Discuss the importance of the Christening in The Importance of Being Earnest

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Discuss the importance of the Christening episode at the end of Act 2. How Important is this episode to the themes and concerns of the play as a whole?

Oscar Wilde's play "The Importance of Being Earnest" touches upon a lot of social problems and issues that occurred and were dominant during the end of the nineteenth century period. Throughout the course of the play the audience realizes the view form which the play was written and that is Oscar Wilde's view of Englishness as he himself was Irish. All the characters in the play are satirised in a way so that they seem comical at certain times through which Wilde is mocking the higher class of the English society.

As the audience finds out very soon from the beginning of the play, the importance of names is very significant as the two main characters Algernon and Jack both have other names so that they can escape form the normal life they live and step into a different world where they pretend to be someone else who doesn't exist in reality. Algernon's character is called Bunbury and Jack's character is called Ernest. By having another character Algernon