De Profundis

by Oscar Wilde, Cerna Rubin (Editor)

Overview

De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to "Bosie" (Lord Alfred Douglas).During its first half Wilde recounts their previous relationship and extravagant lifestyle which eventually led to Wilde's conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency. He indicts both Lord Alfred's vanity and his own weakness in acceding to those wishes. In the second half, Wilde charts his spiritual development in prison and identification with Jesus Christ, whom he characterises as a romantic, individualist artist. The letter began "Dear Bosie" and ended "Your Affectionate Friend".Wilde wrote the letter between January and March 1897, close to the end of his imprisonment. Contact had lapsed between Douglas and Wilde and the latter had suffered from his close supervision, physical labour and emotional isolation. Nelson, the new prison governor, thought that writing might be more cathartic than prison labour. He was not allowed to send the long letter which he was allowed to write "for medicinal purposes"; each page was taken away when completed, and only at the end could he read it over and make revisions. Nelson gave the long letter to him on his release on 18 May 1897.Wilde entrusted the manuscript to the journalist Robert Ross (an ex-lover, and rival to "Bosie"). Ross published the letter in 1905, five years after Wilde's death, giving it the title "De Profundis" from Psalm 130. It was an incomplete version, excised of its autobiographical elements and references to the Queensberry family; various editions gave more text until in 1962 the complete and correct version appeared in a volume of Wilde's letters.In 1891 Wilde began an intimate friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, a young, vain aristocrat. As the two grew closer, family and friends on both sides urged Wilde and Douglas to lessen their contact. Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, often feuded with his son over the topic. Especially after the suicide death of his eldest son, the Viscount Drumlanrig, Queensberry privately accused them of improper acts and threatened to cut off Lord Alfred's allowance. When they refused, he began publicly harassing Wilde. In early 1895 Wilde had reached the height of his fame and success with his plays An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest on stage in London. When Wilde returned from holidays after the premieres, he found Queensberry's card at his club with the inscription: "For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]".Unable to bear further insults and encouraged by Lord Alfred (who wanted to attack his father in every possible way), Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel. Wilde withdrew his claim as the defence began but the Judge deemed that Queensberry's accusation was justified. The Crown promptly issued a warrant for his arrest and he was charged with gross indecency with other men under the Labouchere Amendment in April 1895. The trial was the centre of public discussion as details of Wilde's consorts from the working class became known. Wilde refused to admit wrongdoing and the jury were unable to reach a verdict. At the retrial Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment, to be held to hard labour.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781518612190
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	11/09/2015
Pages:	68
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.14(d)
Language:	Spanish

About the Author

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was a Dublin-born poet and playwright who studied at the Portora Royal School, before attending Trinity College and Magdalen College, Oxford. The son of two writers, Wilde grew up in an intellectual environment. As a young man, his poetry appeared in various periodicals including Dublin UniversityMagazine. In 1881, he published his first book Poems, an expansive collection of his earlier works. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was released in 1890 followed by the acclaimed plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

Date of Birth:

October 16, 1854

Date of Death:

November 30, 1900

Place of Birth:

Dublin, Ireland

Place of Death:

Paris, France

Education:

The Royal School in Enniskillen, Dublin, 1864; Trinity College, Dublin, 1871; Magdalen College, Oxford, England, 1874

Read an Excerpt

Preface by Richard Ellmann


De Profundis is a kind of dramatic monologue, which constantly questions and takes into account the silent recipient's supposed responses. Given the place where it was written, Wilde might have been expected to confess his guilt. Instead he refuses to admit that his past conduct with young men was guilty, and declares that the laws by which he was condemned were unjust. The closest he comes to the subject of homosexuality is to say, impenitently, that what the paradox was for him in the realm of thought, sexual deviation was in the realm of conduct. More than half of De Profundis is taken up by his confession, not of his own sins, but of Bosie's. He evokes two striking images for that young man. One is his favorite passage from Agamemnon, about bringing up a lion's whelp inside one's house only to have it run amok. Aeschylus compared it to Helen, Wilde to Douglas. The other is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have no realization of Hamlet's tragedy, being "the little cups that can hold so much and no more."

