Day: April 10, 2022

Wilde’s audience in De Profundis is ambiguous. While this letter is addressed to Alfred Douglas, he often disappears from the letter entirely as Wilde reflects on personal philosophies and religion. At times, Wilde seems to use De Profundis as a diary, while at other times, he seems to be appealing to an audience beyond Bosie to justify his actions and philosophies. Regardless of who Wilde was originally writing to in De Profundis, his decision to publish it widened the letter’s audience significantly, making the world privy to intimate details of Wilde and Bosie’s relationship. This immortalized Wilde and Bosie not only as historical figures but as queer characters.

In my research for my final paper, I read an article by Alan Sinfield arguing that Wilde “constructed” homosexuality through his work and his public life. In the Victorian era, there were no clear-cut ideas about same-sex attraction. Our modern terms and ideas about queerness did not exist to shape Victorian thought about same-sex passion. Sinfield argues that as an “outed” queer figure, Wilde became symbolic of same-sex attraction. His philosophies and characteristics became associated with queerness and served as marks of queerness in later years.

Considering Sinfield’s argument, De Profundis likely had a significant impact on how people viewed same-sex love. By publishing what essentially serves as a memoir documenting his relationship, Wilde added his personal life to his body of work. This puts intimate details of Wilde’s life up for literary interpretation. As people looked to Wilde’s fiction and philosophy retrospectively with knowledge of Wilde’s same-sex attraction, Wilde and Bosie became literary “types.” They can be likened to Basil and Dorian, or Lord Henry and Dorian, depending on how one reads their relationship. Their relationship calls back to the boy-love of The Symposium and prefigures novels like Giovanni’s Room, where the wealthy and aging Jacques pays attractive boys for company, and beautiful Giovanni’s relationship with the older and more powerful Guillaume proves fatal.

De Profundis puts Wilde’s life and loves up for literary interpretation, placing real people in literary history. Wilde accomplishes what he proposes in Phrases and Philosophies For the Young: to “become a work of art.”

While thinking about my final paper topic, I found myself thinking a lot about morality and social classes in terms of Oscar Wilde and his works. We came across morality with The Picture of Dorian Gray through the corruption of Dorian Gray as well as the characters of Basil Hallward and Lord Henry. Also with these characters, we were able to see Wilde’s perspective on the differences of social class, with Hallward representing a certain innocence and artistry of the lower class whereas Lord Henry of the higher class indulged in hedonism and actively corrupted Gray. The Importance of Being Earnest once more offered Wilde’s commentary on class through the portrayal of Jack and Lady Bracknell. Along with the snobbish arrogance they carried as members of the higher class, Wilde imbued a pretentiousness and the injustice of class as a whole. The characters of Gwendolen and Cecily are also mocked by Wilde as he ridicules them and their characters as superficial and ignorant. He derides the upper class by exaggerating their fixation and enjoyment of superficialities such as style or food. Through De Profundis, we once more see this entitlement and hedonism through Wilde’s portrayal of Lord Alfred Douglas. He also mentions Douglas’s mother extensively in convincingly creating this image of Douglas. As shown through his two works, as well as De Profundis, there is a certain obsession Oscar Wilde carries with hedonism and arrogance, especially concerning the wealthy upper class that he is always eager to shun. It seems that his works utilize the portrayals of certain characteristics he sees in the upper class heavily to show larger themes of morality and ethics; as a whole, these works do actively illustrate Wilde’s own mentality on the subject.

This week during class I couldn’t help but keep coming back to when we talked about Orientalism. Talking about religion and how society tends to over emphasize the characteristics that suit its needs seemed very similar to the idea of the other and the Orient, which is simply the created version of the culture as perceived by the Occident. Society tends to do this to anything that doesn’t fit the traditional constructs of the culture as we have constantly seen this occur with Wilde. What I kept coming back to was Wilde’s own artistic style that strove to bring these elements that society desperately tried to hide, and put them at the forefront of his works no matter how veiled they were. We see it in Salomé with the perverse depiction of Salomé and Herod being absurdly driven by their desires leading to the climax of the play. It is also explicitly confronted in De Profundis where Wilde takes the conventional approach to Christ and Catholicism and turns it on its head. The upper class of England obsessed with their own perfection were being called out for their dirty little secrets hiding behind the mask of a happy marriage and decadent lifestyle. 

