Compare and contrast how gender roles are presented in The Importance of Being Earnest and a Doll’s House in light of Ibsen’s statement that “there are two kinds of moral laws, two kinds of conscience, one for men and one quite different, for women.”

According to Ibsen’s statement, he states that moral laws are divided into two, one for women and the other for men. He’s claiming that the “moral laws” that society has implanted has double standards. Ibsen and Wilde present gender roles through morality, marriage, food delicacies, dance and wealth. These four factors affect how the characters in both plays are viewed by society. Both writers present the expectations society has for both genders. They highlight the obscurity, the society they lived in, had. This method was to leave the audience questioning about the society they lived in. Ibsen displays the realness of a typical marriage and he doesn’t follow the conventions of a Well-Made play, he presents the hardcore facts of marriage and family life; he does this by giving both genders unequal power, which contradicts the meaning of marriage, “the joining of two equals”. Whereas Wilde switches the gender roles, this method is very effective as it emphasises and reveals clearly how ridiculous the social class behaves. Even though Ibsen uses highly respected jobs to portray the archetype of men, Wilde uses the absence of occupation to concentrate on the other aspects of Victorian life. In the first Act, Ibsen outlines the stereotypical views of both genders; women were to be domesticated and men were to be the bread-winners.

Wilde uses the noun “Bunburying” which is to avoid “one's duties and responsibilities by claiming to have appointments to see a fictitious person”. The term branched off of Algernon’s supposedly sickly friend’s name “Bunbury”. To uphold their reputation and respectability, Jack and Algernon