The main theme of self-recrimination is that he did not break with Bosie. But his letter is an attempt to restore relations. And while he admits to "weakness," he explains the weakness as due to his affection, good nature, aversion to scenes, incapacity to bear resentment, and desire to keep life comely by ignoring what he considered trifles. His weakness was strength. The gods, he has discovered, make instruments to plague us out of our virtues as well as our vices.

Wilde acknowledges that along with good qualities, he was "the spendthrift of my own genius." But he passes quickly over this defect, and thosethat attend it. Much of De Profundis is an elegy for lost greatness. As he whips his own image, he cannot withhold his admiration for what that image was. Elegy generates eulogy. He heightens the pinnacle from which he has fallen:

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. I had realised this for myself at the very dawn of my manhood, and had forced my age to realise it afterwards. . . . Byron was a symbolic figure, but his relations were to the passion of his age and its weariness of passion. Mine were to something more noble, more permanent, of more vital issue, of larger scope.

The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colours of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder: I took the drama, the most objective form known to art, and made it as personal a mode of expression as the lyric or the sonnet, at the same time that I widened its range and enriched its characterisation: drama, novel, poem in rhyme, poem in prose, subtle or fantastic dialogue, whatever I touched I made beautiful in a new mode of beauty: to truth itself I gave what is false no less than what is true as its rightful province, and showed that the false and the true are merely forms of intellectual existence. I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

Continued...

Reading Group Guide

1. Richard Ellmann suggests that De Profundis is a love letter, above all else. Does De Profundis follow the conventional form of a love letter? In what specific ways does De Profundis read like a love letter? In what ways does it differ? What makes it romantic?

2. Examine the letter's structure and define its different parts. Do Wilde's style and tone remain consistent throughout?

3. In De Profundis, Wilde recognizes numerous ironies regarding the circumstances of his imprisonment, most notably that he himself is imprisoned after suing Queensberry for slander. What other ironies (or paradoxes) does Wilde point out? What role does irony play in the letter? Why might Wilde choose to speak in these terms?

4. Do you think Wilde is a reliable narrator? How might his memories of Bosie be influenced by his imprisonment? Do you find his criticism of Bosie fair? Why or why not?

5. Throughout De Profundis, Wilde compares Alfred Douglas to numerous literary figures, from the lion's whelp in Agamemnon to Hamlet's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. What, if anything, do these figures have in common? How are they different? Compare the different contexts in which Wilde alludes to these figures.

6. What sort of freedom awaits Wilde upon his release? How does he aim to live?

7. Dante's Inferno is one of the texts to which Wilde frequently alludes in De Profundis. Examine the different contexts in which he quotes from Inferno. What similarities, if any, can you find? Why do you think Wilde quotes from Dante so often?

8. Discuss Wilde's invocation of Christ as both a literary and a historical figure. Whatquality of Christ does Wilde most admire? Why does Wilde call Christ the first individual in history? In what ways is Christ like an artist, according to Wilde? Richard Ellmann refers to this section as the letter's climax. Would you agree? Why or why not?

9. After providing a withering critique of Alfred Douglas's behavior, Wilde turns his criticism on himself, claiming, "I must say to myself that neither you nor your father, multiplied a thousand times over, could possibly have ruined a man like me: I ruined myself and that nobody, great or small, can be ruined except by his own hand." Examine the reasons he gives for writing this. Do you agree with his claim?

10. Toward the end of the letter, Wilde writes, "A man whose desire is to be something separate from himself, to be a Member of Parliament, or a successful grocer, or a prominent solicitor, or a judge, or something equally tedious, invariably succeeds in being what he wants to be. That is his punishment. Those who want a mask have to wear it." What is the price Wilde has paid for this knowledge? Is this something he could have understood in this youth? Why or why not?

Editorial Reviews

"Displays the insight, honesty, and unself-conscious style of a great writer."
—W. H. Auden

From the Publisher