Rage’s Brother: The Bomb at the Centre of Wilde’s Trivial Comedy

Abstract

This chapter argues that Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, described by its author as an ‘amusing thing with lots of fun and wit’, contains an explosive undercurrent of social critique. The funniest of Wilde’s plays, Earnest satirizes the subterfuge (‘Bunburying’) demanded of sexual heretics in Victorian society, where marginal identities and desires were excluded, suppressed, or in Wilde’s case, brutally penalized. Conrad investigates Wilde’s ambivalent attitude to direct revolutionary action such as the Fenian dynamite campaign of 1881-85 and French anarchist activities of the 1890s, attending particularly to the 1884 bomb explosion in the cloakroom at Victoria Station, the ‘terminus’ where Miss Prism left the infant Jack Worthing in a handbag containing her three-decker novel. As Conrad argues, ‘texts, bodies, and bombs all meet at Victoria Station’, and Wilde, as an Irishman and a homosexual, could himself be seen as ‘a potential bomb right at the terminus of Victorian society’.