Oscar Wilde, Sodomy, and Mental Illness in Late Victorian England

Abstract

S i n c e h i S d e a t h i n 1900 O S c a r W i l d e has been many things to many people, from a pariah to a postmodern saint. Frederick Roden, in Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, presents Oscar Wilde as a “queer theologian” by arguing that if “his early catholicism may be denigrated as ‘aesthetic,’ his later soul-searching is decidedly not.” The case for Wilde as being spiritually as well as stylistically inspired by the Gospels relies most powerfully on the letter, styled by Robert Ross as “De Profundis,” that Wilde wrote to his lover Lord alfred “Bosie” Douglas in the early months of 1897. In this work Wilde struggled to make positive sense of his recent experience of humiliation. He sought, through the christian discourse of martyrdom, to elide the inscription of criminality that had been placed on him by worldly authority just as it had similarly been placed on Jesus christ. The most substantial piece of prose that Wilde wrote in prison in the preceding months, however, was a petition for release, sent on 2 July 1896, in which he attempted to use the conceptual realm of mental illness, rather than spiritual illumination, to escape from the constraints of legal classification as a criminal. This choice might be seen as purely opportunistic, since an appeal via the conception of lunacy did provide a recognized legal route out of prison, but it can also be regarded as an act of desperation. after all, those found not guilty by virtue of insanity might be released to the care of a private doctor, as Wilde requested, but they were more likely to be detained in an asylum for the rest of their lives. Reports were obtained—from the prison doctor, from a board of four visitors, and from the superintendent of the