The Reading Gaol of Henry James's In The Cage

Awaiting transfer from Pentonville Prison to Wandsworth Prison in June of 1895, Oscar Wilde received a visit from Richard Haldane—peer, Liberal Member of Parliament, and member of H. J. Gladstone’s Home Office Committee on Penal Reform. Haldane, presumably making his own personal contribution to such reform, promised to bring Wilde “books and pen and ink,” since, as Haldane saw it, Wilde had already “lived a life of pleasure” and “[n]ow misfortune might prove a blessing for his career.” ¹ Never a fan of Wilde, but certainly a friend of Haldane, Henry James heard the latter’s account of his visit to Pentonville and immediately wrote to Alphonse Daudet. “A friend of mine,” recounted James,

saw poor Wilde a few weeks ago, completely beaten physically and mentally—to the point that the prison authorities had had to loosen up on their discipline and put him in the infirmary, where he will probably spend the rest of his time in relatively easy conditions. My friend did not find that Wilde had even the slightest power of resistance or recuperation. If he only had such power, what masterpieces he could still produce! (translation mine) ²

Ostensibly earnest in its sympathy and enthusiasm for Wilde’s potential, James’s letter may well verge into mild disingenuousness, given his reputed distaste for Wilde’s flamboyant public persona and work. And had Richard Ellmann examined the letter in his biography of Wilde, he would certainly have infused his interpretation with characteristic vitriol, viewing it as yet another example of James’s “particularly repulsive” hypocrisy and vicarious distance from the reality of Wilde’s suffering. ³ But to question the sincerity of James’s optimism is, in fact, to overlook its precise similarity to Haldane’s or, for that matter, Wilde’s own in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891). All three of them perform the same gesture, invoking what Victor Brombert dubs the “romantic prison” to shed the best possible light on imprisonment. This popular nineteenth-century figuration of the penitentiary as the locus of monastic solitude and contemplative/artistic freedom—as the space in which incarceration is merely the imposition of external discipline, the removal of the distracted artist from the (sensual) temptations of the world or sybaritic life of pleasure—contained the implicit promise, after all, that imprisonment would facilitate creativity and spiritual rejuvenation or maturation. ⁴

If the Wilde trials precipitated what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick theorizes as “homosexual panic” in the mid-1890s, the public and private representation of the dreadful details of his imprisonment prompted something else.⁵ Not only did the reported details garner support for Gladstone’s penal reform plan, which would not come into effect until after Wilde was released, but they challenged the pervasive, benign figure of the “romantic prison,” which could not quite reconcile the rosy consolation of contemplative solitude and the harsh actuality of oakum picking—the bright promise of artistic freedom and the reality of dysentery, or the glow of monastic asceticism and the gross physicality of acute nausea. Shortly after the reports of Wilde’s physical and mental collapse began to circulate in newspapers, men’s clubs, and letters from one sympathetic friend to another, all the optimism that infused, say, James’s letter to Daudet or Haldane’s assurances to Wilde, disappeared, dissolving into grim observations about the inhumanity of hard labor as a form of punishment. What is curious about this loss of confidence in the potential transformation of an essentially literary construct into a reality for the imprisoned Wilde, however, is not so much that it encouraged a reevaluation of the romantic construct on the part of James, but that it seemed to have no impact on Wilde whatsoever. In 1897 he emerged from his debilitating, two-year stint in Reading Gaol and immediately wrote “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”—an explicit celebration of the romantic prison. A mere six months later James responded with his own, rather unorthodox prison narrative, In the Cage, a novella that, while seemingly inspired by Wilde’s text, countered the “Ballad”‘s easy assumption that a...