Wilde himself is a perfect example of someone obsessed with presenting himself as the norm in high society. As we discussed, though Wilde is an Irishman through and through, he was always obsessed with hiding that side of himself because he would be alienated by those in the upper echelons and unable to rise to the status he achieved. Beyond the fake accent and the fancy British values, lied a homosexual Irishman desperate to hide the truest parts of himself behind a quick wit and beautiful art. After being convicted of gross indecency and having the mask violently ripped away from him, Wilde eventually comes to terms with his true self and lays everything out in his letter to Bosie. Since the curtain is split, the only option was death or true acceptance. Writing this confession to Bosie, the one who ruined his life, highlights his shedding of the past and embracing his otherness despite the stereotypes surrounding it. Just like with Christ, who we assume was this perfect person who did no wrong, but in reality, he was a rebel who constantly challenged the rules and hierarchy of society to save us from our sins. Wilde similarly challenged the status quo, although his comparison to Christ is quite narcissistic. Catholicism is integral with the Irish identity, and although Wilde was not a practicing Christian, he obviously knew much more than the average member of the Church. He uses that knowledge to set the average member on edge and question their black and white perceptions of their religion. This is apparent in Salomé because the story of John the Baptist’s death is perverted into a tale of a child’s naive romantic fantasies. Salomé is determined to love John and kiss him, even if it means severing his head from his body to have total control over him. It is already a tragic story of a saint’s death, but taken to a new level by giving Salomé her own manipulative voice in the matter. Society wants to assume a simple story where good always wins, but here we see a complex and messy end with no one winning because of hatred. I believe this was a veiled argument by Wilde to highlight the destructive nature of assumption of character and the pressures of society.   In the same way society stereotyped the Orient, we see homosexuality and Catholicism characterized in a way that suits the constructs of society. Since same sex attraction is not biologically compatible, society decided it was disgusting and tried to hide these feelings from the public eye. Wilde revealed the nature of these attractions and normality of being caught up in those feelings beginning with Dorian Gray as the impressionable young lad with an acute narcissism attracted to anyone who fueled those feelings and piqued his interest. There was nothing inherently wrong with him or Basil Hallward. They were simply interested in creating or experiencing beautiful things, which led them to their own demise. Furthermore, Wilde delves into the double lives these others are forced to lead with The Importance of Being Earnest when he created Jack’s Earnest and Algernon’s Bunbury, which allowed them the freedom to live as they wanted, although this is veiled at the end when everything works out for them to keep their happily ever after. In De Profundis, even though Wilde never admits to his homosexuality, it is obvious he has come to terms with society’s view of him. But he does not care about that anymore and wishes simply for the acceptance of his friends, which is a true development of character because these differences should not be ostracized, but celebrated.

For my final paper, I have decided to examine Salomé through the lenses of colonialism and orientalism. I wanted to use this blog post as a method to attempt to connect these ideas to Wilde’s Irishness (a test-run).

The first interesting parallel to British-Irish relations in the play relates to its setting in “colonial” Judea. The Romans seem to share a similar role to the British as both empires conquered a diverse array of peoples while also trying to impose their cultural and religious beliefs on a resistant populace. In the beginning of the play, two soldiers (presumably of Roman but definitely of imperial background) have a conversation in which they dehumanize and critique the local Jewish citizenry. One soldier asks, “Who are those wild beasts howling” (552) while the other soldier answers, “The Jews…They are disputing about their religion” (552). The comparison of the Jews to “wild beasts” seems to mirror the British’s animalistic depictions of the Irish, and the verb “howling” could specifically connect to how many of these offensive representations included simian undertones. The fact that the Jewish people were “disputing about their religion” may also relate to Ireland as Protestants and Catholics were constantly thrown into conflict over the doctrines of the overarching Christian belief system. The British elite may have looked down upon this theological disagreement as their religious landscape looked much calmer and more uniformly Protestant on the surface, and this idea appears in the play when one of the soldiers remarks that “it is ridiculous to dispute about such things”– as most Romans would have shared a largely uniform belief in their traditional pantheon or might have not been very passionate about critiquing the majority religion (552).

