De Profundis

“De Profundis” is far more than a love letter to an estranged partner. Rather, Wilde critiques society and the political system of his time. In a manner that seems to honor Socrates and his trial at Athens, as depicted in The Apology and The Crito, Wilde personifies society and questions the validity of its laws. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates debates the morality of laws, as he has been sentenced to death for corrupting the youth and worshiping false gods. He ponders whether it is ethical to evade punishment and if one still has an obligation to honor a law even if it is unjust. Socrates depicts society as humanity’s parent, having raised, shaped, and influenced each individual. As such, Socrates concludes that to evade his sentence is to go against the very society that raised him, and of which he has been a willing participant since his birth.

Wilde exposes a flaw in Socrates’s conclusion, stating that while society has the right to punish its citizens, it possesses the supreme vice of shallowness. Prison unjustly condemns the individual to a life of shame and profiling, even as society fails to acknowledge its hand in the pain and suffering it has enacted. Wilde writes of his decision to sue Bosie’s father, recounting,

Of course once I had put in motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said, ‘Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised to the fullest. You shall abide by what you have appealed to (42).

Through appealing to the laws, Wilde became a willing participant in their enforcement, agreeing to an outcome before it was revealed. Wilde seems to have willingly subjected himself to the hands of a system he already despised but was coerced into engaging.

Wilde shifts gears from the prison system to modernity as a whole. He despises the declining ethics of the current generation, which fails to recognize the influence Christ has on both life and art. Wilde argues that individuality has been forgotten, as each person now is nothing more than a mimicry of others. He quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nothing is more rare in any man […] than an act of his own” (36). Wilde concludes that “most people are other people” (36). This prevents one from confronting their experiences and subsequently their own soul. He argues, “To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie into the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the Soul” (30).

This conclusion arises out of Wilde’s coming to terms with his imprisonment. When he arrived, many other inmates advised him to forget his time in prison, and he himself resolved to end his life upon release. In being stripped down to nothing, reduced to a number, and robbed of all possessions, Wilde saw himself plainly. He argues that knowledge of one’s self—particularly knowledge gained through sorrow—is the means by which one comes to know their soul. Sorrow is truth insofar as it unifies the soul and the body; the body becomes nothing more than the expression of its soul.

This realization contributes to Wilde’s conclusion that sorrow is the highest form of art, as art too works to unify the inner content with the outer form. This appeal to the relation of outer form and inner content is similar to the Hegelian view of art in his Lectures on Fine Art. Hegel defines art as the presentation of Spirit in its totality and thus a means for humanity to study Spirit in its perfection. Spirit here means consciousness, and in each moment of experience, Spirit comes to understand its nature in a fuller sense. Ultimately, Spirit recognizes the ‘other’ as a determination of itself and moves onward in its pursuit of Absolute Knowledge.

Wilde urges Bosie to turn to the life of Christ, the supreme individualist. By this, Wilde means that Christ epitomized the embrace of the unique, divinely inspired human soul—his own as well as others’. This underpins what might at first seem the paradoxical claim that Christ also embodied perfect love; it’s precisely because he recognized the infinite worth of the individual that he could see all of humanity within it. Christ cultivated his imagination and was alone able to relate to others in “their real as in their ideal relations.” He shared in the suffering of societal outcasts, being the first to find beauty in the most ugly and disgraceful sins. Through contemplating Christ’s life and Passion, Wilde has come to see sorrow as the very nourishment of the soul. Wilde develops his characterization of Christ into a larger argument situating Christ at the core of the Romantic movement, which he understands to include not just the Romantic era, but also any art that pays homage to inner life rather than outer forms. Wilde values and reveres Christ insofar as he epitomizes what humanity has forgotten: individuality.

The structure of Wilde’s letter is a stream of consciousness that is predominately argumentative. Wilde constructs Bosie as a straw man through the conversational nature of the letter, guessing Bosie’s potential answers only to easily refute them. As such, Bosie is very much a “character,” bringing Wilde’s account of their relationship into question. His portrayal of Bosie and their relationship relates to the nature of emotions—most importantly, love and hate—and how they affect the body and soul. Bosie indulged in hatred through his hedonistic lifestyle and he took much pride in writing abusive letters to both Wilde and his own father. This hate has ruined Bosie’s imagination, but Wilde, in an attempt to understand Bosie in his ideal state, still has faith in him. Ultimately, the letter serves as a cathartic experience for Wilde by which he comes to terms with his public ruin, imprisonment, and tumultuous relationship.