Realizing Personality in The Importance of Being Earnest SARAH BALKIN ABSTRACT: Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) both centrally feature imaginary persons. In “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” Wilde’s narrator says that “all Art” is “to a certain degree a mode of acting, an attempt to realise one’s own personality. ” The Importance of Being Earnest assigns ac- tors’ bodies to the imaginary person of the title. My essay examines what it meant to realize a personality on the late-nineteenth-century stage in light of recent scholarship on character, stage properties, and materiality. I argue that – because theatre shows the constructedness of material and corporeal being, because farce renders male identity a matter of genre, and because Wilde unifies the characters’ desires under one name – The Importance of Being Earnest uniquely lo- cates personality in a living human body. KEYWORDS: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, “Portrait of Mr. W.H.,” personality, stage properties, character, material culture In Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), characters seek to substantiate the existence of imaginary persons. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” is about an imaginary actor, Willie Hughes, whom Wilde’s characters are determined to prove is the mysterious “Mr. W.H.” to whom Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets. While the imagi- nary personality in “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” is an actor, The Importance of Being Earnest assigns actors’ bodies to a personality the characters collectively imagine: Ernest. “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” ends in ambiguity about the existence of Willie Hughes, whereas The Importance of Being Earnest arrives at an unambiguous paradox: what the Victorian theatre critic William Archer called “Ernest in the flesh – a false but undeniable Ernest” (98). The play’s false but undeniable Ernest emphasizes the constructedness of material and corporeal being. “[B]ecause fictional characters have a more clearly modal existence than real people do,” John Frow argues, “they are exemplary of the way a mode of reality is ascribed to persons of all sorts” (vi). Therefore, instead of “viewing fictional characters as somewhat similar to persons”– © University of Toronto doi: 10.3138/md.0743 http://www.utpjournals.press/doi/pdf/10.3138/md.0743 - Sarah Balkin <sbalkin@gmail.com> - Thursday, March 03, 2016 3:32:33 PM - IP Address:118.209.23.29