Reading De Profundis

Reading De Profundis Josephine M. Guy University of Nottingham Ian Small University of Birmingham DE PROFUNDIS is the most infamous, but the least analysed of Wilde's works. On those occasions when it has been discussed, it is most often read in terms of a love letter, or as Wilde's attempt to justify himself—in his words, to "show his life to the world," to write of "the past and of the future, of sweet things changed to bitterness and of bitter things that may be turned into joy."1 The reasons for critics seeing De Profundis as some sort of confessional document are not hard to find. Uniquely among Wilde's works, it appears to have been composed in isolation from all of the usual institutions of literary production, and thus seems to possess an expressive immediacy absent from the other more self-consciously fashioned works in the oeuvre. More particularly , it seems to exist beyond the reach of those commercial interests that recent historians have seen as central to late-nineteenth-century authorship. The popular history of De Profundis hints at a dynamic connection between expression, authentic experience, and emotional intensity. The image of Wilde conjured up by the work's title (which was Robert Ross's and not Wilde's invention), that of the lonely agonized prisoner pouring out his soul in a work of cathartic emotional and spiritual release, invites us to read the resulting document as a frank and sincere exploration of the self. It should thus come as little surprise to discover that of all Wilde's works it is De Profundis which has been most consistently appropriated for biographical readings— Isobel Murray suggests it can be seen as "partial autobiography"2—and as a consequence, and despite its relative neglect, it is De Profundis which has probably held the greatest sway over the manner in which 123 ELT 49 : 2 2006 Wilde's life, and in particular his character and his creativity, have been conceptualized. Murray's label prompts a number of questions. First, how accurate or how useful an account of Wilde's life is De Profundis if we do consider it to be "partial autobiography"? In other words, what kind of "life" of himself does Wilde give to us? Second, would there be many readers of De Profundis if it were not so intimately tied to such a famous (or notorious ) historical personage? We could pose these questions in a rather different way. Do we value De Profundis principally for the insights it gives us into Wilde the man, either directly (in terms of informing us of events in his private life) or indirectly (in exhibiting aspects of his personality )? And if so, then how secure are those insights? Or, is the work valuable in and of itself as a piece of what modern critics have termed "life-writing," and therefore as a meditation on the nature of suffering and redemption? If we follow this second path, then we also need to ask why the piece is so rarely considered as a whole, and why some of its most obvious literary shortcomings—its repetitions, rambling structure , frequent contradictions—have been so rarely commented upon. Here it is worth stressing that it is an emphasis on the privacy and intimacy of the document that typically permits these kinds of limitations to be explained away. As Richard Ellmann ably put it: "as an apologia De Profundis suffers from the adulteration of simplicity by eloquence, by an arrogance lurking in its humility and by its disjointed structure. But as a love letter it has all the consistency it needs."3 What difference does it make if we replace the label of "partial autobiography " with that of "love letter"? Is Ellmann's label any more appropriate than that of Murray or, for that matter, than that of Robert Ross? Oddly enough, if we take the time to look at the evidence closely, it turns out that it is not at all clear whether the manuscript even represents a single document, let alone possesses a single identity : that is to say, although the first folio begins with "Dear Bosie" and the last folio ends with...