The Eighth Veil: The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ambiguity in

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé

Gerrard Carter

Supervisors: Dr Bertrand Bourgeois and Associate Professor Jacqueline Dutton

Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements of the degree

Doctor of Philosophy

March 2017

School of Languages and Linguistics, French Studies Program The University of Melbourne

i    

ABSTRACT Oscar Wilde’s 1891 radical tragedy Salomé is infused with symbolism, decadence and

erotic transgression. Ambiguity is also a key characteristic that enhances and extends

the aesthetic and textual analysis of Wilde’s rare French symbolist work, and yet it is

often overlooked. Through a semiotic and transtextual analysis of the poetics and

aesthetics in Salomé, this thesis examines the function of ambiguity in the play and how

this notion creates an open work to be actively interpreted by readers. From the

perspective of the present study, the decisive role of semiotics in relation to Wilde’s

Salomé is that it promotes an interactive process between text and reader. Through the

interpretation of signs, Salomé, as an ambiguous text, cries out for elaboration as it

enticingly beckons the addressee to become its co-author.

The dominant function of Wilde’s treatment of the Salomé myth is that of

experimentation. It is the result of the author’s original and creative experimentation

that presents the reader with a high degree of ambiguity. The innate ambiguity of the

text engenders a literary response, as the reader engages in an intertextual pas de deux.

This metaphorical dance enables the reader to unlock the text’s meaning while also

permitting freedom for creative adaptions.

The methodology employed in this thesis to demonstrate Salomé’s masked or

ambiguous motives is a combination of Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work and

French narratological theories of hypertextuality. Through an examination of the use of

a foreign language and the transtextual mosaic of the Salomé myth, this thesis will

demonstrate how generating interpretations becomes an essential element of Salomé’s

poetics and aesthetics.

This study reveals, for instance, that Wilde’s enigmatic Dance of the Seven

Veils is now synonymous with the myth today and has fired the imagination of

countless artists from a variety of media. By comparing the use of French as a veil to

conceal the themes of decadence, necrophilia and erotic sensuality of the femme fatale,

this thesis seeks to elucidate Oscar Wilde’s motivations to write a very implicit, allusive

and ambiguous play in French. To discover such motives would be to lift the eighth

veil, the veil of ambiguity.

ii    

This is to certify that

(i) the thesis comprises only my original work towards the PhD except where indicated,

(ii) due acknowledgment has been made in the text to all material used,

(iii) the thesis is less than 100,000 words in length, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

iii    

PREFACE One of my earliest memories I have as a child is seeing the film Jesus of Nazareth

directed by Franco Zeffirelli. I must have been five years old but the image of the

dancing Salomé surrounded by flames was indelibly etched in my mind and has

remained so for a lifetime. What was it that captivated that young boy to engender a life

long obsession with this biblical myth? Apart from being drawn in by the drama, the

underlying theme of a desire so powerful that it can lead to death has perplexed me all

my life. Another prominent childhood memory is the discovery of my eldest sister’s

high school French book, a visually strange language coupled with unfamiliar accents

that echoed from a world away. This early love of foreign languages, led me to an Irish

author who had composed a play about Salomé in a language other than his own,

French. It was this awareness that inspired my quest to discover what lies beneath the

eighth veil.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many influential forces that have guided me throughout this process. First and

foremost, I would like to thank my principal supervisor Dr Bertrand Bourgeois whose

positive feedback, meticulous corrections and recommended reading list widened my

perspective. I would also like to thank my secondary supervisor Associate Professor

Jacqueline Dutton whose timely feedback and insightful restructuring kept this project

on track.

Special thanks to the generous staff at Melbourne University Libraries, State Library of

Victoria, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris-Sorbonne Libraries, National Library

of Sweden: Kungliga Biblioteket, Stockholms Universitetsbibliotek and the personal

library of Dr Sven-Johan Spånberg in Uppsala, who gave me upon departure my most

cherished first edition of Oscar Wilde’s Complete Letters.

My sincere gratitude to the Director of Columbia Global Centers in Paris, Dr Brunhilde

Biebuyck, whose undergraduate Directed Research program was my initiation into

academic scholarship. I want to thank her for providing me office space upon my return

to Paris and for her passionate support that I carried with me throughout this study.

Special thanks to her devoted staff at Reid Hall especially Christine Babef, Christine

Valero, Laurence Gallu and professors Dr Camille Martin, Dr Olivier Sécardin and

especially Dr Jean-Baptiste Amadieu who directed my undergraduate senior mémoire

honors thesis on Salomé.

Special thanks to Lindsay Kemp and Kelley Abbey for interviews.

Lastly, my family: my sisters Deborah, Janine, Naomi, Simone, and Denise for

unconditional love and support especially during the final stages of this thesis. To my

father Colin and my mother Judith, who although they weren’t granted the opportunity

to complete high school, valued education as life’s greatest gift. It was their sacrifice

and undying devotion to their children that drove me to pursue a PhD. It is to my

parents that I dedicate this work.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: From Mask to Truth, From Truth to Mask…..…………………................1 Salomé’s French Transparency…………………………………………………….........6 Ambiguity Embraced……………………………………………………………….…..11 Ambiguity Gone Wild/e………………………………………………………………..17 An Intertextual Invitation to Openly Dance with Ambiguity.……….………................21 Chapter 1: The Sulamite of Sodom: Wilde’s Tapestry of the Abject and the Subversion of the Biblical Myth……….…………………………………………………….……..27 Salomé’s Intertextual Mosaic of Desire………………………………………………..29 Renan’s Interpretation of the Erotic Song………………………………………….…..38 The Birth of the Monstrous-Feminine……………………………………….................47 The Song of Sexual Yearning….…………..…...……………………………………....50 Cloven Gender: Ambiguity and Nick Cave’s Decadent Aesthetics of Desire................64 Chapter 2: Salomé/Salome’s Outré Art: Sustaining the Fin-de-Siècle Attack…...…....83 Translation and the Diminishing Effect of the Symbolist Voice………………………87 Salomé and the Power of the Visual Paratext………………………………………...102 The Intertextual Dialogue Between the Perverse and the Obscure…………………...120 Chapter 3: The Dance of the Seven Veils: Elucidating Wilde’s Invisible Dance.........125 The Cryptic Seven and the Ambiguity of Naming………….………………………...127 Flaubert’s Dance of Amplification…………………………….……………………...131 Wilde’s Anticipatory Dance of Desire…………………………….………………….139

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Lindsay Kemp’s Appropriation of the Dance of the Seven Veils…………………….144 Kelley Abbey and the Dancing Sexualized Archetype.………………………….…...160 Conclusion: The Eighth Veil of Ambiguity…………………………………………..176 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………….187

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LIST OF FIGURES

1. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) The Beheading of St John the Baptist, (1869) The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham 2. Cheryl Barker and John Pickering in Richard Strauss’s Salomé, Opera Australia (2012) 3. Aubrey Beardsley: Title Page, Salomé (1894) 4.Aubrey Beardsley: The Woman in the Moon, Salomé (1894) 5. Frank Martin: Frontispiece, Salomé (1957) 6. Barry Moser: Frontispiece, Salomé (2011) 7. Aubrey Beardsley: The Stomach Dance, Salomé (1894) 8. Aubrey Beardsley: List of Pictures, Salomé (1894) 9. Alastair (Baron Hans Henning Voigt): Untitled illustration from Salomé (1925) 10. Marcus Behmer: Untitled illustration from Salomé (1903) 11. Barry Moser: The young Syrian & Herodias’s Page (Salomé, 2011) 12. Takato Yamamoto: J’ai Baisé Ta Bouche Jokanaan (2005) 13. Takato Yamamoto: Salomé (2005) 14. Lindsay Kemp as Salomé (1977) 15. Lindsay Kemp as Salomé (1977) 16. The Dance of the Seven Veils in Richard Strauss’s Salomé Opera Australia (2012) 17. The Dance of the Seven Veils in Richard Strauss’s Salomé Opera Australia (2012) 18. The Dance of the Seven Veils in Richard Strauss’s Salomé Opera Australia (2012)

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AN Against Nature (J.K. Huysmans, Translated by Brendan King). AR À Rebours (J.K. Huysmans). BLC The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley (Aubrey Beardsley). CC Le Cantique des cantiques (Traduit de l’hébreu et commenté par

Ernest Renan) CL The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (Oscar Wilde). CW Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Oscar Wilde). H Hérodias (Gustave Flaubert). He Herodias (Gustave Flaubert, Translated by A.J. Krailsheimer). S Salomé (Oscar Wilde)1. SD Salomé (Oscar Wilde, Translated by Joseph Donohue). SFP Salomé, Five Plays (Nick Cave). SH Salomé (Oscar Wilde, Translated by Vyvyan Holland). SS The Song of Songs (Translated from the Hebrew by Ernest Renan,

Translated from the French by William M. Thomson).

                                                                                                               1 Bilingual edition.

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INTRODUCTION

FROM MASK TO TRUTH, FROM TRUTH TO MASK

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth”.

Oscar Wilde, The Critic As Artist, 1891.

Infused with symbolism, decadence and erotic transgression, Oscar Wilde’s 1891

radical tragedy Salomé allowed the author to attend his own unique masquerade ball. It

was a ball of fantasy where the orchestral accompaniment was French symbolism and

fellow attendees were the French literary elite he so admired. Wilde’s employment of a

metaphorical mask in the composition of Salomé provided a forum, which offered the

author the creative freedom to speak the unspeakable. Furthermore, Salomé became the

catalyst for Wilde to realise his innermost ambition to be recognized and respected as a

French author. As he danced amongst the paper faces on parade, Wilde created a

distinct narrative of ambiguity to serve as a mask to his phantasms. However, the man

behind the mask was still Wilde, still the author expressing his own ideas with his true

voice. Faced with such a paradox, the reader is inspired to explore what lies beneath the

mask and to seek the ambivalent mysteries residing in Salomé’s decadent text.

The mask has many faces. Mikhail Bakhtin views the theme of the mask as

being “connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and with

merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself. The mask

is related to transition, metamorphoses, (and) the violation of natural boundaries” (1984,

40). When applying Bakhtin’s conception of the mask to Wilde’s work, the reader is

confronted with the author’s taste for ambiguity. In The Critic As Artist (1891) Wilde

declared: “Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask and

he will tell you the truth” (CW, 1142). Such a paradoxical attestation, as Élodie

Degroisse explains, is a key concept in Wilde’s works and describes Wilde’s mask as it

paradoxically unmasks: “it proliferates as identities get multiplied and substitutes to the

real self that gets split; the audience starts to wonder whether there is actually

something hidden behind the mask” (2014, 65). This activity of unmasking suggests the

notion of ambiguity to the reader. The existence of the Wildean characters should

therefore be “felt in their multiplicity: it is paradoxically by veiling themselves that they

unveil their essence” (Degroisse, 2014, 65).

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For Wilde, the mask is always preferred to the face it covers, as it works at

seducing the reader in welcoming the multiple identities that it initiates2. In Salomé,

Wilde creates characters who wear many masks and who possess multi-faceted

personalities. Through the creation of such characters, Wilde’s aestheticism becomes

one of artifice, an exaggerated devotion which “was more prone to seeing the symbol as

surface, mask, and adornment (in short, cosmetic), [and which] meant he was more

inherently ambivalent about the symbol than his cross-channel cousins, for whom

symbolism was often seen as a cipher to some higher mystery behind life” (Russ 2011,

37-38). As a result, Wilde’s exotic yet obscure work provokes conflicting interpretive

possibilities to derive multiple meanings, which challenge any univocal interpretation.

This thesis proposes that the notion of the veil in Salomé is linked to this very

Wildean notion of mask. The ambiguous nature of the veil is captured in its

transparency. Like the mask, it conceals yet reveals. Wilde’s Salomé is notably

distinguished by his original invention of the Dance of the Seven Veils3, which does not

appear in either the Bible nor in previous literature. Thanks to the ingenuity of Wilde,

the idea of the erotic dance is synonymous with the myth today and has fired the

imagination of countless artists from a variety of mediums who wish to interpret this

most enigmatic text.

In addition to the veil as a new ambiguous device, Wilde also used the French

language to conceal the themes of decadence, necrophilia and erotic sensuality of the

femme fatale; themes that would be censored if expressed in English. French provided

him with a foundation of ambiguity upon which he built a new identity as a

translingual4 author, expressing himself in multiple verbal systems as he flaunted his

freedom from the constraints of Victorian culture (Kellman 2003, ix). Wilde’s daring

determination to write in French affirmed his pre-eminence as an ambilingual5 and

forced readers “to reconsider literary categories and loyalties” (Kellman 2003, x). This

thesis seeks to discover the ambivalences and interpretative possibilities initiated by

Wilde as he wrote a very implicit, allusive and enigmatic play in French. To discover

such motives would be to penetrate the eighth veil, the veil of ambiguity.

                                                                                                               2 Pascal Aquien describes Wilde’s metaphorical mask: “Le masque assumé est toujours préférable au visage qu’il recouvre” (1996, 172). 3  Capitalization is used when referring to the Dance of the Seven Veils. However, when citing Wilde’s stage direction lower case will be used. 4 Streven G. Kellman describes translingual authors as “those who write in more than one language or in a language other than their primary one” (2003, ix). 5 Ambilinguals are those fluent and accomplished in more than one language.

  3  

Through a semiotic6 and transtextual7 analysis of the poetics8 and aesthetics9 in

Salomé, this thesis examines the function of ambiguity and how this notion is both very

relevant and productive to shed a new light on Wilde’s drama. From the perspective of

the present study, the decisive role of semiotics in relation to Wilde’s Salomé is that it

promotes an interactive process between text and reader. In this regard, Salomé can be

viewed as a perfect example of what Umberto Eco theorized as “open work” (Eco

1962). Through the interpretation of signs, Salomé, as an ambiguous text, cries out for

elaboration as it enticingly beckons the addressee to become its co-author. The

dominant or prevailing function of Wilde’s treatment of the Salomé myth is that of

experimentation. It is the author’s original and creative experimentation that presents

the reader with a high degree of ambiguity. The innate ambiguity of the text engenders a

literary response, as the reader engages in what one would call, borrowing from the

technical vocabulary of dance, an intertextual pas de deux. This metaphorical dance

enables the reader to unlock the text’s meanings while also permitting freedom for

creative adaptions. Through an examination of the use of a foreign language and the

intertextual mosaic of the Salomé myth, this thesis will demonstrate how generating

interpretations becomes an essential element of Salomé’s poetics and aesthetics.

Ambiguity is the paradoxical notion that fosters a complex aesthetic and textual

analysis of Wilde’s rare French symbolist work. Derived from the Latin term ambiguus

meaning “doubtful”, ambiguous is defined as “having more than one meaning” (Oxford                                                                                                                6  “Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else” (Eco 1976, 7). 7  Gérard Genette views the subject of poetics as “not the text considered in its singularity […] but rather the architext or, if one prefers, the architextuality of the text […] the entire set of general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres – from which emerges each singular text” (1997, 1). Genette views the subject of poetics in transtextuality as “all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts. Transtextuality then goes beyond, and at the same time subsumes, architextuality, along with some other types of transtextual relationships” (1997, 1). 8 Roman Jakobson defines poetics and its relation to linguistics as dealing “primarily with the question, What makes a verbal message a work of art? […] Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics” (1960, 350). Jakobson expounds on his theory of poetics: “many poetic features belong not only to the science of language but to the whole theory of signs, that is, to general semiotics. This statement, however, is valid not only for verbal art but also for all varieties of language since language shares many properties with some other systems of signs or even with all of them” (1960, 351). 9  This study uses the term “aesthetics” in a generalist sense to describe Salomé’s alignment with the nature and appreciation of art. See Weinstein & Looby (2012) who state that: “It has always been the case that aesthetics was a contested term and, likewise, it has always been true that philosophers and critics have used the term in different and sometimes contradictory ways” (4). They list a number of ideas that count as aesthetic to include “the play of imagination, the exploration of fantasy, the recognition and description of literary form, the materiality of literary inscription and publication, the pleasure of the text, sensuous experience in general, the appreciation of beauty, the adjudication and expression of taste, the broad domain of feeling or effect, or some particular combination of several of these elements” (4).

  4  

1999, 41) and is “unclear” as it does “not distinguish between alternatives” (1999, 41).

The equivalent Latin verb is ambigere which means, “to waver or go around, ambi-

‘both ways’ + agere ‘to drive’” (1999, 41). “Ambiguity”, as Roman Jakobson declares,

“is an intrinsic, inalienable character of any self-focused message, briefly a corollary

feature of poetry” (1960, 370-1) 10 . The question of textual ambiguity and its

fundamental relationship to a textual reading of Salomé, the aural (alliteration,

repetition) and even visual when we consider Beardsley’s accompanying illustrations to

the English edition (1894), multiplies interpretative possibilities. When we consider that

“[i]nterpretation is not the art of construing but the art of constructing. Interpreters do

not decode poems; they make them” (Fish 1980, 327), the poetic study of Wilde’s

Salomé can therefore benefit from such a systematic analysis. If Salomé is understood

as being “open” to a number of critical interpretations and artistic creations, the play

succeeds in refusing a univocal view that limits its ability to transcend the aesthetic

experience.

In addressing the semiotic purport of the Salomé text, Wilde’s aesthetic

manipulation in the use of an experimental language deserves attention on a number of

levels. For Eco, an aesthetic text involves a very peculiar labour or what he terms “a

particular manipulation of the expression” (Eco 1976, 261). Wilde’s Salomé assumes a

poetic function as the text aspires to the condition of poetic drama. As a result, it is

ambiguous and self-focusing: “it directs the attention of the addressee primarily to its

own shape” (Eco 1976, 264). “Semiotically speaking ambiguity must be defined as a

mode of violating the rules of the code” (Eco 1976, 262). Wilde’s choice of ambiguity

is a stylistic one. The reader experiences an aesthetic deviation from the norm. Eco

explains that this distinctive feature “is not entirely satisfactory because not every

deviation from the stylistic norm constitutes an aesthetic achievement” (1976, 263).

Certain critics have unquestionably viewed Salomé as a deficient text reacting

                                                                                                               10  Claid (2006) views ambiguity as a practice of playing between the identifiable interpretations and contextualizes ambiguity as a verb “to ambigu-ize” (6) drawing an apt parallel to “Jacques Derrida’s play of différance in language whereby identifying a single meaning becomes impossible” (6). Claid cites William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930) at work in literature to suggest that “the author and the reader share in the creation of ambiguous interpretation” (6): “First type ambiguities arise when a detail is effective in several ways at once […] In second-type ambiguities two or more alternative meanings are fully resolved into one […] The condition for third-type ambiguity is that two apparently unconnected meanings are given simultaneously […] In fourth type the alternative meanings combine to make clear a complicated state of mind in the author […] The fifth type is a fortunate confusion, as when the author is discovering his idea in an act of writing […] In the sixth type what is said is contradictory or irrelevant and the reader is forced to invent interpretations […] The seventh type is that of full contradictions, marking a division in the author’s mind” (Quoted in Claid 2006, 215n1).

  5  

caustically to the author’s linguistic choice both in the original French and subsequent

English translation11. However, the intrinsic obscurity of language triumphs as Wilde’s

fundamental aesthetic feature. Although the Salomé text is semantically

comprehensible, it is stylistically ambiguous. Such ambiguity is the key element that

heightens the aesthetic experience. Eco explains the function of ambiguity as it incites

an active participation of the addressee: Ambiguity is a very important device because it functions as a sort of introduction to the aesthetic experience; when, instead of producing pure disorder, it focuses my attention and urges me to an interpretative effort (while at the same time suggesting how to set about decoding) it incites me toward the discovery of an unexpected flexibility in the language with which I am dealing” (Eco 1976, 263)

When applying Eco’s notion of the reader’s active participation in formulating

interpretative possibilities to Wilde’s Salomé, one is compelled to grapple with the

textual ambiguity in order to construct a meaningful analysis and subsequently a

creative interpretation as seen in numerous artistic reincarnations12.

Salomé’s textual ambiguity is multilayered due to its intertextual nature. The

interplay between nineteenth century French literary sources and their decadent

interpretations of the Judean princess provides Wilde with a complex palimpsest.

Genette’s detailed taxonomy of intertextuality explores the relationship of a text to other

texts13. When applying Genette’s theories of intertextuality to Wilde’s Salomé we see

that within the drama, Wilde erases prior nineteenth-century Salomé texts and replaces

them with a “modernist refashioning” (Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 11). Works such as

Hérodias (1877) by Gustave Flaubert, À Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans and

Hérodiade (1887) by Stephane Mallarmé can still be recognized and read in

transparency. Wilde’s Salomé is a parchment that has been written on twice. Although

Wilde boasted that “Remember, dans la littérature il faut tuer son père” [in literature

you must always kill your father] (Quoted in Ellmann 1988, 375), the author’s French

forefathers remain as restless ghosts who linger in the margins of his Salomé text14.

                                                                                                               11 Philippe Julian describes Salomé as “one of the most famous and one of the worst of his (Wilde’s) works” (1969, 247). See Chapter 2 for an analysis of the caustic reaction to the first English translation of Salomé. 12  Studied in Chapter 3. 13 See Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1997). See also Michael Worton and Judith Still (eds.), Intertextuality: Theories and Practices (1990), especially pp. 1-45; Graham Allen, Intertextuality (2011), especially pp. 92-121. 14 See Chapter 1.  

  6  

Following the example set by Petra Dierkes-Thrun, this study’s objective in

revisiting the aforementioned treatments of the Salomé story is “not to repeat previous

scholarship on their relationship to Wilde but to read these texts together with and

through Salomé in such a way that each text’s specific importance to Wilde’s modernist

refashioning of certain themes and styles comes into sharp focus” (2011, 11). By

employing Dierkes-Thrun’s approach, this thesis’ main goal is therefore to illustrate

Wilde’s literary parodies as he establishes certain ambiguous traits in the creation of a

bold new femme fatale.

This thesis will demonstrate how Wilde also turned to these authors for

inspiration in the creation of an original poetic language of ambiguity. For instance, by

extracting the sinister characteristics of both mother and daughter in Hérodias, Wilde

fuses the two women into one diabolical character to present the reader with an

enigmatic protagonist that oscillates between two distinct personalities. In turning our

attention to À Rebours, we discover how Wilde is influenced by the mysterious qualities

of Huysmans’s ekphrastic work to give voice to the once silent Salomé. In a similar

fashion to Wilde’s treatment, the Salomé of À Rebours stands at the forefront as she

seduces the decadent aristocratic anti-hero, Jean Floressas des Esseintes. In Wilde’s

drama, the author appoints Salomé to the position of central character. Artificial beauty,

with its numerous subliminal messages, cloaks the personae and presence of Salomé,

highlighting her evil ambivalent nature. Finally, in Hérodiade, Mallarmé’s influence on

Wilde is demonstrated as the author blends beauty and horror to invent a new poetic

language in which “the referential value of words would become subordinate to the

value of their effect” (Shaw 1993, 103). As we unlock the intertextual mosaic of the

Salomé corpus, we begin to decipher the premise behind an Anglophone writer who

seeks to express himself through his art in a foreign tongue.

Salomé’s French Transparency

Originally composed in French, Salomé is uniquely situated in the Wildean canon in

terms of its subject matter and language choice. It also remains distinct and entirely

divergent in its one act structure when compared to Wilde’s other comedic melodramas.

However, Wilde’s original treatment of the Salomé myth has managed to transcend

  7  

national and linguistic boundaries in finding an audience 15 . The preeminent

characteristic, which initially furnishes Salomé with a distinctive quality of ambiguity,

is the play’s linguistic and poetic choice of French that aligns the work with fellow

symbolist writers living and working in France during the time of its composition. The

theme of the Princess of Judea intensely permeated French literature during the second

half of nineteenth century and profoundly influenced fin-de-siècle writers and artists16.

Derived from biblical sources, the character of Salomé dances for the Tetrarch, Herod

Antipas. In reward for her lascivious dance, she may ask whatever her heart desires. She

demands the head of John the Baptist, the prophet imprisoned for having denounced the

incestuous relationship of King Herod with his sister-in-law Hérodias, queen and

mother of Salomé.

The two significant biblical accounts that deal with John the Baptist’s beheading

at the request of Herod’s stepdaughter are Matthew 14:6-11 and Mark 6:14-29. One of

the reasons why Wilde subverted the biblical myth and made the character of Salomé

central, a deviation from the biblical myth, was that he found Matthew and Mark’s

biblical accounts meek. He complained of the “docility of the Biblical Salomé, who

simply obeys Hérodias and, once she receives the head, conveys it to her mother”

(Ellmann 1988, 344). The most extensive biblical account of the prophet’s beheading is

to be found in the book of Mark, which clearly illustrates Wilde’s claim of docility:

And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of galilee; And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. And she came in straight away with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist. And the king was exceedingly sorry; yet for his oath’s sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went

                                                                                                               15  According to data catalogued by the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the British Museum, and various national histories of theatre or literature, Salomé has been published or performed in the following languages, with parenthesis pertaining to the date of the first translation into the language: English (1894), German (1903), Czech (1905), Italian (1906), Portuguese (1908), Russian (1908), Hebrew (1909), Spanish (1909), Esperanto (1910), Dano-Norwegian (1911), Dutch (1911), Japanese (1913), Polish (1914), Ukrainian (1914), Swedish (1915), Chinese (1918), Estonian (1919), Hungarian (1924), Latvian (1925), Slovak (1925), Bulgarian (1929), Greek (1930), Lithuanian (1932), Rumanian (1934), and Serbo-Croatian (1957). See Toepfer (1991, 43). 16 See Mireille Dottin-Orsini, Cette Femme qu’ils Disent Fatale. Textes et images de la misogynie fin-de-siècle (1993), pp. 133-159. See also Wilde, Salomé Présentation par Pascal Aquien (2006), pp. 9-19 and pp.179-204, Claudel (2013) and Marcal (2005).

  8  

and beheaded him in prison, And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother. And when his disciples heard of it, they came and took up his corpse, and laid it in a tomb17.

As Wilde took the biblical myth and subverted it, tailoring it to incarnate the cruel and

depraved Salomé, he turned to the French masters he so admired for inspiration. French

artists of the second half of the nineteenth century such as Flaubert, Huysmans and

Mallarmé deeply influenced Wilde and intensified the author’s desire to belong to an

elite French literary circle. In order to achieve this objective, Wilde composed Salomé

in French.

Wilde is unique among nineteenth-century Anglophone authors in his choice to

write one of his major literary works in French18. This fact prompts the reader to ask:

Why did an Anglophone writer, who lived the majority of his adult life in England,

decide to compose a major literary work in French? When asked how he came to write

Salomé in French, Wilde responded:

My idea of writing the play was simply this: I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English language. There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it”19 (Quoted in Mikhail 1979, 188).

When Wilde finally touched the instrument he had listened to all his life, he created a

beautiful and strange sounding voice. There is a sense of ambiguity to the language that

seems rather peculiar to the native French speaker. However, Wilde embraced this

textual ambivalence: “Of course there are modes of expression that a Frenchman of

letters would not have used, but they give a certain relief or colour to the play” (Quoted

in Mikhail 1979, 188).

In his dexterous statement Wilde emphasises the mode of linguistic ambiguity

that he employed as an author writing in a language other than his mother tongue.

Providing a certain relief or colour to the play through the creation of an ambiguous

sounding French, Wilde “therefore creates a foreign language within a foreign language,

a style of his own which marks his difference” (Eells 2010, 117). In this way, Wilde

initiated a high level of ambiguity through language. French, for Wilde, represented a

fantasy of an “alternative to British and Irish nationality alike and, at the same time, as

                                                                                                               17 Mark 6: 21-29 King James Version. 18 See  Evangelista (2010). 19  Interview with The Pall Mall Budget (London, 30 June 1892).  

  9  

an alternative to nationality altogether” (Cohen 2013, 233). In “Wilde’s French” (2013)

William A. Cohen indicates that an Irish writer who “wrote a play in French raises a

host of questions, both in the abstract and in relation to this (Salomé) particular work”

(233). Cohen asks, “What fantasy does a writer hold about a foreign language? What

fantasy of himself does that language facilitate? Who is the subject of a non-native or

less-than-fluent utterance?” (2013, 233) then proceeds to rationalize that “Wilde

understands French as the very language of art; through the use of French, he can

conceive of forms of identity and subjectivity organized not around national belonging

or linguistic community but instead around aesthetics. He imagines French to be the

paradoxical national language that reaches beyond nationality” (2013, 234).

Wilde’s employment of the French language enabled him to “transcend the

limitation of thought and feeling that would accompany presenting the work in English

to an English audience” (Powell 2009, 59). In this regard, French acts as a protective

veil as Dellamora suggests that Salomé was “so sure to enrage English philistines that

its conception needed to be translated into - perhaps even to be imagined in - French”

(1990, 248). Such hypotheses are certainly valid but why did Wilde want to transcend

such limitation of thought? More importantly, why choose a language such as French?

Did the French language allow the author to explore a certain sensuality and decadence

that he could not express in English nor in puritanical England of the late nineteenth

century? It seems clear that French language and culture seduced this author to venture

into decadent aesthetics in the creation of Salomé. This fact may shed some light on

Wilde’s choice of language and influence in his treatment of the biblical myth but more

importantly Wilde wanted to be known as a French writer. When presenting a copy of

Salomé to Charles Ricketts, whom Wilde persuaded to perform the stage design for

Salomé, the newly recognized Francophile stated, “You do not know that since we last

met I have become a famous French author” (Ellmann 1988, 374). Wilde also wrote to

Edmond de Goncourt on 17 December 1891: “French by sympathy, I am Irish by birth,

and the English have condemned me to speak the language of Shakespeare”20 .

Evangelista suggests, “This epigrammatic autobiographical statement […] alerts us to

the complexities of Oscar Wilde’s identity and intellectual allegiances. Wilde

juxtaposes the variables of desire, heredity and language with a characteristic mixture of

immodesty and extreme graciousness” (2010, 1) and further adds that “The mixture of                                                                                                                20  “Français de sympathie, je suis Irlandais de race, et les Anglais m’ont condamné à parler le langage de Shakespeare" (CL 505).

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French-inflected cosmopolitanism, Englishness and Irishness expressed to Goncourt

made him then and still makes him now difficult to assimilate into a single national

tradition” (2010, 1).

Through such cosmopolitanism, Wilde emerged as an enigmatic author as he

shared a particular intimacy with Paris and the French language. In an interview with

the daily paper Le Gaulois on 29 June 1892, he declared, “There is but one Paris, voyez-

vous, and Paris is France. It is the abode of artists; nay, it is la ville artiste. I adore Paris.

I also adore your language. To me there are only two languages in the world: French

and Greek” (Quoted in Mikhail 1979, 189-90). In the same interview, Wilde expressed

his dislike for English puritanism: “here people are essentially anti-artistic and narrow-

minded. Now the ostracism of Salomé will give you a fair notion of what people here

consider venal and indecorous” (Quoted in Mikhail 1979,190). The French language

became central to the aesthetic experience with which Wilde identified himself as a

writer. Wilde wrote during the time of his composition of Salomé: I am at present in Paris, studying the curious and fascinating development of Art in France, which, I am glad to say, is in the direction of a richer Romanticism, with subtleties of new colour and strange music and extended subject matter. An artist gains his best, his truest inspiration, from the material he uses, and the transformation of the French language, in the hands of the leaders of the new schools, is one of the most interesting and attractive things to watch and wonder at (CL, 499).

Wilde’s fascination for French language and literature provided him with the

imaginative and aesthetic penchant to create such an artistic departure from the biblical

account. Consequently, his Salomé oscillates between multiple influences derived from

the works of French masters. What is interesting however is how the notion of

ambiguity extends beyond the mere paradox as Wilde discovers the ambivalent nature

present in the French works to form the “fragmentation and amalgamation of the play’s

characterization (which) becomes emblematic of the larger dispersions operating within

its dialogue” (Gillespie 152).

Acknowledging the multiple indeterminacies residing in Wilde’s Salomé

enhances creative interpretative possibilities. However, Wilde’s venture into French

symbolism has often been misconstrued. Critics frequently find the ambiguous text

confusing and challenging, cynically dismissing the drama as an insufficient

accompaniment to Wilde’s society comedies21. Furthermore, rather than searching for

                                                                                                               21 “Salome can seem strange in Wilde’s corpus. The play appears to be an uneasy bedfellow with the society comedies, which dominate our received picture of his dramatic work, compounded by the fact that

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the rich diversity of the interpretative possibilities within the text itself, certain critics

have also discovered an opportunity to focus primarily on the psychology of the

author22. The ambiguity that permeates Wilde’s Salomé enhances its openness lending

itself to critical freedom of interpretation and creative adaptions. However, this

enigmatic text sometimes encourages excessive speculation, as some critics exploit the

ambiguity at its core to their own interpretative ends.

Ambiguity Embraced Salomé’s morbid tale of perverse beauty has fascinated Wilde enthusiasts and scholars

who ardently seek to unveil the motivating drives of the author to venture into decadent

aesthetics. The reason for such an irresistible attraction to Wilde’s unique work is that

Salomé offers a remarkable example of multiplicity that “invites readers to make

imaginative responses to the ambivalences and ambiguities within its intratextual

elements” (Gillespie 1996, 148). Dierkes-Thrun describes Wilde “as the first English-

speaking writer to adopt and promote symbolist aesthetics for the London literary

world” (2011, 4) and Bernheimer characterizes the symbolist style present in Salomé as

containing short sentences with “no connectives between them to indicate logical

relation. Each paratactic sentence has a kind of declarative autonomy” (2002, 122). This

“declarative autonomy” produces an economy of signs to reside in and therefore

aestheticize the language to cloak Salomé with a veil of ambiguity.

There is further textual support to illustrate the considerable degree of

multiplicity and ambivalence present in not only Salomé but also cultivated by the

author Wilde himself. Gillespie describes the world of Salomé as remaining “self-

consciously artificial and ambiguous because the personalities of the play’s central

characters seem more isolated and much less developed than those in Wilde’s other

plays” (1996, 147), and he views these enigmatic personalities as “emerging not so

much as flat figures but as outlines left for the reader to fill in” (1996, 147). Critics have

demonstrated the importance in analysing the work by not “reducing Wilde’s play to a

single, “readable” text, but by stressing the discontinuities within the multiplicity of

different Salomes that descend to us” (Frankel 1997, 74). Such “discontinuities” can

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Salome has been so rarely performed since its publication in French in 1893” (Varty 1998, 131). Tydeman & Price also refer to “the instability of Salomé’s critical popularity and the infrequency of its theatrical realisation often left his most experimental play isolated as an apparent aberration among the complete works” (1996, 1). 22 See Millet (1971), Showalter (1990), Knox (1994).

  12  

also be attributed to the author as Wilde’s enigmatic personality presents the reader with

a series of paradoxes. In her introduction to “Wilde the Irishman” (1998), Jerusha

McCormack suggests that Wilde’s mere existence was somewhat ambiguous and it is

therefore, impossible to define him. He was not only both “Irish and British, both mock-

aristocrat and avowed republican” (1998, 1), but he was also “heterosexual, bisexual

and gay […] the champion of the ‘new woman’, and, as editor of the Woman’s World, a

force for her intellectual liberation, yet, within a few short years, he was penning

Salomé, a play of violent, not to say hysterical, misogyny” (1998, 1). However, Salomé

cannot simply be defined as a play that confines its characters within a misogynist realm

as “in the many distorting mirrors of the text’s metaphoric displacements, identities are

not fixed by gender or sexuality but are instead depicted as double, multiple and

shifting” (Fernbach 2002, 46). In fact, Salomé, as the leading protagonist, embodies the

“organizing center for the gender confusion and reversals that structure Wilde’s one-act

play” (Powell 2009, 9).

This gender confusion is also made prominent by the stylised coupling of text

and image through Aubrey Beardsley’s provocative illustrations23: “This juxtaposition

of the drawings and the discourse exerts an influence upon the reader as significant as

that derived from the polyvocality of any of Wilde’s other works” (Gillespie 1996,

139). Gillespie describes the decadent artist’s creative efforts as “graphically

augment(ing) the multiplicity that marks Wilde’s artistic endeavors. They widen the

paradigm for perceiving Salome with the added pluralism unanticipated by conventional

modes of reading” (1996, 139). However, in a review of Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of

Ambiguity (1996), Rod Boroughs justifiably points out that Gillespie’s discussion of

Salomé is “almost exclusively confined to the heightened polyvocality and aesthetic

indeterminacy that arises from the juxtaposition of Wilde’s text and Beardsley’s

illustrations” (1998,187) and further adds that unfortunately “the concentration on the

illustrations as essential interpretive guides and commentaries on the action of the play

results in the almost total neglect of the medium for which the work was written” (1998,

188). Therefore, a critical analysis in the study and significance of the poetics of

ambiguity deserves more attention. This thesis intends to delve further into Gillespie’s

                                                                                                               23 Wilde’s Salomé is also an extremely rare example of a play, which exhibits an artist’s, in this instance Beardsley’s, accompanying illustrations as “a perfect complement to the text…expressive of that same sense of strange beauty which Wilde’s Salome and John embody” (Nelson 1971, 242/Quoted in Gibert 1983). A number of artists who followed Beardsley’s example include Behmer, Alastair, Derain, Harshberger, Martin, Vassos, Shenton and Moser among others.

