Abstract
This chapter focuses on how De Profundis stands today not only as a confessional letter but most importantly as a complex exercise of self-construction, in which Wilde is self-consciously fashioning a version of his life for posterity. In this perspective, it analyses some very interesting contemporary texts that have rewritten Wilde’s last years, such as Patti Smith’s reading of the epistola at Reading Gaol in 2016, David Hare’s The Judas Kiss (1998), Rupert Everett’s 2018 film The Happy Prince—which narrates Wilde’s magnificent fall, focusing on his last “gutter” days as a pariah and exile, in France and in Italy—and Gyles Brandreth’s novel Oscar Wilde and The Murders at Reading Gaol (2012), of the most successful titles in Barndreth’s ongoing series on Wilde.
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Notes
- 1.
The introduction was published, in an abridged version, by The Telegraph on 17 may 2020: Patti Smith, “You Showed us the Terrible Mystery of Love,” The Telegraph, 17 May 2020, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/read-patti-smiths-love-letter-oscar-wilde-showed-us-terrible/. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (London: Folio 2020).
- 2.
Smith, “You Showed us the Terrible Mystery of Love”.
- 3.
On Patti Smith see Eric Wendell, Patti Smith: America’s Punk Rock Rhapsodist (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).
- 4.
In the last three decades, we have recorded several remarkable artistic efforts aimed at rewriting Wilde's prison post-prison years. Prison studies has also become a central area of research within Wilde Studies as witnessed by a number of recent publications; see: Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde, The Unrepented Years (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017) and Nicholas Frankel (ed.) The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018).
- 5.
Guy, Small, “Reading De Profundis,” 123.
- 6.
Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man and Prison Writings, ed. Isobel Murray. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), xiii. See also Pierpaolo Martino, “Celebrity, (Auto)biography and Failure in Wilde’s De Profundis,” in A Quintessential Wilde, His Worldly Place, His Penetrating Philosophy and His Influential Aestheticism, ed. Annette Magid (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017), 116–133. This section of the chapter draws on that contribution, rewriting and expanding it in terms of the investigation of the relevance of the epistola in rewritings by Kilroy and Hare.
- 7.
See again Martino, “The Wilde Legacy”.
- 8.
Su Holmes, Sean Redmond, “Editorial. A Journal in Celebrity Studies,” Celebrity Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2010, 4.
- 9.
Richard A. Kaye, “Gay Studies/Queer Theory and Oscar Wilde,” 193.
- 10.
Cucullu, “Adolescent Dorian Gray,” 21.
- 11.
Dominic Janes formulates very interesting observations in relation to the case of the Queensberry’s card: “The issue of the truth of poses was of importance in the libel trial of 1895 because the scrawled words on the card left by John Sholto Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry, at the Albemarle Club were read as an accusation that Wilde had posed as a sodomite, and therefore, was one. […] What divided the two sides in this case was not so much the question of whether Wilde was or was not a sodomite but whether it did or did not matter that people could appear to be sodomites. On the one hand, it could be held that sodomy was so disgusting and obscene that it should be kept, at all costs, from public attention. On the other, it might be felt that intimations of sodomy were simply part of the amusing spectacle of sophisticated life. From the latter viewpoint, men who sought sex with other men could deploy coded expressions of their desires that were more or less obvious and legible depending on the audience at which they were targeted. Pleasure was facilitated by flirtatious visual games of posing and supposing in opposition to textual imperatives of naming and shaming. However, to flirt with the appearance of sodomy was not the same as proud affirmation, since it had to take place in the context of the threat of public denunciation. Moreover, to pose as a sodomite was to engage with forms that had developed in collusion with imagery conjured from the lurid imaginations of moral opponents.” Dominic Janes, Oscar Wilde Prefigured. Queer Fashioning and British Caricature, 1750–1900 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1–2.
- 12.
Colm Tóibín, “Introduction,” in Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín. (London: Penguin, 2013), xix.
- 13.
Quoted in Tóibín, “Introduction,” xx.
- 14.
