De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to his friend and lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas.
In its first half, Wilde recounts their previous relationship and extravagant lifestyle which resulted eventually in Wilde's conviction and imprisonment for gross indecency. He indicts both Lord Alfred's vanity and his own weakness. In the second half, Wilde charts his spiritual development in prison and identification with Jesus Christ, whom he characterizes as a romantic, individualist artist. The letter begins "Dear Bosie" and ends "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 (another former lover, loyal friend, 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.
Background
Trials
In 1891, Wilde began his 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 friendship. Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, often argued with his son about the topic. Especially after the suicide death of his eldest son, the Viscount Drumlanrig, Queensberry privately accused them of improper acts and threatened to end Lord Alfred's allowance. When they refused, he began publicly harassing Wilde. During early 1895 Wilde had become famous and successful 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".Holland (2004:300)Queensberry's handwriting was almost indecipherable: The hall porter initially read "ponce and sodomite", but Queensberry himself claimed that he'd written "posing 'as' a sodomite", an easier accusation to defend in court. Merlin Holland concludes that "what Queensberry almost certainly wrote was "posing ", (Holland (2004:300))
Indignant about the insult 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 Wilde's arrest and he was charged with gross indecency with other men by the Labouchere Amendment in April 1895. The trial was a matter 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, with hard labour.Sentencing Statement of Justice Wills . Criminal Trial Transcript Page, University of Missouri-Kansas Law School. Retrieved 22 April 2010.
Imprisonment He was imprisoned in Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading Prisons, where poor food, manual labour, and harsh conditions weakened his health.Ellmann (1988:451) He quickly began suffering from hunger, insomnia, and disease.Ellmann (19988:454) He was visited in Pentonville by R. B. S. Haldane, a liberal, reforming MP whom he had known previously. Haldane championed his case and arranged for access to religious, educational, and historical books.Ellmann (1988:456) Whilst in Wandsworth, Wilde collapsed in the Chapel and burst his right ear drum, an injury that would later contribute to his death. He spent two months recovering in the infirmary.Ellmann (1988:465) Friends arranged for him to be transferred to Reading Prison, where he was prescribed lighter duties and allowed to spend some time reading but not writing. Depressed, he was unable to complete even these duties; the Warden of Reading Prison was the strict Colonel Isaacson, and Wilde received a series of harsh punishments for trivial offences. The failure to complete them resulted in renewed sanction.Ellmann (1988:465–466)
Wilde, who still loved Lord Alfred, became troubled as communication from him became rare, then annoyed when he learned that the latter planned to publish Wilde's letters without permission and dedicate poems to him unasked. He wrote to friends immediately, forbidding the former and refusing the latter.Ellmann (1988:460) Wilde still maintained his belief that the Queensberrys owed him a debt of honour as a result of his bankruptcy trial.Ellmann (1988:)
Composition
Wilde's friends continued advocating for better conditions and, in 1897, Major Nelson, a man of a more progressive mind, replaced Col. Isaacson as Warden. He quickly visited Wilde and offered him a book from his personal library, the sympathy bringing Wilde to tears.Ellmann (1988:467) Soon Wilde requested lists of books, returning to Ancient Greek poets and Christian theology, and studying modern Italian and German, though it was Dante's Inferno that gained his attention.Ellmann (1988:478)
Wilde was granted official permission to have writing materials during early 1897, but even then controlled strictly: he could write to his friends and his solicitor, but only one page at a time. Wilde decided to write a letter to Douglas, and in it discuss the last five years they had spent together, creating an autobiography of sorts.Ellmann (1988:479) Wilde spent January, February, and March 1897 writing his letter. Textual analysis of the manuscript shows that Nelson probably relaxed the stringent rules, allowing Wilde to see the papers together: three of the sheets are of relatively fair copy, suggesting they were entirely re-written, and most do not end with a full-stop. Wilde requested that he might send the letter to Lord Alfred Douglas or Robert Ross, which the Home Office denied, but he was permitted to take it with him on release.Holland/Hart-Davis (2000:683) Wilde never revised the work after he left prison.Raby (1988:140)
