Oscar Wilde, De Profundis
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a prominent playwright, journalist, and wit, perhaps best-remembered for the only novel he wrote, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). He was also cruelly persecuted, and eventually imprisoned, for his homosexuality. On Valentine’s Day 1895, Wilde was at the height of his popularity and influence, with his play The Importance of Being Earnest having just opened in London. 4 days later, he found a calling card from the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, at his club, which read ‘For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite [sic]’. Unwisely, Wilde sued Queensberry for libel.
Queensberry was acquitted as details of Wilde’s private life emerged, and he was arrested after leaving court for sodomy and gross indecency. Found guilty, Wilde was sentenced to 2 years’ hard labour (the maximum penalty), and his already-delicate health made his suffering unimaginable. His well-connected friends petitioned for leniency, and he was moved to Reading Jail after 6 months, where he wrote a letter to Douglas, known as De Profundis (‘From the Depths’). The letter discussed their relationship, the extravagance of which Wilde now regretted, but forgave Douglas, and in the second half detailed his spiritual awakening in prison.
Wilde’s spiritual awakening involved identifying himself with Christ, whom he describes as a romantic artist, ‘despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief and we hid our faces from him’ (Isaiah 53:3). He saw his disgrace and imprisonment as an artistic development, but the tone is still painfully sad:
Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed.