De Profundis

"Very simply, Wilde wrote it as a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas while he was imprisoned in Reading Gaol. He was stretching the rules: he was allowed to write letters in prison, so he wrote a letter that was nearly one hundred pages long once it was published. Whether Lord Alfred Douglas was really the intended readership, is highly dubious. Once he had finished writing the manuscript in prison, Wilde asked for several copies of it to be made, for excerpts to be sent to other people, and for copies to be kept by More Adey and Robert Ross because they were his literary executors and therefore ought to have all of his works. All of these things suggest that it is not simply a letter to an ex-lover. “He says that sending somebody to prison for loving boys or men—and the idea that prison will stop you from doing so—is patently ridiculous” Wilde always plays with genre. Genre is both how works are marketed and sold, and it also forms the rules and expectations for how we read works. As with so many of Wilde’s works, it is hard to know how to categorise De Profundis . It gets called a prison letter but it is also a kind of apologia—a self-justification rather than an apology. It is also a form of biography , a manifesto on art, a defiant rejection of society’s standards and judgements, and a declaration of purpose for his future plans for artistic self-definition. Wilde was extremely successful in shaping his future reputation with De Profundis . For example, he wrote that ‘I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age’, and this has helped shape the way that he has been thought about ever since. Basically, yes. After his conviction, he did not deny doing the things for which he was imprisoned. But he says that sending somebody to prison for loving boys or men—and the idea that prison will stop you from doing so—is patently ridiculous. He quite explicitly says in De Profundis that the laws that condemned him were wrong and unjust laws. He continued to be defiant after he left prison, with ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’, and his letters to the Home Secretary and to the newspapers. He campaigned for prison reform, inveighing against the treatment of children and the mentally ill in prison. The only time when he submitted to the law was when he appealed to the Home Secretary for early release on the grounds that he was losing his sanity. At that point, he characterised his homosexuality as a sickness, a disease. He actually quoted as authorities people like Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau, who pathologized the criminal and condemned homosexuality. That was his lowest point. There is a great deal of continuity. In ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol’ and De Profundis , he excoriates the prison system and the hypocrisy of society. In both of these works, he reverses the idea of the prison hierarchy, just as he had in The Soul of Man under Socialism . It is the prisoners who are compassionate and have imagination, and it is those who exercise authority over them who are debased and rendered cruel by that authority. The one point on which Wilde did change—which is more philosophical than political—was on the value of suffering. In The Soul of Man under Socialism , he says that sympathy with suffering is simply degrading. In part, he had been hitting back against Victorian sentimentalising of suffering, and the idea that the poor and weak are somehow purified or ennobled by their suffering. In De Profundis , he recants that view. He says that suffering actually does have value. Suffering is where emotion and form come together. Some of the most intense experiences, like being imprisoned where time stops and all you have are your thoughts, mean that you can see the whole of your life: you live every moment in time simultaneously. It gives a different kind of emotional depth; compassion and imagination grow from that. Wilde shifted his national allegiances throughout his life, in part according to convenience. At times, he downplayed his Irishness. For example, he lost his Irish accent when he went to Oxford. He could talk of ‘our English land’, and align himself with Shakespeare , Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats as one of the greats of English literature . Yet when Salome was refused a licence for performance, he made very clear that he was not English but Irish. At one point he talked of applying for French citizenship, because the French appreciated the true value of artistic freedom. Having said this, he was extremely critical of British rule in Ireland , and was a staunch defender of Irish nationalism throughout his life. I think that his Irishness meant that he was very aware of power—the power that was exercised over his country, and the self-justifying narratives of power. But the Irishness of his works? There’s a huge discussion about this among Wilde critics. He appropriates material from Irish fairy tales, legends and folk stories. There is also a sense in which although he passed himself off as part of English high society, he did so in a way that was all about performance. Many of his works denaturalise and deconstruct the image that English society holds up to itself. His humour was wonderfully subversive and corrosive. As with his sexuality, his Irishness placed him outside the mainstream. He was an insider-outsider with genre, and he was an insider-outsider with the literary establishment. He learned the rules, and could play them, but absolutely to his own advantage."