  13  

initial investigation by including an examination of the play’s textual features, which

will consequently extend the analysis of the poetics and aesthetics of ambiguity in

Oscar Wilde’s most controversial and least understood work.

The destabilizing qualities present in Salomé reinforce Paul Valéry’s declaration

that “there is no true meaning for a text. No author’s authority. Whatever he may have

wanted to say, he has written what he has written. Once published, a text is like an

apparatus that anyone may use as he will, and according to his ability: it is not certain

that the one who constructed it can use it better than another” (1985, 152). Moreover,

the construction and perception of ambiguity in Wilde’s Salomé offers a reciprocal

relationship between author and text. The work is therefore open and can be viewed in

terms of Umberto Eco’s notion of Opera Aperta (1989) or “open work”. For Eco, there

exists a component of multiplicity and polysemy in art with strong emphasis on the role

of the reader engaging in an interactive process with the text. David Robey, in his

introduction to the English translation of Eco’s Opera Aperta, points out that for Eco:

“questions of poetics are central to the discussion of all modern works of art, although

their treatment needs to be complemented by acts of aesthetic judgement” (1989, xiii).

Ambiguity, for Eco, “is the product of the contravention of established conventions of

expression: the less conventional forms of expression are, the more scope they allow for

interpretation and therefore the more ambiguous they can be said to be” (Robey 1989,

xi). In applying this notion to Salomé, we see that the scope for poetic and aesthetic

interpretation becomes increasingly extensive. When the reader is in a position to move

freely amid a multiplicity of various psychological and aesthetic interpretations, then

the work in question initiates a greater degree of collaboration between the artist and the

reader; or using Eco’s term, “the receiver”. Eco states, “Any work of art can be viewed

as a message to be decoded by an addressee. But unlike most messages, instead of

aiming at transmitting a univocal meaning, the work of art succeeds precisely insofar as

it appears ambiguous and open-ended” (Eco 1989, 195).

One can find legitimacy in an equivocal approach to interpreting a text when

considering “the assertion of the essential ambiguity of language opens up a space for

creation and interpretation to which the specialist -writer, critic, scholar- has privileged,

perhaps exclusive access” (Rechniewski 2010, 2). Rechniewski further explains, “this

claim underpins their deontology, the professional ideology which legitimates their

activity” (2010, 2). In order to approach an equivocal reading of Salomé, it is necessary

to view the play as a work of art that “is indeed made not twice but a hundred times, by

  14  

all those that are interested in it, who find a material or symbolic profit in reading it,

classifying it, deciphering it, commenting on it, combating it, knowing it, possessing it”

(Bourdieu 1993, 111). Wilde himself not only concurs with such an assertion but also

elevates the critic to the revered position of artist. In The Critic as Artist, Wilde

declares: “To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his

own, that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises”

(CW, 1128). Expounding on Wilde’s theory Russ suggests, “If the artist redeems life by

transfiguring or augmenting it aesthetically (which for Wilde means improving it), then

the critic furthers this movement almost exponentially by enhancing our appreciation of

the previous enhancement upon life” (2011, 41).

Although Wilde’s Salomé can be considered to possess a degree of “openness”,

in responding to a work “so insistently outside the frame of reference established by his

(Wilde) social melodramas” (Gillespie 1996, 136), Gillespie describes how many

critical responses to Salomé have “felt the need to re-establish interpretative control by

forwarding approaches that give primacy to a single dominant meaning” (1996, 136).

Many scholars seek certitude “through clearly articulated polemical aims” (1996, 136).

Gillespie explains that as a result: Even some of the most innovative responses often fall into versions of structuralist polarities to delimit the play’s parameters. These approaches enforce the primacy of a single perspective that dominates their interpretative response; and they generally derive readings of Salome from perceptions based upon a specific issue, often giving prominence to the play as an ethical, sexual, or political statement and emphasizing the divergence of its views from those of the dominant culture (1996, 136).

One such prominent example of an interpretative analysis that gives “primacy to a

single dominant meaning” is demonstrated in the critical trend to decode or unveil

Wilde’s homosexuality as a determinant and intrinsic component for his work. Such

interpretations claim to unearth semantic references in the text as a mask for the

author’s homosexuality. Recent Wilde criticism “has proven the density and

pervasiveness of this (homosexual) coding, demonstrating how certain linguistic

formations function to express, while nonetheless concealing sexual meanings” (Cohen

191, 1996).

There is further critical support for such a cryptic reading of Salomé in terms of

its “encoding gay desire” (Fernbach 2002, 53). Kate Millett sees Salomé as “not

exclusively or even fundamentally female; she is Oscar Wilde too” (1971, 153) and

describes the play as a “drama of homosexual guilt and rejection” (1971, 153). In

  15  

Sexual Anarchy (1991), Elaine Showalter asks: “Is the woman behind Salomé’s veils

the innermost being of the male artist? Is Salomé’s love for Jokanaan a veiled

homosexual desire for the male body?” (1990, 151) Moreover, Showalter remarks,

“Beardsley’s drawings bring out all too powerfully the secret or unspeakable subtext of

the play, especially its homoerotic and blasphemous elements” (Showalter 1990, 152).

Reading Salomé from this perspective: Artists and audiences alike have interpreted Wilde’s Salomé as a flagship text of coded gay desire and have seen Salomé either as Wilde’s transgendered alter ego or as an aggressively sexual New Woman, reflecting a changed cultural climate comparatively more accepting of male homosexuality and feminist rebellion (Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 12).

If Salomé can be seen as Wilde’s transgendered alter ego and a way for the author to

express homoerotic sexual desire then one may also question such psychoanalytic

explorations in the prophet Iokanaan. One can demonstrate similarly how Oscar Wilde

also explored his own sexual desires and gender identities through not only Salomé but

also that of Iokanaan, identifying with both the masculine and the feminine characters

of his text. In this regard “Salomé as Wilde” could be considered as only half the story.

Wilde can also be identified as the feminized prophet whose powers have been

taken away, taking into account that Wilde felt castrated both symbolically and literally.

Therefore, to support the concept of approaching Wilde’s play with a seemingly

polysemic view, one should take into account that Salomé offers a clear oscillation of

gender identities as Wilde engages in the obscurity of destabilizing traditional

masculine and feminine roles. Bernheimer notices that gender identities in Salomé “are

detached from the essentialist definitions” (2002, 125). The crystallization of the

masculine and feminine aspects of the two characters through a semiotic display of

surreal and fanciful obscurity, Wilde destabilizes the established gender norms of the

Victorian period while engaging ambiguity through both characters.

There is little doubt that the destabilizing of sexualized gender caused confusion

and anxiety during the late nineteenth century. Gender theorist Judith Butler suggests

that “multiple and coexisting identifications produce conflicts, convergences, and

innovative dissonances within gender configurations which contest the fixity of

masculine and feminine placements with respect to the paternal law” (1999, 85-6).

Therefore, “Wilde’s representations often confront his readers with dissentions and

contradictions situated within the seemingly homogeneous social context of the day-to-

day life of the ordinary individual” (Gillespie 1996, 2).

  16  

There is a critical restriction in reducing the character of Salomé to merely

embody the masculine. Garland supports this theory by stating: “a limitation of

suggesting that Salome’s desires are masculine is the redundancy of deviant feminine

desire and the difficulty accounting for a conflict between desires” (2011, 128) and

further explains that “Salome’s role as femme fatale in the play examines late

nineteenth-century tensions in heterosexual relationships between the expression and

danger of female sexuality against the desire for and attempts to subordinate female

sexuality” (2011, 128). Therefore, such an exiguous reading of the text to confine the

demonized femme fatale to only masculinized traits and desires is too limiting in its

scope. One can certainly find legitimacy for a range of critical approaches in forming a

valid analysis of Salomé, “but the validity of a particular view does not convey even a

temporary or provisional exclusivity upon a single reading” (Gillespie 1996, 14) and “a

more effective and rewarding interpretative strategy lies in contextualizing Wilde’s

creative efforts” (Gillespie 1996 4). However, this assertion has not deterred a large

number of academic critics from probing Wilde’s Salomé to generate a connection to

the author’s biographical events in the hope to determine a clear connection to his life

and sexuality24.

As a matter of fact, Wilde’s enigmatic yet dominant personality has incited

many critics to view his writing as a mere extension of his personality. However, Kohl

points out that French critics of the 1930s and 1940s such as Lemonnier and Merle were

among the first to attempt to avoid biographical fallacy by abandoning the biographical

method and replacing it with one that was psychologically orientated but concentrated

first and foremost on the works themselves (Kohl 1989). Edmund Bergler’s essay

Salome: The Turning Point in the Life of Oscar Wilde (1956) set out to prove that

Salomé was a direct psychoanalytic testimonial of the author’s homosexuality. As

previously mentioned, Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1971) and Elaine Showalter’s

Sexual Anarchy (1990) both identify Salomé as Wilde. Bristow’s Effeminate England:

Homoerotic Writing after 1885 claims that Wilde’s Salomé “has encouraged gay and

feminist critics to believe she is an icon of erotic resistance against patriarchal culture”

(1995, 47) and Richard Ellmann, in his celebrated biography of Wilde, states,

“homosexuality fired his (Wilde’s) mind. It was the major stage in his discovery of

himself” (Ellmann 1988, 281). In Wilde’s composition of Salomé, this ‘discovery’ was

                                                                                                               24  See Millet (1971), Showalter (1990), Dellamora (1990), Knox (1994), Fernbach (2002).

  17  

often met with much criticism. Arthur Symons recalled his “abhorrence of the

effeminate Wilde” (Bristow 1995, 17) when he states: Wilde’s vices were not simply intellectual perversions; they were physiological. This miserable man had always been under the influence of one of those sexual inversions, which turned him into a kind of Hermaphroditus. That distress which he tried to express in his writings after his condemnation had nothing virile in it; and his best-known tragedy Salomé reveals in its perversion of a legend his own sexual perversion25.

It is not surprising therefore, that “both in dramatizing a rebellious woman and in

portraying male-male desire,” writes Richard Dellamora, “Salomé puts normal

masculine representation under pressure” (Dellamora 1990, 249).

Millett and Showalter are not alone in demonstrating their theory of a necessary

examination on how Oscar Wilde, as a male homosexual, used the myth of Salomé as a

means of self-definition in his work and life (Meier 2001). Snodgrass (2003) refers to

Zagona’s idea that Salomé served for Wilde much the same function as Hérodiade

served for Mallarmé (Zagona 1960) and quotes Wilde’s close friend and confidante Ada

Leverson in describing Salomé as the play which most fully “expressed himself”

(Snodgrass 2003, 183). Even James Joyce as early as 1909, writing on occasion of the

first production in Trieste, Italy of Richard Strauss’s opera of the same name, noted that

Wilde’s play was “a revelation of his [Wilde’s] own psyche26” (Ellmann 1969, 60).

However, the dominant focus on the psychology of the author often becomes fertile

ground for speculation as ambiguity runs Wild/e.

Ambiguity Gone Wild/e

The identification of the autobiographical aspects in Salomé has been suggested

throughout the twentieth century (Joyce 1909; Millett 1971; Knox 1994). Melissa

Knox’s psychoanalytic biography of Wilde entitled Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely

Suicide (1994) argues that the surface action in the play conceals coded and hidden

meanings 27 . Knox also published a 1994 article, “Losing One’s Head: Wilde’s

                                                                                                               25 Arthur Symons, “Sex and Aversion”, in The Memoirs of Arthur Symons: Life and Art in the 1890s (University Park, PA, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), pp. 146-7. No date is given for this memoir.    26  “Oscar Wilde: Poet of Salomé” by James Joyce. Quoted in Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969). 27 Yale University Press hails Melissa Knox’s Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide as “the first full-length psychoanalytic biography of Oscar Wilde” that “explores the link between little-known childhood

  18  

Confession in Salomé”, in which she assigns each role in Salomé to Wilde and his

immediate circle. Such creative license is not academically convincing. For instance,

Knox makes a speculative and unsubstantiated assumption that Wilde had an early

incestuous “sexual intimacy” with his younger sister, who died at the age of nine,

contributing to a sense of guilt and a fear of woman that ultimately led to the

“development” of his homosexuality28. Knox mentions “clues” that allow her to make

the assumption that Salomé acts like a girl aged “four or five” (1994, 239), far removed

from the seductive and alluring literary tradition of the femme fatale so prevalent during

the second half of the 19th century French canonical works. Knox states: The chaotic family background of the Wilde home suggests that the children’s parents were too preoccupied to give them enough care and affection; Oscar and Isola, I assume, turned increasingly to each other for love and emotional support, which would have quickly ripened into a childish sexual intimacy. This kind of erotic activity between children, when later practiced by adults, has the flavour of perversion, and in the case of Wilde can be found glorified in his drama Salome (1994, 239).

At least Knox clarifies the fact that she did indeed “assume” her theory and therefore

when reading her work, one can conclude that her assumptions cannot be proven within

the text itself. Knox continues to substantiate her theory of psychoanalytic biographical

scrutiny when she declares: “Oscar’s intensity of grief for Isola, that lasted all his life,

derived from the guilt he felt as a young boy. He had allowed himself to be seduced by

his little sister – had probably agreed to infantile sexual play – and then she was the one

who – as Wilde must have felt – was punished by death” (Knox 1994, 240). While

“artists and audiences alike have interpreted Wilde’s Salomé as a flagship text of coded

gay desire” (Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 12), Knox turns her analysis into pure hypothesis.

Knox’s psychoanalytic study demonstrates the way in which the centre of her

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   events and figures in his life and his psychological development to explain both Wilde’s creativity and his self-destructive heroism” (back cover). 28 “Probably his (Wilde’s) realistic conflict – to show or to conceal his homosexuality – intensified the vestiges of guilt he felt about his early sensual exploits with little Isola; the burden of guilt he carried for their childish erotic experiments inspired a longing for punishment. Who knows – the experience with his little sister may have contributed to the development of his homosexuality. At least, he may have thought so. His guilt may have contributed to his fear of women, and by that to the development of his homosexuality […] His (Wilde’s) Salome becomes his anima in Jung’s and Freud’s sense of the innate bisexuality of the human being. His incestuous feelings provoked a great deal of guilt and his sister’s death could only have seemed to confirm the idea that he was guilty and deserved punishment. In the beheading of Iokanaan he expresses his crime of losing his head to his sister, and the punishment of decapitation that he feels he deserves for that crime and for being homosexual. He had to keep his homosexuality a mystery from the world, but at the same time he wanted to declare it from the rooftops” (Knox 1994, 240-1).

  19  

investigation has shifted from the text to ultimately arrive at an “overly speculative

reading” of Salomé, to borrow De Berg’s terms.

“The psychobiographical interpretation of literary texts is a two-way process:

the interpretation of the author and the interpretation of the text go side by side, the one

constantly illuminating and modifying the other” (De Berg 2003, 91). However, De

Berg warns: “If applied uncritically this type of literary criticism is bound to lead to an

overly speculative reading of texts” (De Berg 2003, 91). De Berg’s idea stands true

when approaching Knox’s psychoanalytic biographic study of Wilde. As Knox

routinely hypothesizes while neglecting to support her theories with any sound

evidence, she makes a number of errors. These unsupported theories include Wilde

contracting syphilis and engaging in the aforementioned incest with his sister to name

but a few. When reviewing Melissa Knox’s psychoanalytic biography “Oscar Wilde: A

Long and Lovely Suicide”, James Coakley describes it as “blessedly short in length”

adding that it is “at once and quite simply a failure of method, or perhaps, more

charitably, a risible exercise in fallacious causality” and characterizes Knox’s highly

problematic forced alliance between psychoanalysis and the art of biography as,

“overburdened, narrow-minded” and “tunnel-visioned” (1996, 297) allowing this

“hoary procedure” to construct, “all sorts of fanciful speculation” (1996, 297).

The challenge critics face when claiming the existence of an unconscious

element throughout the work they analyse is to enter the forum of psychological and

biographical criticism without, as Holland points out, “an agenda of their own or a

depth of personal feelings which limits their view and somehow dilutes the richness of

(Wilde’s) character” (Holland 1997, 5). This can be seen in the errors of Ellmann

(1988), Knox (1994) and Garber (1992) in mistakenly referring to a published photo of

what they believed to be Wilde in costume as Salomé, when Holland (1994) revealed in

an article, which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, proving beyond doubt that

the photograph of Salomé indeed depicted Hungarian opera singer, Alice Guszalewicz.

Garber’s inaccurate and grandiloquent characterization of Wilde portraying Salomé in

drag is both excessive and fulsome: The picture is almost too eloquent. His wrists, fingers, and upper arms circled with jewels, his flowing locks adorned with an ‘Oriental’ headdress, a jewelled belt at his ample waist, he kneels, with some little difficulty balancing his long skirt on his hips, and, all concentration, reaches out toward the head on the platter at his feet. The wig on the platter seems the mirror of the one that sits on his own head and cascades down his back, like a Burne-Jones in drag. It is Oscar Wilde in the costume of Salome (339, 1992).

  20  

Holland references these sensationalistic and unsupported claims noting that “in

practice Wilde is not Wilde without the whiff of scandal and, stale scandals being as

interesting as cold mutton, new books need fresh ones. And if they don’t exist, they can

be invented” (Holland 1997, 10).

Garber’s miscalculation and Knox’s unsubstantiated psychoanalytical

biographical study are just a few examples that illustrate the importance of this study to

undertake a revised approach to analysing the symbolic mask and ambivalences in the

aesthetic and poetic structures present in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé. In seeking to explore

this notion of ambiguity my study will not make any of the aforementioned hypothetical

assumptions which Coakley describes as “permitting all kinds of egregious value

judgements about Wilde and his writings” (1996, 298) and instead use the concept of

ambiguity to extrapolate its implications within the text. Although “literature is open to

psychoanalysis as is any form of expression” (Riffaterre 1988, 211) and Salomé offers a

fascinating masking of homosexual desire, my thesis intends to analyze Salomé while

seeking to restrict myself “to a segmentation that can be proven as being dictated by

textual features” (Riffaterre 1988, 212) rather than by intuition or idiosyncrasies. In The

Limits of Interpretation (1990), “Eco refutes the notion of the interpreter’s unlimited

freedom and defends the rights of the text against the disproportionate claims of the

deconstructionist reader” (Pisanty, 2015, 51). Pisanty elaborates on Eco’s theory: “The

text does not allow itself to be interpreted in every conceivable way, but stands as a

parameter of its possible interpretations. This means that every reading must be

compared with the information explicitly provided by the text before being admitted

into the group of acceptable interpretations of the text itself” (2015, 52).

The notion of unlimited semiosis, as Eco states “does not lead to the conclusion

that interpretation has no criteria” (1992, 23). Eco provides a useful methodology in

reducing an unrestrained and uncontrolled interpretation of a text29. Eco’s hermeneutics

enables the Salomé reader to approach the play with three types of attention: intentio

operis (the text’s intention), intentio auctoris (the author’s intention) and intentio

lectoris (the reader’s intention)30. In The Role of the Reader (1979), Eco foresees a

                                                                                                               29  For Eco, “the very existence of texts that can not only be freely interpreted but cooperatively generated by the addressee” (1979, 3) as “such categories as sender, addressee, and context are indispensable to the understanding of every act of communication” (1979, 4). 30 See Eco’s Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992, 64-65).

  21  

Model Reader, which the text produces to coincide with the intention of the text31.

“Many texts make evident their Model Readers by implicitly presupposing a specific

encyclopedic competence” (Eco 1979, 7). For instance, Wilde opens his play “by

clearly calling for a very specialized kind of reader” (1979, 7). The initiative of the

Salomé reader should consist ‘in making a conjecture about the text’s intention” (Eco

1992, 64). The intentio operis is to “produce a Model Reader able to make conjectures

about it, the initiative of the Model Reader consists in figuring out a Model Author that

is not the empirical one and that, at the end, coincides with the intention of the text (Eco

1990, 59).

By employing Eco’s theory of the Model Reader and approaching the Salomé

text with the notion that the text is fundamentally first and foremost, this study will

demonstrate how the destabilizing characteristics within the play do indeed reinforce the

perception that Salomé can be conceived as the most “open” of all of Wilde’s works,

thus recognizing the need to “sustain simultaneous hypostatic interpretative

development” (Gillespie 1996, 155). This thesis will determine that such a method

recognises that multiple interpretations exist within Wilde’s Salomé. In this manner the

Model Author extends an invitation to the Model Reader to become the text’s co-author.

An Intertextual Invitation to Openly Dance with Ambiguity As one approaches a critical study exploring the poetics and aesthetics of ambiguity in

Wilde’s Salomé, one accepts the author’s invitation to attend his decadent masquerade

ball. Accepting the invitation, the reader of this thesis engages in a metaphorical dance

through three principal chapters: each one a pas de deux. The methodology employed in

this thesis to demonstrate Salomé’s masked or ambiguous motives is a combination of

Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work and French narratological theories of

hypertextuality. This thesis uses Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality as it is

delineated in Palimpsests (1982) to chart ways in which Wilde’s Salomé can be

systematically interpreted and understood paying particular attention to its ambivalent

themes. This approach allows an analysis of how Salomé works as a rewriting of

biblical texts. In this way, Genette’s notion of transtextuality will complement Umberto

                                                                                                               31 “To make his text communicative, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by his possible reader. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible reader (hereafter Model Reader) supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them” (1979, 7).

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Eco’s concept of an “open work” as conceptualized in Opera Aperta (1962)32. While

subverting the codes of Victorian puritanical ideals, Salomé provides a veiled symbolic

order of ambivalence. Eco’s Opera Aperta (1962), A Theory of Semiotics (1975) and

The Role of the Reader (1979) allow this study to explore multiple interpretations in

Wilde’s Salomé.

Chapter 1, entitled The Sulamite of Sodom: Wilde’s Tapestry of the Abject and

the Subversion of the Biblical Myth, explores Salomé’s complex intertextual history and

the ambiguity such a practice initiates. This chapter examines firstly the rich mosaic of

French literary sources residing in Salomé before turning attention to the biblical

influences upon Wilde’s play. Wilde was not only inspired by the New Testament, but

also, by the Old Testament. In his reinterpretation of the biblical text, Wilde was

influenced by one biblical book in particular, the Song of Songs, and most strikingly by

Ernest Renan’s French translation from the original Hebrew, Le Cantique des Cantiques

(1860). This chapter adds a further dimension to the notion of ambiguity, using Julia

Kristeva’s conceptualization of the Abject to analyse Wilde’s use of intertextuality. In

Salomé, Wilde takes symbols and subverts them: the dove, for instance, a symbol of

virtue is demonized at the hands of Wilde. Wilde takes the image of the Sulamite in the

biblical book the Song of Songs and subverts it, tailoring it to meet the corrupt and

depraved Salomé. Wilde transforms the solar symbol of gold (characteristic of the

Sulamite) into a lunar symbol of silver (characteristic of Salomé).

Genette’s theory of transtextuality, in particular his concepts of transvaluation33

and transmotivation34, are useful to illustrate the literary transformations Wilde engages

in while exploring “the Abject” in Salomé. In keeping with the theme of Wilde creating

a distinct narrative of ambiguity to serve as a mask to his phantasms, this chapter

explores the subversion of the biblical text and the author’s motivating desire to

represent the transgressive femme fatale. Wilde’s choice of such a linguistic-poetic style

borrowed from one of the most sensual books of the bible caused quite a caustic

backlash at the time. The morning after the Paris opening of Richard Strauss’ opera by

                                                                                                               32 “An open text is a paramount instance of a syntactic-semantico-pragmatic device whose foreseen interpretation is a part of its generative process” (Eco 1979, 3). 33 Transvaluation is the substitution of values that “can be roughly described as axiologically homogeneous” (Genette 1997, 367). Genette’s definition of transvaluation is the rewriting of a text “as a double movement of devaluation and (counter) valuation bearing on the same character” (Genette 1997, 367). 34  Transmotivation is the original motivation being displaced by a newly invented one (See Genette 1997, 330-335). Genette points to Wilde’s “substitution of an emotional reason for the political reasons of Jokanaan’s execution” (1997, 330).

  23  

the same name, the critic Pierre Lalo mocked Wilde’s literary efforts as a “contrefaçon

du Cantique des Cantiques” (Quoted in Aquien 2006, 315). There are a number of

intertextual implications in the use of this word. Contrefaçon meaning ‘counterfeit’, a

forgery or even a pirating work implies that Wilde not only borrowed from the

incantatory styling of Song of Songs but also alludes to the author’s imperfect imitation

as Wilde perverted the Song’s incantations. Genette views imitation as “to figures (to

rhetoric) what pastiche is to genres (to poetics)” (1997, 80). Imitation, he explains, “In

the rhetorical sense, is the elementary figure of pastiche. Pastiche - and, more generally,

imitation as a generic practice - is a texture of imitations” (1997, 80).

The chapter concludes with a study of Nick Cave’s play Salomé from King Ink

(1988) where the Australian author takes the notion of Abjection even further and

serves as an excellent example of Genette’s notion of transmotivation. Dierkes-Thrun

describes the work as “the most provocative of all the feminist-themed interpretations of

Wilde’s Salomé published in recent years” (2011, 188). Cave takes abject themes from

Wilde and extends them to explore a character that is “no yearning, lonely soul in

search of ideal beauty but a bored, sadistic, narcissistic, and hypersexual teenager who

engages in masturbation on stage” and who “enjoys ruthless verbal and physical power

and play” (Dierkes-Thurn 2011, 188). Salomé is perverted and frightening; she loses the

warmth of her desire to profit from the chilling lunar indifference of the femme fatale.

Salomé, for Wilde, can be viewed as a narrative of sexual transgression. There is a sense

of ambiguity in such an abjective transformation for as Kristeva notes, “we may call it a

boarder; abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not

radically cut off the subject from what threatens it – on the contrary, abjection

acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger” (1982, 9).

Chapter 2, entitled Salomé’s Outré Art: Sustaining the Fin-de-Siècle Attack,

demonstrates Wilde’s determination to defy English censorship by publishing Salomé in

the original French in February 1893, producing one of the most significant endeavours

by a writer in a foreign tongue. When Sir Edward Pigott banned Salomé, Wilde was not

discouraged. The author charged forth with the publication giving full reign to his

creative endeavour. If the constraints of the philistine censorship were to halt the

theatrical production, Wilde’s tenacity would give birth to the book’s publication.

Salomé Drame En Un Acte was to become Wilde’s greatest and most unforgettable

opening night performance. The following year, in 1894, Salomé’s textual ambiguity

was heightened due to the much-contested English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas

  24  

coupled with the intratextual multiplicity established by Aubrey Beardsley’s

accompanying illustrations35. In seeking a semiotic and intratextual analysis of Wilde’s

Salomé as it appeared in the English edition, one cannot overemphasize the relevance of

awarding legitimate attention to Beardsley’s work. For it is the juxtaposition of text and

image that solicits another degree of interpretation. In this regard, the reader discovers

yet another freedom of analysis.

When we consider the active role that the Salomé illustrations play in the first

English edition, it seems paramount to include them in a study of the aesthetics and

poetics of ambiguity in Wilde’s Salomé. This chapter explores the ambiguity that

resides in both the textual and the visual aspects of the published English translations,

including the original English edition of 1894, Salome A Tragedy in One Act:

Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde: Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley, as well as

the two very distinct illustrated translations published over the following century: Oscar

Wilde Salomé Newly Translated by Vyvyan Holland Engravings by Frank Martin

(1957) and Oscar Wilde Salomé A Tragedy in One Act Translated by Joseph Donohue

Illustrated by Barry Moser (2011). A close analysis of these texts will reveal not only

the fate of poetic ambiguity in translations of the Salomé text but also the role of

aesthetic ambiguity in the accompanying illustrations.

For Eco, a work of art has the same structural characteristics as does a language.

The work of art “cannot be a mere ‘presence’; there must be an underlying system of

mutual correlations, and thus a semiotic design which cunningly gives the impression of

non-semiosis” (1976, 271). Eco’s notion seems even more relevant when applied to the

English translation of Salomé and its relation to Beardsley’s accompanying illustrations.

The contextual relationship between image and text provides two distinct functions of

semiotics, which through their forced intratextual union, initiate an accelerated degree

of interpretation. Beardsley’s art produces a manner to interconnect messages in order

to produce a text that functions on various levels of discourse. Although such messages

appear “ambiguously organized” (Eco 1976, 271), they “are not realized at random but

follow a precise design” as “both the normal and the ambiguous devices within a given

message exert a contextual pressure on both the normal and ambiguous devices within

all the others” (Eco 1976, 271). The ambiguous arrangement of text and image in

                                                                                                               35 The study of intratextuality deals with the internal relations within the text in contrast to intertextuality, which involves external relations to other texts.

  25  

Salomé’s English edition provokes an interpretation with the multiple meanings on its

correlative.

Chapter 3 is entitled The Dance of the Seven Veils: Elucidating Wilde’s Invisible

Dance, highlighting how Wilde’s enigmatic stage direction “Salomé dances the dance

of the seven veils” ultimately results in creating the most famous and enduring

associations with the Salomé myth. This chapter explores the notion that once an author

completes a work, he is obliged to open it to ongoing dialogue. The powerful symbolic

metaphor of such an ambiguous single-line stage direction initiates endless performative

interpretations.

In Hérodias, Flaubert amplified the gospel account offering the first protracted

description of Salomé’s dance. Wilde took the detailed description and encapsulated

this balletic account by reducing it into an enigma of a single-line stage direction. In

order to elucidate Wilde’s invisible dance and seek to discover the author’s intention in

prescribing a cryptic single-line direction, this chapter examines the rich and colourful

narrative of Salomé’s dance as it appears in Flaubert’s Hérodias (1877) before

analysing two very distinct treatments of Wilde’s infamous Dance of the Seven Veils:

Lindsay Kemp’s 1977 all male production at London’s Roundhouse and Opera

Australia’s 2012 production choreographed by Kelley Abbey.

Kelley Abbey and Lindsay Kemp both used dance as a medium and a language

to communicate their unique and desired interpretation of Wilde’s enigmatic single-line

stage direction, “Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils”. However, it is the work

of the spectator to engage in an interchangeable dialogue in order to fully appreciate the

critical practice of interpretation. This chapter demonstrates the manner in which an

original reading of Wilde’s work reinforces the author’s taste for mystery and paradoxes

to derive divergent translations for original and dramatic interpretation.

Kemp adopts a brazen styled drag to engage in a flirtatious approach to gender.

Such an ambivalent reading of androgyny reinforces the play’s underlying homosexual

signification while also transgressing religious iconography. Kemp is able to challenge

established patriarchal gender norms as he pushes the concept of gender ambiguity to

the extreme, providing an element of the surreal. In the same fashion Abbey’s

interpretation of the dance includes such abject themes as paedophilia, sadomasochism,

religious desecration and the sexualisation of religious and cinematic idols. Abbey

showcases seven different archetypal images of the sexualised woman as seven different

dancing veils. Her inventive and original approach to the infamous dance challenges

  26  

and remodels preconceived notions of seduction in Western culture demonstrating the

way in which Wilde’s Salomé is still relevant today as it elucidates the questions of

sexual norms and behaviours constructed by contemporary society.

By raising the eighth veil of ambiguity to include the intertextuality surrounding

Salomé’s text, this thesis reconsiders Wilde’s play as one of his most open works and

seeks to demonstrate that the intra and extratextual elements from text to dance, via

translations and illustrations, continues to live through adaptations to be relevant to our

contemporary society.

  27  

1.

THE SULAMITE OF SODOM: Wilde’s Tapestry of the Abject and the Subversion of the Biblical Myth

“Salomé is a mosaic. Mr Wilde has many masters, and the influence of each master asserts itself in his pages as stripes of different colours assert themselves in stuffs from the East. The reader of Salomé seems to stand in the Island of Voices and to hear around him and about the utterances of friends, the whispering of demigods”36.

When the reader stands in the “Island of Voices” and hears around him “the whispering

of demigods”, he becomes immersed in Wilde’s rich transtextual tapestry of multi-

coloured interlocking threads. Just as one would turn over an intricate fabric to discover

the hidden tangled workmanship that produced handiwork of such immense depth and

beauty, so too does the Salomé reader once he or she discovers that “the intertextuality

entailed by the use of the mythical story and its heroes, turns the play’s discourse into

an encoded one” (Eynat-Confino 1994, 129). However, deciphering such coding

presents a number of challenges due to the fact that the “intertextual history of the

Salomé story is so complex as to make any account of Wilde’s precise influences highly

problematic” (Price and Tydeman 1996, 12). In the case of Wilde’s play there is more

than one hypotext37, as illustrated by the mosaic of biblical and French literary sources

residing in Salomé38. Therefore, when presented with this wealth of influences, the

reader is confounded by the ambiguity such transtextual practices initiate.

Described as “half Biblical, half pornographic”39, this mere paradox in itself

reflects the initial ambiguity present in the language of the play. However, as the reader

delves further into Salomé’s transtextuality, we see that the element of ambiguity is

decisively heightened. For Genette “every hypotext is ambiguous” (Still & Worton

1990, 39). Still and Worton explain Genette’s notion of hypertextuality while

highlighting its ambiguous nature: Objecting to Riffaterre’s belief that intertextual reading is essentially sylleptic, Genette prefers to maintain the term and the concept ‘ambiguity’: for him every hypertext is ambiguous in that it can be read as an autonomous text and also as a relational text which is dependent in one way or another on its hypotext. The difference between these two positions is not simply one of terminology: for

                                                                                                               36  Unsigned review, Pall Mall Gazette 27 February 1893 (Quoted in Beckson 1970, 135-6). 37 Genette refers to the hypotext as an earlier text, which another text, the hypertext, is grafted. Genette describes such a relationship as hypertextuality (See Genette 1997, 5). 38  See Dottin-Orsini (1993, pp. 133-159). See also Aquien (2006, pp. 9-19 and pp.179-204). 39 See Stephens (1980, 112).

  28  

Genette hypertextuality is a form of bricolage, whereas for Riffaterre an awareness of intertextual functioning confers unity upon the text (Still & Worton 1990, 39).

Since Wilde employs a number of varying influences to construct a hypertext, “an

earlier text that it imitates or transforms” (Prince 1997, ix), his original Salomé appears

more ambivalent in its innate mysterious and transtextual nature. When one considers

that “any writing is rewriting; and literature is always in the second degree” (Prince

1997, ix), one is reminded that although “all literary texts are hypertextual, some are

more hypertextual than others, more massively and explicitly palimpsestuous” (Prince

1997, ix).

The Salomé text is a result of bricolage in every sense of the word, an interwoven

tapestry creating something new with something old. Transtextuality provides the reader

with a methodology to elucidate the literary transformations Wilde engages in when

exploring decadent aesthetics, allowing an analysis of how Salomé works as a rewriting

of biblical texts. Genette’s theory of transtextuality provides an appropriate analysis to

understand how Wilde’s play exists as an extensive hypertextual work. In order to study

how Salomé’s “literary discourse plays with other discourses (sometimes very

seriously), how it uses them in surprising fashion (and) how it reads them in unforseen

ways” (Prince 1997, x), this chapter approaches Wilde’s intertextuality from two

distinct angles: both the biblical influence and the literary influence mainly borrowed

from the French forefathers of decadent aesthetics who preceded Wilde. This chapter

will therefore examine three distinct French works: Hérodias (1877) by Gustave

Flaubert, À Rebours (1884) by Joris-Karl Huysmans and Hérodiade (1887) by Stephane

Mallarmé to illustrate how Wilde drew from such works in order to enhance the

paradoxical characteristics of his central character and the ambivalent nature of his

poetically decadent text.

This section of the study will also focus on the biblical impact administered by the

Song of Songs, not only to mark the deliberate use of linguistic ambiguity Wilde used in

order to create the characteristic obscurity which echoes behind the surface reading of

the text, but also to illustrate the transformation of motivation in Wilde’s hypertext as it

closely resembles the biblical language used in the Old Testament. Furthermore, by

employing Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of the abject to delineate such

transformation of motivation, this chapter will contribute to a greater understanding of

the role of that ambiguity plays in Wilde’s work.

