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Rated: E · Essay · Comedy · #1025705
I had to write this essay for my British Literature class. I had a little fun :D
Many are the cares in a young girl’s heart. A blossoming young woman has to face a variety of new challenges—many of which are within herself like her emotions. There are so many beautiful qualities about womanhood that makes each woman a little different from the next; therefore, each has such an interesting personality.
In the awesome play we read by the name of “The Importance of Being Earnest” the character Cecily is first described by her uncle and it seems like she is a silly girl. Later we meet her in the story and find that she is really infatuated with Algernon (or is it Earnest?) and has been writing in her journal about her “relationship” with him over the past few months even though they only just met. Most people seem to react to her by calling her a psycho. Well, they have her all wrong. Cecily is a very misunderstood character.
Let’s look at Cecily’s situation. She lives at her Uncle Jack’s (or is his name Earnest?) home in the country. She doesn’t seem to have interaction with many people and certainly no one she could consider her peers. There’s no way she can even enjoy the company of others at school because she is taught everything from Miss Prism. Cecily is at home all day, with hardly any company, and without much to do except sit around contemplating, writing, and learning German. She doesn’t even like German since “It isn’t at all a becoming language.” The girl must have been awfully bored a lot of the time.
It is also important to consider the simple fact that Cecily is only just 18 years old. She is 18 years old, living a very sheltered life, and dealing with the same feelings most teenage girls have to go through. It seems like they are making her grow up really fast—maybe that’s just the way it was at the time—but some things are inevitable. One thing that is inevitable is that young people go through new feelings and phases whether they mean to or not. Most girls probably go through the first big crush that is intoxicating and obsessive early in high school. Then again Cecily didn’t go to school or probably anywhere that would allow her to go through something like that early on and get over it. So how else can Cecily cope with her romantic wishes and feelings? She can write all about it. She can pretend to have a life until she actually does.
There are dangers to allowing infatuation to take too much control in your life. Most people have to learn from a bad experience early on that things aren’t always what they seem or what you hope them to be. Cecily of course meets her first love—whom she has been in love with since even before they met—and since she is so inexperienced in life, it’s easy for her to be more forgiving and tolerant. I looked up the name Cecily in a baby name database and interestingly enough her name means “Blind.” Wilde may have done that on purpose as a reflection on this character. She was blind to the dishonesty that existed right in front of her, and she fell in love with a man blindly—without actually knowing him.
© Copyright 2005 Sara Hope (staynfaith at Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
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