This real life murder was committed by Charles Thomas Wooldridge, who murdered his twenty-three year old estranged wife, Ellen Wooldridge. The murder is seen as an aesthetic experience due to the fact that Wilde never actually mentions the victim after the first six lines, showing that art is self-sufficient, not needing to justify any existence or having any particular use. Plus throughout the poem in its entirety Wilde uses the passive tense, which erases any premeditation that could have existed for Wooldridge to commit the crime. This makes the murder an unnatural, non-real experience and if murder is not a real experience with a real person, but only a symbolic imaginary event, the encounter can be judged purely on Aesthetic ground, therefore even the crime of murder can be classified as fine art (Alkalay-Gut). Thomas Wooldridge didn't commit murder, he created it; art for arts sake.
Tragedies can sooth the soul through the use of catharsis, although it rarely does such a thing. It happens everyday, mostly shielded by our own ignorance, but none the less it happens. Tragedy does not escape the paper in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" due to the unexplainable act of murder that occurs in the very fist stanza. The young woman killed by her estranged husband at the ripe age of twenty-three. Despite the fact that Wilde uses his aesthete skill to entirely make the reader forget about the victim, he still focuses on the executional tragedy that is that is the hanging of the murderer. Wilde uses many instances in the poem to remind the audience that the man is on the scaffold and that the preliminary stages of the execution are occurring: "The hangman with his gardener's gloves"; "The hangman's hands were near"; "The hangman, with his little bag"; "And heard the prayer the hangman's snare"; "On which they hang a man" (Wilde, Ballad). Then Wilde talks about the execution as it was happening, showing that in fact people do get punished for their deeds; "They hanged him as a beast is hanged" (Wilde, Ballad).
