Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, and the Rhetoric of Agency.(Critical Essay)

De Profundis occupies a precarious place in Oscar Wilde's canon and for several reasons is often skirted by wary interpreters: it does not fit neatly into any single genre; it does not resemble any of the other works that made Wilde famous; it is full of irritating inconsistencies and contradictions; and it seems ambiguously aimed at a wider audience than its inscription to Alfred Douglas suggests. After all, there are the enduring plays, the fascinating novel, the engaging dialogues; why struggle with a reader-resistant text framed as a personal letter? Its handling in the recent Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997) illustrates this critical uneasiness. De Profundis is almost completely ignored in this collection of essays. In her chapter, for example, Regenia Gagnier (a sympathetic interpreter of De Profundis in an earlier study) devotes one sentence to it, calling it "perhaps his greatest work of art" (27)--but does not elaborate. Nowhere in this volume is there a sustained effort to assess the place of De Profundis in Wilde's canon or to set it within the context of his life.

Many readers disparage or dismiss De Profundis. It has been condemned as a "venomous dossier" and "obsessive piece of writing" (Julian 352), and it has been dismissed as the complaint of a very unhappy prisoner who "thereafter lost interest in" the work (Croft-Cooke 231). Even good-faith interpretive efforts run aground: Avrom Fleishman speaks of being "unprepared--even after several readings, in my own case--to believe my eyes" at its shifts of tone and attitude (285-86). There are some sympathetic interpretations, however. One is biographer Richard Ellmann's judgment that De Profundis is "one of the greatest love letters ever written," but that it suffers from a "disjointed structure" (515). Another is Gagnier's own earlier interpretation of the work as a response to the degradation of prison life; shifting between "realism and romance," "Wilde kept a positive past and created a possible future" as "romance"(Idylls 192). "He reconstructed the world," says Gagnier, "in order to show that he is above it" (Idylls 190). Both interpretations are insightful. Certainly De Profundis is a record of Wilde's deeply divided feelings for Douglas. And it is also at times a romance through which Wilde imagines a future for them both, in which he recovers aesthetic and moral superiority over Douglas.

But there are significant aspects of De Profundis that are not considered in the interpretations by Ellmann or Gagnier. Neither asks why its structure appears disjointed or what might account for its subversive energies--its disconcerting shifts in tone, its abrupt swings in self-positioning, or its figurative intensity. Though Wilde creates a vision of his post-prison future, this vision entails at least as much irony as romance, because much of the time Wilde seems to be writing against himself, constructing self-representations that seem to hide as much as they reveal. Throughout much of the text Wilde seems up to something but unwilling to declare what that might be. I want to look again at the elements of De Profundis that make it unreadable for some and to propose that it has a significant place in Wilde's work. From my perspective, the disjunctions arise from irresolvable tensions lurking in Wilde's rhetorical goals as he sought both to hide and to reveal his own agency within the events of his life. These tensions are not idiosyncratic but are inherent in the sociocultural space Wilde occupied as an active homosexual. He took it as obligatory that he must displace and disguise his motives and actions even as he explained them. The tonal inconsistencies of De Profundis thus need to be read as manifestations of the tectonic pressures embedded in his life--pressures until 1895 kept more or less under control. In De Profundis Wilde was trying to demonstrate not so much that he was above the world, but that he had been--and still could be--an agent in a world that required duplicity and disguise for survival.

When he went to jail in 1895, Wilde resisted his ruin; he did not accept that his work as a writer was finished, though the public thought so. What he viewed as the first step in his project of self-rehabilitation was the letter to Douglas that became De Profundis. In a letter to his friend Robert Ross he declared its purpose: "I want you, and others who still stand by me and have affection for me, to know exactly in what mood and manner I hope to face the world" after prison (Letters 512). He was defending not only his conduct with Douglas but also his stature as an artist, since The Picture of Dorian Gray and other writings had been used as corroborating evidence of moral impropriety in the trials. Thus in De Profundis Wilde hoped to rebuild his earlier stature as an artist and to articulate the terms on which he might be judged by posterity. De Profundis is thus the best evidence we have of Wilde's efforts to rescue himself for history; it is made more poignant by contrast with the self-destructive conduct of his final years. Because De Profundis is so deeply embedded in his life and work, it must be read in the context of the earlier work and his life in the crisis years.

In De Profundis Wilde writes to Alfred Douglas, "[y]ou knew what my art was to me, the great primal note by which I revealed, first myself to myself, then myself to the world" (549).[1] It is this basic purpose that Wilde describes for Ross:

"[y]ou must be in possession of the only document that really gives any explanation of my extraordinary behavior with regard to Queensberry and Alfred Douglas. . . . Some day the truth will have to be known: not necessarily in my lifetime or in Douglas's: but I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into, for all time. I don't defend my conduct. I explain it. (Letters 512)

Though De Profundis is addressed to Douglas, Wilde wanted it read by any reader interested in "the truth" as he would tell it. For these readers he wanted to show his "mental development in prison, and the inevitable evolution of character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place" (Letters 512). Because he knew Wilde wanted it to be read, Ross eventually overcame his reluctance, gave the text a title, and published a sanitized version of it after Wilde's death (Letters 423).