  29  

Salomé’s Intertextual Mosaic of Desire When we examine the Salomé tapestry to identify the prior bricolage in the creation of

such a hypertextual work, we initiate a captivating literary discourse between the

ambiguous practices and influences of biblical and French literary texts. We see, for

example, the processes of reduction and amplification, which are textual

transformations characteristic of Wilde’s Salomé. The process of amplification mirrors

one of Wilde’s previous hypotexts, Flaubert’s Herodias (1877), which engaged in a

similar practice. In Palimpsests (1982), Genette draws attention to the fact that Flaubert

amplified “the twenty lines of the Gospel narrative (Matthew 14 and Mark 6) into

thirty-odd pages” (Genette 1997, 269). Genette explains: “The story calls for no

additional motivation, nor does Flaubert have to provide any, unless it is to account for

the original motivations themselves (overmotivation) by a general political and religious

survey of the Roman Orient under the reign of Tiberius” (Genette 1997, 269). Genette

elaborates: “what twenty lines of Mark or Matthew had made crystal clear-for once and

quite exceptionally, given the usual laconic beckonings of the biblical text - becomes

obscure in thirty pages by Flaubert” (Genette 1997, 270).

Flaubert’s amplification of the biblical text demonstrates the validity of the

powerful concept of “openness”. The brief biblical account of a nameless dancer creates

a blankness of text as the author engages in textual amplification. There is a striking

element of ambiguity in both Matthew and Mark, which beckons a literary

interpretation40. Flaubert embraced such ambivalence to create a powerful tale “of vivid

literary representations of eroticism couched in terms of metaphysical longing, creating

imagery that fused sexual lust with a desire for the divine and vice versa” (Dierkes-

Thrun 2011, 25). In a similar literary transformation, Wilde demotivated Flaubert’s text.

Genette explains: “Beyond the shift to the dramatic mode, his (Wilde’s) purpose is quite

different; his practice…is that of transmotivation, or one motivation displacing another”

(Genette 1997, 270). Salomé is not simply a pawn for Hérodias’s malicious instigation.

She is not a naïve princess groomed by her overpowering mother to perform the fateful

act of demanding the prophet’s head on a silver charger in order to silence the prophet’s

denouncing of her mother’s incestuous relationship with King Herod. In Wilde’s

                                                                                                               40 See Garelick (1998) who draws attention to the fact that “the particular sketchiness of the story provokes the imagination” which leads to a text that “cries out for elaboration […] The story of Salome invites the interpreter to enter the biblical narrative. It beckons enticingly to the artist to insert his own vision of the events” (130).

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treatment, Salomé demands Iokanaan’s head for her own revenge, because she loves

him and he has rejected her. Of course as Genette suggests, “the idea may have been

borrowed from Heine, who attributes the same motive to Herodias herself” (1997, 270).

However, Genette suggests that perhaps “Flaubert and Wilde split the work between

them: Flaubert, by cancelling (or blurring) Herodias’s political motives, unintentionally

exposed the emotional motive that his successors were to take advantage of” (Genette

1997, 330).

Genette defines “the substitution of a motive, or transmotivation, (as) one of the

major procedures of semantic transformation” (1997, 324). In doing so he attributes

three distinct aspects to interpret the procedure of such a semantic metamorphosis: The first is positive; it consists of introducing a motive… This is motivation...The second aspect is purely negative; it consists in suppressing or eliding an original motivation. This is demotivation, such as we have glimpsed in Hérodias, where the innocent reader no longer quite understands why Salomé is demanding Iokanaan’s head. The third operates by way of a wholesale substitution – i.e., by a double process of demotivation and (re)motivation (by a new motive): demotivation + remotivation = transmotivation. That is what Wilde effected in his Salomé, when substituting an emotional motive for the political one of the biblical version (1997, 324-5).

Wilde embraced the exposure of an emotional motive with full force as he fused the

characteristics of both the mother Hérodias and her daughter Salomé to provide a

leading protagonist with the emotional motive of narcissistic desire. In Hérodias, the

dancing princess is portrayed simply “as a docile girl who follows a maternal order

without question” (Zagona, 1960, 78). When Salomé removes her veil to reveal

Herodias, as she used to look in her youth41. Flaubert not only reinforces the notion of

consanguinity between the two women but he also “physically arranges the mother and

the daughter as mirrors and extensions of each other” who work together as “the private

orchestrator and public instrument to overpower Herod and ensure the inconvenient

prophet’s death” (Dierkes-Thurn 2011, 31).

Together, they perniciously engage in the perfect duet. As the title suggests,

Hérodias stands at the forefront as the principal villainess. It is not until the lengthy and

sumptuous description of Salomé’s dance that the daughter of Hérodias exercises her

powerful ability to seduce Herod in order to obtain what her mother most desires: the

head of the sacred prophet. However, as Girard explains: “the mother and daughter are

                                                                                                               41 “Sur le haut de l’estrade, elle retira son voile. C’était Hérodias, comme autrefois dans sa jeunesse. Puis, elle se mit à danser” (H, 171) [Up on the dais she took off her veil. It was Herodias, as she used to look in her youth. Then she began to dance] (He, 101).

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one and the same. As desire intensifies, it renders its victims increasingly

interchangeable” (1984, 315). Girard considers modern adaptions as “celebrations of

either Salome or Herodias”, as “they unwittingly reassert the truth each one taken

separately denies” (1984, 315). Nevertheless, Wilde blends the sinister attributes of the

two women into one paradoxical femme fatale.

In the hands of Flaubert, Salomé is a pawn for her mother and incapable of

autonomy. Salomé’s nefarious nature is subtler, hidden behind her mother. The

ambiguity of Flaubert’s Salomé rests in her hidden monstrosity. Just as she is

camouflaged by the veil in her dance so too is she hidden behind the overt hatred that

her mother possesses for the prophet. Her murderous nature is ambiguous and confusing

as she is infantine and appears innocent. She plays the role of the innocent little girl but

she challenges such prescribed norms, as she possesses the coldness of an assassin. It is

within her confusing ambiguity that she is truly monstrous. When she demands the head

of the prophet, she almost forgets his name: “‘I want you to give me on a dish the

head…’ She had forgotten the name, but then went on with a smile, ‘Iokanaan’s

head!’”42 (He, 103). The request is thus fortified by its mode of delivery, its laissez-

faire style. Salomé’s diabolical nature emerges from the shadow of her mother as she

utilises the charms of a child and the innocence of her virginal beauty to kill.

In contrast, Wilde amalgamates of the mother and daughter to transform his

leading character into one multifaceted seductress who is both calculating and

manipulative. As an autonomous entity, she is able to orchestrate the prophet’s demise

by provoking both attraction and repulsion. When we compare the relationship between

the mother and daughter in Flaubert we can see that Wilde fuses both characters

together in his female leading role. Flaubert’s manipulating mother and her seducing

daughter form the perfect duo. Flaubert’s Herodias wanted the prophet dead and used

her daughter to complete her diabolical plan. However, Wilde makes them into one as

Salomé requests the head of Iokanaan out of her unrequited love, the revenge she takes

upon him as a result of him rejecting her. This notion of individuality is triumphantly

encapsulated when Salomé proudly proclaims: “It is not my mother’s voice that I heed.

It is for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of Iokanaan in a silver charger”43 (S, 142-

                                                                                                               42 “Je veux que tu me donnes dans un plat, la tête…” Elle avait oublié le nom, mais reprit en souriant: “La tête de Iokanaan!” (H, 173). 43  “Je n'écoute pas ma mère. C'est pour mon propre plaisir que je demande la tête d'Iokanaan dans un bassin d'argent” (S, 143-147). Gilbert (1983) describes: “Such a narcissistic statement is the key to Salome’s subversive power. Through it, her notorious demand for the head of John the Baptist can be

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6). Wilde focused his narrative upon the dancing daughter and her monstrous and abject

sexuality. In doing so, Wilde blended beauty and horror to create a new paradoxical

dimension to her character. Salomé, for Wilde, stands at the forefront of his drama as

the author used the characteristics of the pernicious archetypal mother and her infantile

instrument of murder and seduction. However, Huysmans was the first of the three

authors to place the dancing Salomé centre stage of a prophet’s demise.

Salomé incarnates the central object of desire by occupying a dominant role in

chapter five of À Rebours. Inspired by Gustave Moreau’s depictions of the dancing

princess Salomé dansant devant Hérode (1876) and L’Apparition (1874-76),

Huysmans’s ekphrastic work influenced Wilde as the author also placed Salomé in the

central and principal role. Huysmans makes a departure from Flaubert’s account as he

“intensifies the aura of perversity and evil surrounding the dancer, developing Salomé

into a flagship of decadent sublimity and moving her even further away from the

innocent, obedient, nameless daughter of the gospel accounts” (Dierkes-Thrun 2011,

35). Through the eyes of Des Esseintes, the author was able to give voice to an

otherwise silent painting44. Wilde followed the sentiments of Des Esseintes who “at last

saw realised that superhuman, uncanny Salome he’d dreamed of”45 (AN, 83) as he

expressed a desire to dwell “on the delirious charms, on the stirring depravity of the

dancer”46 (AN, 83). Huysmans relinquishes the dancing Salomé from the obscurity of

the biblical accounts found in the New Testament as he replaces the strokes of an

artist’s paintbrush with the ink of a writer’s plume: She was no longer just a dancer who, through the depraved gyration of her loins, wrested a cry of desire and lust from an old man, who could break the spirit and wear down the will of a king through the rise and fall of her breasts, the undulations of her belly and the quivering of her thighs; she had become, in some senses, the symbolic deity of undying Lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accused Beauty, exalted above all the others by a catalepsy that stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles; a monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like Helen of antiquity, everyone who comes near her, everything who sees her, everyone she touches47 (AN, 83-4).

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   understood for what it is, a simple gratification of appetite accomplished with all the naïve, dangerous self-absorption of an animal, terrible but natural: terrible because natural” (152). 44 “Des Esseintes expresses the artist’s desire to expatiate on the cryptic suggestions of the Bible, and himself experiences a kind of mimetic desire for the princess, putting himself in the king’s position” (Garelick 1998, 130). 45 “Voyait enfin réalisée cette Salomé, surhumaine et étrange qu’il avait rêvée” (AR, 91). 46 “Sur les charmes délirants, sur les actives dépravations de la danseuse” (AR, 91). 47  “Elle n’était plus seulement la baladine qui arrache à un vieillard, par une torsion corrompue de ses reins, un cri de désir et de rut; qui rompt l’énergie, fond la volonté d’un roi, par des remous de seins, de secousses de ventre, des frissons de cuisse; elle devenait, en quelque sorte, la déité symbolique de l’indestructible Luxure, la déesse de l’immortelle Hystérie, la Beauté maudite, élue entres toutes par la

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Although Wilde’s knowledge of the iconography of Salomé was immense, he cited

Moreau’s depictions as the only artistic treatments that satisfied him (Ellmann 1988,

342). Through Huysmans, Wilde was able to delve into a world of intriguing and

dangerous beauty veiled in artifice. There is an ambiguous degree of artificiality that

appealed to Wilde as he dreamed of his dancing princess. Ellmann recounts a story of

one afternoon when Wilde asked: “Don’t you think she would be better naked?” (Wilde,

quoted in Ellmann 1988, 342) Then proceeded to answer his own question with a

fetishistic celebration of Salomé’s artificial beauty:

Yes, totally naked, but draped with heavy and ringing necklaces made of jewels of every colour, warm with the fervour of her amber flesh. I don’t conceive of her as unconscious, serving as a mute instrument. No lips in Leonardo’s paintings disclose the cruelty of her soul. Her lust must be infinite, and her perversity without limits. Her pearls must expire on her flesh (Wilde, quoted in Ellmann 1988, 342).

Wilde’s conception of Salomé is almost directly correlated to Huysmans’s “goddess of

immoral Hysteria” as the author describes “the lascivious dance which will awaken the

slumbering senses of the aged Herod”48 (AN, 82). The celebration of artificial beauty is

conveyed in a sumptuous and exhaustive infatuation:

Her breasts quiver and, with the rubbing of her swirling necklaces, her nipples harden; diamonds, stuck on her moist skin, glitter; her bracelets, her belts and her rings spit out sparks; over her triumphal gown, seamed with pearls, flowered with silver and spangled with gold, a breastplate of jewellery whose every link is a precious stone bursts into flame, sending out serpents of fire that teem over dull flesh, over tea-rose skin, like those splendid insects with dazzling wing-casings, veined with carmine, spotted with dawn yellow, mottled with steel blue and stripped with peacock green49 (AN, 82).

As Des Esseintes describes the more unsettling watercolour entitled L’Apparition,

Salomé’s “gesture of terror” [geste d’épouvante] is furthermore cloaked in unnatural

beauty:

She is almost naked; in the heat of the dance, the veils have come loose, the brocades have slipped; she is wearing nothing but goldwork and limpid gems; a gorget grips her throat as does a corselet her waist, and, like a superb clasp, a

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   catalepsie qui lui raidit les chairs et lui durcit les muscles; la Bête monstrueuse, indifférente, irresponsable, insensible, empoisonnant, de même que l’Hélène antique, tout ce qui l’approche, tout ce qui la voit, tout ce qu’elle touche” (AR, 91-92). 48 “La lubrique danse qui doit réveiller les sens assoupis du vieil Hérode” (AR, 90). 49  “Ses seins ondulent et, au frottement de ses colliers qui tourbillonnent, leurs bouts se dressent; sur la moiteur de sa peau les diamants, attachés, scintillent; ses bracelets, ses ceintures, ses bagues, crachent des étincelles; sur sa robe triomphale, couturée de perles, ramagée d’argent, lamée d’or, la cuirasse des orfèvreries dont chaque maille est une pierre, entre en combustion, croise des serpenteaux de feu, grouille sur la chair mate, sur la peau rose thé, ainsi que des insectes splendides aux élytres éblouissants, marbrés de carmin, ponctués de jaune aurore, diaprés de bleu d’acier, tigrés de vert paon” (AR, 90).

  34  

marvellous jewel darts its rays from the cleft between her breasts; lower down, her hips are encircled by a sash and the upper part of her thighs are concealed by an oversized pendant, from which flows a stream of ruby sapphires and emeralds; lastly, the now naked flesh between corselet and sash, the bulge of her belly, is dimpled by a navel in the hollow of which seems to be an engraved onyx seal, with its milky tones and its tints of fingernail pink50 (AN, 85-6).

The Salomé of Huysmans is not nude but almost nude. She is not the goddess Venus

emerging from a bath, but a goddess of immortal hysteria whose counterfeit beauty

springs from the artificiality of precious stones. Dressed in jewels and alluring minerals,

her curious beauty takes a strange and dangerous form, veiled in all its artifice. Her

attraction is ambiguous as Huysmans forges a strong divide between the natural and the

unnatural. Beauty in the form of artificial adornment is primarily interested in the

superficiality that the precious stones produce. Huysmans’s À Rebours best exemplifies

the “fetishistic tendency of late nineteenth-century literature to structure itself around

the piling up of details and privilege the part, the well-crafted phrase or sentence, above

the textual whole” (Fernbach 2002, 49). As Huysmans is fixated with artifice, his

treatment of Salomé reproduces the dualism “whereby an abominable femininity is

aligned with nature and the body, and masculinity is aligned with culture. It also,

however, masks over the horror of women’s nature with a fetishistic celebration of

women’s artificiality” (Fernbach 2002, 49).

The brutal and destructive beauty personified in À Rebours is emphasized in

Wilde’s Salomé as the play appears to be strongly influenced by such a bejewelling

hypotext. Dierkes-Thrun emphasizes that in À Rebours, “Moreau’s Salomés model a

mixture of sexual transgression and quasi-metaphysical sublimity similar to that we find

in Wilde’s Salomé, adding elements of horror and pathology that may have influenced

Wilde as well” (2011, 35). When the prophet Iokanaan asks “Who is this woman who is

looking at me?”51 (S, 76), he is immediately attentive to Salomé’s artificial beauty: “I

will not have her look at me. Wherefore doth she look at me, with her golden eyes,

under her gilded eyelids? I know not who she is. I do not desire to know who she is. Bid

                                                                                                               50  “Elle est presque nue; dans l’ardeur de la danse, les voiles se sont défaits, les brocarts ont croulé; elle n’est plus vêtue que de matières orfévries et de minéraux lucides; un gorgerin lui serre de même qu’un corselet la taille, et, ainsi qu’une agrafe superbe, un merveilleux joyau darde des éclairs dans la rainure de ses deux seins; plus bas, aux hanches, une ceinture l’entoure, cache le haut de ses cuisses que bat une gigantesque pendeloque où coule une rivière d’escarboucles et d’émeraudes ; enfin, sur le corps resté nu, entre le gorgerin et la ceinture, le ventre bombe, creusé d’un nombril dont le trou semble un cachet gravé d’onyx, aux tons laiteux, aux teintes de rose d’ongle” (AR, 93-94). 51 “Qui est cette femme qui me regarde?” (S, 77)

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her begone. It is not to her that I would speak”52 (76). However, it is through Herod’s

words that we can begin to grasp the destructive notion of Salomé’s troubling beauty: It is true; I have looked at thee and ceased not this night. Thy beauty has troubled me. Thy beauty has grievously troubled me, and I have looked at thee overmuch. Nay, but I will look at thee no more. One should not look at anything. Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors is it well to look, for mirrors do but show us masks53 (S, 148-150).

For Wilde, “all art is at once surface and symbol” (CW, 17) as he prescribes in the

preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray. However, he also warns the reader “those who

go beneath the surface do so at their peril, those who read the symbol do so at their

peril” (CW, 17). Toepfer observes that the “ambiguity of meaning, which is central to

aesthetic experience, intensifies through the use of “symbols” which self-consciously

focus attention on the nature of interpretation” (1991, 48) and sees Wilde as a

representative of symbolism “insofar as the signifiers which make his art actually

produce a mask which releases more meaning than any referents beyond them or the

representation that is the mask” (1991, 57). In Salomé, Wilde creates an ambiguous

form of poetics that forces the reader to venture beneath the surface. In formulating a

strange language of ambivalence, Wilde turned to the master of incomprehensibility, the

symbolist poet Mallarmé and his work of art, Hérodiade.

Hérodiade epitomises the seductive power of Salomé as she galvanized a life

long obsession for the poet. Mallarmé, who, commenced his poem in 1864 and died

before finishing it: “on the verge of completion at the time of his death in 1898, the

work reflects the evolution of an entire literary career”54 (Shaw 1993, 103). Like Wilde,

Mallarmé rejected the Biblical accounts in the New Testament to attribute the femme

fatale an agency of ambivalent desire. However, it was the incarnation of female cruelty

embodied in the name that haunted the poet throughout his life. There is an ambiguous

semiotic allure to the name Hérodiade as it suggests an exotic yet dangerous beauty55.

                                                                                                               52 “Je ne veux pas qu'elle me regarde. Pourquoi me regarde-t-elle avec ses yeux d'or sous ses paupières dorées ? Je ne sais pas qui c'est. Je ne veux pas le savoir. Dites-lui de s'en aller. Ce n'est pas à elle que je veux parler” (S, 77). 53 “Eh bien! oui. Je vous ai regardée pendant toute la soirée. Votre beauté m'a troublé. Votre beauté m'a terriblement troublé, et je vous ai trop regardée. Mais je ne le ferai plus. Il ne faut regarder ni les choses ni les personnes. Il ne faut regarder que dans les miroirs. Car les miroirs ne nous montrent que des masques” (S, 149-151). 54 Before abandoning the project, Mallarmé had initially intended for the stage (See Garelick 1998, 134). Although the work was never performed, it nevertheless demonstrates that “in Mallarmé’s writing the function of artistic performance is broadly equivalent to that of performative language and ritual” (Shaw 1993, 4). 55 Bernheimer suggests that the “the name purposely blurs the distinction between the princess Salome and her mother Herodias” (Bernheimer 1993, 69).    

  36  

For Mallarmé, the name itself evoked ambiguity, as evidenced in a letter to Eugène

Lefébure on February 18, 1865: “this word, sad and red like an open fruit” (Quoted in

Borowitz 1972, 14). Borowitz suggests, “the ambivalence between her passion and her

purity are caught within the sound of the name Hérodiade” (Borowitz 1972, 14). The

poet clarifies the essence behind the poem’s title: I left the name Hérodiade to well differentiate her from the Salome I would call modern or disinterested with her archaic trivial event - the dance, etc., to isolate her as in some solitary paintings in the terrible and mysterious act itself – and to paint in gleaming colours what probably haunted, in appearing with its attribute - the head of the saint – even if the young lady were to constitute (to appear as) a monster in the eyes of the lovers of vulgar life56.

In the creation of such a mysterious name the mother and the daughter are intertwined

into an enigmatic and paradoxical personality as Babuts suggests:

Mallarmé’s solution to the problem of the conflicting pulls between a purer Salome, and the dramatic personality of Herodias, the instigator of the action, was to amalgamate the two personalities in one, Hérodiade, who possess at once the stunning beauty, the sensual attraction, and the innocence of Salome and Herodias’s cold and cruel bent necessary to one who orders the execution of an innocent man (2011, 117).

What is striking about the poem is not only the amalgamation of two distinct

personalities but also the ambiguous expression of poetic beauty which is both cursed

and cruel. Mallarmé refuses to present the reader with a princess who is a pawn for her

mother’s orchestrated plan but expresses “the anguish of a sterile, lonely soul, troubled

with diseased imaginings” (Praz 1970, 318). Herodiade fascinates desire; she attracts

yet repels in equal measures, discovering pleasure in the horror of her sterility: I love the horror of virginity, The dread my tresses give me when I lie, Retired at night, reptilian on my couch, My useless flesh inviolate to the touch… 57

Wilde is indebted to Mallarmé in the construction of his protagonist’s conflicting

personality as the poet blended horror and beauty to place Salome/Herodias’s “inner

struggles as well as her search for ideal beauty at the center of the legend” (Dierkes-

                                                                                                               56  “J’ai laissé le nom d’Hérodiade pour bien la différencier de la Salomé je dirai moderne ou exhumée avec son fait – divers archaïque – la danse, etc., l’isoler comme l’ont fait des tableaux solitaires dans le fait même terrible, mystérieux – et faire miroiter ce qui probablement hanta, en apparue avec son attribut – le chef du saint – dût la demoiselle constituer un monstre aux amants vulgaires de la vie” (Quoted in Barbuts 2011, 116, Translation: Babuts). 57 “J’aime l’horreur d’être vierge et je veux, /Vivre parmi l’effroi que me font mes cheveux, /Pour, le soir, retirée en ma couche, reptile, /Inviolé sentir en la chair inutile…” (Quoted in Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 19, Translation Weinfield, see 205n9).

  37  

Thrun 2011, 17)58. Dierkes-Thrun elaborates: “This creative interpretation of Hérodiade

prepared the ground for Wilde’s focus on Salomé’s aesthetic individualism” (2011, 17).

Wilde was holding Mallarmé in high esteem and referred to him as his “master”.

He particularly delighted in the poet’s incomprehensibility 59 . When asked by a

journalist in Dieppe for his opinion of Mallarmé, Wilde responded: “Mallarmé is a poet,

a true poet. But I prefer him when he writes in French, because in that language he is

incomprehensible, while in English, unfortunately, he is not. Incomprehensibility is a

gift, not everyone has it” (Quoted in Ellmann 1988, 339). Wilde idolized Mallarmé’s

ambiguous poetics. The symbolist poet was attuned to his strange and inventive

language as he expressed to his friend Henri Cazalis: “As for me, here I am down to

work. Finally I have begun my Hérodiade. With dread, for I invent a language that

necessarily has sprung from a very new poetics, which I could define in these two

terms: To depict not the thing, but the effect it produces”60 (Oeuvres, 1945, 1440).

The ambiguous effect produced by Mallarmé’s “new poetics” resonates in

Wilde’s drama. Hérodiade is the sister of Wilde’s Salomé, as she also appears chaste as

a corrupt virgin. Hérodiade’s sterility corresponds to the paleness of Salomé. The reader

is fascinated by her duality, her sensuality and her virginity. Within Mallarme’s

Hérodiade are the paradoxical traits depicted in Wilde’s Salomé. She is both virginal

and reptilian; she burns at the same time that she is glacial61. Mallarmé reciprocated

Wilde’s admiration for the poet as he too marvelled at “the unutterable and the Dream”:

“My dear Poet, I marvel that, while everything in your Salome is expressed in constant,

dazzling strokes, there also rises, on each page, the unutterable and the Dream. So the

                                                                                                               58 Wilde felt an affinity with the French author’s symbolist poetry and the way it “could evoke and conjure up certain moods and feelings that would ring true in a purely visceral, emotional and aesthetic sense but not in a strictly descriptive or cognitive one. Ideally, readers would lose themselves as if in a trance and would enter a higher state of intense mental and physical experience” (Dierkes-Thurn 2011, 60). 59  Shaw explains Mallarmé’s ambiguous reception when she states: “The multifarious character of Mallarmé’s literary legacy may be attributed in part to the impenetrable quality of his texts, to the fact that he is among the most difficult of modern poets. It has often been cynically suggested that his writings lend themselves easily to any and all interpretations because they are quite simply impossible to read. But their force and diversity of impact undoubtedly lie less in their notoriously obscure surface than in the cause of this obscurity: the ambiguity that permeates every aspect of his work and thought” (1993, 2). 60 “Pour moi, me voici résolument à l’œuvre. J’ai enfin commencé mon Hérodiade. Avec terreur car j’invente une langue qui doit nécessairement jaillir d’une poétique très nouvelle, que je pourrais définir en ces deux mots : Peindre non la chose, mais l’effet qu’elle produit”. 61 Dierkes-Thrun makes an enlightening distinction between the two women when she states: “Whereas Mallarmé’s Hérodiade was haunted, objectified, and isolated, Wilde’s Salomé asserts her independence and individual will. She turns herself from a passive object of desire into an active subject, successfully manipulating the mental, emotional, material, and political forces around her to her advantage” (2011, 45).

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innumerable and precise jewels can serve only as an accompaniment to the gown for the

supernatural gesture of that young Princess whom you definitely evoked”62.

What was Mallarmé referring to when he described, arising from each page of

Salomé, the unutterable and the dream? The unutterable can be understood as the

silence that echoes behind Wilde’s strange and poetic French. Wilde drew from French

literature the ambiguity, which resonates in each of the three texts discussed. By

infusing the contradictory and ambivalent characteristics of Salomé, Wilde and his

French forefathers veil the forbidden as “cruelties and obscenities are couched at a

distance when they are attributed to a goddess” (Kuryluk 1987, 150). Kuryluk points

out that “there is not one Salome nor a single legend. Searching for her, one discovers a

myriad of figures and a web of configurations: a complex, ambiguous iconography that

was shaped by her awkward position, crossing from ancient to modern times, from

paganism to Christianity” (1987, 190).

Renan’s interpretation of the Erotic Song

The tale of the dancing princess who subsequently requests the head of John the Baptist

is notably found in the biblical accounts of both Matthew 14:6-11 and Mark 6:21-29.

However, in his reinterpretation of the Salomé myth, Wilde turned to the biblical book

found in the Old Testament, the Song of Songs. Ernest Renan’s French translation of

this book from the original Hebrew, Le Cantique des Cantiques (1860) was the catalyst

for Wilde’s exploration into the poetics of desire. Although there is no formal evidence

to prove emphatically that Wilde consulted Renan’s translation, the rhythm, sound and

syntax of the language Wilde used to rewrite the Salomé story, clearly evokes Renan’s

translation. Furthermore, there are unequivocal borrowings from the Song of Songs,

which are sharply etched into Wilde’s Symbolist language.

Situated in the Old Testament, the Song of Songs is considered to be one of the

most poetic books of the Bible. In The Art of Biblical Poetry (1985), Robert Alter

describes the Song of Songs as comprising of “what are surely the most exquisite poems

that have come down to us from ancient Israel, but the poetic principles on which they

are shaped are in several ways instructively untypical of biblical verse (1985, 185)” and

                                                                                                               62 “Mon cher Poète, J’admire tout étant exprimé par de perpétuels traits éblouissants, en votre Salomé, il se dégage, aussi, à chaque page, de l’indicible et le Songe. Ainsi les gemmes innombrables et exactes ne peuvent servir que d’accompagnement sur sa robe au geste surnaturel de cette jeune princesse, que définitivement vous évoquâtes” (Quoted in Ellmann 1988, 375).

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continues to clarify that “although there are some striking love motifs elsewhere in the

bible in Psalms, between man and God, in the Prophets, between God and Israel the

Song of Songs is the only surviving instance of purely secular love poetry from ancient

Israel” making it “the most consistently secular of all biblical texts” (1985, 185). Renan

was clearly attracted to the secular aspect of the Canticles, not to detract from the

veneration of the holy image provided, but to shed light on its beauty and sensuality or

what he eloquently terms this antique work in all its “chaste nudity”. Renan states: “As

for me, my aim has not been to detract from the veneration of the image now become

holy, but to despoil it for a moment of its wings, in order to show the laymen antique art

in its chaste nudity (SS, xxviii)63”.

The sensuality, beauty and resonance of Renan’s French version of Le Cantique

des Cantiques echoes in Wilde’s Salomé. This poetic work furnished Wilde with a

rhythm and resonance in order to “play beautiful music” as he so gracefully affirmed in

an interview with the Pall Mall Budget64. In the preface to his French translation of the

Song of Songs, Renan states: “An attentive study of these different written data, devoted

wholly to religion, reveal to us numerous traces of a profane life, which, not being the

most brilliant side of the Jewish people, has naturally been cast into the shade (SS,

xviii-xix)65. However, Wilde refused to cast the biblical writings to the shadows and

instead illuminated and subsequently transgressed the poetic rendition of the Bien-

Aimée (Sulamite) in his creation of Salomé. The French translation of Song of Songs

not only offered Wilde a melodious poetic tone but also afforded the author a unique

and alluring world situated in the same geographical region as his biblical drama, far

removed from the puritanical reign of England during his time. This version was a way

to verbalize the required sensual nuances and to discover an exotic world, which

harboured all the seductive and erotic fantasies of ancient oriental lovers. Wilde, similar

                                                                                                               63 “Pour moi, mon but n’a pas été de soustraire à la vénération l’image devenue sainte, mais de la dépouiller au moment de ses voiles pour la montrer aux amateurs de l’art antique dans sa chaste nudité” (CC, 14). It is interesting to note that Thomson substitutes Renan’s “voiles” for “wings” in his English translation. 64 When asked how he came to write Salomé in French, Wilde responded, “My idea of writing the play was simply this: I have one instrument that I know I can command, and that is the English Language. There was another instrument to which I had listened all my life, and I wanted once to touch this new instrument to see whether I could make any beautiful thing out of it” The Pall Mall Budget (London, 30 June 1892) Quoted in Oscar Wilde: Interviews & Recollections. Ed. E. H. Mikhail. Volume 1. London: Macmillan, 1979. 65 Une étude attentive de ces écrits donnés tous pour religieux nous révèle de nombreuses traces d’une vie profane qui, n’ayant pas été le côté le plus brillant du peuple juif, a été naturellement rejetée dans l’ombre (CC, 9).  

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to other nineteenth century writers, “looked for a different type of sexuality” one that

was “perhaps more libertine and less guilt-ridden” (Said 1995, 190).

While existing scholarship has certainly signaled the influence of this particular

biblical text upon Wilde’s Salomé66, a comprehensive semiotic and intertextual analysis

of the poetics between the two texts has yet to be undertaken. Similarly, the aesthetics

of transgression found in Wilde’s Salomé has to a large extent been addressed67.

However, critical significance in negotiating the use of abjection with relation to the

demonization of the pure and divine Sulamite deserves further critical attention.

The Song of Songs has been part of the biblical canon since the Hebraic Bible

and as such it exists as “a work of profane love literature, without the slightest mention

of God” (Tuchscherer 1996, 23). Ernest Renan, “whom the Church judged to be

heretical, saw this biblical book as entirely worldly, a purely human and a passionate

love poem” (Tuchscherer 1996, 24). Tuchscherer explains that for a writer such as

Renan, “the Song’s intrinsic symbolism and formal beauty is the only reason it was

added in the Bible; the allegorical justifications came much later when the Synagogue

and the Church had lost their humane dimension” (1996, 24). Similarly, Thomson

reminds the reader as early as 1860 that “[i]t is a profane work, and possesses no

mystical meaning whatever. It is, in fact, an erotic poem and its language is to be

accepted literally” (SS, xi).

In her essay entitled “A Holy Madness: She and He”, a work which considers

other memorable lovers such as Romeo and Juliet and Don Juan in Tales of Love

(1987), Julia Kristeva examines the lovers presented in the Song of Songs. Kristeva asks

the quintessential question, “How did a literally erotic text become sacred?” (95)

Kristeva explains: One can imagine that, very logically and as if overwhelmed by the amorous metaphoricalness, the rabbis carried the obvious figurative meaning of the amorous text one step further; they idealized it by raising it another notch, and this, of course, was quite a notch since the sublime, regal loved one turns into God having an amorous dialogue with his beloved, the nation of Israel” (1987, 95).

                                                                                                               66  See Ellmann 1988; Kuryluk; 1987; Powell, 2009. See also Amadieu, Jean-Baptiste. “Salomé de Wilde et le Cantique des cantiques: de l’orientalisme à la subversion” (2014) in which the author states: “L’idée de ce travail me vint à l’occasion de la direction d’un mémoire de Gerrard Carter à Columbia University” (p. 20) [The idea of this work came to me on the occasion of directing the memoire by Gerrard Carter from Columbia University]. The memoire refereed to is entitled “La Sulamite à Sodome: Influence littéraire et influence biblique dans Salomé de Wilde” [The Sulamite of Sodom: Literary and Biblical influence in Wilde’s Salomé] submitted in Fall 2008 under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Amadieu. 67 See Petra Dierkes-Thrun’s illuminating work Salomé’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (2011).

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When the Synagogue and the Church took the erotic and secular poem and turned it into

a religious dialogue between man and an anthropomorphic God, the reader was still,

nevertheless, confronted with a striking and sexually suggestive text. Although attempts

were made to “evade the carnal embrace of its female lover through allegorical

exposition” (Burrus & Moore 2003, 24), the intimate and “erotic meaning of the text

could escape no one” (Kristeva 1987, 95). Considering the fact that such erotic meaning

was unable to evade the eyes of the reader, how were the Synagogue and the Church

formally able to explain the sexually charged nature of the biblical text? Furthermore

how did both institutions manage to consecutively justify the sexually nuanced words

for a relationship with a higher celestial order?

Within a patriarchal domain, the Synagogue and the Church influenced Jews and

Gentiles alike to align the male lover with an overriding supremacy to enhance the

allegorical totalitarianism. Kristeva clarifies: “By introducing the theme of sensuous

love the Song of Songs does not for that matter represent a concession to feminine

fertility. If it recognizes desire, if it describes its displays and wanderings in voluble and

voluptuous fashion, it does so in order to subject them to the Lover’s regal authority”

(1987, 95-6). Provided with this insight, it is the role of the reader to therefore recognise

that although “Desire and God have always been there, our task is now to put them

under scrutiny, as such, together, in the folds of individual psychic experience. The

word “love” consecrates their being brought together: sensuous and deferred love; body

and power; passion and ideal” (1987, 96). In this regard, the reader becomes the co-

author of the work as he or she seeks to disambiguate “the mobility of semantic space

(which) makes the codes change transiently and processually. […]. The interpreter of a

text is at the same time obliged both to challenge the existing codes and to advance

interpretative hypotheses that work as a more comprehensive, tentative and prospective

form of codification” (Eco 1979, 129).

Following Renan’s dismissal of the Christian interpretation, the sensuous

writings of the Song of Songs had a significant influence on French literature during the

nineteenth century. For example, it inspired the title for Balzac’s The Lily of the Valley

(1835)68. Contemporary critics such as Tydeman and Price view the Song of Songs as a

                                                                                                               68 “I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys!” (SS, 111). Apart from the an obviously borrowing from the Song of Songs in the naming of the title, Balzac refers to the Song of Songs in the following passage: “One evening I found her pensively watching a sunset which reddened the summits with so

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“rich scriptural text with its sharply etched erotic imagery, lyric simplicity of

expression, patterned repetitions and periphrastic elaboration” (Tydeman & Price 1996,

6). They also point out that on December 11, 1891, during Wilde’s Paris sojourn,

coinciding with the period of time in which the playwright composed Salomé, the

Lugné-Poe’s Théâtre d’Art presented a programme of symbolist stage experiments by

Paul-Napoléon Roinard that included a dramatization based on the melodious Song of

Songs.

It is not known whether Wilde ever attended a performance of Roinard’s biblical

dramatization however the Irish writer was certainly familiar with Ernest Renan’s 1860

French translation of Song of Songs from the original Hebrew. A passionate and

devoted admirer of Renan’s scholarly work, Wilde is known to have purchased works

by the great nineteenth-century French intellectual (Wright 2008, 126). Renan’s Life of

Jesus (1863), “in which Christ is depicted as an entirely human, but utterly

mesmerizing, personality, was a golden book of Wilde’s youth; in age, he called it ‘that

gracious fifth Gospel, the Gospel according to Saint Thomas’” (Wright 2008, 126). In

fact, Renan’s heterodox Life of Jesus (1863) and his Apostles (1866) were among the

titles that Wilde requested while imprisoned at Reading Gaol. However, as Thomas

Wright points out the petitioned titles were only granted, “if they were purchased in

original French-language editions, presumably to ensure that none of the other prisoners

could read them” (2008, 257).

If Wilde was as captivated by Renan’s original 1860 French translation of the

Song of Songs as he was with the titles he requested whilst in prison, then Wilde’s

rewriting of the biblical book is the quintessential fait accompli, a work which the

reader may recognize its poetic form but nevertheless is startled by Wilde’s abject and

debased refashioning.

When Wilde performed such an abject imitation or parody of the biblical love

poem in his creation of Salomé, he constructed an abject texture of imitations by context

rather than content. Kuryluk explains, “What makes them sound like a perverse parody

is not the content or the wording but only the context: the fact that Salomé addresses her

love song to the tortured prisoner who rejects her entirely and then to the head cut off

from his body” (1987, 224). Although Wilde demonizes the Sulamite to make her

wretched and contemptible in his literary transformation, he acknowledges the                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    ravishing a glow that it was impossible not to listen to that voice of the eternal Song of Songs by with Nature herself bids all her creatures love” (Prescott Wormeley, Balzac 2011, 63).

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underlying eroticism already present in the scriptures. Kuryluk points out “sacrilegious

as they may sound, Wilde’s parodies of the Bible create not only their own eroticism

but also reveal the sexuality hidden behind the images in the Holy Scriptures; they point

to eros and its rejection as a vital source of religious metaphors” (1987, 223).

Drawn to the veiled eroticism of the biblical text in a quest to distort the Holy

Scriptures, Wilde was presented with a striking element of ambiguity since “Within the

limits of its paradoxes the Song is wholly enigmatic. We never know quite what

happens or whether anything happens” (Landy 1983, 140). Kristeva also elaborates on

the ambiguity presiding within the text, “as soon as the evocation of the amorous

experience begins we step into a world of undecidable meaning-the world of allegories”

(1987, 90). Similar to Greek poetry “as with the Theocritus or Vergil, the biblical love

in Song of Songs is stated in metaphorical discourse. The figure of speech is amatory: as

condensation and displacement of semantic features it points to an uncertainty […] an

uncertainty concerning the bond, the attitude of the loving subject toward one another”

(Kristeva 1987, 91).

To commence analyzing such ambiguity leading to Wilde’s abject subversion of

the biblical myth, the first similarity to note between the two texts is that the Song of

Songs is essentially a poem in dialogue, that is, one can argue, a theatrical poem. “Since

virtually the whole book is a series of dramatic addresses between the two lovers, this

free gliding in and out of parallelism - the very antithesis of the neat boxing together of

matched terms in Proverbs - may be dictated in part by the desire to give the verse

suppleness and liveliness of dramatic speech” (Alter 1985, 186). This presents the

reader with two distinctive elements of ambiguity. First is the notion that “a poem is a

counterpoint of multiple meanings” as “poetry depends on ambiguity for its richness”

(Landy 1983, 139). Landy elaborates on the poetic function of the Song of Songs: A feeling of paradox pervades all the language of the Song. Fundamentally, it attempts the impossible: to communicate in language what is beyond language. Language is an intermediary; temporal and physical, while love is a fusion beyond speech. Moreover, direct experience cannot be expressed in language, yet poetry – all poetry – tries to recreate sensations, to make words “say” something, as well as signifying it” (1983, 140).

Second is the assumption that the Song reads as a theatrical scene where the intensity of

ambiguity is superimposed on the poetic language due to the fact that there are no

discernible characters.

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These aspects present the reader with an interesting notion of ambiguity

considering the hybridity of genres. While critics such as Landy and Black view it as

“conventional to interpret the lovers in the Song as two characters” (Black 2009, 1), one

should note that “earlier work on the Song, particularly dramatic readings, has posited

the presence of a third character, a rustic, shepherd lover whom the woman eventually

chooses over Solomon” (Black 2009, 1). Black suggests “it might also be possible to

suggest that the Song refers to a number of lovers, following the suggestion by some

commentators that it consists of a series of unrelated poems69” (2009, 1-2). This notion

is reinforced by Renan’s interpretation of the Song: “If we take the term dramatic

poetry in its wildest sense to designate a composition in dialogue form with its

corresponding action, the Song of Songs is a drama” (SS, 56). Thomson brings attention

to the fact that: M. Renan’s arrangement of the Song of Songs into a drama of five acts, with an epilogue, has given rise to much controversy. By the “unco guid” it has been denounced as blasphemous; by people holding moderate views on the question of divine inspiration, it has been described as incomplete and inconsistent; while by out-and-out sceptics it has been regarded  as a work of supererogation, being no more deserving of separate and serious treatment than was one of the “racy” tales of Boccaccio or Margaret of Navarre (SS, ix-x).

Kristeva notices that “some verses lend themselves to ambiguous interpretation” (1987,

89) and asks: “who is the lover – a king or a shepherd?” (1987, 89) While Renan detects

the presence of multiple characters within the text, Kristeva notices that “things,

however, are not that explicitly obvious, and the generally allegorical nature of the text

allows indeed for all sorts of surmises” (1987, 89) adding that perhaps Renan has

“given us a lay reading, and too much so, because it is finally a humanistic one, and too

much so, insensitive as it is to the absolute tension of love for the Other” (1987, 90).

The theatrical aspect of the poem renders the shift of genre, specifically the

transition to a play, easy. Wilde’s Salomé is a drama where the young princess is the

central character and takes the principal role. Although she communicates with other

individuals within the play’s dialogue, it is the prophet Iokanaan who is the point of

convergence of this fatal love story. Wilde transforms the biblical ‘poem’, which does

not indicate the distinction of characters, into a play thus passing from one genre to

another. This transformation shows how Wilde’s hypertext is formed according to the

process that Genette calls transposition.

                                                                                                               69 See Falk (1990); and Pope (1977).

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According to Genette, transposition is considered to be the most important of all

hypertextual practices. Genette’s support of such a claim derives “from the scope and

variety of the procedures it calls upon” (1997, 212). While pastiche, caricature, and

forgery are “only functional inflexions bearing on a single practice: imitation” (Genette

1997, 213), transposition, on the contrary “can give rise to works of vast dimensions

[…] whose textual amplitude and aesthetic and/or ideological ambition may mask or

even completely obfuscate their hypertextual character, and this very productivity is

linked to the diversity of the transformational procedures that it brings into play”

(Genette 1997, 213). In this instance, Wilde deliberately sets out to transgress the

meaning of his hypotext by enacting thematic changes resulting in a work of profane

and sacrilegious dimension.

As previously mentioned, in the case of Wilde’s text there is more than one

hypotext. Each of the various treatments of the Hérodias and/or Salomé character that

precedes Wilde’s creation, “often appear as objectifications of female destructiveness,

of apocalyptic bestiality, of what Huysmans calls ‘world-old vice’” (Quoted in Gilbert

1983, 144). Nassaar identifies the thematic change present in Salomé, referring to the

drama as “a highly religious play, but its religion is entirely demonic - a religion of evil.

Wilde’s treatment of demonism in this play is highly original” (1974, 86) and further

points out that “no other author writing in English before him had ever celebrated

demonism as a true religion” (1974, 86). When Wilde initiates thematic changes to his

hypotext, he engages in the ambiguous practice of what Genette terms transvaluation70.

In Wilde’s Salomé the hypertext unquestionably takes the opposite side of its

hypotext and thus the transvaluation of devaluing what was valued. The pure ambrosial

love present in the Song of Songs is transvalued into a morbid transgression of the

Victorian civilized norms of feminine behavior and ideals. Therefore, there is a clear

indication of an inversion of values. As Wilde imitates the Song of Songs there is an

“important paradigm shift from religious faith to erotic transgression that Michel

Foucault has described for late nineteenth-century and twentieth-century modernity”

(Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 52). Dierkes-Thrun cites Foucault’s A Preface to Transgression

as the philosopher and literary critic “outlines the larger cultural discursive movement

toward and obsession with physical sensation, with sexuality and transgression as the

                                                                                                               70 See Introduction.

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ambiguous utopian replacements of metaphysical experience in modernity” (2011, 52).

Dierkes-Thrun further explains: According to Foucault, the language of sexuality in modernity thus carries a heavy cultural burden, one that paradoxically reminds us of the painful absence of the divine in everyday life at the same time as it replaces it with intense experience of a different (physical) kind. Sexual transgression in particular becomes conceptually central as a replacement for religious ecstasy in Western cultural and philosophical modernity, as it allows the self to step outside of itself and experience a momentary suspension of its boundaries (2011, 53).

In accordance with Foucault’s notion of sexual transgression, Wilde replaces the

religious ecstasy that permeates the Song of Songs to create a work that allows the

reader the freedom to experience a suspension of the safe, the known and the natural.

In emulating Genette’s concept of transvaluation, the substitution of values

presented on the hypotext (Song of Songs) can be described as “axiologically

homogeneous”. Initially Wilde’s Salomé, like the biblical Sulamite, exhibits

characteristics “that involve no real value conflicts” (Genette 1997, 367). Both Salomé

and the Sulamite profess the same axiological creed: that is professing undying love for

the object of their affection. However, when Salomé is inflamed with wrath following

her rejection by the prophet, there appears an abrupt conflict of values, allowing us “a

glimpse into the ways in which transvaluation may operate” (Genette 1997, 367) as “the

hypertext takes the opposite side of its hypotext, giving value to what was devalued and

vice versa” (Genette 1997, 367). In Wilde’s hands, Salomé becomes the Sulamite of

Sodom, an ambiguous figure so utterly transgressive that she invites the fascinating and

ambiguous desire of abjection.

This study concentrates specifically on the relationship between Wilde’s Salomé

and one single hypotext: the Song of Songs, in order to illustrate a specific category of

transposition: the thematic transformation or ideological reversal. In the case of Wilde’s

Salomé, such a transformation is overt and deliberately thematic as its “transformation

of meaning is manifestly, indeed officially, part of the purpose” (Genette 1997, 214).

Dierkes-Thrun offers an illuminating insight into Wilde’s biblical transformation

as she traces the limits of erotic transgression to present the reader with a modern and

self-satisfying individual who relishes in her own destructive desires:

In Salomé, Wilde offers a bold aesthetic and philosophical thought experiment that pushes modern individualism to the extreme, the emphatic and ecstatic assertion of a transgressive individual. In Salomé’s final moments Wilde conjures up a postmetaphysical, self-sufficient self able to satisfy her own needs recklessly and triumphantly by savoring her own aesthetic and erotic desires and consuming herself in her own pleasure, transforming a biblical story into a

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testament to modern individualism and erotic transgression. Sublimity becomes purely immanent and tied to physicality, experienced through erotic and aesthetic excess and transgression (2011, 55).

The occasion which best illustrates such erotic transgression occurs in Salomé’s final

monologue when the princess takes possession of the prophet’s severed head. The

monstrous femme fatale tastes his blood upon her lips in an erotic fetishized kiss: “Ah, I

have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on

thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? ... Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love…”71 (S,

164). Salomé exerts her morbid desire for Iokanaan and in doing so, shatters the

confines of a Victorian puritanical ideal. By eroticizing necrophilia at the hands of the

monstrous-feminine constructed within a patriarchal ideology, Wilde is breaking the

boundaries of the taboo, and thus releasing his protagonist to savour in her monstrous

display as she abandons herself to the ecstasy of intense erotic feeling. Toepfer explains

the conception of erotic feeling as it pertains to the character of Salomé: Erotic feeling is aesthetic feeling insofar as it is feeling cultivated for its own sake. More specifically, erotic feeling is an intensity of aesthetic feeling which functions to negate representation […] erotic feeling optimizes the ambiguity (or “impurity”) emanating from the concept of identity itself […] this intensification of feeling implies that ambiguity, the provocation of aesthetic feeling, shifts from being something contained within the relation between representation and its consumer. As a transparent signifier of ambiguity, metaphor seems central to the production of aesthetic feeling (1991, 77-8).

For Salomé, erotic feeling is manifested in an abject manner, thus displaying the

embodiment of the monstrous-feminine.

The Birth of the Monstrous-Feminine

The monstrous-feminine is the embodiment of the patriarchal suppression and distortion

of the feminine. Barbara Creed states, “All human societies have a conception of the

monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific,

abject” (1993, 1). Creed originally conceived the term “monstrous-feminine” to

describe the terrifying and abject representations of woman, arguing that “when woman

is represented as monstrous it is almost always in relation to her mothering and

reproductive functions. These faces are: the archaic mother; the monstrous womb; the

witch; the vampire; and the possessed woman” (1993, 7). For Creed:

                                                                                                               71 “Ah! J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, j’ai baisé ta bouche. Il y avait une âcre saveur sur tes lèvres. Etait-ce la saveur du sang ?...Mais peut-être est-ce la saveur de l’amour ?” (S, 165).

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The term ‘female monster’ implies a simple reversal of ‘male monster’. The reasons why the monstrous-feminine horrifies her audience are quite different from the reasons why the male monster horrifies his audience. A new term is needed to specify these differences. As with all other stereotypes of the feminine, from virgin to whore, she is defined in terms of her sexuality. The phrase ‘monstrous-feminine’ emphasizes the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity (1993, 3).

Salomé’s literary act of violence represented in her final monologue brings into question

Wilde’s motivation for such a sadistic and eroticized take on the biblical myth. Salomé’s

calculating seductive power leading to such a transgressive act of desire can be seen in

terms of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject, which can contribute to a deeper

understanding of the role played by ambiguity in Wilde’s work.

Literature is governed by codes “and it is the violation of these codes that is said to be

the source of the effect of ambiguity” (Robey 1989, xxiv). Taking this into account,

Kristeva’s conceptualization of the abject adds further understanding to the multiplicity at

work in Wilde’s play. In Salomé, Wilde takes symbols and subverts them: the dove, for

instance, a symbol of virtue, is demonized. Wilde takes beauty and transforms it into its

opposite inciting a morbid desire with the horror and fascination that certain physical

functions such as blood, severed heads or dead bodies inspire. Furthermore, Wilde engages

in the abjection of destabilizing traditional masculine and feminine roles by offering a clear

oscillation of gender identities. In doing so, Wilde subverts and rewrites the biblical story of

Salomé, presenting us with a Judean princess as the monstrous-feminine and situating her in

relation to Kristeva’s notion of abjection where she hovers “within abjection, one of those

violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an

exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the

thinkable” (Kristeva 2006, 542).

For Kristeva, art acts as a catharsis or purification and can be seen as a sublimation of

the borderline states. She writes:

If ‘something maternal’ happens to bear upon the uncertainty that I call abjection, it illuminates the literary scription of the essential struggle that a writer (man or woman) has to engage in with what he calls demonic only to call attention to it as the inseparable obverse of his very being, of the other (sex) that torments and possesses him. Does one write under any other condition than being possessed by abjection, in an indefinite catharsis? (Kristeva 1982, 208)

Salomé for Wilde can be viewed as a narrative of sexual transgression, serving as a

means to overcome such borderline states: to explore a forbidden world in order to find

a cathartic artistic liberation or to seek a sense of purification. Kristeva’s theory can be

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useful in the study of Wilde’s text as without the abject, we would have no way of

conceiving an identity for ourselves as fully formed subjects in the symbolic order

(Kristeva 1982, 4). Literature, in Kristeva’s view, “helps the author and the reader work

through some of the maladies that afflict their souls. […] These afflictions include

abjection” (McAfee 2004, 50). McAfee further explains: “In psychoanalytic terms,

surviving these trials involves working through conflicts so that the subject is not

doomed to act them out. Literature offers a way to help work through what afflicts us”

(McAfee 2004, 50).

Salomé’s subtext contains a “veiled pain of the closet” (Dierkes-Thrun 2011,

176) as Wilde disguised sexual ambiguity and uncertainty in symbols and abject motifs.

Dierkes-Thrun describes Salomé as a work that not only “contains identifiable traces of

forbidden sex, of homosexual identity or experience” (2011, 176) but can also “be

understood as a catalyst and symbol for a culture and literature in crisis - an elusive,

oscillating figure that points toward an imagined utopian direction, a way out of the

crisis of the modern subject and a diversion from the death of God” (Dierkes-Thrun

2011, 55). Why then does Wilde journey into the abject? The lure of the abject is that it

is both repulsive and attractive72. In using the biblical text of the Song of Songs, Wilde

interweaves a number of abject themes: beheading, castration, murder, sacrifice and

incest to name the most striking. Wilde takes the image of the Sulamite in the biblical

book the Song of Songs and subverts it, tailoring it to meet the corrupt and depraved

Salomé.

The abject beckons the spectator to its side: “It fascinates desire” (Kristeva

1982, 1). So too, does Salomé in developing “a fierce, shocking and alluring vision of

erotic and aesthetic transgression as an ecstatic new realm for modern individualism”

(Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 2). We, as spectators, have a contract with the abject and journey

with the author into the depths of depravity. In adopting Kristeva’s notion of the subject

firmly settled in the superego, the ethical component of the personality, Wilde’s writing

of Salomé “is necessarily implicated in the interspace that characterizes perversion; and

for that reason, it gives rise in turn to abjection” (Kristeva 1982, 16). Kristeva explains

“the abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a

law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the

                                                                                                               72  See Kristeva (1982). Kristeva notes: “For abjection, when all is said to be done, is the other facet of religious, moral, and ideological codes on which rest the sleep of individuals and the breathing spells of societies” (1982, 209).

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better to deny them. It kills in the name of life” (Kristeva 2000, 551). We can therefore

assert that in the composition of Salomé, Wilde “implies an ability to imagine the

abject, that is, to see oneself in its place” (Kristeva 1982, 16).

As the reader moves simultaneously along the arc of Salomé’s character, her

macabre act of necrophilia is transformed into one of beauty and intrigue, an ambiguous

abjection of fascinating desire negating the possibility of fear. Toepfer expounds on the

aesthetics of fear present in Salomé:

The basic source of fear is a sense of impurity, which the text “aestheticizes” as ambiguity. It is language which separates speakers from the Other, from death. […] The virgin speaker is “monstrous”, yet she feels the thing, which negates the fear that identifies her as monstrous: a stupefying erotic love (1991, 78).

By transforming the biblical Sulamite to embody a monstrous-feminine that “is

constantly beset by abjection which fascinates desire but which must be repelled”

(Creed 1993, 10), Wilde illuminates the notion that abjection is always ambiguous. Like

Kristeva, Wilde “emphasizes the attraction, as well as horror, of the undifferentiated”

(Creed 1993, 10). This notion of ambiguity is demonstrated throughout Wilde’s

transgression of the biblical text.

The Song of Sexual Yearning

The first line of the Song of Songs not only offers us a glimpse into the sensually

nuanced manner in which the Sulamite speaks but when we compare the two texts

(French and English translations of the Song of Songs) there is a striking difference. The

richness in the sonic quality and cadence resonating in Renan’s French bombards the

reader with a series of alliterations. For example the opening line in French reads:

“Qu’il me baise d’un baiser de sa bouche!” (SS, 15) [Let him kiss me with a kiss of his

mouth!]. The acoustic quality provided by the articulated consonant b strikes the reader

with a musical element of recurrence, reinforcing its aesthetic quality as a lyrical poem.

This fundamental factor reiterates Wilde’s irresistible attraction to the French language

as he characterized the composition of Salomé to playing beautiful music. However,

Wilde takes possession of the French language and subverts its metonymical tint. When

the Sulamite first sensually whispers “Let him kiss me with a kiss of his mouth!” (SS,

109), Wilde moulds the Sulamite’s words of love to create the perpetual request Salomé

profligates upon the prophet to “kiss thy mouth”: “Laisse-moi baiser ta bouche” (S, 85)

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[Suffer me to kiss thy mouth]. Salomé repeats this request in an incantatory style, a

much-repeated refrain as she pursues the sacred prophet’s affection.

Her repeated demands become hypnotic. Toepfer justifies the heightened

element of ambiguity when he states: “repetition of words and phrases ambiguates

identities insofar as repeated words and phrases cannot mean exactly the same thing in

different contexts or time parameters” (1991, 64). He suggests “a voice which repeats

phrases can alter their meanings by even very subtle shifts in tone, inflexion, volume,

rhythm, timbre, and gender. These alterations of meaning are simply revised

perceptions of enunciated identities” (Toepfer 1991, 64). Salomé amplifies her

repetition to reiterate her steadfast tenacity when her words increase her involvement

and commitment to danger: “I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan, I will kiss thy mouth”73

(S, 86). In this instance the speaker “contains (even squeezes) the identity of her listener

(Jokanaan) between mirroring or echoing declarations of her “will,” her prophetic

authority” (Toepfer 1991, 70). As Salomé forecasts her sexual determination in a

repeated refrain, transgressing the Sulamite’s opening request, she produces an

“oscillation of sensation (to) achieve a “hypnotic” effect” (Toepfer 1991, 67-8). Toepfer

suggests that Salomé does this “not because she hopes to make the statement true by

repeating it (magic), but because she wishes to indicate to her listener that what “will”

happen is the result of an intensifying obsession within her which repetition effectively

signifies and which he cannot break, undermine, or contain with his own

commands…and prophecies…” (1991, 70)

However, when Iokanaan rejects her, his refusal swiftly transforms Salomé who

was once an emblem of virginal purity into a demonic vampire who demands

vengeance. Once Salomé engineers the prophet’s execution and holds his severed head

in her hands, kissing it passionately and savouring the taste of his blood upon her lips,

the transformation into vindictive femme fatale and bloodthirsty vampire is complete.

Cradling death in her arms, Salomé not only mocks the prophet’s lifeless head but also

relishes in her sacrilegious ways, “Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth,

Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit.

Yes, I will kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan”74 (S, 160). Dierkes-Thurn encapsulates this notion

of sacrilegious abjection as Salomé’s transmogrification seeks a sense of catharsis

                                                                                                               73 “Je baiserai ta bouche, Iokanaan. Je baiserai ta bouche” (S, 87). 74 “Ah! Tu n’as pas voulu me laisser baiser ta bouche, Iokanaan. Eh bien, je la baiserai maintenant. Je la mordrai avec mes dents, comme on mord un fruit mûr. Oui, je baiserai ta bouche, Iokanaan” (S, 161).

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through ecstatic speech when she describes Wilde’s play as possessing a “dark,

unsettling, and apocalyptic quality at the same time as it establishes the utopian idea of

individual transgression as a way out of a fragmented, bleak universe without order or

transcendental meaning” (2011, 46), showing us that “in a place of a venerated God and

his prophet, Wilde installs Salomé’s ecstatic human body on a blasphemous, violent,

ecstatic theatrical throne” (2011, 46).

Although Wilde’s depiction of Salomé possesses the same alluring beauty and

sensuality as that of the Sulamite, there is a sense of abjection, a diabolical arousal by

her words. She is the femme fatale of the Orient. Wilde presents us with a Judean

princess, taken from the same geographical cadre of the Song of Songs, subverting her

to create a princess that is cursed and cruel. Wilde is testing the moral and sexual code

of the sacred by transgressing the characteristics of the Sulamite. Durkheim states, “The

sacred thing is, par excellence, that which the profane must not and cannot touch with

impunity” (Durkheim 1995, 38). Wilde commits sacrilege by bringing the profane traits

of Salomé into contact with the seraphic qualities of the Sulamite. In doing so, Wilde

acquaints himself with the abject to arouse and invert desire. The sensuality of Salomé’s

voice is only a seduction until she takes possession of what she wants: Thy hair is like the clusters of grapes, like the clusters of black grapes that hang from the vine-trees of Edom in the land of the Edomites. Thy hair is like cedars of Lebanon, like the great cedars of Lebanon that give their shade to the lions and the robbers who would hide them by day75 (S, 82-84).

Salomé’s alluring words are reflected in the Sulamite’s: “his countenance is as Lebanon,

beautiful as the cedars” 76 (SS, 118) and “My beloved is to me as a cluster of camphire,

from the vineyards of Engedi”77 (SS, 111).

In this regard, Salomé’s monstrousness is directly associated to questions of

sexual desire. Wilde derives such monstrousness by transgressing the Sulamite’s hunger

for her beloved. The Sulamite yearns for her lover when she states: “Let my beloved

                                                                                                               75  “Tes cheveux ressemblent à des grappes de raisins, à des grappes de raisins noirs qui pendent des vignes d’Édom dans le pays des Édomites. Tes cheveux sont comme les cèdres du Liban, comme les grands cèdres du Liban” (S, 83-85). 76 “Son aspect est celui du Liban, beau comme les cèdres” (CC, 26-7). See Aquien (2006, 172n 46).  77  “Mon bien-aimé est pour moi une grappe de troène des vignes d’Engaddi” (CC, 17-18) See Amadieu (2014) “le langage imagé du Cantique est dépaysant et mystérieux, et d’une profonde étrangeté. Il accumule les comparaisons et métaphores, les polysémies, les dissymétries et les questions sans réponses. De ce point de vue, il offre un modèle pour l’imaginaire de l’Orient pénétré de mystères” (15) [The Song’s language is full of imagery, its exotic and mysterious nature is one of profound strangeness. It accumulates the comparisons and metaphors, polysemy, asymmetries and unanswered questions. From this point of view, it provides a model of the penetrable mysteries of the East] (my translation).

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enter into his garden, and let him taste of its choicest fruits”78 (SS, 116). Landy

associates the garden depicted in the Song as an “essentially private, protected against

the elements, against weeds and wilderness…it is a place of retreat and relaxation. The

Lover goes there to see the spring” (1983, 190). Landy refers to the garden as “man’s

first organization of the world, demarcating good and bad, his own and the other”

(1983, 190). Likewise in Salomé, the concept of demarcation is central to the play for

“that which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject” (Creed 1997, 11). The

Sulamite invites her Lover to the garden “let him taste of its choicest fruits”.

Comparable to the seduction of Eve in the Garden of Eden, the Sulamite shares in an

aesthetically cultivated garden. “Eating fruit tends towards gluttony, Dionysiac

indulgence, an excess of pleasure over sober nourishment […] Correspondingly,

looking preserves the loved object at a distance. Looking at trees and eating fruit

harmoniously combines both poles: absorption and differentiation” (Landy 1983, 191).

Wilde takes the harmonious eating of fruit in a safe and harmonious location and

monstrously associates this action with the biting of the sacred prophet’s bloodied and

severed head: “I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit”79 (S, 160). Salomé

embodies the woman as femme castratrice as she brings “about an encounter between

the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability” (Creed 1997, 11).

Following the Sulamite’s first seductive utterance “Let him kiss me with a kiss

of his mouth!” she immediately correlates her lover’s caresses to the sweetness of wine.

She declares: “Thy caresses are sweeter than wine, when they are mingled with the

fragrance of thy exquisite odours” (SS, 109). Falk suggests that “[t]he food in the Song

most emphatically associated with lovemaking is wine” (1990, 158). Wine is mentioned

a number of times in the Song of Songs to describe the Bien-Aimé(e) [the Lover]: “Thy

navel is as a round goblet, full of aromatic wine”80 (SS, 120), “thy mouth like the most

exquisite wine”81 (SS, 120) and “I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine, the juice of

my pomegranates”82 (SS, 121). Falk views this last example as the most erotic

association of wine “where it is in parallel position to the nectar of pomegranates”

(1990, 159).

                                                                                                               78 “Que mon bien-aimé entre dans son jardin, et qu’il mange de ses beaux fruits” (CC, 24). 79  “Je la mordrai avec mes dents, comme on mord un fruit mûr” (CC, 161). 80 “Ton sein est un coupe ronde, pleine d’un vin aromatisé” (CC, 29). 81  “ta bouche, un vin exquis” (CC, 30). 82   “et je te ferai boire le vin aromatisé, le jus de mes grenades” (31).

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However, her translation from the Hebrew reads: “And give you wine and nectar

from my pomegranates” (1990, 71). For Falk, “each translator explores the relationship

between text and reader in order to speak it anew, and each relationship has its own

emphasis. Some translators, for example, concentrate on semantic accuracy, while

others seek to recreate tone and mood” (1990, 92). Falk suggests, “the concept of

fidelity is even more complex with poetic texts, for with poetry the choices between

form and content tend to be more subtle and more conflictual” (1990, 92). Like most

translators, Falk strives “for a balance among the many facets of a text, but each balance

is unique; there is no formula for a faithful translation” (Falk 1990, 92). While taking

Falk’s perspective on translation into consideration, the allegorical signification of the

pomegranate nevertheless offers the reader a compelling insight into the poem’s

eroticism. Falk suggests, “The pomegranate, long recognized as a fertility symbol in

ancient culture, is mentioned in connection with females several times in the Song”

(1990, 159). However, in the above-mentioned example “it seems to be a symbol, like

the vineyard, of the woman’s sexuality, an image that the first-person possessive “my

pomegranate,” emphasizes [...] Feasting, it seems, always has erotic overtones in the

Song, and wine is the intoxicating temptation to the feast” (Falk 1990, 159).

Renan’s French translation of the Sulamite’s opening lines reads: “Tes caresses

sont plus douces que le vin, quand elles se mêlent à l’odeur de tes parfums exquis” (CC,

15). These lines resonate in Salomé’s discourse when she lavishes the prophet with a

series of adoring declarations: “Ta bouche est plus rouge que les pieds de ceux qui

foulent le vin dans les pressoirs” (S, 85) [Thy mouth is redder than the feat of those who

tread the wine in the wine-press]. Wilde takes the same superlative “plus” but shifts and

displaces the adjective. “Doux” meaning soft or sweet becomes “rouge”, the colour red.

Red not only resembles the colour of wine but also the colour of blood. Blood acquires

a prominent role in Wilde’s play83. For example, Herod slips in the blood of the slain

                                                                                                               83 While Garelick (1998) is mistakenly stating that “this line is not translated by Wilde in his English edition” (206n. 31), see Salomé (2006, 85), she does however suggest that “the redness of wine-press’ feet remains to nuance the redness of the feet of the temple doves” (139) referring to Salomé as she continues to lavish the prophet with adoring declarations while attaching similes to the mouth of Iokanaan: “Elle est plus rouge que les pieds de colombes qui demeurent dans les temples et sont nourries par les prêtres. Elle est plus rouge que les pieds de celui qui revient d’une forêt où il a tué un lion et vu des tigres dorés” (S, 85). [It is redder than the feet of doves who inhabit the temples and are feed by priests. It is redder than the feet of him who cometh from a forest where he hath slain a lion, and seen gilded tigers] (S, 84). Garelick offers an impressive insight into the poetic construct of such lines: “The result is an intricate tapestry of description whose weave extends continually outward, repeating on a small scale of the play’s overarching structure of incantatory, enchained repetition that blurs distinction and unifies the characters” (1998, 139-140).

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Syrian officer, “I have slipped in blood! It is an ill omen! It is a very ill omen!” (S, 94)

And Salomé savours the taste of blood upon her lips as she kisses the prophet’s severed

head.

There is a transgressive sexual association to the blood of the Syrian officer as it

was suicidal blood, which flowed for the soldier’s unrequited love for Salomé. Salomé’s

transgressive sexuality caused his blood to flow and her morbid and abject declarations

are brought to a crescendo towards the end of the play as Salomé associates the taste of

blood with the taste of love when she drinks from Iokanaan’s severed head: “Was it the

taste of blood? ... Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love… They say that love hath a

bitter taste… But what matter? What matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokanaan, I have

kissed thy mouth (S, 164)84. Nothing is redder than the mouth of Iokanaan as Salomé

fetishizes the prophet’s mouth: “It is redder than the feet of the doves who inhabit the

temples and are fed by the priests. It is redder than the feet of him who cometh from a

forest where he hath slain a lion, and seen gilded tigers” (S, 84). Wilde’s French reads:

“Elle est plus rouge que les pieds des colombes qui demeurent dans les temples et sont

nourries par les prêtres. Elle est plus rouge que les pieds de celui qui revient d'une forêt

où il a tué un lion et vu des tigres dorés” (S, 85). Once again Wilde utilizes the

superlative “plus” to an extreme in order to create a sacrilegious subversion of the

Biblical book. The repeated use of “plus” is borrowed directly from the mouth of the

Sulamite. Salomé’s obsession with the prophet’s mouth is actively heightened within its

sexual intensity.

Salomé’s attraction to kiss the prophet’s mouth becomes almost enslaving.

Imprisoned by her ebullient fascination, Salomé begins to hallucinate as shown by the

extravagant profusion of varied images she associates with his mouth to ultimately

become crystalized in her obstinate demand to kiss thy mouth:  “Je baiserai ta bouche”85.

Wilde’s Salomé fetishizes and becomes enthralled with the aesthetics of the prophet’s

mouth, as each part of the prophet’s body becomes an object: “It is thy mouth that I

desire, Iokanaan. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a

pomegranate cut in twain with a knife of ivory”86 (S, 84). Bernheimer describes

Salomé’s “description of what she sees when she looks at Jokanaan (as) the most

                                                                                                               84  “Était-ce la saveur du sang?... Mais peut-être est-ce la saveur de l’amour. On dit que l’amour a une âcre saveur… Mais qu’importe? Qu’importe ? J’ai baisé ta bouche, Iokanaan, j’ai baisé ta bouche” (S, 165). 85  See Pierobon (2009, 90).    86 “C'est de ta bouche que je suis amoureuse, Iokanaan. Ta bouche est comme une bande d'écarlate sur une tour d'ivoire. Elle est comme une pomme de grenade coupée par un couteau d'ivoire” (S, 85).

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striking example of the gaze’s metaphoric displacement of its object” (1993, 74),

suggesting that “Salomé recognizes in Jokanaan not a desirable sexual being but a

desirable mirror of her own literary constitution” (1993, 74). This presents the reader

with a further degree of abjection as we recognize the element of narcissism as the sole

ambition of her desire. Taking Salomé’s narcissism into consideration we notice the

profound influence of biblical text as the Sulamite worships her lover, “Thy lips are like

a thread of purple, and thy mouth is charming. Thy cheek is like the one side of a

pomegranate behind thy veil”87 (SS, 114-5). The Sulamite’s adoring words yield to the

horror of the narcissistic femme fatale while “the “likes” proliferate as Salomé plunders

the language of erotic psalmody” (Bernheimer 1993, 74).

Salomé establishes a border between the divine Sulamite and what Creed refers

to as the “abject body, or the body that has lost its form and integrity. The fully

symbolic body must bear no indication of its debt to nature” (1997, 11). Creed

continues to clarify: “In Kristeva’s view the image of woman’s body, because of its

maternal functions, acknowledges its ‘debt to nature’ and consequently is more likely to

signify the abject (Creed 1997, 11). In this regard, abjection concerns itself with the

fascination and horror of the monstrous and moreover menstruous sexuality since blood

and the moon are dominant images in Wilde’s play. The lunar element is pushed to the

extreme in Salomé, all the more reason that the moon is the feminine

element/component par excellence. She is the symbol of the woman by her cycles, her

curve in the night’s sky.

In Salomé, we are reminded that the moon is not only a dominant icon

throughout the discourse of the play representing fear, foreboding and death but there is

also a sense of vampirism and a correlation to blood which again arises in the numerous

descriptions of the moon. For example, the moon evokes terror and dread within the

Page of Herodias as illustrated by his opening lines: “Look at the moon. How strange

the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman.

One might fancy she was looking for dead things”88 (S, 44). Wilde brings a predatory

element to the seductive characteristics of Salomé. She is like a vampire who feasts on

the living and her alluring qualities ensnare those who “look too much” at a moon that

appears to be “strange”: “Oh! How strange the moon looks! Like the hand of a dead                                                                                                                87  “Tes lèvres sont comme un fil de pourpre, et ta bouche est charmante. Ta joue est comme une moitié de grenade, sous les plis de ton voile” (CC, 22-23). 88  “Regardez la lune. La lune a l'air très étrange. On dirait une femme qui sort d'un tombeau. Elle ressemble à une femme morte. On dirait qu'elle cherche des morts” (S, 45).

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woman who is seeking to cover herself with a shroud”89 (S, 72). The perfect time for

one of the undead, such as a vampire, to suck blood from the living was on the night of

a full moon (Creed 1993, 64). The Greek word for vampire was sarcomens, meaning

‘flesh made by the moon’ (Creed 1993, 64). Salomé is indeed looking for dead things as

she admires the beauty of the moon: “How good to see the moon”90 (S, 62). She is a

sexual predator who dances on blood: “No, no, she is going to dance on blood!”91 (S,

138) And as the moon turns red, Salomé’s allegorical identification with the feminine

image becomes apparent: “Ah! Look at the moon! She has become red. She has become

red as blood”92 (S, 138).

