It is surprising that the influence of Dante's Inferno on Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol has not yet been noted, especially since the poem's debt to Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Thomas Hood's The Dream of Eugene Aram, the Murderer, and the poetry of A. E. Housman has been discussed extensively by many critics. And yet Dante's influence is not incidental but pervasive. Richard Ellmann states the Ballad's basic theme compactly: "The poem has a divided theme: the cruelty of the doomed murderer's crime, the insistence that such cruelty is pervasive; and the greater cruelty of his punishment by a guilty society." ¹ This divided aim is not limited to theme alone but embraces style as well, as Wilde himself asserted in a letter to Robert Ross: "The poem suffers under the difficulty of a divided aim in style. Some is realistic, some is romantic: some poetry, some propaganda. I feel it keenly, but as a whole I think the production is interesting: that it is interesting from more points of view than one is artistically to be regretted." ²

Into this mire of conflicting artistic and thematic currents, Wilde introduces Dante and attempts to respond to him. One thing is very clear in the Ballad: Wilde presents his prison as a hell on earth, consciously dramatizing it as an inferno. Whether the style is romantic or stark and realistic, and as the ballad's theme shifts confusingly, one thing remains constant: Reading Gaol is a horror, a terrifying hell that swallows up criminals or a hideous man-made Satanic crime against humanity. As such, it has natural affinities with Dante's Inferno. No sooner does the poem begin, however, than Wilde gives us a specific reference to the Inferno:

Early on in part 1 of the Ballad, then, Wilde describes himself and the other inmates as "souls in pain" and informs us that there are two circles or rings in Reading Gaol, one inhabited by the guardsman, who has committed a great crime, and one inhabited by himself and the other prisoners, whose crimes are small by comparison. ⁴

The basic thematic difference between the two writers is that Dante's many circles of hell never merge, while Wilde's two rings soon dissolve into one another. This merging of the two rings occurs in part 2. It begins when Wilde and the other sinners start sympathizing with the guardsman:

A prison wall was round us both,
Two outcast men we were:
The world had thrust us from its heart,
And God from out His care:
And the iron gin that waits for Sin
Had caught us in its snare.

Instead of two rings, we now have one—the encircling prison wall—and Wilde identifies himself completely with the guardsman. They are both sinners, and the effect of sin is the same no matter what its size: it alienates the sinner both from society and from God. It does not matter if one's sin is great or small; in all cases, it leads to hell. The guardsman in hell is symbolic of all humanity, moreover, for "all men kill the thing they love."

In the Inferno, Dante located hell in the center of the earth and sinners went to it after death. He also introduced a detailed gradation of the various sins, appropriating a proper punishment for each sin. In The Ballad of ReadingGaolGaol, Wilde responded to Dante by locating hell on earth ⁵ and by rejecting the idea of a gradation of sins. But all mention of different rings in Reading Gaol disappears after part 2. This is mainly because Wilde has completed his thematic response to Dante but also because the poem's other theme—that the guardsman is the victim of a cruel society that murders him and that the British penal system is inhuman and needs to be reformed—begins to gain prominence. Wilde's response to Dante applies only in the instance of the first theme and is irrelevant to the second.

Stylistically, however, Dante's Inferno casts its shadow on the entire Ballad. For Wilde as author in The Ballad of Reading Gaol takes us on a guided tour of hell, much as Dante before him. The two hells are very different, but the stylistic principle is the same. In both cases, moreover, there is a dramatic movement toward intensity of horror: Dante takes us gradually toward the ninth and most terrible circle of the Inferno, where Satan himself is to be found, while Oscar Wilde moves us gradually toward the horrifying hanging of the guardsman. In both hells, there are monsters and demons and grotesques of various sorts. Wilde may have written his Ballad in two different styles, and it may have two divergent themes, but its basic stylistic principle—the exploration of hell—contributes to providing it with what unity it possesses. One basic model of this exploration is Dante's Inferno.

—CHRISTOPHER S. NASSAAR, American University of Beirut

NOTES