Alan Sinfield tells us that “sexualities (heterosexual and homosexual)
are not essential, but constructed within an array of prevailing social
possibilities.” I think it’s less important to classify Oscar Wilde’s sexual
identity than to examine our reception of his performative life; what he
seemed to be, to us. Joyce viewed Wilde’s brand of Christianity in De Profundis
as “Gnostic.” My paper examines the heretical and traditional Christian
elements of De Profundis, and questions Wilde’s motives, concluding that
this infamous epistle served to define the archetypical mythic journey
of the 20th century doomed/ reformed homosexual. Philosopher Ernest Becker
in The Denial of Death echoes De Profundis, clearly drawing a boundary
circumscribing the profundity of queer desire. Wilde’s final major work
claims to confront the nineteenth century ‘heart of darkness’ but its value
is as eyewitness document of one man’s creative disintegration, and yet
it has incidentally, and quite unfortunately, welded the notion of homosexual
redemption deep into our collective unconscious and prescribed notions
of the appropriate boundaries of homosexual creativity.
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