Menstrual blood figures metaphorically in Salomé’s rapid change from ethereal

girlhood into demonic destructive womanhood. As a result the entire play can be seen as

the metaphoric representation of the menarche, a girl’s first menstruation. “Menstrual

sex”, as Helen Tookey explains, “is forbidden, taboo, precisely because it is unrelated to

procreation: menstrual sexuality is for the woman’s own pleasure, not for the patriarchal

system” (Tookey 2004, 25). In her article entitled, “The Fiend that Smites with a Look:

The Monstrous/Menstruous Woman and the Danger of the Gaze in Oscar Wilde’s

Salomé” (2004), Tookey explores the theme of the biblical and mythic personifications

of the ‘dark side’ of feminine sexuality. She argues that “[t]he dominant images of

blood and the moon in Wilde’s play can be connected and understood as images of

menstruality”, suggesting that “the confrontation between Salomé and Iokanaan is the

confrontation of the profane (the sexually desirous, menstrual woman) with the sacred

(the holy man set in a realm apart)” (2004, 23). In this regard, Salomé initiates a

confrontation with the abject since “for men, menstruation is the ultimate female

mystery. Inaccessible to them, it is therefore feared and envied, and rendered taboo,

constructed as profane, in an attempt to nullify its power; anthropologists also

hypothesise male blood-letting or incision rituals as symbolic imitations of

menstruation” (Tookey 2004, 28). According to Kristeva:

Blood, indicating the impure, takes on the ‘animal’ seme of the previous opposition and inherits the propensity for murder of which man must cleanse himself. But blood, as a vital element, also refers to women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a fascinating semantic crossroads, the

                                                                                                               89 “Oh! comme la lune a l'air étrange ! On dirait la main d'une morte qui cherche à se couvrir avec un linceul” (S, 73). 90 “Que c'est bon de voir la lune!” (S, 63). 91  “Ah! non. Elle va danser dans le sang!” (S, 139).  92 “Ah! regardez la lune! Elle est devenue rouge. Elle est devenue rouge comme du sang” (S, 139).

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propitious place for abjection, where death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality all come together” (1982, 96).

The reader’s encounter with Salomé’s blood, as “monstrous in relation to her

reproductive functions” (Creed 1993, 151), initiates an ideological descent into “the

phallocentric notion that female sexuality is abject” (Creed 1993, 151).

Tookey acknowledges the overt transgressions present in Wilde’s text. However,

she highlights the overriding notion of “Salomé’s Lilith aspect, her menstruality, is

encoded in symbols, the key signifiers of menstruation: blood and the moon” (2004,

26). The moon is an omnipresent motif in the drama and she is the unique symbol of

Salomé. Salomé watches and admires the moon with whom she identifies: “How good

to see the moon! She is like a little piece of money, a little silver flower. She is cold and

chaste. I am sure she is a virgin. She has the beauty of a virgin. Yes, she is a virgin. She

has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men, like the other

goddesses”93 (S, 62). A peculiar and curious moon, the allegorical references incite the

reader’s interest. Identifying the moon as female, cold, chaste, and virginal, veils the

moon in seductive ambiguity. In Wilde’s play “she is not just a woman: she is a

dangerous woman” (Tookey 2004, 26-7). The moon as a source of fear is illuminated in

Herod’s description: The moon has a strange look tonight. Has she not a strange look? She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. She is naked too. She is quite naked. The clouds are seeking to clothe her nakedness, but she will not let them. She shows herself naked in the sky. She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman…I am sure she is looking for lovers. Does she not reel like a drunken woman? She is like a mad woman, is she not?94 (S, 94).

In this regard, “the moon-woman, then, is sexual, predatory, and beyond control. She is

dangerous, in particular, dangerous to men” (Tookey 2004, 27).

The image of the moon has long been considered symbolic of dangerous pagan

ritual worship, specifically within the teachings of a patriarchal Christian church. In

Wilde’s transgression of the Song of Songs, we notice that the author dismisses the

                                                                                                               93 “Que c'est bon de voir la lune ! Elle ressemble à une petite pièce de monnaie. On dirait une toute petite fleur d'argent. Elle est froide et chaste, la lune. . . Je suis sûre qu'elle est vierge… Elle a la beauté d'une vierge. . . Oui, elle est vierge. Elle ne s'est jamais souillée. Elle ne s'est jamais donnée aux hommes, comme les autres déesses” (S, 63). 94  “La lune a l'air très étrange ce soir. N'est-ce pas que la lune a l'air très étrange ? On dirait une femme hystérique, une femme hystérique qui va cherchant des amants partout. Elle est nue aussi. Elle est toute nue. Les nuages cherchent à la vêtir, mais elle ne veut pas. Elle se montre toute nue dans le ciel. Elle chancelle à travers les nuages comme une femme ivre…Je suis sûr qu'elle cherche des amants. . . N'est-ce pas qu'elle chancelle comme une femme ivre ? Elle ressemble à une femme hystérique, n'est-ce pas ?” (S, 95).

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Christian interpretation of biblical writings that the church “had transformed into

allegories of divine and spiritual love” (Kuryluk 1987, 226) and subverts the images

used to create “metaphors for sexual topography” (Kuryluk 1987, 226). Kuryluk

explains this procedure in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, “laying bare the eroticism

behind the poetic figures of imagination or the artistic renderings of nature as well as

the manmade world”, stating that “both Wilde and Freud brought back to earth symbols

that Christianity had banished to heaven” (1987, 226).

In Wilde’s Salomé, the Young Syrian describes the princess as “thou who art the

dove of all doves”95 (S, 86). The dove is a symbol of immaculateness and has “become

in the Church the most popular icon of purity and spirituality (Kuryluk 1987, 226).

Kuryluk continues to clarify, “Frequently accompanying the Madonna, the white bird

stands for salvation, purity of heart, innocence, modesty and compassion” (1987, 226),

and is depicted as a symbol for the incarnation of the Holy Spirit in the book of

Matthew in the New Testament. The dove is also prevalent in Greek mythology. For

instance she is the favorite animal of Aphrodite, Goddess of love (Aquien, 1996, 1843).

However, Kuryluk explains, in antiquity doves were birds not of the divine but of

sensual love and belonged to Aphrodite, whose carriage was drawn by them and by

sparrows” (1987, 226). In Salomé, the divine and sacred meaning is reversed as Wilde

“changed the dove into a symbol not of purity full of promise but one pregnant with

moral threat” (Kuryluk 1987, 226).

The image of the dove is frequently used in Song of Songs: “Thy eyes are as

doves’ eyes”96 (SS, 111), “My dove, nestled in the clefts of the rock, concealed on the

summit of the high places, show me thy countenance, make me hear thy voice; for thy

voice is sweet, and thy countenance is lovely”97 (SS, 112), “Thy eyes are as doves’

eyes, under the folds of thy veil”98 (SS, 114), “Open to me, my sister, my love, my

dove, my undefiled”99 (SS, 116), “His eyes are as doves’ eyes reflected in streams of

running water, like pigeons bathing themselves in milk, perched on the rim of a full

vase”100 (SS, 117), “But the jewel is my dove, my undefiled; she is the only one of her

                                                                                                               95 “toi qui es la colombe des colombes” (S, 87). 96 “Tes yeux sont des yeux de colombe” (CC, 18). 97  “Ma colombe, nichée aux trous de la pierre, cachée au haut du rocher, montre-moi ton visage, fais-moi entendre ta voix; car ta voix est douce et ton visage est charmant” (CC, 20). 98  “Tes yeux sont des yeux de colombe, sous les plis de ton voile” (CC, 22).  99  “Ouvre-moi, dit-il, ma sœur, mon amie, ma colombe, mon immaculée” (CC, 25). 100 “Ses yeux sont des colombes sur des rigoles d’eau courante, des colombes qui se baignent dans le lait, posées sur des bords d’un vase plein” (CC, 26).

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mother, the chosen one of her who gave her birth”101 (SS, 119). Although the Song of

Songs concerns the Sulamite, it is interesting to note that the word “colombe” [dove] is

mentioned seven times in the Le Cantique des Cantiques/Song of Songs102.

Correspondingly to the lovers in the biblical text, Wilde’s characters use the

image of the dove: “Her little white hands are fluttering like doves that fly to their dove-

cots”103 (S, 56), “She is like a dove that has strayed. She is like a narcissus trembling in

the wind. She is like a silver flower”104 (S, 60). However, Wilde alludes to the dove for

the final time when Salomé holds the bloodied head of John the Baptist in her hands:

“Thy body was a column of ivory set upon feet of silver. It was a garden full of doves

and lilies of silver. It was a tower of silver decked with shields of ivory”105 (S, 160-2).

The phrase is recaptured in almost identical fashion from the Song of Songs: “His legs

are as pillars of marble set upon pedestals of gold”106 (SS, 118). The durable pillar

symbolises “the tree of life” and is often associated with the erected phallus (Chevalier

& Gheerbrant 1982, 311). Erected upon a fortified pedestal of gold, Wilde transforms

the solar symbol of gold (characteristic of the Sulamite) into a lunar symbol of silver

(characteristic of Salomé). Salomé is perverted and frightening; she loses the warmth of

her desire to profit from the chilling lunar indifference of the femme fatale.

The lunar indifference is also illustrated by the metallic element of silver.

Toepfer points out that from a statistical perspective, the word “silver” is repeated in

Wilde’s Salomé “a rather modest number of times compared to other names or

adjectives” (1991, 76). However, it offers an intriguing insight into its semantic use as

the word “silver”: “like the meanings it designates, is of sufficient rareness, that it

requires fewer repetitions of it to focus listener perception upon a problem of identity

voiced by its use” (Toepfer 1991, 76). For example, “each repetition consists of an

exclusively metaphorical use” (Toepfer 1991, 76). Herod requests that Herodias “fill

with wine the great goblets of silver”107 (S, 120) and he delights at what he perceives to

                                                                                                               101  “Mais l’unique, c’est ma colombe, mon immaculée; elle est l’unique de sa mère, la préférée de celle qui lui donna le jour” (CC, 28). 102 For a detailed description of the symbolic use of the number seven and Wilde’s Dance of the Seven Veils, see chapter 3. 103 “La princesse a caché son visage derrière son éventail! Ses petites mains blanches s'agitent comme des colombes qui s'envolent vers leurs colombiers” (S, 57). 104 “Elle est comme une colombe qui s'est égarée... Elle est comme un narcisse agité du vent... Elle ressemble à une fleur d'argent” (S, 61). 105 “Ton corps était une colonne d'ivoire sur un socle d'argent. C'était un jardin plein de colombes et de lys d'argent. C'était une tour d'argent ornée de boucliers d'ivoire” (S, 163). 106 “ses jambes sont des colonnes de marbre posées sur des bases d’or” (CC, 26). 107  “Remplissez de vin les grandes coupes d’argent” (S, 121).

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be Salomé’s simple request: “In a silver charger? Surely yes, in a silver charger. She is

charming, is she not?”108 (S, 142) In these two examples the word “silver’ “merely

describes objects which the speakers believe possess a metaphorical, ceremonial value.

Metaphor signifies the embedding of one identity in another, and thus operates to

ambiguate and destabilize both identities” (Toepfer 1991, 76). The recurrent use of the

word “silver” seems “pervasive in the text (because it is recurrent); yet it rarifies all

identities into which speakers transform it” (Toepfer 1991, 76). Toepfer explains:

“Silver” ambiguates the categories of enunciated phenomena by attributing to them an unseen quality which (as silverness) makes them precious, beautiful, formed by some unnatural (“artistic”) will, yet “cold” (inorganic), increasingly impenetrable, and softened only by very intense concentrations of heat (“passion”) (Toepfer 1991, 77).

The metaphorical use of the word “silver” heightens the level of ambiguity in Wilde’s

rewriting of the biblical text. Considering that the recurrent repetitive use of “silver” in

Salomé “indicates the extreme complexity of meaning that can attach to recurrent

repetitions” (Toepfer 1991, 79), its repetitive use is “effected by imparting the

equivalence principle to the sequence (which) makes reiterable not only the constituent

sequences of the poetic message but the whole message as well” (Jakobson 1960, 371).

Roman Jakobson suggests that “this capacity for reiteration whether immediate or

delayed, this reification of the poetic message and its constituents, this conversion of a

message into an enduring thing, indeed all this represents an inherent and effective

property of poetry” (1960, 371).

The poetic language of Salomé is richly intensified during Salomé’s final

monologue as she lavishes the prophet with romantic blazons reminiscent of the

Petrarchan conceit. The princess uses elaborate and exaggerated comparisons to praise

Iokanaan’s physical attributes. She describes his body not only as a “column of ivory

set upon feet of silver”109 (S, 162), “a garden full of doves and lilies of silver”110 (S,

162) but also as “a tower of silver decked with shields of ivory”111 (S, 162). “Though its

intensity may vary, aesthetic feeling, as constructed and sustained by the recurrent use

of the word “silver” in relation to a variety of identities, is always this consciousness of

an ambiguity, even an impurity, in the production of identity” (Toepfer 1991, 71).

                                                                                                               108  “Dans un bassin d’argent? Mais oui, dans un bassin d’argent, certainement. Elle est charmante, n’est-ce pas ?” (S, 143). 109 “était une colonne d’ivoire sur un socle d’argent” (S, 163). 110  “C’était un jardin plein de colombes et de lys d’argent” (163). 111  “C’était une tour d’argent ornée de boucliers d’ivoire” (163).

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Toepfer elaborates, “Different modes of representation do not produce different

categories of aesthetic feeling; on the contrary, aesthetic feeling is invoked, repeated,

sustained through all modes of representation that are required to satisfy an

indeterminate capacity (or intensity) for the feeling” (1991, 71).

Wilde’s choice of colour and texture to describe Salomé’s depiction of

Iokanaan’s “ivory” body is quite compelling. In the Dictionnaire des Symboles (1969),

Chevalier & Gheerbrant characterize the colour ivory by “its whiteness, symbol of

purity. Its use in the making of Solomon’s throne could also associate it to the

symbolism of power, in that the hardness of ivory renders it almost unbreakable and

incorruptible”112 (1982, 605 my translation). However, within the context of Salomé’s

final monologue in which the princess holds the severed head, now removed from the

soon to be decaying body, the metaphorical description of Iokanaan adopts a sinister

and murderous characterization. Wilde employs the notion of the abject by offering the

ultimate in abjection, the corpse (Creed 1993, 9). Creed states: “within a biblical

context, the corpse is also utterly abject. It signifies one of the most basic forms of

pollution – the body without a soul. As a form of waste it represents the opposite of the

spiritual, the religious symbolic” (1993, 10). At this moment in the play, the sacred

prophet is without a soul, murdered; his lifeless body merely a headless corpse awaiting

decay.

The whiteness of the durable and opaque ivory is mirrored in the paleness of

Salomé. In Wilde’s hands she becomes the antithesis of the golden Sulamite. The

goodness of the Bien-Aimée becomes monstrous in Salomé: “The color white stands in

Salomé for coldness, sterility, and destruction. The princess is fashioned after the

multitude of terrible virgins in fin-de-siècle literature, young girls hiding behind the

bodily façade of fragile buds but with passions that freeze men to death” (Kuryluk 1987,

226-7). Salomé is no longer pure but cruel, strange and morbid. She is diseased as

Herod states: “I am not ill. It is your daughter who is sick to death. Never have I seen

her so pale”113 (S, 100).

On the contrary, the sun inundates the Sulamite, she is black and “scorched” by

the sun: “I am black, but I am comely, O daughters of Jerusalem, like the tents of Kedar,

                                                                                                               112  “Par sa blancheur, symbole de pureté. Son usage dans la confection du trône de Salomon pourrait en outre l’associer au symbolisme de la puissance, en ce sens que la dureté de l’ivoire le rend quasi incassable et incorruptible”. 113 “Je ne suis pas malade. C’est votre fille qui est malade. Elle a l’air très malade, votre fille. Jamais je ne l’ai vue si pâle” (S, 101).

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like the pavilions of Solomon. Despise me not, because I am a little black, because the

sun has scorched me”114 (SS, 109-10). Landy explains that the Sulamite’s introduction

and withdrawal “is paradoxical because Beauty is essentially something to be looked at

(and) only exists in the eye of the beholder” (1983, 143). Landy views this example as

“wholly enigmatic” (1983, 143) while suggesting that the she “may be a dark beauty or

a beauty in spite of her darkness” (1983, 143). The Sulamite is black, beautiful, and

exotic. Landy asks, “Her embarrassment is caused by her darkness, but is this enviable

or contemptible, ugly or beautiful? (1983, 143) Beauty embodies an uneasy and

ambivalent nature, as the role of the reader is to decipher “[i]f we think of darkness as

antithetical to beauty, we suppose hers to be fear of contempt; if they are

complementary, it is of the malice of envy” (Landy 1983, 143).

In contrast, the moon’s rays illuminate Wilde’s Salomé: “How pale the Princess

is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of

silver”115 (S, 50). Her beauty is white but this coldness is sterile. She is virgin but her

purity is defiled by her diabolical soul. Salomé is as pale as the moon she observes. The

Sulamite of Song of Songs is a solar and luminous heroine, “regardée” [watched] or

“brûlée” [burnt] by the sun, according to the translations. Wilde diverts the axiology by

creating a fatal contra-heroine watched and faded by the moon. Salomé is the perverted

and frightening Sulamite as Wilde explores the notion of “female chastity as a deadly

trap - a kind of vagina dentata, a lunar wasteland” (Kuryluk 1987, 227). Kuryluk

submits, “Through the constant repetition of “white,” “silver,” and “cold,” Wilde

creates in Salomé an inner landscape that is at once moon-like, wintry, and apocalyptic:

frost flowers eat away the substance of life, and seven lunar veils sweep the earth clean”

(Kuryluk 1987, 227).

When Wilde transgressed the divine and holy sanctuary of the Song of Songs, he

diverted the axiology by creating a corrupt, perverted and frightening Sulamite. In doing

so, he inspired countless artists to delve into the depraved universe of the deformed

Judean princess. One such work, which was inspired by Wilde, is Nick Cave’s Salomé

(1993). The Australian artist’s play is a perfect example of transmotivation (Genette)

                                                                                                               114 “Je suis noire, mais je suis belle, filles de Jérusalem, comme les tentes de Cédar, comme les pavillons de Salomon. Ne me dédaignez pas parce que je suis un peu noire : c’est que le soleil m’a brûlée” (CC, 16). 115 “Comme la princesse est pâle! Jamais je ne l'ai vue si pâle. Elle ressemble au reflet d'une rose blanche dans un miroir d'argent” (S, 51).

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and demonstrates how the biblical book of Song of Songs resonates in the underlining

intertextuality of Wilde’s play.

Cloven Gender: Ambiguity and Nick Cave’s Decadent Aesthetics of the Sexual Taboo A multifaceted talent, Nick Cave is an Australian musician, songwriter and author, best

known as the front man for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Described as “the peerless

Prince of musical Darkness” (Maume, Independent 9 June, 2015), “a sinister lord of

malevolent melancholy, the Darth Vader of rock who crushes the souls of inane

journalists the world over with a caustic grunt and the stylish stamp of a glistening

Cuban heel” (Wilson, Vice March 3, 2015), Nick Cave’s career spans over thirty years.

This artist “has produced a comprehensive (and sometimes controversial) body of work

that has arguably shaped contemporary alternative culture and generated wide-spread

comment” (Dalziell & Wellberry 2009, 3). A recent study entitled Cultural Seeds:

Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (2009) is the first collection of academic articles that

claims to feature a “comprehensive scholarly and critical overview of Cave’s work”

(Dalziell & Wellberry 2009, 3). The compilation did not, however, include any work on

Nick Cave’s Salomé from his 1988 collection of poems, song lyrics and short plays

entitled King Ink.

Hailed as “probably the most provocative of all the feminist-themed

interpretations of Wilde’s Salomé published in recent years” (Dierkes-Thurn 2011,

188), Nick Cave’s Salomé offers a fascinating insight into the continual success of the

mystifying biblical princess. Clearly influenced by Wilde in dramatically showcasing

Salomé’s sexual perversity, Cave smashes the taboo by “altering the premise of Wilde’s

aestheticism” (Dierkes-Thurn 2011, 188) to present the reader with a Salomé who is “no

yearning, lonely soul in search of ideal beauty but a bored, sadistic, narcissistic, and

hypersexual teenager who engages in masturbation on stage, (and) enjoys ruthless

verbal and physical power and play” (Dierkes-Thurn 2011, 188).

Cave’s play consists of five extremely concise acts each entitled “The Seven

Veils,” “Dialogue with the Baptist,” “Salomé’s Reward,” “The Chop,” and “The

Platter”. Some acts are so terse (“Salomé’s Reward” for instance consists of only

twenty-six spoken words) that one can assume Cave created Salomé to be appreciated

more as a poetic exploration in abjection than to be produced for a live performance.

Nevertheless, Cave boldly “takes Wilde’s focus on Salomé’s secular aesthetic and erotic

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to the extreme, making sexual pleasure and narcissistic self-gratification her only

motivations in the play” (Dierkes-Thurn 2011, 189). Dierkes-Thrun’s assessment

reveals the extent to which Cave’s text enacts Genette’s notion of transtextuality and

more precisely his concepts of transmotivation (motivation, demotivation), and

transvaluation.

Since “any text is a hypertext, grafting itself into a hypotext” (Prince 1997, ix) the

transmission between author and reader “is always partnered by a communication or

intertextual relation between poetic words and their prior existence in past poetic texts.

Authors communicate to readers at the same moment as their words or texts

communicate the existence of past texts within them” (Allen 2011, 38). Wilde’s Salomé

has most prabably inspired Cave. However, the Australian author is in no way beholden

to him as Cave took the notion of abjection to the extreme while investing an element of

the burlesque. Dierkes-Thrun suggests: “Cave may have absorbed the fin de siècle

Salome theme’s intertwinement of eroticism and metaphysical longing found in

Mallarmé, Flaubert, and Huysmans, but he presents it with such absurd hyperbole and

irony that it is clear he is making fun of the tradition of investing Salomé’s body with

quasi-divine power” (2011, 188-9).

Cave’s Salomé begins with the mysterious character of the Vestal Virgin,

described simply as a “young girl” (SFP, 86) who enters and moves to the centre front

of the stage to announce the title of each of the five proceeding acts. She is the Mistress

of Ceremonies who presides over the action of the drama. In Greek and Roman

mythology, “Vesta was the original and divine virgin, the virgin goddess par excellence.

In her worship, her virginity was expressed by the fact that she was the only goddess

who was not portrayed but illustrated by a flame that burnt in her unadorned and empty

house” (Kroppenberg 2010, 418-9). Kroppenberg describes the Vesta’s virginity as

being “equated with her invisibility; her constant presence on the other hand, was

symbolized by the nonphysical flame: ‘She is presence, not a vision’” (2010, 419) and

elaborates further: Those who approached her would not have been able to find her, because her presence could not be perceived with one’s senses. Any type of depiction, whether physical or mental, would have been an act of profanation. The perpetual virgin was a manifestation of holiness and the essence of the sacred. From the point of view of cultural anthropology, virginity is associated with a state of physical intactness, moral integrity, purity, unity, and not least, great power (2010, 419).

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Kroppenberg’s claim provides an enlightening insight into Cave’s choice of the Vestal

Virgin’s mysterious presence who is not only visible, but who also verbally announces

each act. Ironically, she declines to name the first act entitled “The Seven Veils”,

instead the Vestal Virgin introduces the play in a “deadpan” voice while declaring: “The

Story of Salomé and John the Baptist in five parts. See this mess of thorns” (SFP, 86).

By describing the drama as a “mess of thorns”, the reader is immediately confronted

with a juxtaposition of ritual and religion, pleasure and pain. “The thorn on the rose-

bush” for instance “helps to emphasize the counterpoise or ‘conjunction’ between thesis

and antithesis, that is, between the ideas of existence and non-existence, ecstasy and

anguish, pleasure and pain” (Cirlot 1967, 322-3). Taking this into consideration, if one

was to correlate Cave’s ambiguous depiction with that of Christ’s crucifixion then he or

she is also thrust into a web of religious intrigue. The thorns representing the

martyrdom of Jesus: the symbolic crowning of thorns, which as the biblical accounts

inform us, was used to mock the saviour’s kingship while administering torment, pain

and agony.

Similar to Wilde, Cave displays a taste for paradoxes in the obscure nature of his

stage directions. For example, while the first act opens with Arabic wailing and the

sounding of bells, which consequently shrouds the scene in a characteristic depiction of

the orientalism required to correspond to the biblical narrative, the stage direction also

informs the reader that “all props, crown, throne etc. must look like they were made by

children” (SFP, 86). The childlike setting creates the perfect atmosphere to enhance

Salomé’s immature and petulant attributes. Cave describes Salomé as an obnoxious yet

dangerous upstart. Salomé “sulks and sighs and allows her heavenly body to pursue

conquettishly [sic] the serpentine rhythms of music in a manner of cruel titillation…

Salomé is bored and finds small pleasure in the torment” (SFP, 86).

Compelled by Salomé’s sexual torment, Herod asks the princess, “What ails thee,

my precious Salomé? What is it that has put your pretty little nose so out of joint?”

(SFP, 86) While Cave chooses to use an archaic form of speech in the use of ‘thee’, a

striking similarity to Wilde, he swiftly provides a unique interpretation by using the

contemporary idiom “so out of joint”. In doing so, Cave’s poetics mirror his aesthetics

as the juxtaposition of Arabic wailing and bells is set against props made to look like

children constructed them. King Herod desires Salomé to dance for him: “Dance for me,

my peach…Come, my petal, dance and you shall be rewarded” (SFP, 86). Herod’s

words provide a compelling insight into the intertextuality produced in literary

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production, in particular, the theory of imitation. Imitation is seen “as a theory not only

of writing but also of reading as a performative act of criticism and interpretation” (Still

& Worton 1990, 7). Herod’s words “My peach”, “my petal” echo that of the Sulamite as

she recalls her lover’s declarations of love: “My dove”116 (SS, 112), “My love”117 (SS,

112), “my beloved”118 (SS, 112), “my fair one”119 (SS, 112). Still and Worton suggest

“Every literary imitation is a supplement which seeks to complete and supplant the

original and which functions at times for later readers as the pre-text of the ‘original’”

(Still & Worton 1990, 7).

Considering “that all texts are potentially hypertextual” (Allen 2011, 108),

Genette argues, “that sometimes the existence of a hypotext is too uncertain to be the

basis for a hypertextual reading” (Allen 2011, 108). Cave may not have been aware of

the biblical borrowings, which reside in the Song of Songs. However, the beauty of

engaging in a hypertextual study of Cave’s Salomé is to discover these subtle semiotic

reiterations of the text’s biblical hypotext.

Cave makes a departure from Wilde’s Salomé in pushing the enfant terrible to the

extreme. Cave’s Salomé appears bored, narcissistic and entitled. When Salomé hears

that her dance will be rewarded she responds “[with a pout] A reward?” (SFP, 86)

Wilde’s Salomé on the other hand states, “Will you indeed give me whatsoever I shall

ask of you, Tetrarch?”120 (S, 132) While Wilde names Salomé’s dance in an iconic stage

direction “Salome dances the dance of the seven veils”121 (S, 140), Cave’s Salomé

triumphantly announces the naming of the dance within the text: “Music! Let’s have

some life! Your Majesty, ‘The Dance of the Seven Veils’” (SFP, 86). The previous

imitation of the Song of Songs may have appeared subtle as an ambiguous semantic

reference to a pre-existing biblical text unearthed in a study of intertextuality: “My

peach,” “my petal,” however, Salomé’s announcement of her Dance of the Seven Veils

is a blatant reworking of Wilde’s creation. Since Cave chooses to borrow from Wilde in

the naming of the dance he is acknowledging the relevance and therefore, the

importance of the Dance of the Seven Veils as being pivotal to establishing the dramatic

turning point in Wilde’s drama. By making Salomé announce this dance in the first act,

Cave abandons the theatrical prelude established by Wilde to build the anticipatory                                                                                                                116 “Ma colombe” (CC, 20).  117 “Mon amie” (CC, 20).  118 “Mon bien-aimé” (CC, 20).  119 “Ma belle” (CC, 20).  120 “Vous me donnerez tout ce que je demanderai, tétrarque?” (S, 133). 121 Salomé danse la danse des sept voiles (S, 141).

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tension required to establish Herod’s intense erotic desire. Moreover, the ambivalent

association of the seven veils serve to metaphorically elucidate the play’s subtext. For

as Nassaar suggests, “The thrust of the play is to strip veil after veil from Salome until

she emerges as a deathly pale terror feeding on the blood-soaked head of a dead person.

The demonic vision is entirely confirmed, the angelic vision entirely refuted” (Nassaar

1974, 82).

Cave’s interpretation of Salomé’s dance is unique in representing the

unconventionality of post-modern minimalist dancing. Cave’s stage direction reads:

“The music pulses and snakes, but Salomé remains stock-still, facing Herod. She

removes, one by one, the veils that are bound about her body” (SFP, 86). Shaw suggests

that “[t]he adoption of a significant measure of the “unconventionality” characteristic of

performance works has become one of the most prevalent aesthetic conventions of our

time” (1993, 256). Consequently, the ordered disorder of performance art is now more

widely appreciated than rejected (Shaw 1993, 256), which is due in part to the fact that

such an aesthetic practice is fully consistent with “the ‘postmodern’ precepts prevailing

in contemporary philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences” (Shaw 1993, 256).

Postmodern minimalist dance enacts an active engagement between performer and

spectator as “the work initiates an era in dance when knowledge of convention informs

the absence of convention in the work” (Claid 2006, 91). As the spectator engages in the

subjectivity of Salomé’s minimalist dancing there is a “reverse strategy of seduction at

work…whereby spectators are drawn to the absence of spectacle” (Claid 2006, 114). In

Cave’s interpretation of Salomé’s iconic dance “absence as presence is intriguing”

(Claid 2006, 116) and thereby initiates a multitude of interpretative possibilities.

As Cave describes the removal of Salomé’s seven veils he portrays the princess as

possessing hair “as liquid gold. Her lips are blood-heavy and as clinquant as cut rubies.

Her teeth are like pearls. Her breasts are hillocks of honeycoloured sand. Her quim is

shielded by a fine lace” (SFP, 86-7). Such descriptions evoke the language reminiscent

of the Song of Songs whereby parts of the body are depicted and eroticised as

metaphorical objects. For example, “Thy hair is like a flock of goats…Thy teeth are like

a flock of sheep newly shorn…Thy lips are like a thread of purple,”122 (SS, 114-5),

“Thy lips, my spouse, distil honey; honey and milk are concealed under thy tongue”123

                                                                                                               122 “Tes cheveux sont comme un troupeau de chèvres… Tes dents sont comme un troupeau de brebis tondues… Tes lèvres sont comme un fil de pourpre” (CC, 22-23). 123  “Tes lèvres distillent le miel, ma fiancée ; le miel et le lait se cachent sous ta langue” (CC, 23-24).

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(SS, 115), “his lips are as lilies gushing with myrrh”124 (SS, 117-8), “thy two breasts are

as the two twins of a gazelle”125 (SS, 120). However, when Cave refers to Salomé’s

vagina he uses the slang and vulgar term “quim”: “Her quim is shielded by a fine lace”

(SFP, 87). Cave transgresses the Song of Songs’ biblical language that depicted

metaphorical terrestrial beauty to the grime of the whorehouse. The choice of the lace is

also alluring as it conceals yet reveals, offering a brief sight to her genitalia but at the

same time concealing it as forbidden.

While Cave’s choice of poetics initiates the imitation of pre-existing language

either consciously or unconsciously borrowed from the Old Testament, he engages,

however, in the transgressive debasement of crude speech. The “locatable intertext need

not necessarily be located by the reader who, for reasons of education, time, etc., may

never know or find it” (Still & Worton 1990, 26). Still and Worton cite Riffaterre in

suggesting “what is essential is that in each individual reading, the (various) readers

sense, indeed presuppose that there is an intertext through their perceptions of the

symptomatic nature of the (un)grammatical articulations of the text itself” (1990, 26).

Still and Worton explain this notion further when they state: “the analyst or professional

critic/reader must seek and will usually eventually find a matrix text (or texts), but the

success or failure of this quest is, in a sense, irrelevant to the experience of intertextual

reading: as Riffaterre has himself affirmed, ‘the only requisite (for reading) may be a

presupposition of intertext’” (1990, 26). As Cave imitates Wilde’s text, he indirectly

engages in an intertextual relation with the Song of Songs. By injecting Wilde’s Salomé

with a heightened degree of abjection Cave further plunders the poetic language of the

biblical text.

Watching Salomé dance, King Herod becomes “increasingly delirious” (SFP, 87)

and eagerly counts the cascading veils one by one: “ONE!...oh! see how it flutters from your hand. TWO!...ohh! downward like a dying bird…THREE!...oh beautiful Salomé I love you…oh! Now, FOUR!... see how the veils cause the floor to storm, yet their absence reveals such still and silent flesh…FIVE! … oh my heart pounds out to you. What you create with your seven veils God, creaking at the hinges, could never approach with his seven days. Oh… SIX!!” [Herod clutches painfully at his heart as he collapses] (SFP, 87)

Before the audience hears the definitive number seven which thereby indicates that

Salomé is completely naked, “Herod clutches painfully at his heart as he collapses”

                                                                                                               124 “ses lèvres sont des lis, la myrrhe en ruisselle” (CC, 26). 125 “Tes deux seins sont comme les deux jumeaux d’une gazelle” (CC, 29).

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(SFP, 87). The stage direction indicates that the power of Salomé’s erotic minimalist

striptease overwhelmed King Herod to the point of his near demise. By employing

overdramatic theatrics characteristic of an exaggerated farce, Cave’s parody of Wilde’s

Salomé is “relegating male voyeurism and the metaphysical elevation of female

sexuality to the realm of the absurd” (Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 189). Male voyeurism is

brought to an abrupt end with the entrance of John the Baptist.

The first act ends as John the Baptist, enters dressed in camel skins to ask “What

evil here?” (SFP, 87) Suddenly Salomé calls to the wings of the stage mere moments

before blackout and commands, “Seize him guards! Seize the Baptist!” (SFP, 87)

Unlike Wilde’s play, the prophet is not imprisoned in a cistern, having previously been

arrested for denouncing the incestuous relationship between King Herod and his wife

Herodias. Nor is the Queen present in the play at all. Cave decided to forgo the queen’s

presence and elected to exhibit the relationship between Salomé and men only. Apart

from the Vestal Virgin who may preside over the drama but who does not, however,

engage in dialogue with fellow actors, Salomé is the only female character in the text.

The play consists of Salomé alone, engaging in dialogue with King Herod and John the

Baptist, while the character named the Negro executioner appears in the final act to talk

of Salomé. Cave’s departure from pre-existing treatments of the Salomé story to

exclude the pivotal relationship between mother and daughter highlights Cave’s act of

demotivation even further. By drastically cutting dialogue, Cave does not provide any

motivation for Salomé’s demand for the Baptist’s head except for her own narcissistic

and self-centred pursuits. “The circumambient semantic pressure is such that cancelling

one motive may be enough to suggest another irresistibly (by virtue of the formidable

principle no motive, no action), without even having to identify it explicitly” (Genette

1997, 328). There is no mention of John the Baptist’s denouncement of the incestuous

relationship between Queen Hérodias and King Herod. Nor is there any mention of

Salomé’s unrelenting desire for the prophet. Instead, Salomé exists as a self-centred and

egotistical child who, by her mere existence, feels entitled to defiantly possess that

which she desires.

As soon as the Vestal Virgin introduces the second act entitled “Dialogue With

The Baptist” the audience is greeted with a disturbing scene of the prophet caged in a

wooden kennel with a wire-screen frontage. As the Baptist is incarcerated “like an

animal” (SFP, 88), Salomé “sits atop the box while swinging one long bright naked leg

in front of the cage” (SFP, 88). Dierkes-Thrun suggests that the opening of Act 2 echoes

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“the scene in Ken Russell’s Salomé’s Last Dance in which John is imprisoned in a giant

cage (whipped by two dominatrices and finally sodomized with a spear)” (2011, 189).

However, all eyes are on Salomé as “one hand slips beneath her robe, while the other

holds a large apple which she eats. Her toenails are painted the colour of blood. Salomé

fingers herself” (SFP, 88). The apple, like the apple depicted in the biblical Garden of

Eden is “symbolic of earthly desires, or of indulgence in such desires. The warning not

to eat the forbidden apple came, therefore, from the mouth of the supreme being, as a

warning against the exaltation of materialistic desire” (Cirlot 1967, 14). Cave embraces

the concept of the forbidden fruit to the extreme as Salomé brazenly engages in

masturbation. In this instance, such a display of sexual self-gratification is abject.