Structure and content
First part: Wilde's account of time with Douglas Wilde's work was written as a prose letter on eighty sheets of prison paper. It contains no formal divisions (save paragraphs) and is addressed and signed off as a letter. Scholars have distinguished a noticeable change of style, tone and content in the latter half of the letter, when Wilde addresses his spiritual journey in prison.Raby (1988:135) In the first part, Wilde examines the time he and Lord Alfred had spent together, from 1892 until Wilde's trials in the spring of 1895. He examines Lord Alfred's behaviour and its detrimental effect on Wilde's work, and recounts Lord Alfred's constant demands on his attention and hospitality. Poignancy builds throughout this section as Wilde details the expenses of their sumptuous dinners and hotel-stays, many costing more than £1,000; it culminates in an account of Douglas's rage in Brighton whilst Wilde was ill. Though he was a constant presence at Wilde's side, their relationship was sterile intellectually.Raby (1988:134) Throughout Wilde's self-accusation is that he acceded to these demands instead of placing himself within quiet, intellectual company dedicated to the contemplation of beauty and ideas, but instead succumbed to an "imperfect world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed". This passage concludes with Wilde offering his forgiveness to Douglas. He repudiates him for what Wilde finally considers as his arrogance and vanity; he had not forgotten Douglas's remark, when he was ill, "When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting".(De Profundis) Holland/Hart-Davis, (2000:700)
Second part: Christ as a romantic artist The second part of the letter traces Wilde's spiritual growth through the physical and emotional hardships of his imprisonment. Wilde introduces the greater context, making a typically grandiose claim: "I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age",Raby (1988:135,6) though he later writes, in a more humble vein, "I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering." Describing briefly his ascendancy and dominance of the literary and social scenes in London, he contrasts his past fame and the attendant pleasure with his current condition and the pain it brings. Pleasure and success are an artifice, he says, while pain wears no mask. He turns to humility as a remedy, and identifies with the other prisoners.Raby (1988:136)
Wilde uses Isaiah 53:3 to introduce his Christian theme: "He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we hid our faces from him." Though Peter Raby acknowledges the "obvious relevance" of this quotation to Wilde's situation, he argues that the line does not necessitate the comparison with Christ implicit in his description of Robert Ross doffing his hat to Wilde after his conviction. Wilde adopts Jesus of Nazareth as a symbol of Western kindness and Eastern serenity and as a rebel-hero of mind, body and soul.Kiberd (2000:330) Though other romantics had discussed Jesus in artistic terms, Wilde's conception is the most radical. His earlier antinomian attitude is reiterated and he finds no recompense in traditional morality. Though Wilde loved the beauty of religion, he dismissed it now as a source of solace, saying "My Gods dwell in temples made with hands". Reason was similarly lacking: Wilde felt that the law had convicted him unjustly. Instead Wilde reworked his earlier doctrine of the appreciation of experience: all of it must be accepted and transformed, whatever its origin. Wilde declared he would actively accept sorrow and discover humility, be happy and appreciate developments in art and life.Raby (1988:137)
He also felt redemption and fulfilment in his ordeal, realising that his hardship had at least filled him with the fruit of experience:
Simon Critchley argues that the major element of is self-realisation. Wilde, having lost everything dear to him, does not accuse external forces, justified as this might have been, but rather absorbs his hardships through the artistic process into a spiritual experience.Critchley, Simon Oscar Wilde's faithless Christianity The Guardian 15 January 2009. Retrieved 16 November 2010
Style and themes Though a letter, at 50,000 words long De Profundis becomes a sort of dramatic monologue which considers Douglas's supposed responses.Ellmann (1988) Wilde's previous prose writing had a flippant, chatty style, which he again employed for his comic plays. In prison Wilde was disconnected from his audiences, which Declan Kiberd suggested was possibly his harshest punishment. He characterises Wilde as an Irish critic of English social mores ultimately silenced for his polemics, and reports that while convalescing in the sick-bay, Wilde entertained his fellow-patients and carers with stories and wit until the authorities placed a warder beside his bed.