Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900) was an Anglo-Irish dramatist, novelist, essayist, short-story writer, critic, and poet. He was part of the Decadence, a loosely affiliated coterie of writers and artists of the 1890s whose lives and works manifested a highly stylized, decorative manner, a fascination with morbidity and perversity, and an adherence to the doctrine "art for art's sake." After having a hard childhood, where he was dressed as a girl until the age of nine, he viewed life more critically than others. He often focused in on the upper class and wrote of their absurdity, superficiality, and snobbery. Yet mainly, he wrote of what he felt at the time and what is around him. In The Importance of Being Earnest and A Woman of No Importance, it is evident that the environment, lifestyle, and events in the life of Oscar Wilde have influenced him in writing such one-sided critical satires, in which he reserved none of his strong opinions.
             When it came to satires, Wilde was the master of such literary art. "Wilde has accomplished such satire from the hallowed edifice of romantic literature certain standard characters, themes, and plot situations in order to build out of them a comedy that fuses contemporary social satire with a straight-faced taking-off of the usages of the popular fiction and drama of his time" (Poupard 418). In the beginning, he tried to be a serious writer but failed miserably. It was believed that as an entertainer he was more morally clear-sighted (Bryfonski 504). Although he was full of strong idealism and human sympathy, his dissatisfaction with the society of the 1880s and 90's caused him to make highly personal and melodramatic attacks on issues that he possibly has never looked close enough to understand. Because of this, he was thought of as only presenting one side of life (498). He presented the upper English class with clear hostility and stressed their corruption, shallowness, snobbery, ...