Does comedic literature entertain or instruct?

‘Comedic literature entertains rather than instructs: it aims only to please.’ To what extent do you agree with this view in relation to two texts you have studied?

Comedic literature, it can be admitted, aims to entertain, but it would be inaccurate to claim that it ‘aims only’ to do this. Literature in general operates at a deeper level than entertainment, and, I would argue, comedic literature can embrace similar complexities. The principle that comedic literature has an essence (a message or messages) and that the entertainment value lies in how those messages are crafted, has a long tradition. For example, Horace maintained in his epistle, Ars Poetica, that a poet “gains everyone’s approval who mixes the pleasant with the useful” and that “Often the truth spoken with a smile will penetrate the mind and reach the heart; the lesson strikes home without wounding because of the wit in the saying.” In both The Importance of Being Earnest and Tam O’Shanter, there are (spread “like poppies”), abundant pleasures and also, significantly, useful lessons, which the audience and readership appreciate more because they are clothed in wit, irony, extravagant word-play and many other comedic devices. The truth, therefore, will emerge through the laughter and smiles, although it will “strike home” in a gentler way (or “without wounding”) because we are being diverted and entertained.

The Importance of Being Earnest is instructive about the theme of love and marriage in the upper-classes, but the way that this theme is treated is quite different from what an audience watching a play written in the late nineteenth century might expect. Women characters are more dominant, for example. When Jack admits to Lady Bracknell in Act 1 that he smokes, she replies that she is glad to hear that he does and when she learns that he knows nothing, she is also pleased to hear it, stating, “I do not approve of anything that tampers with natural ignorance.” This is a subversion of the traditional attitude towards gender relations, accepted in upper-class nineteenth century society. Women were expected to be compliant, feminine and subordinate, whilst men were supposed to be manly, forceful and economically independent. Her questions reveal that Jack is feckless, idle and incompetent. Algy is portrayed in a similar way, although his social standing is even more suspect as he is not even wealthy. Gwendolen, speaking about her father in Act 2, says “The home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man”. This is a reminder of the ‘separate spheres debate’, conspicuously expecting men to partake in the more active world of commerce and decision making while assigning a more passive domestic role for women. Gwendolen’s views completely overturn the accepted order in which a woman’s domain is in the home. It is this accepted order that Wilde lightly challenges. He satirizes the hypocrisy of Victorian attitudes to love and marriage, which forces Jack and Algernon to invent a non-existent twin and ailing acquaintance in order to escape their straight-jacketed way of life, requiring them to act in a proper way, at least on the surface.

In a not too dissimilar way, over one hundred years before, the world of Tam O’Shanter is also a world where there are assumptions about gender roles. The poem shows the male and the female out of sympathy with each other, and Burns, through a somewhat indecisive narrator (whose views are difficult to pin down), endeavors to criticize this regrettable state of affairs. When we first meet Tam, “bousin at the nappy” and “getting fou and unco happy”, we might take the view that he is taking a ‘heroic’ stance against his “sulky, sullen” wife at home “Gathering her brows like gathering storm”, whose fury and ill temper foreshadow the approaching storm. In the next line “Nursing” is a metaphorical reminder of a wife’s responsible role in looking after the children and home, but the narrator changes this with the introduction of the noun “wrath” - into a picture of her as a symbol of vengeance. It is not long, however, before the tone changes as the poem mocks the false masculine emotion of comradeship fueled by alcohol. Tam regards Souter Johnny as a “brither”, but only because “They had been fou for weeks thegither”. The more inebriated he becomes, the more vulnerable he becomes, and, beneath the bravado, his foolishness is more and more exposed, and our laughter spurred on.

