The Convert as Artist: Oscar Wilde, John Henry Newman, and the "Realization" of Conversion

Abstract: This article considers the significance of Oscar Wilde's deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism by exploring how conversion figures in Wilde's literary work. A striking intertextual relationship links De Profundis , the hybrid memoir-letter Wilde wrote in 1897 in the final months of his prison term, to the nineteenth century's most famous conversion narrative: John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman's narrative provides Wilde with a compelling precedent for imagining conversion as, counterintuitively, an act of consistency, not change, but Wilde departs from Newman's model by refusing the teleological and linear paradigm of conversion in which Newman is deeply invested. Ultimately, the essay argues that Wilde's literary writing puts forth a model of conversion-as-realization, a paradigm that rejects oversimplified notions of conversion that would frame it as a decisive, once-for-all act. Instead, "realization" captures a paradoxical and poignant idea of religious transformation, one that is profoundly shaped by the intense stasis that characterizes Wilde's experience of imprisonment.