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Dramatic Irony
Explanation and Analysis—The Novel and the Handbag:
A conversation between Cecily and Miss Prism in Act 2, Part 1 foreshadows the revelation that occurs at the end of the play:
Miss Prism: Do not speak slightingly of the three-volume novel, Cecily. I wrote one myself in earlier days.
Cecily: Did you really, Miss Prism? How wonderfully clever you are! I hope it did not end happily? I don't like novels that end happily. They depress me so much.
Miss Prism: The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.
Cecily: I suppose so. But it seems very unfair. And was your novel ever published?
Miss Prism: Alas! no. The manuscript unfortunately was abandoned. I use the word in the sense of lost or mislaid.
Miss Prism makes sure to specify that she did not abandon the pursuit of novel-writing—she actually physically lost the manuscript. At the time, this seems like an odd detail to emphasize, but the comment makes sense later on in the play, when Miss Prism reveals that, having confused her manuscript for a baby she was tending, she placed the former in a perambulator and the latter in a handbag.
Just as this earlier moment of foreshadowing pays off, it leads into a moment of dramatic irony. From the moment Miss Prism mentions the handbag, the audience, who learned earlier in the play that Jack was found in a handbag when he was a baby, immediately knows that he is the infant Miss Prism abandoned. In Act 3, Part 2, Jack presses Miss Prism for more information:
Jack: [Who has been listening attentively]. But where did you deposit the hand-bag?
Miss Prism: Do not ask me, Mr. Worthing.
Jack: Miss Prism, this is a matter of no small importance to me. I insist on knowing where you deposited the hand-bag that contained that infant.
Miss Prism: I left it in the cloak-room of one of the larger railway stations in London.
Jack: What railway station?
Miss Prism: [Quite crushed]. Victoria. The Brighton line.
This exchange is especially ironic because it is not enough for Jack to know that the baby in a handbag was abandoned 28 years ago at a railway station (as if multiple babies were abandoned that same year under identical circumstances), he needs to know the exact name of the railway station.
Miss Prism confirms that the handbag in which she placed the baby is the same handbag in which Jack was found, but her attitude in Act 3, Part 2, in keeping with the play's comical mood, is utterly absurd:
Miss Prism: The bag is undoubtedly mine. I am delighted to have it so unexpectedly restored to me. It has been a great inconvenience being without it all these years.
This line is ironic because Miss Prism, who for some reason seems to have gone 28 years without buying a replacement handbag, is more concerned about the bag than she is about the baby.
Miss Prism's statement that the good ended happily and the bad unhappily in her novel also foreshadows the end of the play, in which all four lovers end up happily united, with Lady Bracknell begrudgingly allowing the engagements to proceed. Cecily's comment that the ending of Miss Prism's novel seems rather unfair also foreshadows the fact that the "heroes" of the play go unpunished for all their deceit and immoral behavior.
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