A lot of the comedy in the poem is at Tam’s expense and, by extension, at the expense of men in general. In Kirk-Alloway, well-fortified with “Inspiring bold John Barleycorn”, when he spies Nanny or Cutty Sark, a “winsome wench and walie”, it is clear that this sexualized young female is a complete fantasy version of young womanhood. Although he escapes from her with impunity, it is both satisfying and hilarious that his dignity (and his mare’s tail) receives an abrupt jolt, as Meg frantically wins “the key-stane of the brig”. Hopefully the jolt may encourage him to appreciate the feminine world as it really is. This hope seems to be endorsed by the closing remarks: “Whene’er to drink you are inclin’d,/Or Cutty-sarks run in your mind…Remember Tam O’Shanter’s mare”, although this amusing moral could be a parody of the sententious Calvinistic sermons, which Burns was probably familiar with. As Burns was a poet who was inclined to be, if not hedonistic, certainly celebratory and life-affirming, it is probably justifiable not to take the rather garrulous narrator’s somewhat limp conclusion too seriously. Even so, some feminists have been critical of what they regard as a duplicitous tone throughout the poem and especially at the end where they argue that there is a mocking, authorial voice beneath the façade of the final moral, reinstating the masculine point of view.

To come to any definite conclusion about how serious Burns is in objecting to the neglect and waywardness of men in their treatment of distressed wives would be impossible. What is remarkable about the poem as well as instructive for the reader, however, is the way that Burns combines various literary traditions and registers to create a highly subtle and accomplished poem which has universal appeal and significance. The narrative tale which incorporates superstitious folk-beliefs is interwoven with a much more self-conscious and deliberately elaborate style, using standard English. After depicting Tam ignoring the “rair and rustle” outside, for example, the personified “Care” is introduced and is soon as intoxicated as Tam. The swift undignified treatment of this typical neo-classical poetic device is an indication that Burns is mocking this style of serious didactic poetry. Similarly, a few lines on, there is a tone and style change, with the narrator using standard English in a deliberately sententious way, contrasting the cheerful and cosy atmosphere inside the public house with the cold world of reality and reason:

“But pleasures are like poppies spread

You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed”

The English in these lines is deliberately formal, in order to contrast the unsettling truth about pleasure with Tam’s cosy feeling about it. Further similes accompany the one above to build up the literary effect, although, tellingly, at the end of the verse the formal, generalized comments merge with Scots diction when “Tam maun ride” into the unlyrical real world of the midnight tempest outside.

A similar cluster of similes occurs in the very dramatic events following Tam’s hot-headed outburst inside the kirk when he cannot contain his admiration for “Cutty-sark”. The pattern of three similes is a parody of the rhetorical style found in epic poetry such as that of Homer and creates a mock-heroic tone, delaying the action to create suspense. This tone is echoed in the final moral, where the meaning of the poem is absurdly over-simplified. However, by using a mysterious and ambiguous narrator, Burns detaches himself from the supernatural world of folk-lore as well as the sententious style of the neo-classical literary tradition. It is as though he stands outside both high and low culture, felicitously mocking both, although this is not to imply that there are concealed depths underneath the entertainment which are instructive about society and human nature in general, for example about the fleeting nature of pleasure in our lives.

There is a similar undercurrent of mockery in The Importance of Being Earnest. Although Wilde probably had no deliberate intention of pillorying the society around him or even of imposing any message or moral at all, he nevertheless succeeds in ridiculing many of the social customs and traditions of the late Victorian England. For example, following Algernon’s light-hearted tête-a-tête with his butler at the beginning of Act 1, Algy complains about Lane’s lax views about marriage, adding, “Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.” Wilde’s contemporaries would expect matters such as good conduct and morality to be modelled by the wealthy middle-class and upper class for the benefit of their servants. By wittily turning his audience’s assumptions about social class completely on its head in this way, Wilde completely blurs the line between master and servant and forces them (and us) to rethink the artificiality of the various divisions in nineteenth century society as well as in our own.

