Celebrity, (Auto)biography and Failure in Wilde’s De Profundis

De Profundis is at once a marginal and a central work in Wilde's canon and possibly the one which best projects towards a responsive and intelligent reading of Wilde as a central author and character in the late Victorian scene. TDe Profundis is an unstable text which, as such, is perfectly capable of recounting an unstable, contradictory, double character. This article focuses on how De Profundis exceeds any reading which tries to reduce it to a single and stable identity; Wilde' s letter is not just a(n) (auto)biographical document and yet it cannot be fully considered a philosophical enquiry on the nature of suffering and redemption. Through De Profundis Wilde wrote his own partial autobiography, self-acknowledging— through a complex exercise of literary artifice and invention — his celebrity status, in other words, the position of a man who "stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture" of his time, revealing, at the same time, to the reader the very reasons and events which turned his success and celebrity into failure and infamy. Wilde' s will be a magnificent fall which turned his social failure into eternal literary fame, translating "Oscar Wilde" into a cultural icon, into a global celebrity, into a paradigm of otherness, difference and resistance to the “order of discourse” (Foucault), to be performed and “reproduced” in a number of different contexts.