Unit 7: Victorian Era

• Intro to The Victorian Era
• Texts 
• See Brit Lit - Historical Eras/Contexts (in Notability) or get it again in Google Classroom if necessary.
• Nails
• What were some of the main people, events, and ideas of the Victorian Period?

• Oscar Wilde
• Texts 
• The Importance of Being Earnest
• An Ideal Husband (film)
• Nails



He's an English Man!

• What is a comedy of manners and how does Wilde's Importance of Being Earnest qualify as such?
• What does the word "earnestness" or "earnest" mean and how does Wilde use it as a pun (the name "Ernest") that critiques Victorian virtues?
• How does the subtitle "A Trivial Comedy for Serious People" contribute to Wilde's tone and thematic development?
• How does Wilde use epigram, hyperbole, understatement, and irony to satirize (critique) Victorian values and institutions?

• Lit Terms
• Comedy of Manners - A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality.
• e.g. Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest

• Hyperbole - Calculated overstatement, exaggeration

• e.g. "I'm so hungry I could eat a ________"
• e.g. "He ate everything in the house."

• Understatement - Says less than is intended

• e.g. "Adolf Hitler was a naughty man."
• e.g. "I hate to seem inquisitive, but would you kindly inform me who I am?" (Oscar Wilde) 

• Paradox - Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level.

• e.g. "Without laws, we can have no freedom."
• e.g. "The simplicity of your character makes you exquisitely incomprehensible to me." (Oscar Wilde)
• e.g. "I adore political parties. They are the only place left to us where people don't talks politics" (Wilde).

• Epigram - a short, witty, often paradoxical—sometimes satirical—statement designed to surprise the audience

• e.g. "Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing / Should certain people die before they sing!" (Coleridge)
• e.g. "What is an epigram? a dwarfish whole, / Its body brevity, and wit its soul" (Coleridge)
• e.g. "Forty years of romance make a woman look like a ruin and forty years of marriage make her look like a public building" (Oscar Wilde). 
• e.g. "Relations are simply a tedious pack of people who haven't got the remotest knowledge of how to live, nor the smallest instinct about when to die" (Wilde).
• e.g. "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his" (Wilde).
• e.g. "I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy" (Wilde).
• e.g. "God made women beautiful so that men would love them; and he made them stupid so that they could love men" (attributed to La Belle Otero).

• Victorian Poets 
• Texts (Poets)
• Tennyson, Housman, Hopkins
• Nails
• What are some of the common ideas and tones expressed by Victorian poets . . . and why?
• Lit Terms 
• Tone - definition