Algernon wittily overturns the expectations of the audience like this several times during Act 1. During his facetious exchanges with Jack about courtship and marriage, he challenges Jack’s contention that people who are forgetful about their marriage responsibilities end up in the Divorce Court, declaring, “Divorces are made in heaven”. It is evident here that Algernon has no respect for the conventional institution of marriage as he has inverted the epigram about marriage that his audience would recognize. When discussing the physical change in the recently widowed Lady Harbury with Lady Bracknell, he similarly subverts the adage about grief changing hair colour: “I hear her hair has turned quite gold from grief”, which has a directness and honesty that could have shocked, but more likely disarmed his original audience. This was certainly Wilde’s intention. When Algernon complains about women flirting with their husbands, he sums it up as “washing one’s clean linen in public”. We cannot take his indignation seriously as he has again transposed another well-known adage for effect – and a definite outcome of this remark as well as the other examples above is to bring us a little nearer to any underlying truth beneath the humour.

Lady Bracknell is another character who overturns the assumptions of conventional morality. In her speech she is polite and formal, but she has the capacity to be utterly heartless, as in her speech about Bunbury’s illness. She remonstrates with Algernon about Bunbury’s “shilly-shallying” about “whether he is going to live or die” purely because it inconveniences her own social engagements. Lady Bracknell’s main purpose is the power she wields over others and she is important in the plot as she is able to withhold consent to her daughter’s engagement to Jack. Her ‘trivial’ nature is revealed on a number of occasions. For example, in the final Act, she is impressed to learn that Miss Cardew’s family solicitors are Messrs. Markby, Markby and Markby, but only because she has been told that “one of the Mr. Markbys is occasionally to be seen at dinner parties”. Although this is obviously entertaining, it also reveals the shallowness and snobbery of her character. This is even more dramatically borne out shortly afterwards, when she is informed of Miss Cardew’s fortune. Knowledge of the hundred and thirty thousand pounds suddenly enables her to appreciate how attractive Cecily is and, with intense irony, she points out regretfully that “We live…in an age of surfaces.”

Triviality or even the reputation for wickedness, however, does not prevent any of the characters from achieving success or of attaining virtue. In Act 2, when Algernon is announced as ‘Mr. Earnest Worthing’ to Cecily, she admits in an aside, “I have never met any really wicked person before…I am so afraid he will look just like everybody else.” A few moments later, when Algernon waltzes in “very gay and debonair”, she is not surprised that “He does!” Although Wilde is making a serious point here – that we should not be taken in by appearances – we cannot take anything in this fictional world too seriously. If we did, we could be misled by people like Miss Prism, who informs Cecily that in her work of Fiction, “The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.” This is not only untrue in life; it is also a false definition of Fiction. We also discover Cecily’s ludicrous opinion of literature during her conversation with Algernon in Act 3, when she claims that “Dr Chasuble is a most learned man. He has never written a single book, so you can imagine how much he knows.”

Although this is a total non-sequitur, it does make us pause to consider whether there is anything instructive in the remark. Perhaps our best guide is to recall Wilde’s subtitle for the play: ‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People’. There are numerous references to weighty and important topics, but they are all approached in a tone of mockery. Both Jack and Algernon apply to Dr. Chasuble to be Christened, for example, as if it is something trivial and not a solemn, spiritual sacrament of the church. In subverting conventions in this way, we are moved more and more away from a tone of ‘earnestness’ towards an irreverent way of looking at life, a tone more in keeping with Wilde’s intention. He was familiar with the naturalist and realist writers such as Emile Zola and George Meredith, but, if he was influenced by genre such as these, it would have been in reaction against them. The ‘earnestness’ of naturalist fiction and the ‘new drama’ of dramatists such as Ibsen, who explored social issues with serious intentions rather than in an entertaining way, was not something that Wilde was interested in taking seriously in his plays.

In conclusion, it would be wrong to assume that Wilde concurs wholly with Gwendolen in her opinion that “In matters of the grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.” Despite all the ridicule and mockery in Oscar Wilde’s flamboyant style, and the irrepressible humour, vitality and mock heroism of Burns’s poem, there is much for us to find instructive in both Tam O’Shanter and The Importance of Being Earnest. Both texts conform to Horace’s principle that literature should “entertain and educate” and they both “delight…and add to our knowledge and wisdom” of the world around us.