Wilde's De Profundis and Book History: Mute Manuscripts

The Essays collected in Philip E. Smith II's Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde (2008) testify to the wide range of courses that can make use of Wilde's writings to exemplify their critical aims. De Profundis seems to be especially protean in this respect, since it lends itself to identification with a number of genres and themes. It can be read in relation to histories of sexuality (and the nature of what constitutes evidence for sexual behaviour and attitudes in such histories); to traditions, both nineteenth-century and modern, of life writing and of prison writing; as a love letter which addresses the urgency of desire and its vexed relationship with what Linda Dowling describes as "Platonic eros and spiritual procreancy"; as a quasi-theological exploration of suffering, as well as, in Julia Prewitt Brown's view, "a culmination of Wilde's philosophic exploration of the vexed relation of art and truth."¹ De Profundis has also been helpful to Wilde's biographers, providing insights into the incidents surrounding his trial (including the bankruptcy proceedings brought against him) and his relationships with his wife, children, and with Douglas. Here the veiled references to Douglas's "trouble" at Oxford and the later Lambart/Danney scandal that led to Douglas being sent away "to Egypt" provide important clues to events that might otherwise have remained completely hidden.² In addition De Profundis contains details about other aspects of Wilde's life, especially his literary career: there are references to the composition of works such as An Ideal Husband, Salome, La Sainte Courtisane, and A Florentine Tragedy, as well as indications of the complexity of Wilde's dealings with the popular press, including papers such as the Pall Mall Gazette for which he wrote. There is the sense in which, despite the unusual circumstances in which it was composed, De Profundis seems to recapitulate, in both its style and allusions, many features of Wilde's earlier published works, not least of which are his extensive debts to Dante, his knowledge of the classical (and especially Greek) canon, and his familiarity with the Bible.

A further and less-often explored context for reading De Profundis is that provided by book history. In their introduction to the Blackwell Companion to the History of the Book Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose make bold claims for what they describe variously as "a new scholarly adventure" and "a new academic discipline"; "book history," they argue, "offers an innovative approach to studying both history and literature."³ Can this approach contribute anything new to our understanding of De Profundis?

To date the most thoroughgoing attempt to apply the insights of book history to aspects of Wilde's oeuvre is Nicholas Frankel's Oscar Wilde's Decorated Books (2000). In that volume Frankel's primary interest is in what he terms the "graphical dimensions of Wilde's writings" as evidenced in Wilde's concern with "the event of book publication in its own right." However, Frankel excludes De Profundis from his enquiry, along with "The Portrait of Mr W. H.," on the grounds that these works (neither of which was published as a book in Wilde's lifetime) constitute "exceptions" to his thesis because they "so successfully defied ... the efforts of editors, publishers, designers, and in the latter case Wilde himself, to bring them within the order of the book." Frankel goes on: "The production histories of these works alone tell us that for all the ravages they have suffered at the hands of successive editors, these works are more than simply books manqué." While not necessarily disagreeing with the last of Frankel's claims, I nonetheless want to suggest, for reasons developed below, that the issue of what Frankel terms "the visual semiosis of the text as it appears before our eyes," as well as the larger topic of a work's textual transmission, still bear examination with regard to our understanding of De Profundis, although not for the reasons underlying Frankel's analysis of the book publications of Wilde's other works.⁴

Eliot and Rose's phrasing in...