While Wilde’s Salomé yearns for Iokanaan’s love, Cave’s Salomé employs a

sexual activity where man, in this case the sacred prophet, is not necessary to satisfy her

sexual yearnings and appetites. The fact that Salomé is masturbating while

simultaneously eating an apple provides an insight into the psychological structure of

her character. Salomé is the threatening Other as she revels in the taste of a forbidden

fruit. In this regard, Salomé’s garden is the garden of sin, highlighted by the sexual act

of masturbatory self-gratification. Cave takes an image usually associated with the

biblical Eve in the Garden of Eden and further transgresses the religious motif to the

extreme. While Eve is certainly damned in the Bible, Cave further exploits the biblical

narrative by subjecting the female to perform a blasphemous and degrading act.

Salomé’s actions do not go unnoticed by the Baptist as he hurls insults at the

princess: “You are sin. Lucifer, the dark angel, watches over you knowing that one day

he will claim you. You are the wicked and you have his mark upon you. Repent now or

suffer horrors too vile to mention” (SFP, 88). There is an apocalyptic warning in the

prophet’s speech. However, just as his physical body is caged and imprisoned so too are

his ominous words of prophecy, as they have no effect on Salomé. Furthermore, her

fearless scoffing reply renders his threats null and void and reveal her obnoxious

immaturity: “If I have my way, pompous turd, you won’t have a brain for much

longer!” (SFP, 88) John retorts as he barks back, “Spawn of incest, you are damned for

eternity. Too vile for the grave, too vile for the grave. You are beyond redemption!

Marked with devil blood, ruled by the moon! O hellish vixen! O cloven gender!” (SFP,

88) Describing Salomé as “cloven gender” offers an intriguing insight into Cave’s view

of the gender ambiguity present in the young femme fatale.

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‘Cloven’ is the past participle of cleave. The verb ‘to cleave’ is to split or divide.

For instance, goats have cloven hoofs. “Cloven” gender refers to Salomé’s “split”

gender as her character, as demonstrated in Wilde’s text, exhibits signs of gender

ambiguity, which is represented in the variable oscillation between the character’s

masculine and feminine attributes. Cave takes inspiration from Wilde whose protagonist

initially appears innocent and virginal but swiftly morphs into an assertive and

masculinized femme fatale. Salomé, like the traditional femme fatale “comes in many

guises, but she is always Other” (Stott 1992, 37). Stott elaborates further: She is always outside, either literally (…) or metaphorically, for as a sexually fatal woman she represents chaos, darkness, death, all that lies beyond the safe, the known and the normal. In effect, the major common feature of the femme fatale is that of positionality: she is a multiple sign singularized by her position of Otherness. (1992, 37-38)

Wilde’s Salomé becomes masculinized as she gazes longingly at the object of her desire

who is in turn feminized by a succession of blazons: “I am amorous of thy body,

Iokanaan! Thy body is white, like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed.

Thy body is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea, and come down

into the valleys”126 (S, 82). The poetic blazons are once again borrowed from the Song

of Songs: “I am the rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys! As a lily among thorns, so is

my beloved among the maidens”127 (SS, 111).

The intense adoration illustrated by Salomé’s fetishization of Iokanaan’s body

continues until the prophet rejects her unquenchable advances prompting a sudden

caustic backlash: “Thy body is hideous. It is like the body of a leper. It is like a

plastered wall, where vipers have crawled; like a plastered wall where the scorpions

have made their nest”128 (S, 82). Salomé’s words embody a masculine aggressive

quality. She moves from the seductress to the aggressor. She rapidly transforms from

the ethereal virgin to the vindictive masculinized femme fatale: “Wilde gives a heroine

who lusts after and murders John the Baptist for an erotic frisson, and who traverses

both sides of the customary borders of gender, a beautiful and “pure” young woman

who also claims possession of masculine power and authority” (Powell, 2009, 61).                                                                                                                126 “Iokanaan! Je suis amoureuse de ton corps. Ton corps est blanc comme le lys d’un pré que le faucheur n’a jamais fauché. Ton corps est blanc comme les neiges qui couchent sur les montagnes, comme les neiges qui couchent sur les montagnes de Judée, et descendent dans les vallées” (S, 83). Douglas neglects to repeat “like the snows that lie on the mountains”. 127 “Je suis le narcisse de Saron, le lis des vallées! Comme un lis au milieu des épines, telle est mon amie au milieu des jeunes filles” (CC, 18). 128 “Ton corps est hideux. Il est comme le corps d’un lépreux. Il est comme un mur de plâtre où les vipères sont passées, comme un mur de plâtre où les scorpions ont fait leur nid” (S, 83).

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Powell further suggests that “[t]he passionate language of Salomé’s addresses to

Jokanaan, in turn, is modelled on the love poetry of Song of Solomon, except that in the

biblical source the passionate speaker is a man extolling the beauty and sexual allure of

a woman. Within the frame of this gender shift, Salomé is “like” a man, and Jokanaan

like a woman” (2009, 61).

Powell is not alone in making the error of attributing the adoring declarations of

passionate love borrowed from the Song of Songs to that of the man. Ellmann also

states: “But the Song of Songs describes a woman’s beauty, not a man’s” (1988, 344)

and Davies refers to the biblical book “in which a man lauds a woman’s beauty” (2011,

63). In the Song of Songs there is a mutual exchange of poetic love between both the

male and female characters of the biblical text. Furthermore, the Song of Songs is an

ambiguous text as “the Song has a variety of contexts that shift frequently in no

apparent dramatic sequence and within which many different kinds of voices speak.

There is no reason to assume only a few fixed speakers in the Song, and even less

justification for viewing Solomon as a central character” (Falk 1990, xiii). Nevertheless,

we can assume that in Wilde’s Salomé the “fetishization of the male body by a woman

signifies a sexual/textual inversion” (Fernbach 2002, 56). Despite Davies’s oversight in

assuming that it is solely a man who lauds over a woman’s beauty, she is correct in

refusing to fix Salomé’s “troubling of gender categories within a finite authorial

agenda” (2011, 63). She claims that “the currency of gendered signifiers that flow

between Salome and Iokanaan destabilizes finite identity categories,” adding “the play

suggests that a “male” body can just as easily present a feminine persona as a masculine

one. The discursive production of both gender and sex in the text is consistently

queered” (2011, 64).

Cave draws from Wilde’s approach to gender ambiguity and consequently

reduces his text: “cloven gender”. In doing so, Cave’s reduction of Wilde’s play can be

seen in terms of Genette’s notion of excision whereby a text can be reduced “without

diminishing it or, more precisely, without subtracting from it some part or parts. The

simplest, but also the most brutal and the most destructive to its structure and meaning,

consists then of suppression pure and simple, or excision” (Genette 1997, 229). Genette

views such a practice as not necessarily diminishing the text’s value. Rather, “it is

possible to “improve” a work by surgically removing from it some useless and therefore

noxious part…reduction by amputation (a single massive excision) is a very widespread

literary, or at least editorial, practice” (Genette 1997, 229). Genette’s theory of excision

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is evident as John the Baptist describes Salomé as “marked with devil blood, ruled by

the moon” (SFP, 88).

As this study demonstrates, the moon plays a prominent role in Wilde’s play.

From a statistical point of view the moon is mentioned nineteen times by six different

speakers (Toepfer 1991, 79). In opposition, Cave’s drama refers to the moon seven

times and by only two speakers: the characters of John the Baptist and Salomé.

Although Cave is extremely economical in his references to the moon, his choice of

language establishes the reverential potency of the moon symbol. However, the moon is

not an omnipresent motif watching over the events but is aligned with the devil’s blood.

Cave demonstrates a Wildean influence as his literary forefather used numerous

descriptions of the moon to signify its power as a dominant feature in the play.

In Wilde’s text, the “Slaves bring perfumes and the seven veils, and take off the

sandals of Salomé”129 (S, 138). Although Herod initially appears overjoyed to watch the

princess dance: “Ah, thou art to dance with naked feet! ’Tis well! ’Tis well! Thy little

feet will be like white doves. They will be like little white flowers that dance upon the

trees”130 (S, 138), he suddenly repeals his sudden delight: “No, no, she is going to dance

on blood! There is blood spilt on the ground. She must not dance on blood. It were an

evil omen”131 (S, 138), and turns to the moon which has become red as blood, “Ah!

Look at the moon! She has become red as blood. Ah! the prophet prophesised truly. He

prophesied that the moon would become as blood. Did he not prophesy it? All of ye

heard him prophesying it. And now the moon has become as blood. Do ye not see

it?”132 (S, 138) The moon has moved from descriptions of white and silver to one

portrayed red as blood. Cave’s choice of language presents the reader not only with a

degree of ambiguity but also within its concise semantic structure, Cave’s text remains

dense and informative. John’s striking words “Marked with devil blood, ruled by the

moon” conjure up visions of a young girl damned for eternity who is herself,

psychologically caged in bloodlust and lunacy. Cave prefers to forgo Wilde’s numerous

                                                                                                               129 Les esclaves apportent des parfums et les sept voiles et ôtent les sandales de Salomé (S, 139). 130 “Ah! vous allez danser pied nus ! C’est bien ! C’est bien ! Vos petits pieds seront comme des colombes blanches. Ils ressembleront à des petites fleurs blanches qui dansent sur un arbre” (S, 139). 131 “Ah! non. Elle va danser dans le sang! Il y a du sang par terre. Je ne veux pas qu’elle danse dans le sang. Ce serait d’un très mauvais présage” (S, 139). 132 “Ah! regardez la lune ! Elle est devenue rouge comme du sang. Ah! le prophète l’a bien prédit. Il a prédit que la lune deviendrait rouge comme du sang. N’est-ce pas qu’il a prédit cela? Vous l’avez tous entendu. La lune est devenue rouge comme le sang. Ne le voyez-vous pas?” (S, 139).

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descriptions of the moon and instead chooses to make a triangular connection of satanic

symbolism in correlating the moon, devil blood and Salomé.

Salomé responds, “Cleanse me, Baptist. Take this yoke, the moon, under which

ah slave, the terrible Empress of mah body” (SFP, 89). Salomé recognizes her

enslavement to the moon as depicted by the image of the “yoke”. The yoke is a symbol

of subjection, servitude and slavery. “A yoke is a burden or a bond or both” (Ferber

2007, 245). Ferber states: “The burdensome aspect of being under a yoke is the more

frequently found, especially in the Old Testament, where “yoke” (Hebrew ’ol) usually

refers to social or political subservience” (2007, 245). Ferber cites Deuteronomy in the

Old Testament: “Because thou servedst not the Lord thy God,” Moses warns his people,

“Therefore shalt thou serve thine enemies,” and the Lord “shall put a yoke of iron upon

thy neck, until he have destroyed thee” (Deut. 28.47-48). The image of the yoke is also

present in the New Testament in the teachings of Jesus. Jesus says, “Take my yoke

upon you, and learn from me: for I am meek and lowly of heart: and ye shall find rest

unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:29-30). Cave

momentarily removes Salomé from this biblical setting and inserts her enslavement into

an historic period of American chattel slavery.

Cave demonstrates this shift linguistically by Salomé’s exaggerated speech:

“under which ah slave” and “mah body”. Salomé embodies the African American slave

by enacting a characteristic southern accent in order to align the dialogue’s delivery

with the colloquial speech of pre civil war America. However, although such imitation

may initially appear as a simple parody to a particular period of American history, the

high degree of sensitivity in relation to the historic narrative of North American race

relations is disregarded by Cave and therefore abject. As Cave turns this sensitive issue

into the theatre of the absurd, he conjures up historic images of a painful past which still

have ramifications and can cause turmoil and division in the twenty-first century.

Cave’s venture into burlesque travesty reinforces the notion that Salomé has no regard

for the sacred and furthermore separates her from society’s norms.

Salomé makes a mockery of the sanctity of Baptism as she taunts John the

Baptist feigning a desire to be cleansed and made holy. She states: “I am woman.

Cleanse me. Wash away all that’s comely. Chasten me, Baptist, with your waters” (SFP,

89). At which time the stage direction reads: “The moon appears above them. It is a

gold platter” (SFP, 89). Cave’s description of the moon as a “gold platter” presents an

interesting intertextual reading. This study has shown that the sun inundates the

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Sulamite in Song of Songs in direct contrast to Wilde’s Salomé who is aligned with the

sterile, white and silver qualities of the “chaste” moon. However, in Cave’s treatment,

he reintroduces a golden moon.

John the Baptist lashes out at Salomé: “Get thee behind me Satan!” (SFP, 89),

his words taken directly from the book of Matthew in the New Testament where Peter

tempts Jesus with a secure option and a way to avoid his impending suffering and

painful death: “But he turned, and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art

an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of

men” (Matthew 16:23). Cave’s borrowing from the biblical text marks a powerful

reflection on the notion of temptation. In the New Testament “Christ’s role is to drive

out sin from within the individual. Abjection is no longer exterior” (Creed 1997, 41).

Temptation represents a psychological struggle within an individual and possesses the

power to override one’s values and ideals.

Wilde famously plays with the paradox of temptation when he states: “I can

resist everything except temptation” (CW, 424). As powerful as temptation is, however,

the sacred prophet is immune to Salomé’s sexual taunts and request to cleanse her with

his waters. John the Baptist’s forceful rebuke is intensified by his acidic tongue: “A

single strand of your hair would pollute the sacred Jordan river. Was it you who dipped

her toe in what is now called the DEAD SEA? I would suffer an eternity in darkness,

clothed in worms, rather than make a mockery of the blessed mystery of baptism” (SFP,

89). An undeterred Salomé responds: “Suit yourself, dick breath!” (SFP, 89) Once again

her language is childlike and insolent. She is a petulant child eager to have her own

way.

Drawing the act to a close, the moon lowers itself and “appears to hover just

above and behind Salomé’s head” (SFP, 89). The princess mocks John as she incarnates

traditional religious iconography: “See, Baptist. The moon sanctifies me. It sits behind

my crown of curls like a gloriole” (SFP, 89). Cave presents the reader with an image of

Salomé in a holy state. Symbolised by a golden halo surrounding her head, Salomé’s

ambiguous “holiness” attempts to elevate her inner spiritual qualities to that of the

divine. The halo surrounding icon motifs “is a well-known symbol which denotes a

sanctified state” (Solrunn, 2004, 23). Solrunn explains the aesthetics of icon imagery in

terms of portraying a source of light that is not manmade but is rather the divine light of

God: “According to Orthodox tradition, an icon shall be honoured, because it manifests

and actualises the spiritual reality towards which the faithful turn. In this way an icon

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may be a reminder of God’s presence and an aid in prayer” (2004, 23)133. As Salomé is

aligned with the light of a divine God she presents the reader with an ambiguous

identity. While depicting a hallowed and anointed outer self, she is fundamentally a

woman who is murderous, narcissistic and ready to commit sin. In Christian tradition,

sin is regarded as breaking the laws of God as established by the Ten Commandments

given to Moses, the patriarchal leader of the chosen people. Sin that comes from within

is deceptive, perceptually misleading and ambiguous. In Creed’s view:

The definition of sin/abjection as something which comes from within opens up the way to position woman as deceptively treacherous. She may appear pure and beautiful on the outside but evil may, nevertheless, reside within. It is this stereotype of feminine evil - beautiful on the outside/corrupt within - that is so popular within patriarchal discourses about woman’s evil nature (1997, 42).

As the audience is left with the lingering image of the gold platter resting behind

Salomé’s saintly appearance, the stage is enveloped in darkness to signify the end of act

two.

However, Salomé’s corrupt nature returns to reveal itself in the proceeding third

act. The shortest act within Cave’s play, act three entitled “Salomé’s Reward” begins

with the customary announcement of the Vestal Virgin before a single spotlight

illuminates Salomé centre-stage. The title is brief but thought provoking. The concept of

a reward is treated ambiguously, since it is usually bestowed upon a person as an award

for doing good but in the case of Salomé, it is inverted, and she gets rewarded for acts

of evil. The fact that Salomé receives the head of John the Baptist as her reward attests

to her innate diabolical nature. “In an evil whisper” (SFP, 90) Salomé speaks, “My

mouth asks for it. My heart weeps for it! My cunt yearns for it!! The moon, in turn,

demands it. THE HEAD OF JOHN THE B.!!” (SFP, 90). Cave explores a number of

performative acts derived from ecstatic speech 134. “In its original sense, ecstasy

(“ekstasis”) refers to a condition of being “outside oneself.” If we assume that language

is central to the construction of a self, then ecstasy also implies a condition of being

“outside” language” (Toepfer 1991 13). Salomé’s mouth asks for John’s head, her heart

weeps out of intense longing for the head of the Baptist, and her cunt sexually yearns                                                                                                                133 “The use of gold leaf is an important aesthetic agent in the art of icons, but it is also a symbol with a specific theological significance. The gold symbolises what is known as ‘the uncreated light’. The uncreated light stands in contrast to the created light, for example sunlight, lamplight or candlelight which all have the quality of lighting an object, which again casts a shadow… All who come near God are illuminated and transformed by the uncreated light. The holy persons portrayed on an icon are illuminated from the inside and made translucent because their light comes from God himself” (Solrunn 2004, 23-4). 134 Ecstasy or the experience of an ecstatic state originally referred to the realm of religion, with the ultimate connection to God.

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for it. Salomé’s lewd and obscene language confesses her carnal motive as John’s

impending death is aligned with sexual satisfaction. Cave’s linguistic choice shakes the

confines of accepted speech, confronting the reader with a sense of destabilization.

Cave transgresses biblical rhetoric customary to the Salomé story to offer the reader a

blasphemous departure from Biblical authority. Furthermore, Cave invites pagan ritual

sacrifice in the association with the moon and its demand for the head of the Baptist.

To announce the fourth act entitled “The Chop”, the Vestal Virgin appears to be

vestal no more as the stage direction indicates: “Stands back; fingers herself absent-

mindedly as she looks on” (SFP, 91). Cave’s bizarre interpretation of female eroticism

displayed by the Vestal Virgin’s distracted yet voyeuristic act leaves the possibility for

interpretation open and impels the reader to collaborate in the construction of the text’s

meaning. The Vestal Virgin who initially appeared as an impassive actor, who guided

the reader through the play’s five consecutive acts, now engages in an active

transgression of public masturbation. Considering the impending death of the Baptist, as

the title suggests, this exhibition of abject voyeurism shatters the confines of normal

behaviour. The position of the abject “is radically excluded” and draws the reader

toward the place where meaning collapses (Kristeva 1982, 2).

Following the Vestal Virgin, Cave’s stage direction indicates: “As in the

remarkable painting by Puvis de Chavannes the scene is thus: (left to right) NEGRO

with axe; JOHN THE BAPTIST, hands roped and kneeling; SALOMÉ, hand working

diligently between her sugar thighs” (SFP, 91). The painting Cave is referring to is

entitled “The Beheading of St John the Baptist” (1869) which is housed at the Barber

Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham (Fig. 1). This work is not to be

confused with the larger version produced in 1870 that shares the same title and is

exhibited at the National Gallery in London. “Although most scholars have dated it to

the same period… the London picture is very different in style and offers a rather

different interpretation of the subject” (Leighton & Bomford 1996, 592). Namely, the

addition of the male figure in the red robe, assumed to be Herod, and the seated woman

who shields her eyes from the horror of the sacred beheading. Due to the compositional

aspect of the previous rendition with regards to Cave’s stage direction, it is clear that the

author was referring to Puvis de Chavannes’s three-figured work. Surprisingly,

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however, “although they now look very different, the London and Birmingham pictures

originally shared an almost identical composition135” (Leighton & Bomford 1996, 592).

Considered to play a critical role in the history of late-nineteenth century French

art, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes “specialized in the depiction of women’s stately

listlessness. His work, in turn, helped give direction to the wilting females of the

symbolists” (Dijkstra 1986, 77). Similar to the symbolists who preceded Cave, Puvis de

Chavannes’s treatment of the female aesthetic spoke to the author’s creative spirit. Not

only did the subject of Salomé inspire Cave but he was also influenced by the painting’s

compositional structure. The compelling aspect of Cave’s treatment is his abject

translation of the pivotal scene. While the painting depicts an ambiguously demure

Salomé, her head inclined modestly as she clasps her cloak to cover her body, Cave

smashes the sexual taboo. He brazenly depicts Salomé once more in an act of sexual

self-gratification as her hand works “diligently between her sugar thighs”.

One similarity between the painting and Cave’s play is the presentation of John

the Baptist. In both treatments John is peacefully surrendering himself to the Lord.

Puvis de Chavannes depicts the holy prophet already sainted with a golden halo; his

arms open in an act of holy sacrificial offering. Similarly, Cave’s submissive John

surrenders to a holy sacrifice as the stage direction indicates: “He looks heavenward”

(SFP, 91) and the prophet states: “I am ready, Lord!” (SFP, 91) The one contrast

between the two treatments is that in Cave’s play, John fires a threatening outburst to

Salomé before his ultimate surrender: “All Heaven and Hell are watching, evil one! The

angels puff up the clouds for me, the poker is in the furnace for you!” (SFP, 91).

Although, in Puvis de Chavannes’s painting, one can only imagine John’s spoken words

before the executioner strikes, his demeanour is one of tranquillity and peace.

Another contrast to be considered between the two works is the active

involvement of the princess. In Puvis de Chavannes’s painting, Salomé passively stands

back, platter in hand as she awaits her trophy. She appears to be almost lingering, as the

platter is held downward by her side. Her expression seems listless, as does her placid

holding of the platter. Cave takes a more active approach as Salomé “in climatic

ecstasy” (SFP, 91) torments the prophet until he takes his last breath: “And so am I! Let

the axe drop, and silence this fucking do-gooder!” (SFP, 91) When John the Baptist

utters his final words, “I go to my God. Though narrow are the gates, he will show the                                                                                                                135 “An X-radiograph of the London painting confirms that it was conceived initially as a three-figure composition” (Leighton & Bomford 1996, 592).

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way” (SFP, 91) the “moon blinks on and blood runs down the insides of SALOMÉ’s

dress” (SFP, 91). The blinking moon signifies life. The ancients depended on the cycle

of the moon for the planting of their crops. “Also known as ‘Lunar Planting’, or ‘Moon

Lore’, moon planting was adopted as farmers observed improved germination and

growth of plants during certain moon phases” (Bagnall 2009, 10). As previously

addressed, the moon also depicts a woman’s menstrual cycle. The flowing of blood

from the insides of Salomé’s dress leaves the interpretation open to ambiguous semantic

references. For example, Salomé’s menstrual blood flow is abject and is furthermore

ambivalent as it signifies life and death. A woman’s menstrual cycle confirms her

fertility, which is a life force, whereas Salomé’s blood flow may also imply death in the

representation of a miscarriage. The paradoxical notion of life and death aligns itself

with the blood flow of John’s beheading which is certain death.

The last act, which is entitled “The Platter”, is without doubt the most shocking

in terms of glorifying Salomé’s disturbing abject eroticism. The Negro executioner

enters with John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Cave insists the “head must be infinitely

bloody and so on” (SFP, 92). Herod recoils in horror and clutches his “problem heart”

(SFP, 92) before the Negro states, “This my most worthy master is the head of John the

Baptist… minus the tongue, which Salomé demanded for herself. She said to inform

you that you may eat the head but she’s gunna teach her cunt to talk good” (SFP, 92).

The fact that Salomé insists on keeping John’s tongue presents a number of

interpretative possibilities. It forces the reader to engage in an act of co-authorship since

the work of art is “constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to

countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable [sic]

specificity” (Eco 1989, 4). Eco’s notion of open work requires the collaboration of

interpreters to derive meaning from the text’s inherent ambiguity and incompleteness.

He states: Every work of art, from a petroglyph to The Scarlet Letter, is open to a variety of readings - not only because it inevitably lends itself to the whims of any subjectivity in search of a mirror for its moods, but also because it wants to be an inexhaustible source of experiences which, focusing on it from different points of view, keep bringing new aspects out of it (Eco 1989, 24).

Cave’s foray into decadent aesthetics invites the reader to complete the work, elevating

the role of the reader to that of co-author. The reader may embark on any number of

pathways to explore this notion by questioning Cave’s ambiguous employment of

abjection. What is the reason for Salomé’s insistence in claiming the prophet’s tongue?

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Is the tongue a trophy, a lover’s keepsake or a token of sexual degradation? Is the

tongue a prop to be used in Salomé’s abject sexual self-gratification? Or is Salomé

implying that in order to be baptized she requires the tongue to instruct her in scriptural

rhetoric? Will the prophet’s tongue bestow upon the princess John’s authority and

power? Will Salomé in turn finally acquire the prophet’s discipline and strength? The

questions are endless and reinforce Eco’s notion of an open work. However, when

taking Eco’s concept into consideration, nothing seems more ambiguous than the play’s

finale. Moments before blackout, a mysterious pre-pubescent girl enters for the first

time “naked but covered in bloody hand-prints” (SFP, 92) to announce the play’s end:

“GIRL: (Deadpan) The end” (SFP, 92).

In drawing to a close, this study shows how Cave joins Wilde’s intricate tapestry

of the abject and demonstrates Salomé’s enduring legacy for causing shock and

controversy one hundred years after its publication. For as Wilde once stated: “It is only

the shudder that counts” (Ellmann 1988 341). Both Cave and Wilde take the biblical

text of Salomé and subvert it, engaging the reader to journey with them to the extreme

limits of what is permissible in society. By transgressing the Biblical book of Song of

Songs, Wilde created a distinct narrative of ambiguity to serve as a mask to his

phantasms. In doing so, Cave is entwined in the Song’s mosaic. This literary

transformation sheds light on the author’s motivating desire to represent the femme

fatale in all her abject glory. Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality further

illuminates the decoding of the intricate Salomé tapestry, its hidden threads and its loose

ends.

The interwoven tapestry of creating something new with something old recalls

Genette’s theory of transtextuality. Genette provides the concept to examine the literary

transformations Wilde utilized as inspiration in his rewriting of the biblical myth. The

process of adopting and consequently combining both literary and biblical influences to

create an original work such as Salomé provides the reader with an inspiring literary

tapestry so ambiguous that the reader is compelled to explore the play’s foundation.

Wilde was clearly influenced not only by the previous French masters and their various

artistic treatments of the Salomé story but more profoundly by Renan’s French

translation of the Song of Songs. The sensuality, beauty and resonance of Renan’s

French translation echoes in Wilde’s Salomé to such a degree as to highlight the play’s

sexual and transgressive themes. Kristeva’s conceptualization of the abject also proves

very relevant to understand Wilde’s transformation of the original biblical motivation.

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This chapter demonstrates the role of ambiguity in Wilde’s work and contributes to a

further understanding of the transtextual practices of demotivation, transmotivation and

transvaluation. Wilde takes the images present in the Song of Songs and subverts them,

demonizing the once celestial images. Genette proposes that at times the existence of a

hypotextual work is uncertain. However, this study illustrates the way in which Cave,

for instance, engages in a biblical borrowing of the Song of Songs by imitating some of

the poetics exhibited in Salomé. The reader is able to discover subtle semiotic

resurgences of Wilde’s biblical hypotext.

This study will now proceed to consider other modern adaptations that

demonstrate different degrees of experimentation, not always as innovative as Cave’s

successful modern interpretation of Wilde’s work.

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2.

SALOMÉ/SALOME’S OUTRÉ ART: Sustaining the Fin-de-Siècle Attack136

Ada Leverson, the eccentric novelist whom Oscar Wilde affectionately named “The

Sphinx”, was enamoured with Charles Ricketts’s 1893 design for John Gray’s

Silverpoints. In the preface to her Letters to the Sphinx from Oscar Wilde, published in

1930, Leverson’s passion for maximising the decorated book’s visual and aesthetic

effect upon the reader became the catalyst for the reader’s intimate response to the play.

The limited first edition of Salomé was therefore the visualisation of the play’s

“unwritten thoughts”: There was more margin; margin in every sense of the word was in demand, and I remember looking at the poems of John Gray (then considered the incomparable poet of the age), when I saw the tiniest rivulet of text meandering through the very largest meadow of margin, I suggested to Oscar Wilde that he should go a step further than these minor poets; that he should publish a book all margin; full of beautiful unwritten thoughts, and have this blank volume bound in some Nile-green skin powdered with gilt nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory, decorated with gold by Ricketts and printed on Japanese paper, each volume must be a collector’s piece, a numbered one of a limited “first” (and last) edition: “very rare.” He approved (Quoted in Frankel 2000, 1).

Leverson’s powerful imagination in visualizing the aesthetic beauty and artistic

possibilities of the decorated book reignited the fire of Wilde’s dancing princess as she

remerged from the flames of banishment. When Sir Edward Pigott banned the play,

citing an old law, which forbade the depiction of Biblical characters on stage, Wilde

turned to the decorated book to evoke his “ever-burning desire to conflate total theatre

design with total book design” (Navarre 1999, 91). In this respect, the first published

edition of Salomé was a theatrical performance.

Toward the end of the nineteenth century a book’s “physical appearance and

manner of publication mattered at least as much as the text itself” (Frankel 2000, 1-2).

Published on both sides of the channel, Wilde went to meticulous lengths in the

aesthetic presentation of the printed French publication. The book was to be

sumptuously bound in “Tyrian Purple and fading silver” (CL, 554). The French edition

marked a love affair for Wilde, simulating the author’s own personal affair with his

                                                                                                               136 Title inspired by Gilbert, Elliot L. “Tumult of Images: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome” (1983): “Beardsley and Wilde, through a notable representation of perverse sexuality in their work, participate in a devastating fin-de-siècle attack on the conventions of patriarchal culture even as they express their horror at the threatening female energy which is the instrument of that attack” (133-4).

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clandestine lover, Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie). Wilde stated: “Bosie is very gilt-haired

and I have bound Salomé in purple to suit him” (CL, 555-6). Wilde was known for “his

obsession with, promotion of, and contributions to the look of a book” (Navarre 1991,

92). Yet the French edition is not illustrated. However, it relies on the aesthetics of the

vibrant purple Tyrian cover, the silver stamping and the unique layout of the text as it

“conjures up images of the sky and encourages readers to ponder the timeless landscape

of poetic myth” (Navarre 1991, 92)137.

As Wilde’s “Salomé underwent the transformation in 1892 from the pseudo-

symbolist work to one in the mainstream of English decadence” (Frankel 2000, 54),

illustrated books dominated the landscape of Victorian culture. Frankel explains in

Wilde’s Decorated Books (2000), “we must distinguish a French symbolist audience

from an English theatregoing one […] in 1891 (before it was published) Salomé had

been read by an extremely localized group of Parisian writers – and read, moreover,

under the sign of ‘poetry’ rather than ‘theater’ simply by virtue of Mallarmé’s

proximity” (53). Frankel also suggests, “it would not be until the publication and

reviews of Salome as a book in 1893 that the full force of the work’s “decadence”

would be realized” (54). In its elaborate published form, Salomé’s theatricality was

explored as the visual aspects of the printed edition highlighted Wilde’s mysterious and

ambiguous text. Prior to commencing the English translation, Lord Alfred Douglas

wrote in a review for Spirit Lamp (Oxford) published in May 1893, “Artistically

speaking the play would gain nothing by performance, to my mind it would lose much.

To be appreciated it must be abstracted, and to be abstracted it must be read” (Quoted in

Beckson 1970, 139).

Taking the above comments into consideration, the Salomé reader experiences a

new and unusual aesthetic reception of Wilde’s work. As the late nineteenth century

reader holds the physical Salomé book in his or her hands and opens the tyrian purple

cover, he or she is transported into a world of symbols, French decadence and most of

all poetic beauty. The crisp sound of the turning of the first page marks the beginning of

the play as the curtain dramatically rises. Nevertheless, nineteenth century readers had

to be content with the French language version of Salomé as it wasn’t until the

following year in 1894 that the play was published in English. There is a sense of

                                                                                                               137  Frankel suggests “the edition’s highly unusual, purple paper wrapper, with its silver modern-face lettering, that establishes this as a symbolist book with synaesthetic aspirations, fundamentally in accord with symbolist color theory” (2000, 56).

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ambiguity to the language that seems to unsettle native English speakers when

confronted with an English translation of Salomé’s strange French symbolist text.

Furthermore, the English edition ushered in a bold new dimension to Wilde’s drama as

the play’s notion of ambiguity was heightened due to the intratextual multiplicity

established by Aubrey Beardsley’s accompanying illustrations.

Critics and translators such as Holland (1957), Ball (2012) and Harries (2012)138

have often been swift to attack the original English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas

in order to explain why Salomé has not enjoyed the success of Wilde’s acclaimed

society comedies in the English-speaking world139. A number of translators have taken

to task Douglas’s original rendition of Salomé in English, subsequently contributing

their own adaptions. These include Wilde’s son Vyvyann Holland in 1957, R.A.

Walker, also in 1957, Richard Howard in 1978 and renowned Wilde biographer,

Richard Ellmann in 1982. As recently as 2011, Joseph Donohue updated Douglas’s

much criticised translation of the play to modern day colloquial standards in an attempt

to appeal to a contemporary audience and gain a new favourable reception for the play.

In doing so, however, he lost the essence of Wilde’s initial goal of experimentation

through the use of a poetic and mysterious mode of communication, the language’s

distinct repetitive refrains and the use of symbolic metaphors. The intentional

strangeness and ambiguity of the play is ultimately diminished.

This chapter goes against the grain to reinstate Douglas’s translation. There are

obvious linguistic flaws in the original English version but I will argue that overall

Douglas was successful in capturing the strangeness and experimentation of the

symbolist language present in the original French text140. Furthermore, in performing a

semiotic analysis of Wilde’s Salomé as it appeared in the English edition, one cannot

overemphasize the relevance of awarding legitimate attention to Beardsley’s work. For

it is the juxtaposition of text and image that solicits an increased degree of

interpretation. In this regard, the reader discovers his or her freedom of analysis for it is

in the interaction between the text and the image that a more nuanced analysis can

                                                                                                               138 Ball states that Douglas’s English translation contains “clumsy phrasing and indefensible archaisms” (2012, 46) and cites Elizabeth Harries characterizing the translation as possessing “ridiculous inversions and archaisms” (2012, 46). Vyvyann Holland describes sections of Douglas’s translation as “almost absurd” (1957, 6). 139 In his opening notes to the 1912 English edition of Salomé, Wilde’s literary executor, Robert Ross, sheds light on the play’s lack of reception in English speaking countries: “Salomé has made the author’s name a household word wherever the English language is not spoken” (vii). 140 See Oscar Wilde, Salomé, présentation par Pascal Aquien, illustrations d’Aubrey Beardsley, Paris, GF Flammarion, 1993, 2006, pages: 25-28.

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emerge for the reader. More significantly, Beardsley’s illustrations “offer the reader

important interpretative guidance; for these drawings represent an engaging range of

direct, indirect, expository, and digressive commentaries on the discourse of the play”141

(Gillespie 1996, 138). As an artist, Beardsley creates a unique function of visual poetics

where the illustrator maximizes two distinct semiotic codes. So much so that “one’s

perception of Beardsley’s work stands out as an experience separate from the act of

reading the drama but as part of the total impression of Salome, although admittedly this

entails a response markedly different from conventional linear interpretations”

(Gillespie 1996, 139).

Considering the critical attention attributed to Beardsley’s illustrations in the

original English publication and the vast degree of interpretation initiated by such a

distinct intratextual relationship with Wilde’s text, it is important to also focus on the

play’s illustrations when exploring the subsequent English translations. I will therefore

include such works in a study of the aesthetics and poetics of ambiguity in the two

illustrated translations, which were published in the following one hundred years.

This chapter explores the inherent ambiguity that resides in both the textual and

the visual aspects of the published book. From the original English edition of 1894

Salome A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde: Pictured by

Aubrey Beardsley we turn to two very distinct published translations: Oscar Wilde

Salomé Newly Translated by Vyvyan Holland Engravings by Frank Martin (1957) and

Oscar Wilde Salomé A Tragedy in One Act Translated by Joseph Donohue Illustrated

by Barry Moser (2011). In order to support the claim that the original English

publication succeeded in capturing the ambiguity of Wilde’s original symbolist French,

this study will demonstrate that as we progress through time, translators have departed

from Wilde’s initial intention of ambiguity residing in the Salomé text. While, at the

same time, the Salomé illustrations have also abandoned the original decadent

aesthetics, which heightened the aesthetic intensity of Wilde’s play.

                                                                                                               141 See also Gilbert (1983). Gilbert suggests that “the text and pictures of the English Salome are in fact very closely related – commenting on and illuminating one another in a great many ways and achieving a single strong focus” (133).

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Translation and the Diminishing Effect on the Symbolist Voice Despite being considered the villain in Wilde’s dramatic downfall, one must not neglect

the fact that Douglas was a gifted poet142. “I am the love that dare not speak its name”143

is a poignant line, which still resonates with the twenty-first century reader. Salomé is a

poetic text deserving of a poet’s critique and, in the case of Douglas, deserving of a

gifted poet’s translation. Douglas felt the depth of Wilde’s words that enabled him to

capture the melody of Wilde’s musical text: One thing strikes one very forcibly in the treatment, the musical form of it. Again and again it seems to one that in reading one is listening; listening, not to the author, not to the direct unfolding of a plot, but to the tones of different instruments, suggesting, suggesting, always directly, til one feels that by shutting one’s eyes one can best catch the suggestion. The author’s personality nowhere shews itself (Quoted in Beckson 1970, 139).

