The Importance of Being Earnest

The serving of tea snacks plays an important function in Act 1 and Act 2. A strict set of manners surrounds the serving of tea and snacks among the British upper classes, all of which are all subverted in the play. Rather than smoothing social relations, the sharing of the tea snacks is a point of conflict for the characters. Immediately after telling Jack that the cucumber sandwiches are reserved for Lady Bracknell in Act 1, Algernon eventually eats all of them and makes the absurd claim to his aunt that there were no cucumbers at the market. Algernon has made a mockery of his obligations as a host. Likewise, in Act 2 he eats muffins in perfect composure while Jack complains that he has ruined his chances to marry Gwendolen, making a mockery of his obligations as a guest.

In Act 2, the tea snacks are also a site of conflict between Gwendolen and Cecily. Again, rather than smoothing relations between the two young women, the tea service is an opportunity for each to insult the other. Despite their “sweet” affects, they reveal themselves to be quite vicious. In this way, the tea snacks are a means by which the play enacts situational irony. 

In another instance of irony, Cecily uses her diary in a way that is contrary to the basic purpose of a diary. Diaries are typically private, but she declares that hers is meant for publication. Instead of recording the actual events of her life, she instead makes up her entries and documents a months-long courtship with the fictitious Ernest complete with ring, broken engagement, and letters sent at least three times a week. Cecily’s diary, then, is a parody of the idea of a private diary recording one’s private thought.

The printing of private diaries in the Victorian era was widespread to the point that a writer like Wilde could joke that it was the sole purpose of keeping one. He also seems to mock the sort of person who would write a diary for publication, implying that they will make things up because they are playing to an audience. Overall, Cecily’s diary reinforces her character as someone obsessed with notoriety and more interested in style than substance. 

The "three-volume novel" was the result of a publishing method used during the Victorian period. Long novels would be printed in three installments with the profits from the first often funding the printing of the second and third volumes. Three-volume novels were not a genre in themselves, but their relative cheapness, method of circulation, and subject matter meant that they were the Victorian middle class's main access to literature during the nineteenth century.

Three-volume novels tended to depend upon a stable of cliched plot devices: mistaken identities, farcical misunderstandings, fantastic coincidence, and the revelation of a main character's hidden ancestry and family fortune. By the close of the nineteenth century, “a variety of writers seem to associate the three-volume novel with what seem like the values of a caricatured mid-Victorian middle class: conventionality, regularity, propriety, and dubious pretensions of endurance or monumentality” (Menke, Richard. “The End of the Three-Volume Novel System, 27 June 1894.” BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History, 2013).

Wilde expressed contempt for three-volume novels in his essay "Critic as Artist," writing that "anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature." In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde makes use of the unrealistic plot devices of the stereotypical three-volume novel while simultaneously exploiting them for comic effect and, through the character of Miss Prism, openly mocking them.