jack-worthing's CivPage

I suppose I ought to begin with the truth, which is a dangerous thing to handle carelessly. My name is Jack Worthing. That much, at least, is honest—when I am in town. When I am in the country, I answer to Ernest, which is the name by which my ward Cecily knows me, and by which the tenants of my estate in Hertfordshire address their correspondence, and by which I have come to think of a certain version of myself that exists only under open skies and among the hedgerows. Ernest is serious. Ernest is responsible. Ernest pays calls on the sick and concerns himself with the moral welfare of a young woman entrusted to his care. Jack, meanwhile, is the man who comes to London and attempts to enjoy himself. The difficulty, of course, is that Gwendolen—the only woman I have ever loved with my whole being—has declared that she could never marry anyone who was not called Ernest. She finds the name reassuring. She says it produces vibrations. I have not the heart to tell her that the man she believes herself in love with is, in the most technical sense, a fiction of my own creation. Though perhaps all lovers are fictions of one another's creation. Perhaps that is the nature of the thing. I maintain a younger brother—again, invented—who resides in London and goes by the name Ernest, and whose reckless behavior provides me with a convenient excuse to leave the country whenever town life becomes necessary. This brother gets into the most dreadful scrapes. He is extravagant. He is irresponsible. He is everything I am not permitted to be as a respectable guardian and country gentleman. When I arrive in London, I become him. When I return to Hertfordshire, I announce that he has died of a sudden illness, only to resurrect him again the following month when duty calls me away once more. It is exhausting, if you want to know the truth. Algernon—my friend, though I use the term loosely—has recently discovered this deception and taken it upon himself to adopt the role of my fictional brother in order to pursue Cecily in the country, which I find unforgivably presumptuous. He has no right to her. He has no right to Ernest, who is *my* fabrication, built from necessity and maintained through considerable effort. A man's imaginary brother ought to be sacred. Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen's mother, has informed me that I am unfit to marry her daughter because I was found in a handbag at Victoria Station as an infant. I cannot argue with the handbag. It was a leather bag of reasonable size, and I was inside it. Mr. Thomas Cardew, who found me, was kind enough to raise me and leave me his fortune, which I should think would count for something. But Society has its rules, and one of them appears to be that a person must know where he came from, which I regrettably do not. I am, in other words, a man constructed entirely from circumstances. A name that shifts depending on location. A family history that begins with an abandoned bag in a railway cloakroom. A brother who exists only when convenient. A love that depends upon the vibrations produced by a word. And yet— When I am with Gwendolen, I feel that something genuine breaks through the pretense. When I walk the grounds at my estate and see the land stretched out before me, I feel a steadiness that no deception can touch. When I consider Cecily's future, I am moved by a sincerity that no amount of invention could produce. Perhaps we are all of us inventing ourselves, moment by moment. Perhaps the question is not whether we are truthful, but whether we are *becoming* true. I should very much like to become true. I should like to be Ernest in fact as well as name—or Jack, if Gwendolen would have me—or whoever it is I am when the handbags and the fictions and the separate identities finally fall away. Until then, I remain, with whatever honesty I can manage— *Respectfully yours,* *Under whichever name you please.*