"The Thing He Loves: Murder as an Aesthetic
Experience in The Ballad of Reading Gaol" by Karen Alkalay-Gut
My Response to this Criticism:
While the Critic makes a very real point
and draws on the text for my support, I feel that this Critism fails to properly interpret and therefore, dismiss, Wilde's
work. The Critic is too literal in her interpretation of the poem. By focusing on Wilde's dismissal of what is obvious a brutal
sin she overlooks the entire point Wilde is making which is that all men do what the inmate has done but some do it in a way
that causes their loved one more harm because they break their heart and have to live with the pain of knowing that a
loved one has killed their love whereas the inmates victim did not have a chance to realize that her love had betrayed her.
It is important to remember that while Wilde was literally writing about the story of a fellow inmate the real crime he is
excusing is his lovers actions which led to his imprisonment. The way he sees the situation it would be better to be the murdered
wife of the inmate who would be avenged by justice than the abandoned prisoner who has to live on in guilt knowing that his
love is dead.
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"Culture and Corruption": Paterian
Self-Development versus Gothic Degeneration in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray by Nils Clausson
My Response to the Criticism:
I very much agree with this critics interpretation
of the character of Dorian Gray's journey into moral decrepitude. Though it is never explicitly stated, and Dorian is given
a female love interest in the story, I have always felt it safe to assert based on the influence of Lord Henry, which is too
enourmous to just be that of a friend, and Wilde's own personal history (he had not yet openly embraced his homosexuality
and was therefore, in my opinion and in the opinion of the critic, expressing his own demons through Dorian's) that the morally
outrages crimes Dorian commits that are never given a name in the novel were acts of homosexuality. The critic also explains
that because of this controversial journey of the character compared to the darkness and complexity of the story,
the novel cannot be explained in term of any genre, especially not one that existed at the time the novel was written.
Rather the novel is a mix of a gothic novel because of it's dark journey into evil and a self-development both of the central
character and the writer himself.
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"Oscar Wilde, De Profundis, and
the Rhetoric of Agency" by David Foster
While I agree with the critic on most points
I find this criticism extremely annoying in that it correctly identifies everything it attempts to analyze such as Wilde's
motivations, audience, and style only to go on to condemn the letter for correctly adressing those things. For example, Foster
discusses that although the "letter" is addressed to Lord Douglas, the audience was meant to be far broader and it was therefore
a mix between specific complaints against Douglas and "truths" Wilde interprets from each situation. The critic then goes
on to complain that the letter did not come off as personal enough. It is contradictory of him to point out that Wilde was
not only writing to his lover only to then complain about his doing this sucessfully. Although Douglas was his main intended
audience he also knew many friends who still supported it would be reading it and he wanted them to know exactly how he ended
up in the situation he was in.