The above quotation is taken from Douglas’s review of Salomé published in 1893, a

year before the published English translation. While reviewing Wilde’s work, Douglas

was especially attentive to the author’s musical styling and moreover Wilde’s goal of

experimentation in the use of employing a foreign French. He suggested that Wilde’s

“French is as much Mr Wilde’s own as is the psychological motive of the play”,

Douglas wrote: It is perfect in scholarship, but it takes a form new in French literature. It is a daring experiment and a complete success. The language is rich and coloured, but never precious, and shows a command so full and varied that the ascetically artistic restraint of certain passages stands out in strong relief (Quoted in Beckson 1970, 139).

Douglas understood Wilde’s language to be “rich and coloured” and as such, a “daring

experiment” which would therefore require a daring English translation. In order that

the English version elicit the prescribed rhetoric of a symbolist dream144, Douglas

needed to produce a similar effect in English to create a poetic language which, like the

original French, could stand “out in strong relief”. This was achieved through the

                                                                                                               142 For a comprehensive review of the life and poetry of Lord Alfred Murray Douglas see: Douglas, Murray. Bosie A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (2000) and Wintermans, Caspar. Alfred Douglas: A Poet’s Life and His Finest Work (2007).  143 A phrase from the poem “Two Loves” by Lord Alfred Douglas published in 1894. 144 Mallarmé described Wilde’s Salomé as a language expressed in “constant, dazzling strokes” rising from each page “the unutterable and the Dream” (See Introduction). Maurice Maeterlinck also characterizes Salomé’s poetics to inspire a dream as he thanks Wilde for “the gift of your mysterious, strange, and admirable Salomé. I expressed my thanks to you today as I emerged, for the third time, from this dream whose power I have not yet explained to myself” [(le) don de votre mystérieux, étrange et admirable Salomé. Je vous ai dit merci aujourd’hui en sortant, pour la troisième fois, de ce rêve dont je ne me suis pas encore expliqué la puissance] (Quoted in Ellmann 1988, 375).

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stylised borrowing of a particular Biblical lexicon and grammar reminiscent of the King

James Bible.

The French text is strange and ambiguous, incantatory with sonorous repetitions

and salient (projecting/pointing outward) in scriptural phraseology. The French is

simple in syntax but rich in symbolic metaphor while experimenting with imagination

and the emotion of desire. When translating Wilde’s French into English, the

translator’s intention must capture the ambiguity and foreignness of the language. For a

writer such as Wilde, “the art of symbolist theatre becomes a special, idiosyncratic, and,

most of all, private art while remaining an art that is nonetheless the true mask of self”

(Donohue 1994, 90-1). Donohue supports his assertion by stating, “Wilde’s Salome

must be approached with the idea in mind of the fin-de-siècle artist’s search for means

of embodying in art the multiple subjective correlatives (to invert T.S. Eliot’s useful

notion) of an authentic self” (1994, 91).

Despite Donohue’s claim to approach Wilde’s Salomé “with the idea in mind of

the fin-de-siècle artist”, his 2011 translation, to be analysed later in this chapter, departs

from the original goal of experimentation. By modernizing the language of a Symbolist

text, Donohue strips Wilde’s Salomé of its essential aesthetic value. The impulse to

rejuvenate the text has resulted in diminishing the play’s innate ambiguity and

ambivalent codes of signification.

Wilde’s creation of a strange and ambiguous language presents challenges when

the Symbolist rhetoric is translated into English for an English audience. Powell

substantiates this idea by stating that: Even if Salomé were to have been performed in English in London, the jewelled artifice of Wilde’s language, its fantastic repetitions, and its disconnected dialogue would have thrown off an effect akin to a performance in a foreign language. In other words, the effect of estrangement that Salomé produces from language itself - from the sound of it, its meaningfulness, and communicative potential - is part of the texture of the play itself, regardless of the language it is performed in or whether the audience is English or French (2009, 60).

 Within symbolist aesthetics, Salomé provides an excellent example of the art of

artificiality and the curious effect, which a strange symbolist-style language produces

upon the reader. Wilde’s use of French as not only a symbolist idiom that constitutes a

“slightly childish language” (Jullian 1969, 274) but also “a flowery French in which the

anglicisms were acceptable as they gave a real ingenuousness to the babbling of Salome

and a strange majesty to Herod’s speeches” (Jullian 1969, 274). While Wilde’s choice

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of French is described as “a poet (who) joined an international avant-garde” (Jullian

1969, 274), his distinctive voice can be heard within the peculiarities of a distinctive

French lexicon and grammar: “In order that certain words should stand out as the author

intended, Salome has to be acted with an English accent” (Jullian 1969, 274). At the

same time, “a work by an English-speaking playwright will, when translated into

English, always sound foreign by virtue of its journey” (Cohen 2013, 245), Salomé’s

symbolist styled rhetoric should transfer a similar strange effect upon the English

reader. For example, when the Salomé translator renders “the pared-down quality of the

French original in English, the language of the translated Salomé is made equally

strange: it employs a mannered English, unlike that of any of Wilde’s other dramas,

which is largely a stylised form of King James biblical diction” (Cohen 2013, 245).  

In the Translation Review essay entitled “Oscar Wilde’s French Salomé in

English” (2012), David Ball asks a very relevant question: “Should the translator use

“biblical” diction or try to find a modern English equivalent for the French as it is

written?” (45) This query becomes even more salient when we examine Donohue’s

modern day colloquial version. In order to capture the desired symbolist French

equivalent the translator must create a language as strange and ambiguous as the

original. To the native English speaker, one seems to require a biblical sounding King

James Version not only to appear coherent with the historical setting of the play but also

to provide a certain linguistic/poetic transparency. The modern Salomé reader

instinctively senses that the poetic language employed differs from common linguistic

usage. In order to convey Wilde’s symbolist voice of the original French, the translator

must remain true to the ambiguity of speech through symbolic metaphors residing in the

subtext of the play and expressed through heightened archaic rhetoric. Cohen supports

this idea when he suggests: Wilde could in fact achieve the effects he sought in an English Salome, in part through its modulated biblical diction, but even more powerfully through what he would designate as a form of language that is the perverse of art – a special category of English that can produce the aesthetic qualities which he imagines to be inherent in French (2013, 246).

Modernising the language to present day colloquial discourse unfortunately results in

losing the dramatic intensity and symptomatic expression of what the original French

language achieved, a dream-like poetic language of ambiguity. One must remember that

Salomé “is a carefully designed, melodic text whose linguistic and thematic structures

recreate and reinforce the play’s overarching effect” (Garelick 1998, 129). A play in

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which the “repetitive, incantatory dialogue appears and reappears in the mouths of

different characters who never seem entirely aware of the shared, enchained nature of

their speech” (Garelick 1998, 129). There is a note of estrangement or a sense of

incomprehensibility characteristic of a symbolist text. When translating such a play into

English, the translator must capture the incantatory style of the French and furthermore

the hieratic repetitions and aesthetic excesses that symbolist tragedy requires. Douglas

achieved this in stunning effect by employing archaic and Biblical sounding rhetoric.

However, it is challenging to demonstrate the value of the original English

translation by Lord Alfred Douglas when even Wilde did not seem entirely convinced

by the English translation. Whilst imprisoned, Wilde wrote to Douglas: I remember, for instance, in September ’93…We had, not naturally indeed, differed on the artistic value of your translation of Salomé…Three months later…new scenes occurred, the occasion of them being my pointing out to you the school boy faults of your translation of Salomé. You must by this time be a fair enough French scholar to know that the translation was as unworthy of you, as an ordinary Oxonian, as it was of the work it sought to render. You did not of course; know it then (CL, 686-692).

Despite what he states in the above quotation, it seems highly improbable that Wilde

did not approve of the translation before it went to print. Especially when considering

the meticulous lengths he went to in contributing to the aesthetic presentation of the

original French publication. Wilde’s disapproval of Douglas’s command of the French

translation, the English edition’s “stylistic affections and its lack of fidelity to the

French original are taken to be at variance with Wilde’s intentions. But the evidence

suggests that Wilde took a strong hand in the translation” (Cohen 2013, 243). Cohen

suggests: “Had he [Wilde] not been so committed to publishing an English edition he

could approve, one wonders why he would have endured a row with Douglas over it; it

is clear that Douglas’s name came off the title page as translator because Wilde made

changes that Douglas would not countenance” (2013, 243).

Wilde was meticulous when it came to the translation of his works. When

Henry-David Davray worked closely with Wilde on the translation of Wilde’s The

Ballad of Reading Gaol (1897) into French, the translator’s testimony sheds light on the

author’s meticulous intervention: “Each word was weighed, each term debated, each

phrase read, reread, and scanned, with all possible intonations”145. Cohen points out that

“[a]t each stage in Davray’s recounting, Wilde’s attention to the process of translation

                                                                                                               145 “Chaque mot fut soupesé, chaque terme fut discuté, chaque phrase fut lue, relue, scandée, avec toutes les intonations possibles”. Davray, Oscar Wilde, 94-5 (Quoted in Cohen, 2013, 244)

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reflects his sensitivity to fine sonic distinctions as well as broader aesthetic

considerations” (2013, 244) and cites Davray’s account to support the notion of Wilde’s

involvement in Douglas’s English translation:

The conversation returned to the impossibility of translating poetry, since the only difference among the words, the dissimilarity of sound and accentuation of syllables, suffices to make the qualities of the original disappear, which constitute a great part of its beauty. Wilde was singularly brilliant, and he raised the subject to a discussion of the goals of art and the conception of the artistic work.146

If Wilde was equally invested in the English translation of Salomé as he was with the

French translation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol then the critic can approach Salomé’s

English edition as an artistic work that extends beyond translation: “The differences that

can be seen between the French and English versions are at times examples of an

editorial hand at work, a desire to change the original text in a way that goes beyond

translation and into significant changes of content and style” (MacDonald 2013, 2). The

linguistic effects produced by Wilde’s non-native French result in the development of

an original and distinct language of subtle and aesthetic nuance: “Rather it would seem

that where he [Wilde] is limited linguistically, he takes his handicaps and turns them

into strengths, with some features of the style of Salomé in English originating in the

earlier French version” (MacDonald 2013, 2). Under the unofficial guidance of Wilde,

Douglas sought to elicit from the text an experimental language evoking the rhetoric of

the Old Testament.

When Douglas translated Salomé, biblical discourse creates a sense of scriptural

foreboding making it compatible with classical phraseology. Such heightened speech

evokes the experimentation and exotic quality of character that, especially in modern

theatre, a symbolist tragedy demands in order to remain faithful to the original French

text. Douglas created a powerful rewriting of Wilde’s original French and as such his

translation can be viewed in terms of Laurence Venuti’s notion of a symptomatic

reading whereby “the discontinuities at the level of diction, syntax, or discourse that

                                                                                                               146 “La conversation reprit sur l’impossibilité de traduire la poésie, puisque la seule différence des mots, la dissemblance du son et de l’accentuation des syllabes suffisent pour faire disparaître l’aspect de l’original et ce qui constitue une grande part de sa beauté. Wilde fut singulièrement brillant, il éleva le sujet jusqu'à une discussion des buts de l’art et de la conception de l’œuvre artistique” (Davray, Oscar Wilde, 107. Quoted in Cohen 2013, 244).

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reveal the translation to be a violent rewriting of the foreign text” becomes “a strategic

intervention into the target-language culture”147 (Venuti 1995, 25).

For Venuti, “translation is a process by which the chain of signifiers that

constitutes the source-language text is replaced by a chain of signifiers in the target

language which the translator provides on the strength of an interpretation”148 (1995,

17). Douglas’s linguistic choice may have been a result of the historical and cultural

context of Victorian England during the late nineteenth century, however such an

interpretation furnishes the language with an element of estrangement and ambiguity

that destabilizes the modern reader aligning the play with the original French Symbolist

text.

There is no better way to demonstrate the different relationships between the

original text in French, the translations, and the intertext, than to examine a pivotal

scene from the play, tracing its trajectory across the various linguistic, cultural, and

temporal traditions. Bearing this in mind, if we take, for example, Douglas’s translation

and most notably his archaic speech, we notice a certain peculiarity when Herod speaks

to Salomé: “You hear what your daughter says. She is going to dance for me. Thou

doest well to dance for me, Salome. And when thou hast danced for me, forget not to

ask of me whatsoever thou hast a mind to ask. Whatsoever thou shalt desire I will give

it thee, even to the half of my kingdom” (S, 136). The French original reads: “Vous

entendez ce que dit votre fille. Elle va danser pour moi. Vous avez bien raison, Salomé,

de danser pour moi. Et, après que vous aurez dansé, n’oubliez pas de me demander tout

ce que vous voudrez. Tout ce que vous voudrez je vous le donnerai, fût-ce la moitié de

mon royaume” (S, 137). Such an example “has none of the heightened diction, syntactic

inversion, or archaism characteristic of the first English edition” (Cohen 2013, 246) but

rather, “like the estrangement for English readers and audiences encountering a drama

in French, the English translation into antiquated diction has a defamiliarising effect. If

one accepts that Wilde at least approved the English translation that was published, then

this effect would seem to be deliberate” (2013, 246). If an element of alienation exists

when the Salomé reader encounters Douglas’s English translation, then Douglas has

                                                                                                               147 Nassaar credits Wilde (not Douglas) for such a radical rewriting from the original French. He suggests, “Wilde must surely have wanted the words, phrases, and sentences of Salome to fuse in total harmony, without a single discordant note to disturb the play’s rhythmic flow. Under these circumstances, translation becomes creation” (1974, 81). 148  For   Douglas, interpretation relies on the employment of classical phraseology reminiscent of the Biblical borrowings from the King James Version of the Bible.  

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achieved Wilde’s goal of experimentation that was intended to portray the spiritual and

imaginative French symbolist text. One in which the metaphorical and aesthetic

constructs of a symbolic language works in harmony with the sonic repetitions of the

French.

However, a half a century after the Douglas translation, the Salomé text begins

to depart from the text’s initial objective of ambiguity. When comparing the above

translation to that of Holland’s, some editorial additions can be noticed: “You hear what

your daughter says? She is going to dance for me. And after you have danced for me,

you may ask me for anything that you want. I will give you anything you want, even

unto half of my kingdom” (SH, 47). Holland transforms the opening statement into a

question with the addition of the interrogation point. Furthermore, he decides to forgo

archaic rhetoric by extracting “Thou doest,” “thou hast,” “thou shalt,” and “thee” to

remain closer to the specificities of the original French text. Despite Holland’s departure

from biblical diction, he does however borrow from Douglas’s translation, which

appears in the previous pages: “Yes, dance for me, Salome, and whatsoever thou shalt

ask of me I will give thee, even unto the half of my kingdom. The original French reads:

“Oui, dansez pour moi, Salomé, et je vous donnerai tout ce que vous me demanderez,

fût-ce la moitié de mon royaume” (S, 133)149. As Holland attempts to remain faithful to

the original French, he inadvertently diminishes the intrinsic element of symbolism,

which Douglas achieved through the stylized borrowing of Biblical and archaic speech.

This essential factor is made even more prominent in the 2011 translation.

Donohue significantly modifies the equivalent translation to produce quite a

compelling alteration to that of the original: “You heard what your daughter said. She’s

going to dance for me. It’s perfectly in order, Salomé, to dance for me. And after you’ve

danced don’t forget to ask me for all you want. All you want I’ll give you, even if it’s

half my kingdom” (SD, 59). The strangeness of antiquated speech is once again absent

in Donohue’s translation, which ultimately strips the English translation of the

appropriate posture necessary to convey Wilde’s original intention of experimentation.

This is distinctly evident in the grammatical use of the English contraction: “she’s,”

“it’s,” “you’ve,” “don’t,” and ‘I’ll”. The abbreviations drastically eliminate the

necessary archaic rhetorical emphasis that heightens the richness of the enunciated word

captured through the lilting of the French tongue.                                                                                                                149 Aquien points out that this quotation is taken word for word from the Bible in Mark 6, 23: “Marc 6, 23 est repris ici mot pour mot par Wilde” (2006, 174n)

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Despite the fact that French symbolist writers had a fairly limited audience,

native speakers of French living during the time of Salomé’s creation may have been

familiar with the style of French symbolist writers such as Maeterlinck and

Mallarmé150. Therefore, Douglas created an applicable ambivalence to the English

translation that corresponded to establishing a comparable symbolist effect upon a

native speaker of English. Many may find legitimacy in both Holland and Donohue’s

modernization of the Salomé text, since “[t]ranslation is the forcible replacement of the

linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text with a text that will be intelligible to

the target-language reader” (Venuti 1997, 18), and in this instance the target-language

reader lives over one hundred years after the original. However, in an attempt to

produce a modernized version the translator should create within that language “the

echo of the original” (Benjamin 2002, 258). The new translation should resonate within

this echo expanding the resounding reverberation of the original text and its meaning.

Benjamin elaborates on this theory: The task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language, which produces in that language the echo of the original. This is a feature of translation that basically differentiates it from the poet’s work, because the intention of the latter is never directed toward the language as such, as its totality, but is aimed solely and immediately at specific linguistic contextual aspects (2002, 258).

When the translator departs from the aesthetic value of such striking “linguistic

contextual elements”, the Salomé text is unfortunately diminished.

In examining the archaic rhetoric Douglas employed through the stylized

biblical borrowings of the Old Testament, leads one to a fascinating investigation as to

which French version of the Bible Wilde consulted when composing his drama in a

language other than his own. In the aforementioned quotation we encounter the French

phrase “fût-ce que la moitié de mon royaume”. The use of “fût”, the past imperfect

tense of the subjunctive mood of the verb “to be”, is not common and the inversion

“fût-ce” is the only occurrence of this literary conjunction of the verb in the text

(Macdonald 2011, 4-5). MacDonald points to the fact that “nowhere else in the play

does Wilde use the imperfect subjunctive” (2011, 5) and references Wilde repeating the

phrase six times in the French version of Salomé (S, 133, 135, 137). This phrase also

offers a fascinating insight into the biblical passage that Wilde consulted as inspiration

                                                                                                               150 Similar to Salomé “Maeterlinck makes extensive use of the repetition of simple phrases, which lends a dream-like quality to the verbal texture; he also employs scenic elements in a way similar to Wilde” (Raby 1988, 105).

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and to what French version of the Bible Wilde may have used. For example in Mark

(6.23) where Herod swears his oath to Salomé, MacDonald offers a number of French

examples. Mark (6.23) of the Sacy version of the bible reads as, “Oui, je vous donnerai

tout ce que vous me demanderez, quand ce serait la moitié de mon royaume”151 (Sacy).

The 1846 translation by Lamennais translates the passage as: “Quoi que ce soit que tu

demandes, je te le donnerai, fût-ce la moitié de mon royaume”. The 1860 translation by

Albert Rilliet is nearly the same : “Quoi que ce soit que tu me demandes, je te donnerai,

fût-ce la moitié de mon royaume”152. These examples also provide an insight into the

grammatical structures Wilde employed since “both the Lamennais and the Rilliet

versions use the pronoun tu as Herod address Salome, and not the pronoun vous that

Wilde uses for Herod’s promise to Salome” (Macdonald 2011, 5).

Regarding the English source to this passage, the King James version of the

Bible, Mark 6.23 reads: “Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto half

of my kingdom, if thou wilt but dance for me”. The Biblical idiom “deviates from the

Wilde version of this phrase in placement of commas and in the substitution of ‘ask of

me’ for ‘desire’ and ‘unto’ for ‘even to”. (MacDonald 2011, 5) MacDonald points to the

fact that “it is then open for discussion as to whether Wilde referred to any other

English versions of the bible while translating Salomé into English” (2011, 5). In his

statement MacDonald neglects to mention Douglas as the translator of the play and

continues to credit Wilde as responsible for the English translation: “While Lord Alfred

Douglas is credited as the translator of Salomé into English, Oscar Wilde himself is

acknowledged to have had a hand in the translation” further adding: “The differences

that can be seen between the French and English versions are at times examples of an

editorial hand at work, a desire to change the original text in a way that goes beyond

translation and into significant changes of content and style” (Macdonald 2011, 2). The

content and style of Biblical rhetoric employed by the translator demonstrates Wilde’s

desire to emulate an archaic voice or sound of Scripture.

MacDonald’s claim is supported by the notion characteristic of contemporary

translation studies that translation is inherently manipulative since “all translation

implies a degree of manipulation of the source text for a certain purpose” (Hermans

1985, 11). However, translation is first and foremost interpretation and as such, Douglas

                                                                                                               151 Quoted in MacDonald (2011, 5). 152 Quoted in MacDonald (2011, 5).

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chose to use a stylised version of English that for contemporary standards often seems

antiquated and out-dated153.

Douglas’s archaic and Biblical rhetoric often provokes quite caustic judgements.

Vyvyan Holland was extremely candid when characterizing Douglas’s choice of

Biblical diction calling it “almost absurd to use this form in the case of the matter-of-

fact Herodias” (SH, 6). In the foreword to his Salomé translation Holland points out that

the “second person singular was adhered to wherever it occurred, irrespective of

whether it was used in Biblical phraseology or as a form of address between relatives

and close friends as is usual in the French language” (SH, 6). This is evident when

Douglas translates the ordinary and familiar French “tu” as “thou,” with, as Ball

describes “archaic verb forms to match” (2012, 46). Ball sides with Holland finding

“absurdity in the whole wretched thing” (2012, 46). But was such manipulation of

translation so absurd? Douglas deliberately chose to transform the original French and

construct a symbolic language, the resultant transition creating a destabilising language

of aesthetic ambiguity.

In his foreword, Holland explained the reason for retaining Biblical phraseology

“only in the case of Iokanaan, who, as John the Baptist, would be expected to speak in a

biblical way, particularly as some of his utterances are taken literally from the

Scriptures?” (SH, 6) This is certainly due to the fact that Iokanaan paraphrases certain

scriptural passages from the Bible. However, if Holland decided to use such strange

antiquated speech inherent to Biblical phraseology then it seems imperative to remain

consistent throughout the theatrical discourse of the play in order for the piece to remain

cohesive. Observing this key fact, one notices that the English translation of Wilde’s

work benefits from a somewhat archaic, biblical sound in order to produce a

phantasmagorical world reminiscent of French symbolism. French differs in syntax but

more importantly, it differs in its musicality. Wilde was attracted to the elegant sonic

distinctions between the two languages, describing the process of writing in French as

touching or playing a musical instrument154. For Wilde, the language of Salomé

required attention to sound, to be enjoyed like a refrain of music155. An archaic form of

diction provides that sound in English. One only has to compare the original English                                                                                                                153 For Eco, “a translation is an actualized and manifested interpretation – therefore an important witness” (1979, 35). See also Crisafulli, Edoardo. Eco’s Hermeneutics and Translation Studies: Between ‘Manipulation’ and ‘Overinterpretation (2004) p. 89-104. 154 See Introduction. 155 Wilde often referred to Salomé in musical terms. In De Profundis he writes “one of the refrains whose recurring motifs make Salomé so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad” (CL, 740).

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translation to the musicality of a Shakespearean sonnet of iambic pentameter to

appreciate the inflection of such antiquated speech.

Amid the seemingly endless barrage of attacks upon Douglas’s translation, Ball

asks: “What, then, could possibly account for such intense scholarly interest in the play

(again, mostly in translation), the fact that it seems to be widely read, and the applause

that greeted performances of those ludicrous lines on stage as recently as 1995 at the

Brooklyn Academy of Music?” (2012, 54) When Ball poses this question he

immediately undermines his argument. In fact, the eccentricity of the Douglas

translation has inspired numerous revivals of Salomé with the requisite aura of

symbolism in delivering such an ambiguous text. For example, it bears mentioning that

the production Ball cites as containing such “ludicrous lines” is the critically acclaimed

revival of Salomé directed by Steven Berkoff.

First staged at Dublin’s Gate Theatre in April 1989 before the production was

revised as part of the Edinburgh Festival and later in New York at the Brooklyn

Academy of Music in 1995, Berkoff’s Salomé was an exceptional critical and

commercial success. Berkoff’s masterful direction revitalised Wilde’s most

misunderstood play, highlighting the Biblical phraseology of antiquated speech,

enhancing the play’s unique genre. Berkoff deliberately chose to use the Douglas

translation and as a result audiences have credited the stylised language of antiquated

speech as the highlight of Wilde’s play156.

Berkoff’s performance as King Herod coupled with his exaggerated articulation

of the Douglas translation spurred Al Pacino’s irresistible fascination with Wilde’s

Salomé. Pacino was spellbound by the language used, not knowing that Oscar Wilde

was the author and that this strange language he so admired was actually the translation

of a text originally composed in French. Pacino describes the experience of seeing

Berkoff’s production as if he “had found a friend, someone I wanted to know” and

stated: “witnessing something that I had never seen before and hearing words that I’ve

never heard before. I mean, Shakespeare of course, but in this fashion…I was just

mesmerized, I was stung by it. And like a lot of the audience, riveted. When you play

this (Salomé) in the theatre you see audiences tend to really listen to you”157. Pacino’s

comments offer a compelling insight into the power of the Douglas translation. While                                                                                                                156 See Salomé & Wilde Salomé (2011) starring Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain, Film and Documentary highlighting Pacino’s long fascination with Wilde’s Salomé. In particular, Q & A: Stephen Fry in conversation with Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain. 157 See Q & A: Stephen Fry in conversation with Al Pacino and Jessica Chastain.

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comparing the translation to that of a Shakespearean play, the actor was still unsettled

by the language. The play possessed the rhetoric of Shakespeare but not in “this

fashion”. The language is ambiguous, a language of symbols which requires the

audience to “really listen” in order to decode and articulate its meaning (Burns 1994,

34).

Berkoff’s pre-eminence, which attracted Pacino to the play, was magnified “by

what came out of that mouth: strangled vowels, elongated and mannered enunciation”

(Tydeman & Price 1996, 106). The production presented “extremely stylised and

unnaturally slow methods of enunciation and movement” (Tydeman & Price 1996,

110). Lines were delivered excessively slowly, prompting one critic to describe such

delivery as “a consistent vision of an exaggerated norm” (Coveney, Financial Times,

8.11.1989). The Observer described the cast of actors speaking “as if they had only just

learnt the use of their tongues” (Kellaway, 12.11.1989) allowing the spectator to focus

“attention on the words themselves” (Tydeman & Price 1996, 110). Such attention to

detail supports the notion offered by Tydeman and Price who suggest that “in

consequence the language came across variously as pure aestheticism, a trance-like

manner of speaking for sound rather than sense, or on the contrary as heightening the

moral stakes by giving the audience time to reflect on the implications of what was

being said” (1996, 110).

The strangeness of Douglas’s antiquated speech bolstered the trance like musical

effect, which Berkoff’s slow and exaggerated delivery provided. Berkoff’s approach

seems legitimate considering that “during rehearsals, Wilde reportedly demanded a

particularly slow, sensuous recital of his lines by the actors” (Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 63).

Dierkes-Thrun also suggests that “Wilde’s play achieves a powerful dreamlike

atmosphere through its stylized, dense, repetitious poetic prose, which unfolds at an

exaggeratedly slow pace and creates an almost ritualistic effect, building up hypnotic

force over time” (2011, 59). In this regard, the original English translation can also be

compared to the musical quality present in the original French text. If Wilde attributed

the sound of French to a ballad, or as he describes, “as one loves an instrument of music

on which one has not played before”158 then it seems to support the notion that perhaps

                                                                                                               158 In a letter to Florence Balcombe Stoker dated 22 February 1893, Wilde writes: “My dear Florence, Will you accept a copy of Salomé – my strange venture in a tongue that is not my own, but that I love as one loves an instrument of music on which one has not played before” (CL, 552).

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an exaggerated delivery in the form of magnified enunciation indicates and therefore,

reinforces the eccentricity of Douglas’s English translation.

The success of Berkoff’s production was particularly attributed to the acting and

the way in which the actors dramatically articulated the Douglas translation. When

interpreting Wilde’s unusual text, actors such as Pacino and Berkoff found a certain

fascination in Douglas’s manipulation of the original French and decided to highlight

the language through an exaggerated delivery. In doing so, the two actors heightened

the element of the play’s ambiguity.

Douglas was particularly attentive to the sonic qualities of the English language

as he was to the French. Despite the disparaging remarks expressed by modern critics,

the great symbolist poet, Stéphane Mallarmé, was one admirer who not only applauded

Douglas for his poetic talents but who also acknowledged the French influence on his

work159. In a letter to Douglas dated 24 March 1897, Mallarmé writes: Your Poems, which can bear the title proudly and simply, reached me in Paris, this winter, late, through complicated circumstances. I have the pleasure of reading them in the original without nevertheless neglecting the translation which renders them miraculously well; but even more in the parallelism of the two languages, I delighted in the first, your own, the original version, which fuses a double instinct which is both French and English. For your verse, depending on your emotion, however much it takes flight and trembles, infinitely, as in your greatest contemporary masters, retains a sureness of touch, unbroken and lucid, which is characteristic of us here160.

Mallarmé’s astute description of Douglas’s poems offers a compelling insight into the

parallelism of both the original French and the English translation. Mallarmé’s

reference to the French influence on Douglas’s poetry is quite powerful as it was this

influence that illuminates his English translation of Salomé. However, Douglas is

frequently criticized for his command of language and his interpretation of the various

phrases and idioms used. One example is the relative pronoun “dont” which, quite

common in French, is most literarily translated in light of its grammatical function “of

whom” or “of which”. When Douglas translates Salomé questioning the tempestuous

cries of the prophet, he remains authentic to the grammatical construction. Wilde’s

French reads: “Qui a crié cela? (…) Ah ! le prophète. Celui dont le tétrarque a peur ?”

(S, 63). Douglas translates this as: “Who was that who cried out? (…) Ah, the prophet!

                                                                                                               159 Mallarmé spent a year in London (1862-1863) in order to gain a certificate entitling him to teach English. Upon his return to France, Mallarmé taught English until his retirement in 1893. See Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé edited and translated by Rosemary Lloyd. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988 (See pages viii-xxvii). 160 Quoted in Douglas, Murray. Bosie A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas (2000), p. 98.

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He of whom the Tetrarch is afraid?” (S, 62). If we compare the original to Donohue’s

modernised version we can see a vast difference in the idiomatic expression: “Who is

that shouting? Oh! The prophet. The one the tetrarch is afraid of?” (SD, 16) The simple

use of “He of whom” remains consistent in the creation of a theatrical language

coherent to the time in which the play was composed.

However, in modern theatre Salomé’s ambiguous expressions and obscure

rhetoric seem especially strange to a contemporary audience when comparing it to

colloquial English. The antiquated speech once again furnishes the language with the

appropriate degree of eccentricity that the play requires. According to Ball, the above

translation is an “unspeakable sentence” (2012, 46), referring to the convoluted syntax

but in doing so, this critic reinforces the notion that Wilde’s Salomé is dreamlike in

symbolic metaphor, like the work of Mallarmé. There was no other poet to whom Wilde

would rather have been compared, the poet who was incomprehensible in French161. For

Wilde, to be incomprehensible in the English version of Salomé simply brought him

closer to Mallarmé.

In creating a symbolist drama, Wilde took biblical borrowings to furnish the

play with a scriptural system of linguistic signs, not only a biblical tone of foreboding

but of desire, decadence and strangeness. This cannot be achieved or created with the

same desired effect without remaining within the parameters of biblical speech to align

itself with the symbolist language reminiscent of the French writers such as Mallarmé

and Maeterlinck living during the time of Salomé’s composition. One only has to refer

to perhaps the most colloquial of Donohue’s translation when he takes the original

French: “Taisez-vous. Vous criez toujours. Vous criez comme une bête de proie. Il ne

faut pas crier comme cela. Votre voix m’ennuie” (S, 151-3), translated by Douglas as

“Peace! You are always crying out. You cry out like a beast of prey. You must not cry

in such fashion. Your voice wearies me” (S, 150-152). Donohue transforms it into:

“Stop it. You’re always mouthing off. You sound like a predatory animal. You just

can’t talk like that. Your voice makes me crazy” (SD, 68). Apart from the grammatical

use of the English contraction: “You’re” and “can’t”, the modern idiomatic phrases of

“mouthing off” and “makes me crazy” are perhaps best suited to midday soap opera or

as Ball suggests: “sounds like a contemporary American pop song” (2012, 52).

                                                                                                               161 See Introduction.

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One reason to explain such a modernized transformation is that when an author

and translator live in contrasting historical periods, “the mother tongue of the translator

is transformed as well” (Benjamin 2002, 256). Renowned German philosopher and

critic, Walter Benjamin extends upon his theory: “While a poet’s works endure in his

own language, even the greatest translation is destined to become part of the growth of

its own language and eventually to perish with its renewal” (2002, 256). One can

certainly appreciate Donohue’s colloquial rejuvenated text and therefore feel endeared

to a modernized treatment of the play.

However, as previously mentioned, in approaching a symbolist work such as

Salomé, the task of the translator should consist “in finding the particular intention

toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original”

(Benjamin 2002, 258). Taking Benjamin’s idea into consideration, Douglas’s version

captures the desired atmosphere that Wilde’s symbolist tragedy set in fantasy biblical

times requires.

Modern audiences do not require a modern colloquial reimagining of Wilde’s

text to enjoy Wilde’s play. The commercial and critically acclaimed productions of both

Berkoff and Pacino are testaments to that fact. Unfortunately, “those who have

responded with hostility to Salome have tended to do so on the grounds of emotional

and aesthetic excess” (Tydeman & Price 1996, 109). However, this study argues that

such emotional and aesthetic excess is the play’s strongest feature. Salomé epitomizes

the aesthetics of excess. Rather than remaining within the confines of familiar and

comprehensible language present in Wilde’s major achievements in society comedy, the

“destabilisation of language - emptied of its expressive power and ability to

communicate - produces in Salomé something like the intellectual and spiritual

weightlessness that would later be symptomatic of theatre of the absurd” (Powell 2009,

59-60)162.

The original English translation produced by Douglas in 1894 has been

contradictorily described as either “almost absurd” (Holland 1957, 6) or a work which

contains “clumsy phrasing and indefensible archaisms” (Ball 2012, 46) to very rarely

being described as “a brilliant success” that “only an artist of the highest calibre could

                                                                                                               162 Burns supports the opinion that Wilde’s Salomé is symptomatic of theatre of the absurd when she states: “Theatre is in a way the domain of the ridiculous; or, rather, all theatrical spectacle is potentially ridiculous, in the risks it must take to convince us of the unlikely and the untrue. Few plays run those risks as daringly as Salome” (1994, 35).

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have produced such a stunning effect”163 (Nassaar 1974, 81). Despite the contradictory

evaluations of the original translation, this study argues that the archaic rhetoric was the

fundamental feature in establishing a symbolist style language to coincide with the

original French text. However, during the past one hundred years, which followed the

original translation, the level of ambiguity was exceedingly diminished. Not only in the

play’s poetics of ambiguity but also in the visual aesthetics of ambiguity. This can be

seen in the play’s accompanying illustrations.

Just as the translations performed by both Holland and Donohue depart from

Wilde’s initial goal of experimentation, so do the artists who provided the visual

accompaniment to the play. Martin and Moser respectively follow their translator’s

direction away from the ambiguity established by Wilde, Douglas and Beardsley. In an

attempt to modernize Wilde’s symbolist inspired language to modern day colloquial

standards of the time, the translator’s have employed artists who offer purely decorative

images, which do not necessarily complement Wilde’s text. The accompanying artwork

appears ornamental rather than complementary since they do not provide a visual

narrative of the play. What Wilde achieved in words, Beardsley achieved in pictures. It

is such a unique collaboration of text and image that enhances the reader’s experience

as he or she is immediately thrust into the thresholds of interpretation by Salomé’s

powerful paratext.

Salomé and the Power of the Visual Paratext Resembling Japanese print patterns, Beardsley’s decadent and grotesque black and

white pictures illuminate Wilde’s symbolist text while simultaneously commenting on

it. An artist of extreme originality, Beardsley blended horror and beauty as he engaged

in the hybrid form of combining illustrations with text. As technological and aesthetic

innovations progressed, fin-de-siècle books ushered in a golden age of illustration

(Kooistra 1995, 1). Beardsley’s Salomé series are not mere embellishments in a purely

decorative form, but produce meanings by their contingent and intratextual

                                                                                                               163 Nassaar refers to the 1931 edition of Douglas’s autobiography where Douglas admits that the published translation was so altered as to bear little or no resemblance to his name (1974, 80) and suggests “the result is such a brilliant success that one can only heartily believe Douglas when he asserts that the English Salome was composed by Wilde. Only an artist of the highest calibre could have produced such a stunning effect” (1974, 81).

