Victorian Visual Culture

Oscar Wilde’s lengthy poem, “Ballad of Reading Gaol”, is highly concerned with visuality in relation to being an inmate. The main character of the poem, so to speak, is one of the prisoners who killed his wife and peculiarly has a “wistful eye” meaning although he is aware of the inevitability of death, his perception allows him to be less fearful; this is particularly unnerving for the narrator as he is someone who is very focused on the visual and cannot comprehend how in the panopticon, one could ever escape the adoption of the fixated eye that is cast on them. That is to say, there is an adoption of the “master’s tools” whereby an individual who is the object of the gaze naturally becomes the gazer of another person. The panopticon’s design encourages a reciprocation of the gaze where it is not just the guard in the central tower who is intently watching the inmates but also the inmates exchange gazes amongst each other because of the circular structure: “He does not sit with silent men/Who watch him night and day…” (Wilde, lines 61-62).

As you can see in the above photograph, it would be understandable for an inmate to fixate on another inmate; thus, it is no surprise that the narrator of Wilde’s poem becomes almost obsessed with this other inmate especially because this man’s humanity has not yet been completely depleted like that of the narrator. The utilization of the panopticon in conjunction with the proliferation of photography as a tool by police cements how the concept of “terror” became suddenly, and overwhelmingly, visual; in other words, what once was an idea was now a ubiquitous image of
“the terrorist”. Wilde emphasizes that terror is a part of the inmates’ souls, something immovable and tangible: “And Horror stalked before each man, and terror crept behind” (Wilde, 12.3.5-6). In this passage, the narrator personifies terror where the boundary between human and capital ‘t’ Terror becomes blurry; and so thus, like with photography of criminals, the image of “the terrorist” develops into one image in the collective minds. In their essay on Fenian photography, Mac Suibhne and Martin describe it perfectly when they posit that “the ‘panorama of faces’…was that they could not be easily differentiated…” in which this collection of indistinguishable faces not only incites more fear because anyone could then be positioned as a terrorist but also foments a psychological essentialism that negates the individuality of each person (Mac Suibhne and Martin, 118).

Wilde, Oscar. “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” 1897.

Mac Suibhne, Breandán, and Amy Martin. “Fenians in the Frame: Photographing Irish Political                            Prisoners, 1865-68.” Field Day Review, vol. 1, Field Day Publications, 2005, pp. 101–20, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30078606.