Analysis Of Oscar Wilde's Love Letters

Introduction
“Always, with undying love, yours, Oscar”, a closing to one of the many love letters that the highly successful author and playwright, Oscar Wilde wrote to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. His enormous capacity to love and to show compassion coupled with his graceful writing abilities allowed Oscar Wilde to produce some of the most beautifully articulated love letters. Within his letters, Oscar Wilde encapsulated irrational love and worked to elegantly communicate indescribable emotions. Today, his letters are seen as a piece of art and are widely praised. In his time, however, his love letters lead to his arrest, and eventual poverty and death at 46. To explain, the letters where proof of his same-sex relationship and he was arrested

Not only are his love letters a beautiful illustration of emotion but also a reminder of a shameful history of humiliations to lovers and the prosecution of desire in the United Kingdom. Oscar Wilde’s love letters have the powerful ability to share emotion and history. Futherover, Oscar Wilde’s letters can prove that love letters, in general, have the capacity to share emotion and history. Recently, with faster and more convenient technological ways of communicating, the practise of writing love letters has declined. Overall, in 1999 Canada post predicted that letter revenue would decrease by 20 million dollars in the next five years (Janigan 1999) and the prediction was nearly correct. This fact can be concerning because, as previously demonstrated, love letters can be proven to show importance in conserving and illustrating emotion and history. Before love letters are lost, an important question should be answered: What is the importance of love letters in a progressively more technologically centred society? Love letters prove to be important by creating a long lasting avenue in which individuals can be particularly vulnerable and express deeply personal sensibilities. With these characteristics love letters carry relevant histories, information, and emotions, that would not otherwise

Exploring the way in which love letters provide history, it can be seen that love letters provide new insights and perspectives on historical events. As well, they can provide information on previous writing styles, that could prove to be historically important. Love letters have also been proven to provide information, in the form of unfiltered thought. In psychology, love letters have assisted in the clinical process of assessment when analyzing letters written by those with mental health disorders. Furthermore, other research has also benefited from this unfiltered information within love letters. Love letters have proven to preserve and share emotion as well. Through this characteristic, love letters help those in relationships, as a polysemic object, to prove the sincerity of their love; that is questioned over technological communication, and for individuals to create connections through the vulnerable emotions love letters carry. As well, the display of human life and raw emotion in love letters can be seen as an art that should be kept. Overall, love letters show importance in history, research, and articulating emotion. It is important to note that the vulnerability put into love letters makes the content within them unfiltered and