Indeed, many of the standard themes of his earlier aestheticism fall by the way in De Profundis, the long letter he wrote in prison to his friend and lover Lord Alfred Douglas, his connection with whom lay behind his imprisonment. His recent biographer, Richard Ellmann, (1) tells us that after he was released, " did not mind contradicting" his earlier work (531), in which he had disparaged such subjects as social improvement, by writing two letters to the Daily Chronicle about the state of England's prisons and the mistreatment of prisoners therein.
Oscar Wilde's thinking changed while he was in prison. Even though they reveal inconsistencies in his intended persona, we must include that persona in our sense of him, giving some credence to his claim that he has found a higher self. Doing so foregrounds in the text three borrowed identities that Wilde assumes in order to help define his own.
One can assess the sincerity of De Profundis by locating what we can know of its subject in a dialogue between the identity Wilde intends to convey and the implications of the literary forms he uses to convey it. The sincerity of Wilde's De Profundis, put into doubt by trains of thought in the letter that are uncharacteristic of Wilde's earlier writing, is challenged further by contemporary literary theory in its rejection of the autobiographical subject as coherent entity.
0 kommentar(er)
