REFORMED PRISONER OR PRISON REFORM?: AN ACCOUNT OF OSCAR WILDE’S CARCERAL WRITINGS (1895-1900)

Mohsen Gholami, Majid Yazdani

Abstract


The present paper aims at sifting through Oscar Wilde’s carceral/post-carceral writings: De Profundis (1905), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), and The Daily Chronicle’s letters (1897-8) in order to pinpoint how Oscar Wilde’s literary voice, during incarceration, transformed from that of an aesthete, or a witty writer into an uncompromising prison reform activist, remaining actively engaged in mounting a propaganda tool against the desperate plight and hardship of the late nineteenth-century penal system, and accordingly, calling for the necessity of implementing major penal reformations as a retaliatory measure. The overriding question concerning this paper, therefore, will center on ‘How prison reformed Oscar Wilde’, and ‘How Oscar Wilde reformed prison’ from every conceivable angle to explore the fact that Oscar Wilde is worthy of consideration in the way in which he was affected in prison and solitary confinement and how he summoned strength to cope with the deprivations of prison life as well as implementing his recommendations to help reform prison, which were incorporated in the 1898 Prison Act.

Keywords


Oscar Wilde, Carceral Literature, Gross Indecency, Penal Reform, 1898 Prison Act

Full Text:

PDF

References


Bailey, V. (1997). English Prisons, Penal Culture, and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895–1922. Journal of British Studies, 36(3), 285–324. https://doi.org/10.1086/386138

Buckler, W. E. (1990). Oscar Wilde’s “chant de cygnet”: “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” in Contextual Perspective’, Victorian Poetry. Vol. 28, No. 3/4, The Nineties.

Cross, R. (1971). Punishment, prison and the public; an assessment of penal reform in twentieth century England by an armchair penologist. Volume 23 of Hamlyn lectures, London. Stevens & Sons.

Ellmann, R. (1988). Oscar Wilde. Penguin Books Ltd; New edition.

Hernen, E. (2013). Names are Everything: For Oscar Wilde, Posing as a Letter and Visiting Card.

https://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/resources/documents/names-are-everything-oscar-wilde-posing-letter-and-visiting-card-elaine-hernen.

Housden, M. (2006). ’Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment and an early idea of “Banal Evil”’ or ‘Two “wasps” in the system. How Reverend W.D. Morrison and Oscar Wilde challenged penal policy in late Victorian England.’ Retrieved December 23, 2019, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26544603_’Oscar_Wilde’s_imprisonment_and_an_early_idea_of_Banal_Evil_’_or_’Two_wasps_in_the_system_How_Reverend_WD_Morrison_and_Oscar_Wilde_challenged_penal_policy_in_late_Victorian_England’

Jarrin, C. A. (2008). You Have the Right to Refuse Silence: Oscar Wilde’s Prison Letters and Tom Clarke’s Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life. Retrieved from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236705532_You_Have_the_Right_to_Refuse_Silence_Oscar_Wilde’s_Prison_Letters_and_Tom_Clarke’s_Glimpses_of_an_Irish_Felon’s_Prison_Life

Jarrin, C. A. (2008). You have the right to refuse silence: Oscar Wilde’s prison letters and Tom Clarke’s Glimpses of an Irish Felon’s Prison Life. Eire-Ireland, Vol. 43, pp. 85–117. https://doi.org/10.1353/eir.0.0018

Millard, C. S. (1908). The Athenaeum. London British Periodicals. University of Toronto. https://archive.org/details/p1athenaeum1908lond

Paul, R. (2008). “[U]ngrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious”: Subaltern Voices in the Writings of Oscar Wilde. Nordic Journal of English Studies. ojs.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/njes/art.

Portanova, J. J. (2015). Great Books Written in Prison: Essays on Classic Works from Plato to Martin Luther King, Jr. http://publicism.info/writing/prison/7.html.

Robins, A. H., & Sellars, S. L. (2000). Oscar Wilde’s terminal illness: Reappraisal after a century. Lancet, Vol. 356, pp. 1841–1843. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(00)03245-1

Sandulescu, C.-G., & Princess Grace Irish Library. International Conference (5th: 1993: Monaco). (1994). Rediscovering Oscar Wilde. C. Smythe.

Sandulescu, G. C. (1994). Rediscovering Oscar Wilde - Rowman & Littlefield publisher. Retrieved from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/424182858653867194/

Sherard, R. H. (1916). The real Oscar Wilde: To be used as a supplement to, and in illustration of “The life of Oscar Wilde”: with numerous unpublished letters, facsimiles, portraits and illustrations. London: T. Werner Laurie.

Smith, F. B. (1976). Labouchere’s amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment bill. Historical Studies, 17(67), 165–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/10314617608595545

Stefanakou, F. (2015). [PDF] Images of prison in Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol | Semantic Scholar. Retrieved December 22, 2019, from https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Fioroula-Stefanakou-2015-Images-of-prison-in-Oscar/5917e46de784739b1cea019236e2fae3d1c6357c

Stokes, A., & Dalrymple, T. (2007). Pit of shame: the real ballad of Reading Gaol. Waterside Press.

Stokes, J. (1996). Oscar Wilde: myths, miracles, and imitations. Cambridge University Press.

Stoneley, P. (2014). Looking at the others: Oscar Wilde and the reading gaol archive. Journal of Victorian Culture, 19(4), 457–480. https://doi.org/10.1080/13555502.2014.965500

Taylor, T. (2011). CHANGING THE PRISON SYSTEM. Kapiti Monthly Meeting. The Quaker Lecture. The Religious Society of Friends in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Wilde, O. (1999). De profundis; Ballad of Reading Gaol and other writings. Wordsworth Editions.

Wilde, O. (1999). The soul of man, and prison writings. Oxford University Press.

Wilde, O. (2007). Collected works of Oscar Wilde: the plays, the poems, the stories and the essays including De Profundis. Wordsworth Editions.

Wilde, O., Baldwin Ross, R., Mason, S., & Holland, V. B. (n.d.). Full text of "A collection of original manuscripts letters & books of Oscar Wilde including his letters written to Robert Ross from Reading Gaol and unpublished letters poems & plays formerly in the possession of Robert Ross, C. S. Millard (Stuart Mason). Retrieved December 23, 2019, from Dulau website: https://archive.org/stream/collectionoforig00adulrich/collectionoforig00adulrich_djvu.txt

Williams, K. (2009). “A Criminal with a Noble Face”: Oscar Wilde’s Encounters with the Victorian Gaol by Kristian Williams: Anarchist Studies. Retrieved December 23, 2019, from https://anarchiststudies.org/a-criminal-with-a-noble-face-oscar-wildes-encounters-with-the-victorian-gaol-by-kristian-williams/




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.21533/epiphany.v13i1.317

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2020 Epiphany

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Epiphany (pISSN 2303-6850, eISSN 1840-3719) is currently Indexed/Abstracted