Once in high school, I choreographed a rather large, performance art/dance project of my own design. I led a cast of a dozen or so players through a number of interconnected pieces, about an hour in all. Needless to say, I was very proud of myself. On the opening night of the show, mere moments before the curtain went up, my soundman lost the recording of the accompanying music I had selected and, without consulting me, substituted a random recording that he had lying around. I needn’t describe what followed.
When I read our unexpurgated copy of De Profundis, I felt that heart-crushed seventeen year-old artist rise from her ancient burial ground to tremble in sympathy with poor Mr. Wilde. I am not referring to Wilde’s romantic betrayal by his immature, unworthy boyfriend, although my seventeen year-old self certainly could relate to that unfortunate situation too; I am referring to the unique misery of having one’s work destroyed by an inferior artist. Wilde writes, “I thought life was going to be a brilliant comedy…I found it to be a revolting and repellent tragedy” (705). He also describes, in painful detail, how Bosie’s hand was all over this change in genre. He admits that he was completely dominated by his young lover, that he could not work when Bosie was around, and that his beautiful artist’s life – a work of art in itself – deteriorated into a dull collage of expensive, yet mindless and repetitive amusements at the other’s command. Thus one of Wilde’s objectives in using his tiny allotment of prison paper to write De Profundis, it seems to me, is to give authorial credit where credit is due: to put the pen in Bosie’s hand. His other objective is to write the drama of his own reclamation of the authorial role through the writing of the letter.
When I began to regard Wilde’s letter as a play, many details that had first confused me, gained clarity. Wilde actually explains his modus operandi half way through his project: “In modern art atmosphere counts for so much. Modern life is complex and relative. Those are its two distinguishing notes. To render the first we require atmosphere with its subtlety of nuances, of suggestion, of strange perspectives: as for the second we require background” (723). When I had taken Wilde’s writing at face value (ie. as a private letter to Bosie), I had wondered why Wilde would feel the need to rehash his whole relationship in detail. After all, Bosie had been there too. However, when I regarded the letter as an epistle-format dramatic monologue, I realized that all of this information was required to give the drama the appropriate background. And what could be a better “strange perspective” than that of a convicted “sodomite”?
In addition to noting the evidence of his articulated approach to the project, I also recognized many attributes of a typical “well-made play” in this letter. Wilde’s story begins with a simple meeting and proceeds with relentless logic towards its inevitable conclusion. Although Wilde is no slave to Aristotle, he uses the “fatal flaw” as his primary plotting device. He tells Bosie, “Your terrible lack of imagination, the one really fatal defect of your character, was entirely the result of the Hate that lived in you” (707). And indeed, Wilde’s drama unfolds like a flower from this perfect little bud: Bosie hates his father. Pure Sophocles!
Wilde also incorporates theme and variation, including doubling. At first, all of the doubling is antithetical: that is, Bosie represents Wilde’s evil twin. In a rare moment of sympathy, Wilde writes, “As far as our friendship is concerned Nemesis has crushed us both like flies” (723), and much of Wilde’s monologue elaborates on this idea. For every set of circumstances in which Wilde demonstrates his faithful and generous spirit, Bosie, given the same set of circumstances, exposes his selfish, niggardly soul. The particular aching beauty of Wilde’s doubling scenarios comes in large part from the fact that every replay of events at Wilde’s expense comes as a direct result of his relationship with Bosie. Wilde takes ill because he has nursed a sick Bosie. Wilde’s mother, the writer forcefully suggests, dies because her son is moldering in prison, again thanks to Bosie. As a reader, one sees elegance in this aspect of Wilde’s narrative – like a good nineteenth century melodrama, no piece is out of place.
When he turns to the figure of Christ, Wilde shifts from nineteenth century dramatic forms to those of the sixteenth century. Indeed, I don’t think that it is a coincidence that he begins this passage with a prayer for Christ’s heart and Shakespeare’s brain. I see the Christ passages of the letter as a kind of meta-narrative in the style of Shakespeare, Kyd, Marlowe, and the other genius playwrights of the Elizabethan era. In discussing Christ’s life, Wilde creates a play-within-a play about the possibility of making one’s life an art object, exactly the project that the letter itself enacts. He asserts, “[T]here was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art, and there find its complete fulfillment” (741). Christ becomes, with this alchemy, a performance artist, the “true precursor of the romantic movement in life” (741). Thus as an admiring fellow artist, Wilde can praise Christ’s poetics: “[H]is entire life also is the most wonderful of poems. For ‘pity and terror’ there is nothing in the entire cycle of Greek Tragedy to touch it.” (741). Although Wilde returns to the subject of Bosie’s fatal flaw at the end of his letter-play, Christ and Shakespeare remain on stage for the third act as Wilde’s personal eudaemonoi, helping him to find his final words.
I know that it is difficult to reconcile Wilde’s petty laundry lists of expenses with my suggestion that this letter represents anything other than a personal vendetta (and maybe I have been overly influenced by seeing V For Vendetta this weekend), but I think that Professor Tongson’s own work on the subject may provide a helpful clue to unraveling this supposed inconsistency. For those of you who haven’t read the chapter in question yet, she discusses Wilde’s disgust for Bosie’s lack of tact and how it forms the basis of his larger ethical argument against his lover – again, we return to the ethics of formal choices.* With this idea in mind, I propose that Wilde shifts to the embarrassing and mundane minutiae of his financial relationship with Bosie precisely to indict the younger man for his own materialism. A good playwright knows that each of his characters must speak in his or her own unique voice. To this end, Wilde gives his late mother the language of poetry and gives his former lover, likewise, the language of the ledger.
Considering the care with which Wilde has composed this missive – again, I can’t help seeing him like the caged lesbian in Vendetta, writing his desperate message in a crabbed hand on tear-soaked toilet paper – I share Natasha’s outrage at his publisher’s decision to edit the great man’s work without his permission. When Wilde’s curtain finally rose again, the least he deserved was to have his story told to the tune he chose.
* I apologize if my brief summary of Professor Tongson’s point is off the mark and, as always, am ready to be told I don’t know shit.
- Erika
