История литературы / 31. Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of Reading Gaol

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 –1900) was an Irish playwright, poet and author of numerous short stories and one novel. Known for his biting wit, he became one of the most successful playwrights of the late Victorian era in London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was written after his release from Reading prison in 1897. Its main theme is the death penalty. Wilde was incarcerated in the town of Reading after being convicted of homosexual offences in 1895 and sentenced to two years' hard labour in prison. During his imprisonment a hanging took place. Charles Wooldridge was someone whom Wilde had seen many times during his imprisonment. He had been found guilty of slitting his wife’s throat with a razor. It inspired in Wilde’s mind an illustration of the way we are all malefactors, all in need of forgiveness. According to Wilde the greater the crime, the more necessary charity. His final vision of the world is not frivolity, but one of suffering. Although Wilde never hid his authorship of the poem, it was published under the name C.3.3., which stood for "Building C, floor 3, cell 3, at Reading." This ensured that Wilde's name—by then notorious—did not appear on the poem's front cover. “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”(1898) wasn’t meant to tell the story only as many ballads do. Ballads tell a story sometimes at great length. The genre of a ballad became very popular since ancient times. The fact that Wilde wrote a ballad makes us believe that at last he compelled the work to be enjoyed & understood by all classes of people (for the most part his works were meant for elite, as he put it himself). But his ballad was not meant to be enjoyed only. It was meant to perplex, to disturb. It’s addressed to human kind at large. It’s not about a particular case or religion, though Christianity is the main background for it. It’s about abstract things & notions – common justice & brotherhood, real love & compassion. Oscar Wilde himself was arrested & spent time with other “souls in pain”. It was an impulse to write a ballad, in which he posed certain questions that we, ordinary human-beings, can’t give answers to (Have we the right to convict this man? Are we guiltless?) Wilde gives us a panorama of human attitude to death & he shows how absurd it is. A convict is put into a cell, & people watch him night & day, they watch him when he prays, so he doesn’t have time to repent. The doctor comes: a sick person can’t be hanged. There’s no proper grave. They throw a body into quicklime. The very idea of Christ who died for us is being discussed in the poem at length. God forgives, but human-beings don’t. The laws of jungle are fair & true, unlike the laws of humans. There’s no idea of justice among human-beings. Sometimes the ballad is considered to be a cry in wilderness, because not so many people are sensitive to the grief of others. Not so many people know & want to know for whom the bell tolls. It’s a tragedy not of a character only, but of certain notions by which the people live. It’s a story of death & disaster. It’s told with great economy. Here Wilde is clever enough to avoid terrible descriptions, unpleasant scenes. It’s different from other ballads, because the emphasis is not on the action; it’s on the attitude. It begins with the introduction that presupposes the appearance of several melodies that are simultaneous according to the medieval theory of the counterpoint. All people commit crimes every day. Here is the melody of penitentiary institution. Every episode shows that the period before the execution is much worse than execution itself. The execution is wrong both morally & physically. This is a very strange & terrible stanza. Christ was kinder than the men. Wilde speaks to a bush that grew there. It’s practically the end of the ballad & Wilde’s life of his doctrines. As in every ballad some parts are repeated being slightly transformed. To make it sound like a tragedy Wilde expanded some stanzas (form 4 to 6 lines) & it had a different rhyming system, which is more effective. There is a final conclusion, but this conclusion presupposes reaction of the reader or listener, which is really predetermined. Wilde is clever enough not to represent himself as an ordinary convict. In fact he does not give us any slang or dialect that will show us the status of the prisoners. They are all ennobled by the recognition of their common & individual guilt. It’s a ballad of feeling of a two-year torment, which broke the spirit of Wilde & his health. It has also broken his protective shell. And still in the repetitions that every ballad abounds with we see the poignant attitude of an author who managed to comprise the feelings of humanity. The bitter personal experiences with the inhumane prison system would very likely have tempted Oscar Wilde to “launch an unbridled attack on that system, subordinating poetry to propaganda”. But that would have come into conflict with the aesthetic creed he had preached his whole life long. So Wilde had to adapt his style to the simplicity and earnestness of the subject. The power of the poem derives from the well-proportioned balance of a realistic presentation of the monotony of prison life and the unavoidable fate that awaits the condemned man and the bits of grotesque fantasy through which Wilde could capture the nightmare quality of the period before the execution. ‘The Ballad’ is a very impressive poem which has a strong emotional impact on the reader. In those 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.