Players on the modern stage lack the intellectual experience or depth of feeling even to recognize a tragedy when its elements surround them. Instead he became absurd, Wilde laments: “the dreadful thing about modernity was that it put tragedy into the raiment of comedy, so that the great realities seemed grotesque or lacking in style” (DP, 102). Wilde describes his situation as potentially tragic in the sense of attendance by grand familial or historical forces: Sir and Lady Wilde made for their child’s inheritance an august and noble name, and the child dragged that name down to infamy. It made futile the attempt at what in the best circumstances would have been insufficient: “Never even in my most perfect days of my development as an artist could I have found words fit to bear so august a burden or to move with sufficient stateliness of music through the purple pageant of my incommunicable woe” (DP, 27).īut Wilde also feels that something not merely in his own circumstances, something in modern life itself, precludes the expression of tragedy. His mother would have wanted to be mourned like a Shakespearean queen her son’s tribute to her should have been an expression of his highest style, a work in which all was extravagantly formal but the meaning of his style was no longer in his control. One reason that words fail is that, accustomed to speaking from a position of effortless superiority, Wilde is conscious of how vulnerable his style looks against a background of abjection. “Her death was terrible to me,” he writes “but I, once a lord of language, have no words with which to express my anguish and my shame” (DP, 27).
“But my enemies have had full access to me always twice in my public appearances in the Bankruptcy Court twice again in my public transferences from one prison to another have I been shown under conditions of unspeakable humiliation to the gaze and mockery of men.” 2 During Wilde’s early months of imprisonment his mother died. “Hardly if at all have my friends suffered to see me,” he writes.
The text has a controlled voice and turns often toward the writer’s old extravagance of expression, the petty generosity of a rich man who takes pleasure in making constant small expenditures but underlying this is the heavy tone of one who feels himself to be speaking from the depths of potentially final defeat. The theme of De Profundis is tragedy, its expression and possibility. It is a curious document: part apologia, part aesthetic discourse, part religious testimonial, part retort to religion, a letter that addresses a private recipient and was written for public view, but that despite these layers of performance has a strange inward quality this is a letter from Wilde to himself. First published in 1905 by an arrangement between Oscar Wilde and Robert Ross, who visited Wilde at Reading and later became his literary executor, De Profundis was written in prison over three months in 1897.
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