Tóibín, “Introduction,” xx.
- 15.
Ashley H. Robbins Oscar Wilde. The Great Drama of His Life. How His Tragedy Reflected His Personality (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2011), 1.
- 16.
Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde is the title of a 1998 play by Moises Kaufman, which as Marcovich puts it “is written as a poststructuralist resistance to authorship and to textual authority,” indeed “Gross Indecency attempts to reconstruct the Wilde trials out of newspaper reports, memoirs and various biographies of Wilde.” Heather Marcovitch “The Judas Kiss, Gross Indecency, Velvet Goldmine: the postmodern Masks of Oscar Wilde,” in Quintessential Wilde, ed. Annette M. Magid (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2017), 141. Kauffmann himself in his “Introduction” to the Metheun edition of the drama insists that his original idea was that “any legitimate attempt to reconstruct this historical event had to incorporate, in one way or another, the diversity of accounts. This posed a fascinating problem: how to create a theater piece that could encompass all the different stories. And yet have a coherent, dramatic though line.” Hence the idea “that the piece had to make[…] the presence of the actor telling the story – visible.” Moises Kauffman, Gross Indecency. The Thrre Trials of Osca Wilde (London: Metheun, 1998), x.
- 17.
On Wilde’s trials and his imprisonment see the very recent and exhaustive monograph by Joseph Brostow, Oscar Wilde on Trial. The Criminal Proceedings, from Arrest to Imprisonment (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022).
- 18.
As Frankell records, in the summer of 1896 Wilde wrote a “moving desperate clemency petition” in which he “documented his treatment over the previous year, and in it Wilde pleaded for some remission in his sentence.” Wilde’s petition met with a largely sympathetic response from Sir Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the recently appointed head of British prisons […] On 27 July 1896, Ruggles Brise instructed Major James O. Nelson the governor of Reading Prison to provide Wilde with foolscap paper, ink and pen “for use in his leisure moments in his cell.” Wilde addressed Nelson in terms of the “most Christ-like man I ever met;” Nelson’s “compassion and generous actions helped rebuild Wilde’s self-confidence, not just as man but as a writer.” Nicholas Frankel, “Introduction,” in Id. (ed.), The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 7–8.
- 19.
Frankel, “Introduction” in Id. (ed.), The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, 12.
- 20.
Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 180.
- 21.
Guy, Small, “Reading De Profundis,” 129.
- 22.
Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, ed. Colm Tóibín (London: Penguin, 2013), 89.
- 23.
Wilde, De Profundis, 100.
- 24.
Guy, Small, “Reading De Profundis,”130.
- 25.
Wilde, De Profundis, 134–135.
- 26.
For the issue of the performance of the self, see also the seminal study by Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday) published in 1959. On Wilde and performance theory see, again, Marcowitch, The Art of the Pose.
- 27.
Wilde, De Profundis, 135–136.
- 28.
Wilde, De Profundis, 113.
- 29.
Wilde, De Profundis, 120.
- 30.
According to Godwin “De Profundis enabled Wilde to reconstruct his public image during his incarceration. This reformed identity is dependent upon Wilde's ability to position himself alongside the sinful woman anointing Jesus, the prodigal son, and the adulteress, who are all forgiven by Christ for their sexual sins. Through the retelling of these parables, Wilde asserts that he has received Christ's forgiveness, since his plight is analogous to these celebrated biblical figures. In so doing, Wilde parallels the forgiveness of homosexual and heterosexual sins and positions himself as a forgiven sinner worthy of public exoneration.”—Kelli M. Godwin, “Oscar Wilde's De Profundis: A Narrative of Sexual Sin and Forgiveness,” The Explicator, Vol. 67, No. 1, 2008, 60.
- 31.
See, again, Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde”.
- 32.
Smith, “You Showed us the Terrible Mystery of Love”.
- 33.
Fenton Johnson, “De Profundis, 1895–97; published 1905 and 1962,” in 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read, ed. R. Canning (New York: Alison 2009), 84.
- 34.
