SOURCE: Gladden, Samuel Lyndon. “‘Sebastian Melmoth’: Wilde's Parisian Exile as the Spectacle of Sexual, Textual Revolution.” Victorians Institute Journal 28 (2000): 39-63.

In the following essay, Gladden analyzes Oscar Wilde's journal, written under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, in terms of his thoughts about being exiled from England after serving his prison term.

Many men on their release carry their prison about with them into the air, and hide it as a secret disgrace in their hearts, and at length, like poor poisoned things, creep into some hole and die. It is wretched that they should have to do so, and it is wrong, terribly wrong, of society that it should force them to do so. … For I have come, not from obscurity into the momentary notoriety of crime, but from a sort of eternity of fame to a sort of eternity of infamy, and sometimes seem to myself to have...