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'The Ballad of Reading Gaol' is strongly connected with Oscar Wilde's biography. This section tries to throw light on the most important turning point in his life, the time in prison, as well as on the effects this experience had on his thinking and writing.
2.1 Oscar Wilde - Playboy and Prophet?
When taking a closer look at the life of Oscar Wilde it is very likely that one discovers the striking duality in the personality of that author, the contrast between the fashionable "Dandy" and the thoughtful Prophet. These two apparently inconsistent personalities are, however, quite compatible and oppose each other not at all, as this section will show.
In fact, a certain "adolescent emotional attitude" (Woodcock, 193) runs through Wilde's life like a red thread. Writing, talking and even life itself was a "wonderful game" (Woodcock, 194) for the author, a game of virtuosity and inspiration. He virtually made a cult of joy and pleasure and built up a "new scheme of life" (Woodcock, 214), believing that through "Dandyism" he could improve the world. But he could not maintain the "simplicity of life" (Woodcock, 196) he had hoped to achieve since it was very difficult for him to cope with his sudden fame. He could not expect much help from his friends who very often just turned to him because of his wealth and his complete lack of the sense of property made things even worse.
Still, the game went on and Wilde continued to love talking, drinking, eating and sexual indulgence. Especially with regard to his sexuality Wilde lead a double-life. On the one hand he had two sons with his wife, on the other hand he went out to meet young men to "get the best of both worlds" (Gagnier, 163). He regarded "daring and even rashness" (Woodcock, 207) as absolutely necessary for a man of society. Yet, his downfall actually came from too little daring, as Woodcock puts it, since it emerged from his homosexuality, that "hidden part of his life where he [...] played with a fire he was incapable of handling" (Woodcock, 208).
It is quite remarkable that Oscar Wilde always had the strong desire to avoid pain. He had a "really morbid over-sensitivity towards pain, uglyness, and misery" (Woodcock, 202). The game collapsed, his sexual preferences were revealed and Wilde was put on trial. After he had been sentenced to two years hard labour, suddenly "all those terrible factors of defeat, failure, [...] shame, hatred, abuse" (Woodcock, 216) which he had feared so bitterly, came crowding in. Overnight the famous and successful author became "the figure and letter of a little cell in a long gallery, one of a thousand lifeless numbers" (Kohl, 275).
Prison was a terrible experience for Wilde but also an important turning point in his personal development. It was a time of desolation, dreariness and humiliation but after having fully identified with his fellow prisoners he found among them a common humanity, a certain sympathy and solidarity. He realised that "pleasure is [...] only one side of the garden of life and cannot of itself make a man whole" (Woodcock, 218). Prison has not robbed him of his love for life but it has endowed him with another, a different perspective on life. His main concern seemed to "view the world with love and understanding" (Woodcock, 219) and not with the hostility and hatred which one would possibly expect from a man in his position.
After his release from prison Wilde was free to love as he wished but for that freedom he had "forfeited his social position and economic society as well as the personal affection of many former friends and his right to see his two young sons" (Gagnier, 145).
That is the prophetic dimension of Oscar Wilde which may have existed within him all his life long but which came out not before his time in prison, where he wrote his De Profundis, a long letter to his friend Alfred Douglas which constantly shifts between romance and realism and in which his "totalising plan to love and forgive [...] is disrupted repeatedly by [...] outbursts of 'real' hatred as he feels it" (Gagnier, 179).
2.2 The time in prison
On 25 May 1895, after two trials, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years hard labour. He had spent several time in prison since he got arrested on 5 April but most of the time he could spend in freedom, released on bail. At first, Wilde was sent to Wandsworth gaol; on 20 November he was transferred to Reading, the jail where he would serve the rest of his sentence.
In these days the prison system was not as humane as today. The aim was not to make people fit for a re-integration in society but merely to lock them away. The men were locked in their cells twenty-three hours of the day and had only one hour exercise in which they were not allowed to talk at all. The food was inadequate, medical treatment was primitive and the small libraries, if there were some at all, were in the charge of narrow-minded chaplains. Monotony determined life in prison and hostile warders used every break of the rules as an excuse to punish the prisoners. Rules, so Thomas Martin, one of the few kind warders, wrote, which were "made with no other object than to be broken, so that an excuse may be found for inflicting additional punishment" (Martin, 333).
Martin came to Reading gaol some seven weeks before Wilde's release. He was always kind to Wilde and tried to make time in prison easier for him. Wilde, so Martin, was always dreadfully distressed because he could not polish his shoes or brush his hair. He suffered terribly from the fact that he was not allowed to write at first. Yet, Wilde faithfully obeyed the laws and got through it with ever new tenacity.
But there were also instances in which the poet would get cynical and bitter. In church, when the chaplain would tell the prisoners how wicked they all were and how thankful they should be that they lived in a "Christian country where a paternal Government was as anxious for the welfare of their souls as for the safe-keeping of their miserable bodies" (Martin, 333) Wilde would smile, a cynical and disbelieving smile, overshadowed by despair. To Martin he said: "I long to rise in my place, and cry out and tell the poor, disinheretched wretches around me that it is not so, [...] that society has nothing to offer them but starvation in the streets, or starvation and cruelty in the prison" (Martin, 333).
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