Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” critiques the very audience it tailors to in creating “a trivial comedy for serious people.” In the play, Jack Worthing masquerades as Ernest whilst in London so he can enjoy his hedonistic town life free from connection to his identity in the country. His friend, Algernon Moncrieff, similarly takes up the name Ernest and parades as Jack’s fictitious brother in order to woo his love interest Cecily Cardew, Jack’s young and beautiful ward. In this witty play on the word earnest and clever construction of double identities, Wilde satirizes conventional Victorian values and morals, poking fun at the quintessential Victorian mode of duality and repression in identity in order to maintain public respectability. This refers to the concept of being earnest, a trait highly prized by the Victorians. Although through a drastically different mode and performance, David Bowie engages in a similar commentary on society in his persona Ziggy Stardust. An alien rock-and-roll Messiah sent to Earth to renew hope in humanity only to be ultimately destroyed themself (I use the pronoun “they” to signify Ziggy’s gender queerness), Ziggy Stardust as a persona and an album criticizes society’s tendency to worship music performers (Booth). Ziggy’s death at the conclusion of the album emphasizes Bowie’s point about the pitfalls of fame: the audience builds up an artist while they claim and collect pieces of the art for themselves, leading to the demise of the artist. Bowie’s decision to not only destroy Ziggy but to destroy his own performance of the persona had significant consequences for the course of his career, as the very thing Bowie seems to warn against comes to pass and his audience conflates his identity with his performance of Ziggy as a persona. Both Wilde’s and Bowie’s performances criticize their respective audiences in a commentary on what it means to be earnest, authentic, and how a performed identity can alter your true self. 

In my previous blog post, I defined the Victorian age as one of duality, in which double standards and contradictions manifest in characters from The Picture of Dorian Gray, highlighting Victorians’ repression of their turbulent inner lives in order to maintain a polished, respectable public appearance. Continuing this analysis, I now point to the concept of Victorian earnestness, which Opaleski-DiMeo defines: “Victorian society expected people to act morally and respectably; however the importance of ‘being earnest’ in Victorian culture was not to be genuinely sincere, but to make yourself appear to be genuinely sincere. Reputation was more important than character” (3, italics in original). Jack and Algernon in “The Importance of Being Earnest” enact this idea through their adoption of fake identities in order to participate duplicitously in society and to win the women they desire. They lead double lives and invent fictional engagements (coined bunburying by Algernon) to, essentially, have their cake and eat it too. Algernon escapes a boring dinner with his aunt (301), Jack becomes engaged to his love Gwendolyn (306-7) and Algernon to Cecily (330), and all the events of the play unfold and unravel because of the invention of Ernest as a double for Jack and Algernon to have the opportunity to live life as they please. Their identities and lives are thereby far from genuine, and in the end, they are willing to adopt the invented identity of Ernest and replace their names to please their fiances, an act that destroys their ability to live with real earnestness. Embodying their fabricated performance ruins their capability to ever be authentic or sincere, making Jack’s final realization that he discovered “the vital Importance of Being Earnest” an ironically empty statement (358). In these characters, Wilde holds a mirror up to his Victorian audience in satirizing what Lady Bracknell so aptly terms “an age of surfaces” (349). 

Through his performance of Ziggy Stardust, Bowie, too, holds a mirror up to his audience, inviting them to see the reality of Ziggy as a costume Bowie has donned for a while in a criticism of his audience’s treatment of fame. With the release of the album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” Bowie skyrocketed to fame, and despite the album highlighting the dangers of stardom, Ziggy became an iconic persona that many audiences blended with Bowie’s identity against Bowie’s wishes. The lyrics of “Star” are particularly revealing of Bowie’s thematic statement with the album. “I could make a transformation as a rock and roll star /  So inviting, so enticing to play the part / I could play the wild mutation as a rock and roll star” reveals Ziggy’s rise to stardom as they begin to become enamored with fame and it’s clear Bowie is pointing to stardom as a part he is playing. Ziggy will go on to provide the message of salvation for humanity, but they will be destroyed to pieces on the very stage their audience worships them upon. Yet, the key line in Bowie’s song “Star” is “I could make it all worthwhile as a rock and roll star.” Ziggy lives a hedonistic life lifted to the heights of fame even at the cusp of Earth’s apocalypse, but then, as if they are an Icarus figure, their wild success and their life is destroyed. Nevertheless, Ziggy believes this life is worthwhile. 

In conclusion, Wilde’s play and Bowie’s persona articulate the impact of performing identity. Though their art points to itself as an act–whether with characters who adopt their fake double identities or with a Messiah rock star who is devoured at the height of fame–their audiences interpret their art as dangerously close to real. Wilde’s play on being Ernest/Earnest and Bowie’s performance of a persona critique their audiences’ failure to understand the temporary farce of the performance. Both “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars” were wildly popular in their time and they continue to live on in the social consciousness despite their explicit adoption of inauthentic characters. Bowie faced the consequences of Ziggy as a persona which audiences believed to represent Bowie himself and didn’t want to see die, while Wilde was destroyed by the performance he perpetuated in his personal life as he hid his true gay identity. With this in mind, it seems the play was a way for Wilde to vent his frustration that he could not truly be earnest without being condemned by a society that was steeped with fake, repressed identities itself. For Bowie, though a major goal of his career was to adopt a wild variety of personas, his performances weren’t always interpreted as identities separate from his own, and thus he couldn’t escape the lasting impact, particularly from Ziggy, his personas wrought on his career. 

Works Cited

Booth, Susan E. “‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’—David Bowie (1972). https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-preservation-board/documents/booth_ziggy_stardust.pdf

Bowie, David. “Star.” The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LceHJ-peoVU. 

Opaleski-DiMeo, Kristie-Anne. “Importance of Being Earnest and Literary Theory.” Jackson School District, 2014.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Importance of Being Earnest.” The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, Penguin Books, pp. 291–363.