Johnson, “De Profundis,” 84–85.
- 35.
See Martino, “The Wilde Legacy”.
- 36.
Wilde, De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, 151.
- 37.
Josephne Guy and Ian Small, “Reading De Profundis,” 130.
- 38.
Guy, Small, Reading, 136.
- 39.
Graham Price, Oscar Wilde and contemporary Irish Drama. Learning to be Oscar’s Contemporary (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 108.
- 40.
Price, Oscar Wilde, 128.
- 41.
Guy, Small, Reading, 145.
- 42.
Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” 135.
- 43.
It is interesting to note how, in the last decades, De Profundis has represented a source of inspiration for musicians moving in different fields, from art-rock to contemporary music.
- 44.
Wilde, De Profundis, 148–149.
- 45.
Frankel, “Introduction,” in Id (ed.) The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, 16.
- 46.
Frankel, “Introduction,” 16.
- 47.
Wilde, De Profundis, 158.
- 48.
Oscar Wilde. 2013. De Profundis and Other Prison Writings, 158–159.
- 49.
David Hare, The Judas Kiss (London: Faber & Faber, 1998).
- 50.
Marcovitch, “The Judas Kiss,” 140.
- 51.
Hare, The Judas Kiss, 37.
- 52.
Another play which stands as a rewriting of Wilde’s last years and more specifically of De Profundis and “The Ballad of the Reading Gaol” is Gareth Armstrong’s Wilde Without the Boy (2014) which has been regularly performed by Gerard Logan since its opening in July 2014 at the Buxton Festival. As Rose puts it “the adaptation of Wilde’s epistle presents an unusual and difficult challenge as far as adaptations go: the morphing of a private letter into a stage play.” Gerard Logan and Armstrong’s collaborative creative process gave birth to a one-act play, of about an hour, in which—also in order to provide the audience with some context as the adaptation would have to communicate with very mixed audiences, some of whom knew nothing, or very little, about Wilde’s letter—we see Wilde reviewing the manuscript before his release from prison. We have in short Wilde reading the epistle with the voices of key players in the story from Justice Wills to Charles Parker as voices off. See Riccardo Cassarino, Maggie Rose, “Gareth Armstrong’s Stage Adaptation of De Profundis and The Ballad of the Reading Gaol and its Italian Translation” in Wilde World, eds Giovannelli, Martino, 183–197.
- 53.
Hare, The Judas Kiss, 97.
- 54.
Steve Prokopy, “Interview: What Oscar Wilde Means to Rupert Everett, and the Most Poignant Scene in The Happy Prince,” Third Coast Review, 29 October 2018, https://thirdcoastreview.com/2018/10/29/film-interview-rupert-everett/.
- 55.
Peter Ackroyd, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (London: Abacus, 1983). As Joe Moran brilliantly summarizes Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde: “reads a line between historical reclamation and literary invention, and is [an] amalgam of painstaking research and biographical speculation in which its central character recounts the story of his life during his last days in Paris between August and November 1900. In this account, Ackroyd's Wilde reveals much about the relationship between class, culture, and sexuality in late Victorian society, only to suppress these issues ultimately by transforming his life into a personal morality tale. Wilde confesses in the novel to two principal ‘sins’—his desire for fame and his desire for young men—and these desires become linked in the text as he turns his back on both of them in favor of an eternalized and transcendent ‘art.’ […] Ackroyd's novel is told by Oscar as he lives out his final days in the down-at-heel Hotel d'Alsace in Paris, surviving on money borrowed from friends. […] In a so-called journal which is, as the book's title suggests, more of a ‘last testament,’ he intersperses anecdotes of his encounters in Paris—where Oscar is often snubbed in restaurants and theatres, and spat at and jeered by strangers in the street—with a more substantial chronology of his life from his Dublin childhood to his arrest, imprisonment, and exile.” Joe Moran, “‘Simple Words’: Peter Ackroyd's Autobiography of Oscar Wilde,” Biography, Vol. 22, No. 3 (summer 1999), 356–357.
