De Profundis

Concepts such as love and hate form the basis both for Wilde’s critique of Bosie’s character and his eventual argument positing Christ as the supreme individualist. Wilde writes that his relationship with Bosie was emotionally tumultuous, as Bosie would continuously lash out in anger. Bosie’s predisposition towards hatred potentially explains Wilde’s deliberate personification of emotions and his emphasis on the toxicity of hate. Bosie, Wilde asserts, indulged in hate far too often, ultimately corrupting his very soul. Hate is easily satisfied. More importantly, it renders one blind to the “real and ideal relations” of others.

Wilde uses this definition of love—the ability to understand the “real and ideal”—relations of another, into an ongoing motif. For instance, Wilde writes, “But Hate blinded you. The faculty ‘by which, and by which alone, we can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations’ was dead to you” (20). Later on, Wilde again repeats the definition when he states, “The faculty ‘by which, and by which alone, one can understand others in their real as in their ideal relations,’ your narrow egotism blunted, and long disuse had made of no avail” (24). Here he argues that hate and egotism slowly destroy love.