De Profundis (letter)
De Profundis (Latin: "from the depths") is a letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to his friend and lover Lord Alfred "Bosie" Douglas.
In the second half, Wilde charts his spiritual development in prison and identification with Jesus Christ, whom he characterizes as a romantic, individualist artist.
Especially after the suicide death of his eldest son, the Viscount Drumlanrig, Queensberry privately accused them of improper acts and threatened to end Lord Alfred's allowance.
[2][Notes 1] Indignant about the insult and encouraged by Lord Alfred (who wanted to attack his father in every possible way), Wilde sued Queensberry for criminal libel.
The Crown promptly issued a warrant for Wilde's arrest and he was charged with gross indecency with other men by the Labouchere Amendment in April 1895.
[3] He was imprisoned in Pentonville, Wandsworth, and Reading Prisons, where poor food, manual labour, and harsh conditions weakened his health.
[7] Depressed, he was unable to complete even these duties; the Warden of Reading Prison was the strict Colonel Isaacson, and Wilde received a series of harsh punishments for trivial offences.
[10] Wilde's friends continued advocating for better conditions and, in 1897, Major Nelson, a man of a more progressive mind, replaced Col. Isaacson as Warden.
[11] Soon Wilde requested lists of books, returning to Ancient Greek poets and Christian theology, and studying modern Italian and German, though it was Dante's Inferno that gained his attention.
Textual analysis of the manuscript shows that Nelson probably relaxed the stringent rules, allowing Wilde to see the papers together: three of the sheets are of relatively fair copy, suggesting they were entirely re-written, and most do not end with a full-stop.
[13] Wilde requested that he might send the letter to Lord Alfred Douglas or Robert Ross, which the Home Office denied, but he was permitted to take it with him on release.
[15] HM Prison, Reading Dear Bosie, After long and fruitless waiting I have determined to write to you myself, as much for your sake as for mine, as I would not like to think that I had passed through two long years of imprisonment without ever having received a single line from you, or any news or message even, except such as gave me pain [...]Wilde's work was written as a prose letter on eighty sheets of prison paper.
Scholars have distinguished a noticeable change of style, tone and content in the latter half of the letter, when Wilde addresses his spiritual journey in prison.
[17] Throughout Wilde's self-accusation is that he acceded to these demands instead of placing himself within quiet, intellectual company dedicated to the contemplation of beauty and ideas, but instead succumbed to an "imperfect world of coarse uncompleted passions, of appetite without distinction, desire without limit, and formless greed".
Describing briefly his ascendancy and dominance of the literary and social scenes in London, he contrasts his past fame and the attendant pleasure with his current condition and the pain it brings.
[20] Wilde uses Isaiah 53:3 to introduce his Christian theme: "He is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we hid our faces from him."
[20] Wilde adopts Jesus of Nazareth as a symbol of Western kindness and Eastern serenity and as a rebel-hero of mind, body and soul.
Wilde, having lost everything dear to him, does not accuse external forces, justified as this might have been, but rather absorbs his hardships through the artistic process into a spiritual experience.
[24] Though a letter, at 50,000 words long De Profundis becomes a sort of dramatic monologue which considers Douglas's supposed responses.
Also in my letter there are several passages which explain my mental development while in prison, and the inevitable evolution of my character and intellectual attitude towards life that has taken place, and I want you and others who stand by me and have affection for me to know exactly in what mood and manner I face the world.
In 1924, when Lord Alfred served six months in prison for libel against Winston Churchill, he wrote a sonnet sequence entitled In Excelsis ("In the heights"), intentionally referencing Wilde's letter.
They rebelled, and the reading was broken off; but the unalterable impression that it left in everybody’s mind was that Bosie was, in Labouchere's words, a young scoundrel and that he had ruined his great friend.
[14] In 1960, Rupert Hart-Davis examined the manuscript in the library of the British Museum, and produced a new, corrected text from it, which was published in The Letters of Oscar Wilde in 1962.
He wrote that: In July Ruth and I had the excitement of being the first people to see the original manuscript of Oscar's longest, best, and most important letter De Profundis, which had been given to the British Museum by Robbie Ross with a fifty-year ban on anyone's seeing it, so as to make sure Lord Alfred Douglas never saw it.
[41]The 1962 Hart-Davis edition is currently still in print in the expanded version of the book titled The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, which was published in New York and London in 2000.
In this volume, entitled De Profundis; 'Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis', editor Ian Small tried "to establish an authoritative (and perhaps definitive) text" of Wilde's prison letter.
Substantially, the text is in the public domain in the UK and in the European Union (at the very least in Ireland, France and Germany), but copyrighted in the United States and Australia.
G. S. Street, who had earlier been an intellectual opponent of the decadents, had two impressions of De Profundis: one, "that it was poignantly touching, the other it was extraordinarily and profoundly interesting".
[52] Street dismissed contemporary complaints that the letter lacked sincerity, saying this was just a manifestation of those who opposed Wilde's graceful writing style.
They were later developed into an immersive nightclub drag musical at Harvard in 2015 and later in New York City in 2019, OSCAR at The Crown and the love that dare not speak its name.