  Continuing on the topic of religion, both the British and the Romans seem to have attempted to eradicate local religions in their respective colonial territories. For example, the Cappadocian character explains, “In my country there are no gods left. The Romans have driven them out. There are some who say that they have hidden themselves in the mountains,…but I think they are dead” (553).  This “driving out” of a competing belief system may relate to how the Protestant British attempted to destroy Irish Catholicism, which also managed to retain many localized and traditional pagan influences. In another literature class, I learned about how some people in rural Ireland believed that ancient mythological beings had escaped into the further reaches of the countryside – mirroring the Cappadocian pantheon’s retreat into “the mountains.” Additionally, imperial oppression has the ability to create a larger sense of pessimism within the colony, and the Jewish character expresses this feeling when he states that “God doth not show Himself…Therefore great evils have come upon the land” (563). In this way, the disappearance of God is described as an abandonment because his absence has caused “great evils” or suffering.  The character further elaborates this sense of hopelessness by explaining that “God is terrible. He breaketh the strong and the weak as a man brays corn in a mortar” (563). I would argue that this statement may loosely connect to Ireland as there must have been frustration about the many hardships of being under colonial rule – especially after the devastating Great Famine (occurred earlier in the 19^th century).

When I came home from the hospital after I was born, the first thing that my dad read to me was The Ballad of Reading Gaol. It’s an odd thing to read to a newborn baby, and it is the first thing that was ever read to me. After I read the poem for class, I texted my dad and asked him why, of everything he could have chosen to read to me, he chose that poem. His response was simple: “it’s a good poem.” That is true, but it still didn’t feel like enough of a justification. The poem is fairly dark and has intense themes. Of course, a baby isn’t going to understand the poem, but it is interesting for a new parent to reach for such a poem to share with his daughter.

I thought about it a bit more, and thought about what draws us to poetry in the first place. My dad did not connect to the actual material in the poem, but something about the poem made him want to read it in that moment. I was born on 9/11, and my dad was in Lower Manhattan when the Twin Towers fell. I reread the poem thinking about that and wondering if that experience made him think of the poem in the days afterwards. The Ballad of Reading Gaol–while far from related plot-wise–does have some themes that I imagine would have resonated with someone at the time. There is despair throughout the poem as the prisoners feel their own shame and watch the death of their fellow prisoner. Especially as the poem reaches its end, there is a transition from a more general attitude describing what prison is like to a deep sadness at the death. Such themes are universal to tragedy, which is what people experienced on 9/11 in a grand scale.

That leaves us with the question of why people are drawn to poetry in the first place. My dad has not been to prison and has not “killed the thing he loves,” yet something about the poem felt important to him at a specific time in his life. There are certain poems that I love that follow a story that I don’t relate to, but that doesn’t stop me from loving them or connecting to them. I think that part of the benefit of poetry is that it can make us feel connected to things far away from ourselves because certain themes apply in a variety of situations. When poetry works well, it resonates on a personal level even when the poem isn’t personal at all. The Ballad of Reading Gaol is much better than Wilde’s other poetry because it is less concerned with appearing to be a certain thing and more concerned with expressing a story that Wilde clearly thought was important. Because the aim is different, the poem comes out feeling more genuine, which I find much more interesting to read. When we read Wilde’s earlier poetry, we talked in class about how it seems as if Wilde felt as if he had to follow a certain form in order for his poetry to be legitimate. By this poem, that is no longer his focus.

De Profundis and Ballad of Reading Gaol are interesting shifts for Wilde because they–to use his term–are so much more earnest than everything else that he wrote. The material that came before these works was witty and clever and carefully constructed. Although that person is still very much apparent in his later work, it seems like how he comes across is less of his focus. What came before is so intentionally masked, and by the time Wilde was in prison, it seems as if he no longer felt as if masking would be useful. That brings about very honest writing that I found to be some of the best that we’ve read this semester. There is a lot of charm in Wilde’s witticisms, but De Profundis and Ballad of Reading Gaol are different in that it feels as if there is so much more passion in them. I think it is easier to connect with Ballad of Reading Gaol than it is to connect with any of his other poems, and that is because he is expressing what feels real rather than trying to be clever or construct a mask.