In reading Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis, I noticed the highly emotive language that is used throughout to describe Wilde’s experiences. Words like “suffering”, “sorrow”, “grey”, and “forgotten” pop out to the reader within the first few paragraphs. This transparency of feeling is juxtaposed by the reluctance in Wuthering Heights. Many times, the reader is left to piece together the pain of many of the main characters–particularly Heathcliff and Catherine–as the characters themselves have a difficult time coming to terms with their suffering.

One connection I found particularly interesting this week is between Wilde’s thoughts on sorrow and Tennyson’s thoughts on grief. Wilde’s thoughts on sorrow as “one very long moment” in which “we can only record its moods” sounds strikingly similar to what Tennyson seems to do in “In Memoriam”. Recording his own moods in sorrow. I find this quite interesting, and wonder what prompted Wilde to write his thoughts on Sorrow.

In Oscar Wilde’s poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” he writes from the perspective of a man in jail, witnessing another prisoner who’s being put to death for killing his love. He then takes this physical action of the man killing his love and turns it into an abstract idea that I believe suggests all men kill the things they love through toxic masculinity. Wilde writes, “Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard, Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word, The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!”, and goes on to outline other which ways men can go about killing their loves. I believe this is similar to Heathcliff and Catherine in how the issues between Edgar and Heathcliff drove Cathy to breaking. Their hypermasculinity drove the two men to fight over Cathy in a reductionistic sense that negated her validity as a person with autonomy, consequently killing the thing they loved.

Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaols an epic poem that shared many similarities in themes to Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The first similarity is the descriptions of death between lovers in both texts. This can be seen in the quote, “He did not wear his scarlet coat/For blood and wine are red/And blood and wine were on his hands/When they found him with the dead/The poor dead woman whom he loved/ And murdered in her bed.” This description seemed almost identical to the circumstances of the death of Catherine Earnshaw, who also died in her bed. In addition, Heathcliff asked to be buried next to her, hence the line of being found with the dead.

Further similarities can be found when Wilde discusses how relationships can bring about death in partners during their youth or during old age. He says, “Some kill their love when they are young, / And some when they are old; / Some strangle with the hands of Lust, / Some with the hands of Gold: / The kindest use a knife, because / The dead so soon grow cold.” Catherine was ‘killed’ by Heathcliff when she was young, while Heathcliff died of sadness when he was much older. In addition, when Catherine died, it was snowing, windy, and cold.

A connection I made was between “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, by Oscar Wilde and Wuthering Heights. The lines “Some kill their love when they are young,

And some when they are old;

Some strangle with the hands of Lust,

Some with the hands of Gold:

The kindest use a knife, because

The dead so soon grow cold.

Some love too little, some too long,

Some sell, and others buy;

Some do the deed with many tears,

And some without a sigh:

For each man kills the thing he loves,

Yet each man does not die.”

remind me of the love battle between Catherine, Heathcliff and Linton. In the end, everybody kills the things they love in different ways. The poem could be used as a representation of how Catherine killed her love for all of the men in her life and in turn ended up killing herself and Heathcliff too. There is a repetition of love killing the people involved.

On this week of “David connects this class with his other Revolutions of the 19th Century class,” David will once again connect this class with his other Revolutions of the 19th Century class! After my discussion about The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was written about five years before his imprisonment, it’s a bit eerie to read Wilde as being so deeply religious and spiritual in “De Profundis”, as Dorian Gray what was a fairly sardonic and cynical novel. As a gay man, no doubt he frequently contended with the notion of his homosexuality and of how it affected his status in nigh-puritanical Victorian England. I wonder then to what extent Wilde’s newfound spirituality was merely a result of severe emotional and physical repression during his imprisonment. With nothing else to turn to, it’s easy to surmise that he was desperate enough to turn to the same God that allegedly hated those like him in order to perhaps ease the suffering he felt. It makes me a little sad, is all.

Between these two texts, there is the notion that to love something is to necessitate a killing of that something. And in both cases, I cannot help but wonder if the love causing death is because the love is always unattainable. Heathcliff is not the direct cause of his love’s death, but he does take part in it, and in especial attention to his lament whence he finds her dead, it seems his love originates, and the death of his love, allows him to turn Catherine into his ideal. He can now say (since she is dead and voiceless) that she was his cure, and he will never be adequately contradicted on this notion. Likewise, the subject of Wilde’s poem kills his wife, whom Wilde repeatedly stated he loved, in what to me seems the interest of preservation. Love is a labor, and Wilde notes this, and it is far easier to kill a love, to keep it safe and idealized, than to recognize that whole and wholly yielding love is but a fantasy. This interpretation for Wilde’s poem is reaffirmed by the continual reference to Christian imagery, and with that reference, Wilde is juxtaposing human love (which is weak and flawed) with God’s love or the love of God (which is full and perfect). However, I do not read this as Wilde supporting Christianity, but rather using that Christian conceptualization of love as a cultural touchpoint for the grander message he is attempting to convey.

In Oscar Wilde’s letter “De Profundis,” Wilde writes that some of the things he was accused of and sent to prison for were correct but some were not true at all. His letter, at least to me, seemed a little regretful as he expressed some of his misgivings and wrongdoings. However, he does say that the laws he has been convicted under are wrong and unjust laws. He goes on to say, “But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me” (23). He realizes he won’t get any justice from the prison or those who make the laws, but he can create his own sense of justice after he is free. This reminds me of Abel Magwitch from Great Expectations who tells Pip about his life of crime and imprisonment. He wants to make Pip a gentleman and live vicariously through him in order to get justice for the things that have been done to him.

In The Ballad of Reading Gaol, the lines “Some love too little, some too long, /Some sell, and others buy; / Some do the deed with many tears, / And some without a sigh: / For each man kills the thing he loves, /  Yet each man does not die.” Reminds me quite a bit of Wuthering Heights. I feel as though it connects to how Cathy dies first, and Heathcliff and Edgar outlive her for some time. Meanwhile having a child, ultimately an act of love between Cathy and Edgar killed her. On the other hand, it also connects a bit more metaphorically in the sense that her relationship with Heathcliff livened, but also killed her spirit, in the grand scheme of things. Overall, I thought these two connected in the expression of the man metaphorically killing his loved one.

In The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde, the horrible prison conditions described really reminded me of how Newgate Prison was depicted in Great Expectations. In chapter 32 of the novel the prison is described as being disorganized and suffers from serious neglect both to the building and the prisoners who are held inside. The prison has no formal regulations and left prisoners to do as they pleased. When Pip visits Newgate Prison he describes it as being very depressing. This is the same in The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Wilde wonders how a person could be put in such a horrible, depressing place such as the one described in the text. Prisons were quiet horrible during these times and often had multiple prisoners placed together in one cell so that they would barely walk around freely. Both of these depictions of prison life paint a very dreary picture in the readers mind. However, over the course of many years, thankfully there have been numerous improvements of prison facilities and also with the treatment of the inmates.