linguistic:paraphrasing, linguistic:voice_change
Satire and parody

The play repeatedly mocks Victorian traditions and social customs – marriage and the pursuit of love in particular. In Victorian times earnestness was considered by some to be the overriding societal value; originating in religious attempts to reform the lower classes, it spread to the middle and upper classes during the mid-19th century. The play's subtitle introduces the theme, which continues in the discussion between Jack and Algernon in Act I: "Yes, but you must be serious about it. I hate people who are not serious about meals. It is so shallow of them".

Wilde's inversion of values continues: when Algernon arrives in Woolton masquerading as Ernest he tells Cecily that he is not really wicked at all.

In the final scene Jack asks Gwendolen if she can forgive him for not having been deceitful after all:

In turn, Gwendolen and Cecily have the idea of marrying a man named Ernest. Gwendolen ignores her mother's methodical analysis of Jack Worthing's suitability as a husband and places her entire faith in a forename, declaring in Act I, "The only really safe name is Ernest". This is an opinion shared by Cecily in Act II: "I pity any poor married woman whose husband is not called Ernest". Wilde portrayed society's rules and rituals in the figure of Lady Bracknell: according to the Wilde scholar Peter Raby, minute attention to the details of her style created a comic effect of assertion by restraint. She dismisses Jack's London address as on the unfashionable side of Belgrave Square and is unmoved by Jack's explanation that the handbag in which he was found as a baby was deposited in the cloakroom of the socially superior half of Victoria Station.

Wilde parodies 19th-century melodrama, introducing exaggeratedly incongruous situations such as Jack's arrival in full mourning for the brother who has just walked into his house, and the sudden switch from fulsome affection between Cecily and Gwendolen to deep hostility on discovering that they are supposedly both engaged to the same man.