The Aesthetics of Exile: Wilde Transforming Dante in Intentions and De Profundis

The Aesthetics of Exile: Wilde Transforming Dante in Intentions and De Profanáis Jay Losey Baylor University Those who have the artistic temperament go into exile with Dante and learn how salt is the bread of others and how steep their stairs. —Selected Letters of Oscar Wilde THE COMMEDIA has always exerted a powerful influence on artists, especially Dante's portrayal of the exiled artist. His politically motivated exile from Florence has become a literary paradigm of the artist pitted against institutional authority. In nineteenth-century England , this dialectic appears most notably in the engravings of Blake, the cultural criticism of Carlyle, the aesthetic criticism of Ruskin and Pater, and the political criticism of Wilde. Dante's representation of the artist beset by bestial desire, by sin, and by a feeling of damnation appears frequently in Wilde's work. Wilde employs such imagery to ridicule homophobic Victorians.1 Their moral hypocrisy, he suggests, reflects the attitude of institutional authority, particularly political authority. It is no mere coincidence that he revels in Dante's scathing indictment of Florentine politicians. And Wilde, modifying Dante's method, mixes aesthetic and political judgments, creating what may be termed an aesthetics of exile. Lake Dante, he stresses the need for the artist to remain true to his artistic vision, even if he is exiled or destroyed by institutional authority. In fact, Wilde relishes his role as an antagonist. In his poetry, letters, fiction, theoretical essays, and autobiography, Wilde portrays himself as an outsider from both Ireland and England not only to render political judgments (à la Dante) but also to create an image of himself as an artist made to suffer by the political institutions 429 ELT 36:4 1993 he belittles. This image is both private and public. In De Profundis, Wilde, who has finally eaten Dante's bitter bread, transforms a personal meditation on his own experience into a critique of the Judeo-Christian beliefs Victorians profess to follow. By doing so, Wilde creates a hellish vision of late-Victorian culture in decline. Indeed, as I shall argue, the aesthetics of exile assumes increasing importance in Wilde's work. In the early poetry and Intentions, he presents a fictional version of man destroying himself through bestial desire; in De Profundis, tapping into his own experience, he presents himself as one of the damned being flayed by Victorian authorities. But whether theoretical or autobiographical , he indicates that the self-professed goal of any artist should be to remain free of society and its rules. Although Wilde fell short of this goal by involving himself in the charges against Douglas's father, he provided in his work a model for subsequent artists. This paradigm, as I shall show, is a contemporary version of the one Dante had already provided in the Commedia. Early Poems In two early poems, "Ravenna" (1878) and "At Verona" (1881), Wilde assumes a Dantean mask to create a fictionalized exile. In "Ravenna," the poem awarded the Newdigate Prize, Wilde blends perceiver and object by making Ravenna the setting and by reminiscing about his trip there in June 1875: "A year ago I breathed the Italian air, . . . musing on Ravenna's ancient name."2 The predominant poetic form of "Ravenna" is an elegy, a lament for this city's lost greatness as the center of Italian art. For Wilde, the central poetic figure associated with Italian art is Dante, and his literary references to Dante establish an uncanny resemblance between the speaker and the Florentine poet: Alas! my Dante! thou hast known the pain of meaner lives,—the exile's galling chain, How steep the stairs within king's houses are, And all the petty miseries which mar Man's nobler nature with the sense of wrong.3 The invocation of Dante by name (in the form of an apostrophe) suggests an exilic tribute: the other has known "pain." And the reference to being exiled (Dante from Florence, Wilde imaginatively from Ireland and England) indicates a poetic identification: speaker and poet have felt "exile's galling chain." 430 LOSEY : WILDE Wilde establishes a dialogue with Dante by quoting almost verbatim from Paradiso XVII. The line—"How steep the stairs within king's houses...