Victorian Visual Culture

In interpersonal interactions, there is often the assumption, conscious or not, that in some sense we can know a person by looking at them. Visual cues like body language, eye contact, the many things people express about themselves through the way they dress, and signifiers of things like gender and race play a major role in communication and categorization of the people we encounter; we often feel that, by seeing someone, we can understand them better. 

In Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol, however, seeing and being seen becomes a means of alienation and dehumanization. Throughout the poem, the guards are frequently referred to as “watchers”, and their primary function is to look upon the prisoners in the jail and actively, intentionally fail to identify with them. They watch the condemned man sleep before his execution and are unable to “understand / How one could sleep so sweet a sleep / With a hangman close at hand”, they watch the other prisoners pray in desperation and wonder why they are suddenly appealing to God, and they “must set a lock upon [their] lips, / And make [their] face a mask” to prevent themselves from reacting to and trying to understand a prisoner’s pain (Wilde). The gaze of the guards on the prisoners takes place in their most vulnerable moments but does not aim for empathy, instead rendering their pain and fragility something unrecognizable and strange. Looking at them in this way only increases their isolation from the rest of humanity; although they are reacting to their circumstances in very human ways, those circumstances mean that the people who watch them at all times will not even extend them pity.

The speaker of the poem also looks at the other prisoners, especially the condemned man, and while this looking functions differently from the unfeeling surveillance of the guards it still leaves the inmates isolated. Their lack of real, substantial connection with other people leaves them to identify so strongly with the condemned man by sight alone that they go through immense suffering alongside him. The sun, the light that makes seeing possible, is frightening and harsh, exposing them in the stark reality of their restricted existence to each other and those who control and punish them.

The image of ships passing each other during a storm feels naturally dark, but Wilde subverts the association of the darkness with the “shameful day”. The day and light bring clarity and visibility to things that the prisoner would rather not be reminded of, and the sense of shame and unworthiness that comes with being reminded of their situation means that identifying and connecting with another prisoner feels too painful to pursue. In this way the prisoners are isolated completely. Identification with another prisoner is dangerous and hurts them by cementing their reality and status, and identification with anyone else such as a guard is rendered impossible by the way each group is positioned. When the condemned man is finally killed, it is a “secret deed”; he is denied identification with anyone in his final moments, and his death is invisible to everyone except the people killing him. He is not allowed to be looked on with pity, sadness, or even anger; he is simply erased.