Gwendolen Fairfax

Gwendolen is Lady Bracknell’s daughter and Jack’s beloved, whom she knows as Ernest, and she is fixated on this name. Her mother does not like Earnest because of the preoccupation of the Victorian middle- and upper-middle classes with the appearance of virtue and honor. Gwendolen is so caught up in finding a husband named Earnest, whose name, she says, “inspires absolute confidence,” that she can’t even see that the man calling himself Earnest is fooling her with an extensive deception. It creates a dilemma for Jack, who is willing to be baptized with that name.

She is a model and an arbiter of elegant fashion and sophistication, and nearly everything she says and does is calculated for effect. As Jack fears, Gwendolen does indeed show signs of becoming her mother “in about a hundred and fifty years,” but she is likeable, as is Lady Bracknell, because her pronouncements are so outrageous.


Cecily Cardew