- 56.
Eagleton, “The Doubleness of Oscar Wilde.”
- 57.
Prokopy, “Interview: What Oscar Wilde Means to Rupert Everett”.
- 58.
Dalya Alberge, “Oscar Wilde's grandson ‘terribly moved’ by Rupert Everett's Biopic,” The Guardian, 5 June 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/jun/05/oscar-wilde-grandson-terribly-moved-rupert-everett-biopic-merlin-holland.
- 59.
Peter Bradshaw, “The Happy Prince Review—Rupert Everett Is Magnificent in Dream Role as Dying Oscar Wilde,” The Guardian, 22 January 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/22/the-happy-prince-film-review-rupert-everett-oscar-wilde.
- 60.
Kristen Page-Kirby, “It Took a Decade for Rupert Everett to get ‘The Happy Prince’ Made—and in the End, He Had to Do It Himself,” The Washington Post, 19 October 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/express/2018/10/19/it-took-decade-rupert-everett-get-happy-prince-made-end-he-had-do-it-himself/
- 61.
A permanent plaque commemorating Oscar Wilde on Platform 10 at Clapham Junction was unveiled in July 2019 as part of a combined project by Wandsworth LGBTQ + Forum and Studio Voltaire. David Robson, chairman of Wandsworth LGBTQ+, explained that at a time when people are still under threat because of their sexuality, the plaque would act as a reminder that hate crime is not tolerated in the rail industry.
- 62.
Rupert Everett, To the End of the World. Travels with Oscar Wilde (London: Abacus, 2020), 14–15.
- 63.
Particularly, interesting among recent rewritings of The Happy Prince collection is Wilde Stories, a 2016 artistic transmedia project designed by Athena Media. The project brings together Irish artists including composer Michael Gallen and visual artist Felicityn Clear, to re-imagine the stories in a broadcast collaboration with RTE’ lyric fm. Each reading/performance of the stories by actors/narrators Robert Sheehan, Lauren Coe and Brian Gleeson with music by Gallen is followed by a commentary by Wilde scholars Anne Markey, Jarlath Killeen, Eleanor Fitzsimons and Merlin Holland; all the five readings are available as podcasts on Soundcloud while the original artworks were brought together in a Live Event in Temple Bar ins October 2016. The project website, with links to podcasts, videos, musical performances and project blog is accessible at: http://www.wildestories.ie/index.html.
- 64.
Sturgis, Oscar: A Life, 364.
- 65.
Karl Beckson, ed., Oscar Wilde, The Critical Heritage (London and New York: Routledge, 1970), 60.
- 66.
Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 282.
- 67.
Jarlath Killeen, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 38. See also Anne, Markey Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales. Origins and Contexts (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2011), in which the author extensively explores “Wilde’s recourse to Irish Folklore” (8) in conceiving and writing his tales.
- 68.
Bradshaw, “The Happy Prince Review”.
- 69.
Oscar Wilde “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, ed. Merlin Holland (Glasgow: HarperCollins, 1994), 1093–1107.
- 70.
Wilde “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1095.
- 71.
See Norbert Koh, Oscar Wilde. The Works of a Conformist Rebel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
- 72.
Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106.
- 73.
Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106.
- 74.
Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106.
- 75.
Wilde, “Pen, Pencil and Poison,” 1106.
- 76.
Michael Gillespie, Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 32.
- 77.
Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 283.
- 78.
Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace, 34.
- 79.
Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace 39.
- 80.
Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace 39.
- 81.
Gillespie, Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity, 40.
- 82.
Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” 1125.
- 83.
Guy, Small, Studying Oscar Wilde. History, Criticism and Myth (Greensboro: ELT Press), 91.
- 84.
Dana Shiller, “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel.” Studies in the Novel 29.4 (1997): 558.
- 85.
Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol (London: John Murray, 2012).
- 86.
Clare Clarke, Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8.
- 87.
Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Murders at Reading Gaol, 287.
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Martino, P. (2023). Performing De Profundis. In: WILDE NOW. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30426-2_4
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