Miss Prism Cecily's governess and a symbol of Victorian moral righteousness. She is educating Cecily to have no imagination or sensationalism in her life. Quoting scripture as a symbol of her Victorian morality, she reveals a secret life of passion by her concern for the whereabouts of her misplaced novel and her flirtation with the local vicar. She becomes the source of Jack's revelation about his parents.
Canon Chasuble, D. Like Miss Prism, he is the source of Victorian moral judgments, but under the surface he appears to be an old lecher. His sermons are interchangeable, mocking religious conventions. Like the servants, he does what Jack the landowner wants: performing weddings, christenings, sermons, funerals, and so on.
However, beneath the religious exterior, his heart beats for Miss Prism. She pays no attention to her lessons, has 'a capital appetite' Act I, p. When we first meet her, she appears innocent, but she is already scheming to achieve what she wants — not to do her lessons, to meet Algy in the guise of Ernest.
Like Algy and Gwendolen, Cecily resists seriousness, seeing it as both silly and unattractive, commenting to Miss Prism, for example, that German is an unbecoming language, and that German lessons make her plain Act II, p. For all her apparent simplicity, she is a highly manipulative character; and we must assume that in her life beyond the end of the play, she will continue to learn how to get what she wants, following Gwendolen's example.
Algy will also be a hen-pecked husband in the world beyond the end of the play. Contact Us Register Sign In. Cecily Cardew enters the play long before she makes her appearance on stage.
Her guardian Jack describes her while confiding his secrets to Algernon Moncrieff. Jack decides that his alter ego as a younger brother Ernest has to end. Jack seems to be dangling Cecily like bait, and the audience suspects how Algernon will respond. Cecily makes her first appearance onstage in a rose garden, the appropriate romantic setting of sentimental melodramas. Cecily should be studying with Miss Prism, her tutor. She complains vociferously about her German lessons.
References to the German language and sensibility as representing respectability recur throughout the play.
Algernon knows Cecily feels fascinated by Ernest. Her self-deception makes the opportunity easier for Algernon to exploit her fantasy but harder to wiggle out of the lie. Cecily continues to confide her romantic dreams to Algernon, revealing that she, like Gwendolen, feels attracted to the name Ernest.
Her speech makes the audience wonder if Cecily and Gwendolen have been reading the same sentimental novel. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Themes Motifs Symbols.
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