Elliptical Thinking: Planetary Patterns of Thought in De Profundis

Abstract

In an 1881 letter asking a friend to meet his mother, Oscar Wilde writes: ‘all brilliant people should cross each other’s cycles, like some of the nicest planets’. In comparing the people in his social circle to celestial bodies in orbit, Wilde sets forth an idea that will soon become literalized in images within and surrounding his works. An illustration in Salomé (1894) renders Wilde the actual ‘(wo)man in the moon’, through placing his distinguishing physiognomy – slightly drooping eyes and thick full lips – on a white circle [fig. 1], while many cartoons satirizing Wilde’s American lecture tour put his head at the centre of a plant that seems to be more sun than flower. An 1881 Punch cartoon by Edward Sambourne, ‘O.W.’, features Wilde’s head as the only visible centre of a sunflower, with crisp triangular petals extending outward so rigidly that they appear to emanate from his body [fig. 2]. Another cartoon appearing in Judge magazine, entitled ‘A Thing of Beauty Not a Joy Forever’, features a sunflower-adorned Wilde standing with his head and torso in the centre of an enormous shape of ambiguous identification [fig. 3]. A very large orange circle with small yellow triangles coming off it, the shape could either be an enormous sunflower or, given its absence of a stem and leaves, a sun. Be he the face of the sun or the man in the moon, Wilde is, in all three of these illustrations, combined with a celestial body.