Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, and the rhetoric of agency

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2001 by Foster, David

But just as he did in revising The Picture ofDorian Gray, Wilde also calibrates his language to disguise and displace the homoerotic agency implicit in the story De Profundis tells. While in many passages he denies his own will-power, in other places he takes pains to claim a covert agency for himself. Even in what he describes as his most submissive moments, Wilde implies volition: I "admit the folly of throwing away all this money on you, and letting you squander my fortune (517). Wilde "allows" Douglas to behave badly, "throws away" money on him, "lets" him waste his income. Even his most abject yieldings are represented as acts of commission:

I had always thought... that when a great moment arrived I could reassert my will-power in its natural superiority. It was not so .... My habit ... of giving up to you in everything had become insensibly a real part of my nature .... it had stereotyped my temperament to one permanent and fatal mood. (519)

Wilde asserts a superior "will-power" that is given up as a "habit"-that is, unreflective behavior that dulls the awareness of consequences. Even as he subtly affirms his own responsibility for enabling and furthering relations with Douglas, he also displaces the reader's attention away from his own complicity towards the insatiable shallowness of Douglas's demands:

You must see now that your incapacity of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the time of others: your lack of any power of sustained intellectual concentration ... were as destructive to your own progress in culture as they were to my work as an artist? (513)

Commenting on this continuous cycle of accusation and selfassertion, James Winchell suggests that Wilde was evidently "strangely puzzled by the continuing riddle" of blame and responsibility in his own narrative (236). But the polarity of Wilde's rhetorical strategy here is intentional. Portraying himself as a fond companion to a foolish and willful boy, he can displace fault onto Douglas even as he retains the stature of a temporarily yielded superiority. Such a strategy allows him to construct the impression of self-analytic honesty uncompromising enough to validate the accompanying, damning judgments of Douglas. He portrays himself as an indulgent collaboratora fond lover who just could not say no. By this means he hopes to sustain the implication of his own agency within the framework of a systematic plan to discredit Douglas.

It is not hard to see why Wilde adopts a strategy of displacement. His own letters suggest that he was not only an enabler, but often in fact the dominator in the relationship with Douglas. He reveled in the life he led with Douglas between 1893 and 1895, often encouraging and approving Douglas's impulses: "Dearest Boy," he wrote during rehearsals of A Woman of No Importance in 1893, "We have only just finished Act 2!! Don't wait. Order, of course, what you want. Lunch 1.30 tomorrow: at Albemarle .... Ever Yours Oscar" (Letters 337). The reason he refused to break with Douglas even as the trial loomed was not passive submission to Douglas but Wilde's own eager pleasure in their activities. Moreover (as Ellmann recounts it and as the trial testimony repeatedly establishes), Wilde enjoyed dominating the boys who circled around the two of them in their Savoy Hotel rooms in London, and he actively planned and funded travels to Europe and North Africa with Douglas for new sexual encounters. When friends remonstrated with him about his increasing absence from his family in the period 1893-1895, Wilde would not listen. Indeed, he would retail to others his own sarcastic versions of such remonstrances when they were offered by wellmeaning friends.6