Plot Overview

Jack Worthing, the play’s protagonist, is a pillar of the community in Hertfordshire, where he is guardian to Cecily Cardew, the pretty, eighteen-year-old granddaughter of the late Thomas Cardew, who found and adopted Jack when he was a baby. In Hertfordshire, Jack has responsibilities: he is a major landowner and justice of the peace, with tenants, farmers, and several servants and other employees all dependent on him. For years, he has also pretended to have an irresponsible black-sheep brother named Ernest who leads a scandalous life in pursuit of pleasure and is always getting into trouble of a sort that requires Jack to rush grimly off to his assistance. In fact, Ernest is merely Jack’s alibi, a phantom that allows him to disappear for days at a time and do as he likes. No one but Jack knows that he is Ernest. Ernest is the name Jack goes by in London, which is where he really goes on these occasions—probably to pursue the very sort of behavior he pretends to disapprove of in his imaginary brother. 

Jack is in love with Gwendolen Fairfax, the cousin of his best friend, Algernon Moncrieff. When the play opens, Algernon, who knows Jack as Ernest, has begun to suspect something, having found an inscription inside Jack’s cigarette case addressed to “Uncle Jack” from someone who refers to herself as “little Cecily.” Algernon suspects that Jack may be leading a double life, a practice he seems to regard as commonplace and indispensable to modern life. He calls a person who leads a double life a “Bunburyist,” after a nonexistent friend he pretends to have, a chronic invalid named Bunbury, to whose deathbed he is forever being summoned whenever he wants to get out of some tiresome social obligation.

In Act II, which is where our excerpt is from, Algernon shows up at Jack’s country estate posing as Jack’s brother Ernest. Algernon, who has fallen hopelessly in love with Cecily, asks her to marry him. He is surprised to discover that Cecily already considers that they are engaged, and he is charmed when she reveals that her fascination with “Uncle Jack’s brother” led her to invent an elaborate romance between herself and him several months ago. Algernon is less enchanted to learn that part of Cecily’s interest in him derives from the name Ernest, which she says “inspires absolute confidence.”

Algernon goes off in search of the local rector to see about getting himself christened Ernest. 

In our excerpt of The Importance of Being Ernest we meet three characters, Jack, Algernon and Cecily. Here is a brief characterisation of the three: 

On page 36, lines 3-9 in our excerpt this dialogue takes place:

Algernon:    “Oh! I am not really wicked at all, cousin Cecily. You mustn’t think that I am wicked.”

Cecily:    “If you are not, then you have certainly been deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner. 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.”

 This exchange between Algernon and Cecily occurs in Act II when Algernon, who is presenting himself as Jack’s brother Ernest, is shown into the garden. He greets Cecily, calling her his “little cousin,” and she greets him as “my wicked cousin Ernest.” The moral status of Jack’s fictional brother has undergone a change between Acts I and II. At Algernon’s flat in Half Moon Street, “Ernest” was merely “profligate” (Algernon’s word). To use Jack’s terminology, he got into “scrapes,” which is to say “jams” or mischief. Precisely what Jack considers a “scrape” isn’t made clear in Act I. They are, however, something Algernon is fond of. When Jack warns him that Bunbury may get him into “a serious scrape some day,” Algernon replies, “I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious.”

 Once the action moves to the garden of the Manor House, where Miss Prism’s moral viewpoint seems to hold sway, Jack’s brother graduates to “unfortunate,” “bad,” and downright “wicked.” Cecily yearns to meet a “really wicked” person, she says. The moment before Algernon enters, she soliloquizes that she’s terrified “he will look just like everyone else.”

This open interest in the idea of immorality is what takes Cecily out of the realm of Victorian hypocrisy and makes her a suitable love interest for Algernon. Her notion that if Jack’s brother is not really wicked he has been “deceiving us all in a very inexcusable manner” turns the plot of the play on its head. She goes on to define hypocrisy as “pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time.” It isn’t, of course. It is the opposite of hypocrisy. In fact, it is the creed of the Wildean dandy-hero.

source: http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/earnest/quotes.html