Resist Everything Except Temptation: The Anarchist Philosophy of Oscar Wilde by Kristian Williams

Author:Kristian Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5: Refuse to Be Broken by Force

Prison Writing and Anti-Prison Writing

A Criminal with a Noble Face

During his American tour of 1882, Oscar Wilde visited Lincoln, Nebraska, and lectured on the doctrines of the Aesthetic movement. Afterward his hosts took him on a tour of their city’s most impressive public building—the local jail. He later wrote to a friend about the prisoners: “Poor sad types of humanity in hideous striped dresses making bricks in the sun, and all mean-looking, which consoled me, for I should hate to see a criminal with a noble face.” Wilde visited the “little whitewashed cells, so tragically tidy, but with books in them. In one I found a translation of Dante, and a Shelley. Strange and beautiful it seemed to me that the sorrow of a single Florentine in exile should, hundreds of years afterwards, lighten the sorrow of some common prisoner in a modern gaol.”1

Without realizing it, Oscar Wilde had glimpsed his future.

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