Analysis of Prison Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas by Oscar Wilde

Early in 1895, Oscar Wilde was thrown to prison facing charges of ‘gross indecency’, serving a two year sentence. He was initially imprisoned in Pentonville and Wandsworth before being transferred to Reading Gaol in November of the same year. He slept on a plank bed with no mattress, he walked in a single file in the yard with other prisoners but he was not allowed to communicate with any of them, he was hungered and had suffered from dysentery. Furthermore, during the first month, Wilde was confined to a treadmill for six hours a day, with only five minutes of rest every 20 minutes. 

Then in January 1897, when he still had a little less than five months still to serve, he started writing the letter that was later addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas or ‘Bosie’, as friends and family often call him, since inmates weren’t allowed to write plays or novels or essays. So each day, when Wilde was alone in his cell – the third cell on the third floor of the C wing, specifically – he was given paper, pen, and ink that was later taken again in the evening. The entire thing took him three months to complete. 

The day of his release, he handed the manuscript to Robbie Ross, a devoted friend of his, who had two typed copies made, one of which he sent to Bosie. Five years after Wilde’s death, Ross published extracts and excerpts from the text. However, it was not until 1949 that the complete version was published. 

By the time that he started writing De Profundis, Wilde had spent nearly two years without contact from Bosie. Though he had written endless letters to him frequently, Bosie still hadn’t responded with a single letter or visited him in prison. In those letters Wilde had sent him, he stayed very hopeful – hopeful that once he’d gotten out, they’d reunite and they’d run away to a little house on a small island in Greece, where they could live together happily. And De Profundis is when he truly snapped and lost his patience at Bosie. He grew tired of constantly waiting and being oh so desperate for love and affection from his own lover.

So in the letter, Wilde wrote about his love for Bosie and his bitterness towards him. He simultaneously loved him and detesed him. And the way that he wrote it, I feel like, he captures his realest and rawest depths of his aching soul. It’s like a demonstration of Wilde at one of his lowest points in life – if not the lowest point in life. He stripped off his mask he had hid behind to conceal his vulnerability from everyone. 

In it, you can easily tell that their relationship was extremely toxic and emotionally draining and exhausting for both Wilde and Bosie, even within reading the first few pages of the letter. And if I were to judge based on what is solely written in these pages, I’d say that there’s no way that they were meant to be together in any shape or form. They were both too flawed, too selfish and egocentric, too infatuated by the image they crafted for each other and almost absolutely abhorred the reality (as known in most of Wilde’s works), they have too much unattainable expectations for each other that they cannot reach themselves, &c. 

However, upon learning more about the nature of their relationship that is outside of what is written in De Profundis and their letter to each other, I cannot help but reconsider my thoughts. I learnt that after Wilde’s sentence ended and after he wrote the letter, they once again got together. That’s when I began thinking differently. I could imagine how much they still wanted to be with each other. No matter how draining and tiring it is, how the media kept scrutinising them everywhere they go, &c, they kept coming back to each other’s arms and kept wanting their relationship to work so badly. And I think that that’s got to mean at least something. 

But then they were on again and off again towards the end of their relationship, coming back to the same pattern they were in before Wilde was sentenced to prison, before Wilde died in the late November of 1900, without Bosie, because he didn’t think that his illness was that bad. 

So upon consideration, the letter cannot be read for its accurate account of the entirety of their relationship, nor can it be taken at its word. While some of Wilde’s accusations were, in fact, true, while others were merely petty and foolish as it was written purposely to hurt Bosie. But that’s not the initial point. De Profundis can never fit into a single category, and if it could, one would have to squeeze it in so tightly. 

It is fascinating to witness and read about the changes that came over Wilde’s emotions towards Bosie, from loving him rather blindly and accepting the worst of his flaws to calling him out with such bitterness and pettiness. And to imagine him writing about the fresh wound that is still suffering inside him in the dim light of his prison cell with bloody red tears falling down his pallid cheeks to his neck, is so enthralling and heartbreaking to imagine that it feels like a luxury and a privilege to be able to only feel compassion and only having to deal with the imagination instead of having to deal with the exact memory and feeling colouring all one’s thoughts hauntingly. And to wonder what it feels like for someone like Wilde, who wasn’t at all prepared for what the prison had to roughly offer. 

Overall, it may be said that De Profundis is a testimony of one being in a toxic relationship, how though at the end of their time together, before Wilde’s sentence, the two were left mentally and emotionally drained and hollow, they couldn’t stay apart from each other. 

It’s a story of two lovers who kept bringing each other down and pulling out the organs and tissues from each other’s system but couldn’t break apart, until death, herself interfered and separated them.