Oscar Wilde and Prison Writing

Abstract

This article examines selected texts that Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) wrote during his time in Reading Gaol (1895-97) through the prism of contemporary theories on prison writing in order to identify how routine and the cruelty of his confinement led him to new knowledges about himself – particularly, to his realisation of a similarity between his own suffering and Christ’s suffering. This article will show how this realisation consists of self-conscious process of a reconceptualisation of the self – that is, a process according to which he comes to a realisation not only of the subject that he was before his sentence, but also of the subject that he is becoming under the pressures of punitive and disciplinary power. Such discussion will be centred on his confessional letter De Profundis, but I will also examine texts less discussed by Brazilian scholarship, such as Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of Prison Life, an essay that he sent to the editor of the Daily Chronicle after his release to denounce the cruelty with which Reading Gaol used to punish the younger inmates. Beyond examining texts by this author still under-examined in comparison to his works of fiction and poetry, this article seeks to expose a dimension of his personality that, subjected to the routine and the pressures of a prison system, proves to be much more fragile and docile than those of the caustic dandy and of the star artist whose eccentricities ended up leading Victorian justice to finally sentence him to prison for gross indecency.