What question did this study set out to answer?

To analyze how Oscar Wilde employs the pronoun 'we' in his poem to express collective experiences of confinement and suffering.

April 3, 2026Open Access

Three different “We"s in Oscar Wilde's “The Ballad of Reading Gaol"

Key Points

To analyze how Oscar Wilde employs the pronoun 'we' in his poem to express collective experiences of confinement and suffering.
Literary analysis of Oscar Wilde's 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol'.
Examination of Wilde's personal experiences and historical context surrounding his imprisonment.
Comparison between Wilde and Charles Thomas Wooldridge's circumstances.
Identification of three distinct uses of the pronoun 'we' in the poem.
Exploration of the emotional connections between Wilde and the convicts, particularly Wooldridge.
Discussion of the implications of shared suffering and identity in the prison context.

Abstract

Three different "We's in Oscar Wildes "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" Sera Sakaguchi The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.(Psalm 51:17) On 22 April 1895 Oscar Wilde was indicted for committing acts of "gross indecency" with certain male persons and was sentenced to two years' hard labour on 25 May in the same year.The impact of the imprisonment was enormous as he introspectively wrote in De Profundis: "I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say, quite simply and without affectation, that the two great turning-points of my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison."' After his two unfortunate though significant years in prison, Wilde set about the project to recount his prison experience.His focus was on the execution at Reading in 1896 of Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who was sentenced to death for the murder of his wife.Although Wilde andWooldridge never became directly acquainted, Wilde must have felt a certain bond with him (and indeed with all the convicts) as a co-inmate, condemned as guilty, obeying inhuman prison routines, and waiting for the time of release from confinement.One crucial difference between them is that while Wilde could continue to live after the release, in the case of Wooldridge, the release was synonymous with death.Wilde painfully expresses this difference in the poem: "each man kills the thing he loves, / Yet each man does not die" (884).In this paper, I shall argue that the pronoun "we" is used in three 1.

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