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DeProfundis occupies a precarious place in Oscar Wilde's canon and for several reasons is often skirted by wary interpreters: it does not fit neatly into any single genre; it does not resemble any of the other works that made Wilde famous; it is full of irritating inconsistencies and contradictions; and it seems ambiguously aimed at a wider audience than its inscription to Alfred Douglas suggests. After all, there are the enduring plays, the fascinating novel, the engaging dialogues; why struggle with a reader-resistant text framed as a personal letter? Its handling in the recent Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (1997) illustrates this critical uneasiness. De Profundis is almost completely ignored in this collection of essays. In her chapter, for example, Regenia Gagnier (a sympathetic interpreter of De Profundis in an earlier study) devotes one sentence to it, calling it "perhaps his greatest work of art" (27)-but does not elaborate. Nowhere in this volume is there a sustained effort to assess the place of De Profundis in Wilde's canon or to set it within the context of his life.
Many readers disparage or dismiss De Profundis. It has been condemned as a "venomous dossier" and "obsessive piece of writing" (Julian 352), and it has been dismissed as the complaint of a very unhappy prisoner who "thereafter lost interest in" the work (Croft-Cooke 231). Even good-faith interpretive efforts run aground: Avrom Fleishman speaks of being "unpreparedeven after several readings, in my own case-to believe my eyes" at its shifts of tone and attitude (285-86). There are some sympathetic interpretations, however. One is biographer Richand Ellmann's judgment that De Profundis is "one of the greatest love letters ever written," but that it suffers from a "disjointed structure" (515). Another is Gagnier's own earlier interpretation of the work as a response to the degradation of prison life; shifting between "realism and romance," "Wilde kept a positive past and created a possible future" as "romance" (Idylls 192). "He reconstructed the world," says Gagnier, "in order to show that he is above it" (Idylls 190). Both interpretations are insightful. Certainly De Profundis is a record of Wilde's deeply divided feelings for Douglas. And it is also at times a romance through which Wilde imagines a future for them both, in which...