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relationship164. In “The Artist as Critic: Bitextuality165 in Fin-de-Siècle Illustrated

Books” (1995), Lorraine Janzen Kooistra views “aesthetic judgments on the degree of

graphic or literary excellence and evaluations of image/text compatibility (that) give

way to analytical descriptions of verbal/visual interaction […] illustration always works

with the text to establish meanings and direct interpretations for the reader” (4). When

considering Kooistra’s idea in relation to Beardsley’s pictorial interpretation of Wilde’s

text, we notice a profound degree of intratextuality as the illustrations augment the

ambiguity of Wilde’s pluralistic poetics.

Before even reading the play’s opening line, the reader is already drawn into a

world of mystique and ambiguity by the play’s paratext 166 . Beardsley’s deep

understanding of Salomé is portrayed by his unique and masterful parody of sex and

gender. Such an assault on the senses provides a window into Beardsley’s interpretation

of Wilde’s text as he incites the reader to take the initiative to make “a conjecture about

the text’s intention” (Eco 1992, 64). Considering that Eco’s hermeneutic theory is

concerned with three types of intention: intentio operis (the text’s intention), intentio

auctoris (the author’s intention) and intentio lectoris (the reader’s intention)167, the

Salomé reader engages in a variety of legitimate readings through an examination of

Beardsley’s illustrated paratext. The semiotic codes within the text are illuminated

through the intention of Salomé’s ambiguous paratext. In other words, the intention “is

not displayed by the textual surface… One has to decide to ‘see’ it” (Eco 1992, 64).

Therefore, “it is possible to speak of the [para]text’s intention only as a result of the

conjecture on the part of the reader. The initiative of the reader basically consists in

making a conjecture about the [para]text’s intention” (Eco 1992, 64).

When one is confronted with the paratextual elements of the published English

edition of Salome, the level of ambiguity is intensified. Genette explains that the

                                                                                                               164 Gilbert supports this theory when he states: “At first glance, those drawings may seem to conceal rather than illuminate the play, veiling its secret with their “irrelevance.” But the truths they tell are no less potent for being masked. In Salome, we see not the unfortunate dissociation of literature and art which has so often been alleged, but one of the most successful collaborations of poet and illustrator in history” (1983, 159). 165 Bitextuality, a term coined by Kooistra, “incorporates the strategies of both visual and verbal interpretation in order to understand how the dialogue between picture and word produces meaning within a network of cultural discourses. Representation – whether verbal or visual – is best understood as a social relationship in which various forms of power, knowledge and desire are enacted and disseminated. The marriage of image and text operates within this kind of social structure” (Kooistra 1995, 5). 166 For Genette, the paratext “is what enables a text to become a book and to be offered as such to its readers and, more generally, to the public” (1997, 1). 167 See Introduction.

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paratext “marks those elements which lie on the threshold of the text and which help to

direct and control the reception of a text by its readers” (Allen, 100). However,

Salomé’s notion of openness is reinforced due to the fact that its paratextual reception is

in a sense, “uncontrollable”. It remains difficult for the artist to manage the reception of

the text due to the extreme multiplicity of Salomé’s paratextualities. In other words, the

published play’s paratext initiates diverse interpretative possibilities as the Salomé

reader is thrust into the mysterious and the unknown by the intratextual elements of

Beardsley’s cryptic illustrations. In this manner, intrigue continues to beckon the reader

as he or she meditates on the intricate artistic components that furnish Beardsley’s work

with multiple signifiers. The reading experience is hence enhanced as the varying

degrees of interpretations are derived via the paratextual reception that invites the reader

to construct textual meaning. Constructing textual meaning through the play’s

paratextual features supports Genette’s claim that the paratext is in itself a text (Genette

1997, 7).

Genette’s conceptualisation of the paratext includes the peritext and the epitext.

For example, Salome’s peritext consists of the play’s title, the list of persons of the play

and the list of pictures by Aubrey Beardsley. The play’s epitext consists of the

controversial reviews of the French original, the scandalous banning of the play’s

opening168, interviews with the author, letters from his immediate circle of friends,

publicity announcements and “other authorial and editorial discussions – ‘outside’ of

the text’” (Allen 2011, 100). Genette explains: “The paratext consists as [the]

ambiguous prefix suggests, of all those things which we are never certain belong to the

text of a work but which contribute to present – or “presentify” – the text by making it

into a book. It not only marks a zone of transition between text and the non-text (“hors-

texte”), but also transaction” (Quoted in Allen 2011, 100).

In this regard, the Salome reader enters into a “contract” with the author when he

or she is confronted with the play’s paratextual elements. In Oscar Wilde The Picture of

Dorian Gray: Pour Une Poétique Du Roman (2004), Pascal Aquien suggests that the

operating modes, which are the various components employed by Wilde such as the

novel’s title, preface, and the first page constitute a highly structured reading contract

with the novel’s addressee (9). In taking Aquien’s approach to Salomé and applying it to

a semiotic reading of Wilde’s play, the author’s choice of title and title page offers a                                                                                                                168 “In fact, the censor’s ban itself became a sign of the play’s decadence; it was cited in a number of reviews of the 1893 edition as well as in Bodley Head’s advertising for the play” (Frankel 2000, 54).

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compelling insight into the play’s paratextual features. Salome A Tragedy in One Act:

Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde: Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley (Fig. 3) is a

multilayered and complex directive of ambiguity. As previously mentioned, if the

paratext is “not the text, it is already some text” (Genette 1997, 7), we can approach

Salomé’s paratext as a text in itself.

The title “Salome”169 instantly captures the attention of the reader to venture into

decadent aesthetics and immediately informs the addressee of the author’s departure

from previous treatments of the biblical story. In Wilde’s play, Salomé occupies the

central role as the overpowering femme fatale capable of assuming her own autonomy.

Wilde is informing the reader that he is breaking with previous treatments as Salomé is

not simply her mother’s pawn but is elevated from the once coquettish daughter to the

rank of principal character. Since an obsessive fascination for the Salomé myth

permeated the second half of the nineteenth century, the reader is already acquainted

with the protagonist’s taste for corruption and intrigue. However, Wilde’s dancing

princess becomes associated with a satanic element as Beardsley’s horned bare chested

androgynous figure sinisterly smiles whilst entangled in an intricate garden of evil.

Nestled amongst the hellish flora and fauna, the sexually ambiguous figure appears to

be mockingly hanging on a cross as the horned pinnacle replaces Christ’s crown of

thorns. The figure is elevated between two lighted candles presiding over an altar in a

blasphemous act of replicating a Christian mass. Beneath the fiendish figure, kneels a

naked demonic cherub. Hands clasped in the repose of prayer, the ambiguous winged

angel attracts yet repels as it forms a private and intimate connection to the reader.

If the Salomé reader is familiar with the play’s history of censorship, the title

page gains a further degree of ambiguity. Beardsley’s original submission included the

disturbing addition of male genitalia to present the demonic figure as a hermaphrodite.

Snodgrass astutely clarifies the historical ramifications of Beardsley’s provoking

hermaphrodite imagery:

Sexually self-enclosed as both male and female, the hermaphrodite became the conventional icon of “pure” eroticism associated with those less than pure late-nineteenth-century lovers who presumably could achieve no sexual satisfaction

                                                                                                               169 Navarre (1995) offers a detailed account of Salome’s original English edition title page (See pages 104-116). Navarre questions the plays Anglicized version of the title: “Why the accent aigu does not appear on the title-page of the 1894 Bodley Head edition remains a mystery” (1995, 104). Although one may determine that Navarre’s query is quite obvious, due to the fact that the English edition requires an Anglicized title to correspond to an English translation, the two subsequent English translations used for this study (Holland and Donohue) both use the accent aigu (Salomé) for the play’s title.  

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in reality (only in lecherous fantasies) and whose desires only increased for not being physically fulfilled. In the process the hermaphrodite’s graphic sexuality exposed the blatantly carnal foundation of the age’s “spiritual” myths (1995, 58-60).

Assuming the horned naked figure represents Salomé, Beardsley masterfully

encapsulates the dancing princess’s characteristic indeterminacies. In Beardsley’s

treatment of the biblical myth, Salomé is the metaphorical hermaphrodite par

excellence. She embodies both masculine and feminine personality traits as Beardsley

oscillates between both sexes to greet the reader with a perplexing notion of gender

ambiguity. Alluding to such gender indeterminacies in the title page immediately thrusts

the reader into Salomé’s den of iniquity. Armed with the aforementioned signifiers, the

reader is presented with a multitude of conflicting ambiguities, which ultimately find

their voice in the proceeding acts of degeneracy. Wilde’s Salomé narcissistically

relishes debased acts of sexual abjection. Namely, inciting incest, which leads to murder

and ultimately to the disturbing act of self-gratifyingly necrophilia.

Beardsley was certainly aware that his title page was in fact unacceptable or, as

he would describe, “impossible” for the nineteenth century reader. In a letter to Robert

Ross dated late August 1893, the artist wrote: “I think the title page I drew for Salomé

was after all ‘impossible’. You see booksellers couldn’t stick it up in their windows. I

have done another with the rose patterns and Salomé and a little grotesque Eros, to my

mind a great improvement on the first” (BCL, 52). Placating to Victorian sensibilities,

publishers Matthew and Lane forced Beardsley to reproduce a sanitized version in order

to remove the male penis, eliminating the offending member. The suppression

diminishes a compelling dialogue with the Salomé reader. Since Wilde’s epitext

includes the controversial censorship of the Beardsley’s illustrations, twenty-first

century readers lose the opportunity to engage in a deeper understanding of the play’s

historic context.

As Genette demonstrates with his theory of paratextuality, “there are a number

of ways in which the naming of the author or the titles of works can function to control

reception of the text” (Allen 2011, 102). When Salome’s subtitle proclaims “A tragedy

in One Act” the Wilde reader ventures into uncharted waters as Salome marks the

author’s first foray into tragedy, and a significant departure from his fellow Victorian

society comedies. Varty supports this notion when she suggests that “Salome can seem

strange in Wilde’s corpus. The play appears to be an uneasy bedfellow with the society

comedies which dominate our received picture of his dramatic work” (1998, 131).

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Furthermore, the play is performed without an intermission. Salomé demands to be

experienced in one act, implying that the reader, like King Herod, becomes ensnared in

the protagonist’s seductive trap170.

In accordance with the play’s subtitle, the reader is forced to engage in the

play’s accelerated momentum as its action propels the reader towards unsettling acts of

sexual degeneracy and ultimately death. In this regard, the play’s subtitle establishes its

pace due to the one act contract and the omission of an intermission. Those familiar

with Salome’s intricate intertextual history are already cognizant of the biblical saga of

murder and seduction. Therefore, in a sense, from the subtitle onwards the reader races,

knowingly, towards death.

Salomé’s subtitle continues with the description: “Translated From The French

of Oscar Wilde”. This statement declines to mention Lord Alfred Douglas as the official

translator of the play preferring to acknowledge his involvement in a personal

dedication on the following page: “To My Friend Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas The

Translator of my Play”. This ambiguous peritext alludes to the contested relationship

between both author and translator. Furthermore, the title supports the notion that Wilde

played a more substantial role in the translation from the French than had originally

been perceived. However, the dedication is nevertheless ambiguous. Critics are often

perplexed by the mysterious nature of Wilde’s intimate one page tribute to his

clandestine lover. Navarre views the dedications as “suspicious”171 while Hodnett

suggests that “Lord Alfred Douglas’ role as translator is relegated to the dedication

because Wilde considered his version inept and revised it” (1982, 229).

Eco’s notion of code and decoding and how this concept can also be applied to

non-linguistic forms of communication offers the reader a revealing insight into

Salome’s title page which is aesthetically bolstered by Beardsley’s accompanying

frontispiece entitled “The Woman in the Moon” (Fig. 4). Throughout the book,

Beardsley deliberately uses gender ambiguity, androgynous figures, hermaphrodites,

sexual explicit imagery and grotesque fantasy to radically alter the play’s referential

function. Eco explains that establishing syntactic relationships that violate the usual

laws of the code eliminate the possibility for a univocal decoding (1989, 195).                                                                                                                170 In describing Beardsley’s assault on the reader’s senses, Kooistra (1995) also notices the symmetry between the reader and King Herod: “Beardsley’s play thus becomes a scene of voyeurism which casts the reader/viewer in the role of Herod, manipulated and even titillated by the sexuality of the pictured scenes” (135). 171 “Because this information does not appear on the title-page, the validity of this statement appears suspicious” (1995, 114).

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Presented with such ambivalence, the Salome reader discovers “that the current code

has been violated to such an extent that it can no longer help. The addressee thus finds

himself in a situation of cryptographer forced to decode a message whose code is

unknown, and who therefore has to learn the code of the message from the message

itself” (Eco 1989, 195).

Aligning oneself with Beardsley’s sub-textual imagery, the addressee is

confronted with the ambiguity of sexual symbols infused “into an ironic reading of

Wilde’s play which offers a transforming counter-narrative for Salome by mimicking

the author’s themes” (Kooistra 1995, 132). The illustrations “tease us with the prospect

that they contain dangerous and perverse meanings, if only by the sheer profusion of

undraped body parts and sex organs dispersed throughout” (Frankel 2000, 73). Frankel

views Beardsley’s illustrations as not to be “described as working to produce ‘hidden’

meanings” but rather “it would be far more accurate to say that Beardsley’s drawings

seduce meaning, draining it away from the sign, so that finally what you see is what you

get” (2000, 73). However, as Eco’s theory of open work confirms, Beardsley’s

illustrations elicit unique and diverse interpretations: “No matter how popularized,

consumed, and fetishized, a poetic message will still find someone who will approach it

with, as it were, a virginal mind, even if this means that he or she may interpret it

according to a new code that has little or nothing to do with the one initially intended

by the author” (Eco 1995, 198). Eco’s theory of open work is clearly relevant when

analyzing Beardsley’s illustrated frontispiece.

Nothing could be more faithful to the notion of multiplicity initiated from

Beardsley’s commentary of Wilde’s text than the frontispiece as the confronting image

strongly advances the semiotic dialogue of the play. This is clearly demonstrated by the

diverse readings it has provoked. The Woman in the Moon offers a fascinating example

when considering Eco’s notion of openness and the role of the reader in interpreting a

text or an image. The addressee becomes the co-author in order to complete the

meaning established by Beardsley as he himself interprets Wilde’s text. In this regard,

there is an intratextual triangular effect as the reader participates in an active role of co-

authorship. For example, Wilde composes the play; Beardsley interprets the drama in a

pictorial form then as the addressee, the reader, interprets the scene’s bi-textual nature.

The placement of the illustration within the printed book is intriguing in relation to the

Wilde’s text as The Woman in the Moon refers to the opening lines of the play: The Young Syrian: How beautiful is the Princess Salome tonight!

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The Page of Herodias: Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from the tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things. The Young Syrian: She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. One might fancy she was dancing. The Page of Herodias: She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly172. (S, 44)

The frontispiece immediately draws the reader into the opening action of the play and

the ambiguities that the first scene initiates. The foundation of this ambivalence is

produced by Wilde’s employment of a strange symbolist language and the effect of

uncertainty that such rhetoric incites. The play begins as the moon entrances the two

characters and immediately sets the scene for the profound ambiguity that Wilde threads

throughout his entire drama. The image elicits a mixed and divisive range of

interpretations. Showwalter describes the two androgynous figures as a “frightened

couple” (1990, 152) and cites Marcus for praising “The Woman in the Moon” as the

only appropriate illustration of Beardsley’s interpretation of Wilde’s play. However,

Marcus’s description of the image is unsupported by Wilde’s text as she assumes that

the androgynous figure is Salomé: “John and Salome […] cowering in comradely

innocence before Herod’s face in the moon” (1990, 152). Marcus is not alone in

assuming that the male nude is John the Baptist and the feminized figure is Salomé as

Dellamora suggests, “John screens Salomé from the lustful regard of Wilde/the Moon-

figure. But John’s frontal nudity reveals the actual object of Wilde’s gaze, namely, the

youthful male body. In this instance the screen discloses a specifically male-male sexual

desire” (1990, 256).

Gillespie also remains perplexed regarding the characters depicted in the image

as he suggests: “presenting unidentified figures in a situation never directly addressed

within the play, calls into immediate question any application of linear interpretation”

(1996, 148). Walker goes as far as to imply that “the drawing has little connection with

the play” (1967, 26) and Snodgrass cites Arthur Symons who also wrongly identified

the human figures to be Narraboth and Salomé suggesting that the frontispiece is “an

                                                                                                               172 Le jeune Syrien : Comme la princesse Salomé est belle ce soir! Le page d’ Hérodias : Regardez la lune. La lune a l’air très étrange. On dirait une femme qui sort d’un tombeau. Elle ressemble à une femme morte. On dirait qu’elle cherche des morts. Le jeune Syrien : Elle a l’air très étrange. Elle ressemble à une petite princesse qui porte un voile jaune et a des pieds d’argent. Elle ressemble à une princesse qui a des pieds comme des petites colombes blanches… On dirait qu’elle danse. Le page d’ Hérodias : Elle est comme une femme morte. Elle va très lentement (S, 45).

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indication of just how successfully disorienting Beardsley’s pictures were” (1995, 276).

There appears to be an abundance of possible readings regarding “The Woman in the

Moon” thus confirming Eco’s theories of interpretation173.

Clearly, Beardsley’s frontispiece is a complex work that can be interpreted on

several semiotic levels. Tydeman and Price acknowledge the element of homoeroticism

present in the ambiguous image by “the intimately linked male figures […] observing

the moon among the clouds of the night-sky are the Page and the Young Syrian of the

play’s opening” (1996, 118-120). However, they also acknowledge that another possible

interpretation is that “perhaps the second figure is intended for Salome, but the lack of

elaboration in costume or coiffure would seem to contradict this, and both figures are

almost certainly masculine” (1996, 120). Snodgrass also advocates for Beardsley

depicting both figures as male: “That this “Salome” is actually Narraboth seems evident

not only from the logical order of the picture in the text but also from the fact that the

figure’s bared chest is portrayed without breasts, anatomical details Beardsley clearly

did not neglect when he depicted Salome in his other illustrations” (Snodgrass 1996,

278).

Snodgrass’s insightful confirmation that the feminized figure depicted is in fact

male shrouds the play in secrecy, providing a veiled subtext of homosexual eroticism.

Snodgrass notes that “the customary and ideologically serviceable distinctions between

male and female identity erode once we are shocked into the recognition that this

female companion is actually Narraboth, a male” (1996, 278-9). One can never derive a

single definitive axiom from Beardsley’s artistic interpretation of Wilde’s text as

Snodgrass implies: “Beardsley seems to insist on forcing a multiplicity of self-

contradictory readings and implying a world that is anything but univocal (or

diametrical)” (1996, 278). Snodgrass in turn reinforces Eco’s notion of the active role of

the reader by stating, “Thus, instead of giving us figures of clearly defined gender, in

this frontispiece Beardsley presents us with figures whose gender identities oscillate as

we try to decipher them” (1996, 278).

Never neutral, Beardsley’s frontispiece continues to incite a broad spectrum of

interpretation as the reader attempts to grasp the intratextual relationship between

Beardsley’s images and Wilde’s text, two distinct semantic and perceptual codes. Heyd

makes an interesting observation when she endeavors to distinguish the image’s

                                                                                                               173 See Eco, Umberto. The Open Work (1989).

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mimetic cryptograph, “Beardsley’s ‘direction’ of the scene is rather different than

indicated by the author. Whereas in the play Narroboth (the young Syrian boy) is

looking at Salomé and Herodias’ page is looking at the moon, Beardsley version they

stand next to each other, both staring at the moon” (1986, 100). Heyd’s interpretation is

not textually supported when we revisit the opening lines of Wilde’s text. As previously

mentioned, both the Page and the Syrian are looking at and commenting on the moon.

The Young Syrian certainly describes the princess in the opening line: “How beautiful

is the Princess Salome tonight!” however, by following the Page’s incentive to “Look at

the moon”, the Young Syrian ultimately fall’s under the moon’s seductive spell as he

attaches a series of metaphors to describe the moon.

Beardsley’s depiction of the moon becomes even more ambiguous as he adorns

the moon’s face with a caricature of the author. This Wildean moon serves “as an

emblem for this basic interpretive irresolvability” (Snodgrass 1995, 279). What was

Beardsley trying to achieve by inserting Wilde’s facial features in the moon’s face? The

moon, or in this case, Wilde’s eyes are conspicuously fixated on the couple. The nude

male is feminized by his discernable effeminate posture. Furthermore, the clothed figure

is extremely feminized by the choice of clothing and feminine attributes. Was Beardsley

conveying a subliminal message in referring to Wilde’s clandestine homosexuality? Is

the ambiguous facial expression one of envy, desire, shame, secrecy, sorrow, or even

despondency? Aligned with the moon is a visible flower whose large dimension draws

the reader’s attention. Tydeman and Price identify the ambiguous emblem as “the

notorious green carnation much favoured as a badge of identification by homosexuals of

the period” (1996, 120). Though they also claim that the flower “may be nothing more

sinister than a rose” (1996, 120).

The multiple interpretations derived from the heightened level of intratextual

ambiguity reinforces the idea that one can never arrive at a single univocal reading of

Beardsley’s frontispiece. The vast scope of critical analysis engages the reader in an

exciting textual dialogue that continues to evolve when he or she revisits “The Woman

in the Moon”. Snodgrass adequately encapsulates the frontispiece’s powerful ability to

produce multiple interpretations: “In the end, however, while we may shift from one

interpretation to another, even perhaps trying to synthesize their contradictions, no

interpretation can finally rise to dominance or ultimately vitiate the other; we are forced

to entertain all of them, in all their paradoxes, as defining the picture’s meaning” (1995,

280).

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Beardsley was masterful at playing with the ambivalences Wilde created within

the text providing the reader with an invitation to delve into an intriguing world of

fantasy. Beardsley’s allure of the grotesque incited interpretation and advanced the

semiotic and perceptual stimuli before the reader arrives at Salomé’s opening scene. The

title page and adjacent frontispiece complement one another as the multilayered

subtextual codes convey the artist’s deep understanding of Wilde’s work. Set apart from

Wilde’s text the two images offer their own distinct narrative and bolster the aesthetic

and textual intensity of the play.

In contrast, the 1957 publication strays from such an example of open work and

diminishes the limitless interpretative possibilities penned by Beardsley. When Frank

Martin was commissioned to illustrate Vyvyan Holland’s new translation in 1957, his

engravings were more decorative and therefore departed from Beardsley’s dialogue

with the Salomé text. For example, the frontispiece of the 1957 publication portrays the

dancing Salomé as a lone figure; her arms extended above her head as the movement of

her veils conceal her near naked body (Fig. 5). In contrast to Beardsley, there is no use

of gender ambiguity, nor does Martin offer a conspicuous and sexual insight into the

play’s diverse and multi-layered characters. On the contrary, the dancing Salomé

performs her exotic dance alone. This one-dimensional figure is restrictive in the sense

that she conforms to the cultural view of the subservient female dancer. Her role is to

provoke a desire as Martin references the critical dramatic juncture that is the Dance of

the Seven Veils.

While the reader can appreciate Martin’s intent to portray the infamous dance as

he highlights the dancer’s feminine beauty and the illustration’s power to evoke

orientalist imagery already associated with the Salomé story, the frontispiece is

controlled in its one dimensional style and therefore presents a closed work. Martin

restricts the reader’s ability to derive interpretative possibilities. The beauty of

Beardsley’s drawings “in their tautological yet often contradictory depictions of the title

character, continually remind us that one cannot derive full meaning from Salome

simply by foregrounding a particular figure or advancing a specific polemical position

in either conformity with or opposition to society” (Gillespie 149).

Highlighting the feminine attributes of the dancing Salomé is a theme which

runs through the entirety of Martin’s work as the artist continues to make a complete

departure from Beardsley’s interpretation of gender ambiguity, a central theme

throughout Wilde’s drama. Martin’s decorative prints reinforce the patriarchal notion of

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masculinized soldiers and subservient female slaves, for example, the untitled image of

the Princess Salomé reclining on a chair as near naked female slaves attend to her while

the queen Hérodias leans forward and speaks in Salomé’s ear. This illustration would

probably be more suited to Flaubert’s treatment in referencing the queen’s control as

she orchestrates the death of the prophet. Furthermore, in Wilde’s reading there are no

female characters other than Hérodias and Salomé, who interact with only males in the

play reinforcing Salomé as the central role of the piece. This engraving highlights the

fact that Martin’s work is mostly decorative and exhibits a limited relationship to

Wilde’s text.

There is, however, an original aspect in Martin’s approach here, as he clearly

acknowledged Salomé as the central and leading character of Wilde’s interpretation of

the Biblical drama. The fact that Martin presents the reader with a portrayal of Wilde’s

one-line stage direction in the form of a dancing Salomé reinforces the notion that, for

Martin, Salomé’s dance is the critical and dramatic turning point of the play174. Martin

also duplicated the aesthetic affect in the use of the colour green to reinforce and

highlight the title, which appears on the opposite page. The dancing princess swirls and

bathes gloriously in green tones, which also envelop the moonlit sky, the foliage of the

garden and the palace adornments. Martin’s 1957 frontispiece offers a compelling

paratextual insight into the artist’s interpretation of Wilde’s work.

Nonetheless, in the original English edition, Beardsley departs from the relative

banality of simply depicting an oriental dance in his seventh illustration entitled “The

Stomach Dance” (Fig. 7) to produce a very subversive interpretation of Salomé’s

dance175. As the ambiguous and provocative title suggests, Beardsley offers the reader a

glimpse into his world of eroticism as he “removes the scene from Judea to the Far

East” (Kuryluk 1987, 236). In Beardsley’s hands, Salomé becomes the corrupt and

distorted ballerina; the antithesis to the graceful and delicate coryphée depicted by

artists such as Edgar Degas during the second half of the nineteenth century176. In “The

                                                                                                               174 See Chapter 3. 175 It is interesting to note that “The Stomach Dance”, which portrays Salomé’s “dance of the seven veils”, chronologically occupies the seventh illustration. See chapter 4 for a comprehensive review of the Salomé’s dance and the symbolic reference to the number seven. 176  Regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism, Degas is especially renowned for his works depicting classical dancers. Despite being remembered for these elegant paintings, his most controversial work, a sculpture entitled: “La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans” (1881) [The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer], received mixed reviews when it was unveiled in the Sixth Impressionist Exhibition, 1881. (See Daphane Barbour. “Degas’s Little Dancer: Not Just a Study in the Nude” (1995) pp. 28-32. One critic,

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Stomach Dance,” the dancer is no longer portrayed as elegantly poised against a barre177

but rather she is perverted and aggressive or, as Guy Ducrey suggests, Salomé is “the

archetype of the belly dancer”178. Here the dance is showcased as a confrontation, the

dancing princess staring intently at her entranced viewer. Her powerful seduction is as

aggressive as it is sexual. Beardsley depicts a provocative Salomé whose eyes are not

downcast to assume a subservient position, a slave to man’s desires or as the pawn to

her mother’s ambitions. Rather, she is a woman who issues a challenge. Her expression

is defiant and striking. Beardsley empowers the image to mirror Wilde’s emboldening

declarations when Salomé affirms: “I am Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of

Judea”179 (S, 76). Salomé’s power and confidence radiates from the image, as her eyes

appear threatening. Her seduction is, in a sense, diabolical.

Both Martin and Beardsley depict dance movement as polar opposites. While

Martin masterfully captures the fluid movement of Salomé’s dance by the circling

action of cascading veils and the swirling flow of her dress, Beardsley depicts a

smoldering angular movement depicted by a masculinized stance. Movement is

furthermore enhanced by the free-floating roses, which are replicated by her rose

adorned breasts. The eroticism displayed by the placement of the roses on her nipples

enhances Salomé’s blatant sexuality. In this regard Beardsley’s image appears

threatening to the male viewer while Martin’s depiction of the dancing Salomé

conforms to the non-threatening stereotype, distancing his work from Wilde’s text. Part

of Beardsley’s appeal is due to the fact that “[p]atriarchal anxiety about the emergence

of women as a political force during the nineteenth century also crystallized around the

image of Salome” (Varty 1998, 136). Varty elaborates on the ambiguous nature of

Salomé, “Young, innocent, of astonishing beauty, eliciting voyeuristic sexual response

from a male court, Salome could sum up all the decorative and diverting qualities

requisite of woman”. However, “she was equally fury, harridan and whore, a dangerous,

capricious murderer, to be castigated for revelling in her own monstrous desires” (Varty

1998, 136). Beardsley embraces this ambiguity that is present in Wilde’s protagonist

while Martin’s frontispiece reproduces the patriarchal norms of femininity of the

1950’s.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Paul Mantz, commented upon “the instinctive ugliness of a face upon which all vices imprint their detestable promises” (Quoted in Barbour 1995, 28). 177 A handrail placed at hip height, used by a dancer to maintain balance during practice. 178 “L’archétype de la danseuse du ventre” (1996, 265). 179 “Je suis Salomé, fille d'Hérodias, princesse de Judée” (S, 77). Note: In the English translation, “Princess” is capitalized.  

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The monstrous desires evoked by Varty are pushed to the extreme in

Beardsley’s “The Stomach Dance”. For example, one should note the presence of the

demonic gargoyle who dwells in the underworld. The underworld is made prominent by

dividing the image into black and white. Situating the gargoyle in the blackness

references his demonic presence. The satanic figure is symbolic of the fires of hell as

his hair is also depicted as flames. The monstrous facial expression appears to revel in a

certain mysteriously evil intent as the gargoyle plays his instrument providing the

musical accompaniment to Salomé’s dance. Salomé appears to ascend from the

darkness of hell, rising as a seductive phoenix to taunt all who succumb to her wiles.

Salomé’s brazen sexuality is further emphasized by the gargoyle’s presence as Tydeman

and Price suggest:

The gleeful minstrel’s undisguised erection testifies to the erotic impact made by the sinuous, bare-breasted, rose-nippled Salome, but a major distinction between this routine and that often presented on stage is that the dancer’s features in no way portray seductive allure but are set in the mask-like stare which emphasis her adoption of the role of avenger rather than temptress (1996, 118).

Beardsley’s artistic interpretation of the multifaceted Salomé closely resembles the

aggressive nature of Wilde’s unique positioning of the dancing femme fatale. While

Martin encapsulates the vibrancy of the Middle Eastern dancer, the artist’s frontispiece

reduces all ambiguity.

Furthermore, such a divergence increases with Salomé’s 2011 English published

translation. There is a significant contrast between the levels of interpretative

possibilities when one compares Beardsley’s original frontispiece to that of Moser’s

portrait of Wilde which was featured in the 2011 modern English edition of Salomé

(Fig. 6). A straightforward portrait, Moser’s work appears purely realistic and lacks the

ability to engender diverse interpretations. It contrasts markedly from Beardsley’s

masterful ability to translate Wilde’s text in a mysterious and subtextual manner offers

the reader the opportunity to become, in Eco’s terms, a co-author to the text. In

comparison, Moser presents a work that is closed. Although Moser displays an exquisite

technique and presents the reader with a beautiful work of art, the main (if not the only)

possible interpretation of a Wildean portrait is a biographical commentary of the play.

Moser, or the addressee/reader, may see Salomé as the most autobiographical of all of

Wilde’s works and like The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) shrouds the work with a

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metaphorical veil to mask the hidden desires of homoerotic desire180. An elegant yet

straightforward portrait is simply that, a portrait. Moser declines to offer a particular

commentary of Wilde’s unique Symbolist work. Moser’s engraving does not offer the

reader any insight into an understanding of the play, nor does such a portrait incite the

reader to engage with the play’s subsequent text.

For Moser, the choice of portraiture and still life to illustrate the play requires

very little critical response from the reader. One such example is the illustration entitled

“Fruits are brought” (SD, 39), which one could consider being a reference to the King’s

banquet. Unfortunately, such still-life imagery appears rather mundane and irrelevant to

Wilde’s text. The images fail to provide the reader with an opportunity to engage with

the play on a deeper semiotic level. The images are decorative and at random,

neglecting any insightful commentary. In this regard, Moser misses the opportunity as

an artist to enrich the play. Of course his illustrations are open to interpretation and

certain readers may find opportunity for such interpretation. However, when we

compare Moser’s artistic rendering to that of Beardsley’s, the rich diversity of meanings

that Beardsley is able to inspire are not matched by Moser. Snodgrass supports this idea

when he indicates that the “careful placement of the pictures within the produced text

indicates a clear intention for the pictures to correspond in general subject matter and

chronology to the events of the drama” (Snodgrass 1995, 278).

As previously mentioned, Beardsley utilizes the play’s frontispiece to deliver a

homosexual reading of Wilde’s drama while playing with gender ambiguity in the

depiction of the Young Syrian and the Page. However, Moser decides to abandon any

reflection or commentary on the relationship between the two characters: their intimacy,

their tragedy, or their sexuality. Instead, he prefers to offer the reader two adjacent

portraits entitled “The Young Syrian” and “Herodias’s Page” (Fig. 11). The characters

that in Beardsley’s illustration embodied gender and sexual ambiguities now remain

fixed as separate identities with no visible connection to one another except that they

exist on the same page.

While Moser has portrayed both men of North African appearance to familiarize

the reader with the geographical location of the play, these two adjacent portraits appear

purely descriptive and negate the possibility to delve deeper within Wilde’s Symbolist

text. Moreover, Moser has made a further departure from Beardsley’s feminization of

                                                                                                               180 See Introduction: Kate Millet (1971), Elaine Showalter (1990) and Melissa Knox (1994).

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the page to disambiguate gender ambivalences within the image, hence neglecting

Wilde’s subliminal subtext of homoeroticism.

Existing as individual artworks separated from Wilde’s texts, Moser’s

illustrations are of excellent quality and certainly would find an appreciative audience

for their aesthetic value. However, the declaration made on the edition’s dust jacket

does not support an intratextual relationship with Wilde’s play: Barry Moser is an artist who speaks the blunt yet fluent language of present-day communication through the penetrating gestural vocabulary of the graphic arts. The resulting combination of words, and images directly engages with Wilde’s characters and their story, setting a bold new standard for the melding of literary and pictorial excellence. At the same time, it leads readers and audiences alike to rediscover perennially significant themes – of love, death, power, and individuality (2011).

The above claim is not sustained within Moser’s work as his illustrations distance

themselves from Wilde’s most ambiguous text. In contrast, Beardsley as the original

pictorial translator of Salomé, provides the reader not only an interpretative guidance

but also “the potential for expansive imaginative responses” (Gillespie, 139). This

becomes both an invitation and a challenge.

Furthermore, Beardsley positions within the opening pages of his artistic

interpretation a chronological “List of Pictures” (Fig. 8), which acts as a prelude to the

play. Such a paratextual feature is a foretaste to the ambiguities residing in the

forthcoming text. The position of the “List of Pictures” which immediately follows

Salomé’s frontispiece and title page reinforces Genette’s notion that the paratext is

rather a “threshold” or a “vestibule that offers the world at large the possibility of either

stepping inside or turning back” (Genette 1997, 2). The Salomé reader stands at this

threshold, the “List of Pictures” acts as gateway to the play and entices the reader for

further exploration. Genette speaks of “an edge” or “a fringe” to explain the zone which

“controls one’s whole reading of the text”181. Genette elaborates:

Indeed, this fringe, always the conveyor of a commentary that is authorial or more or less legitimated by the author, constitutes a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of a pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that – whether well or poorly understood and achieved - is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it (more pertinent, of course, in the eyes of the author and his allies) (1997, 2).

                                                                                                               181 Genette cites Philippe Lejeune to describe such a “fringe”: “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text” (Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique (Seuil, 1979, 328). Genette suggests that Lejeune was partly aiming at what he calls the paratext (1997, 2n5).

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The list of titles naming Beardsley’s forthcoming illustrations certainly offers the reader

a “better reception for the text” in assisting him or her to decode the ambiguous nature

of the play. Beardsley’s own ambiguous interpretations of the play are already evident

in the ambiguous naming of each illustration: The Woman in the Moon, The Peacock

Skirt, The Black Cape, A Platonic Lament, The Eyes of Herod, The Stomach Dance, The

Dancer’s Reward and The Climax. Such titles constitute an ambiguous narrative in and

of themselves.

In this way, Beardsley’s “List of Pictures”182 advances the semiotic nature of

illustration as it “stress(es) the series over the individual picture” which “has value and

meaning by virtue of its place on (sic) what structuralist theory might term a metonymic

chain of illustrations, just as a painted tile has meaning in relation to the broader

mosaic” (Frankel 2002, 272). However, such a mosaic in the hands of an artist like

Beardsley becomes predominantly ambiguous. In this regard, the reader once again

becomes the co-author as he or she derives his or her personal interpretation of Wilde’s

play. For Eco, the essential concept of interpretation is compelled by the text itself and

as such, Salomé’s illustrated and titled paratext “tells us which kind of reader it

postulates. The exactness of the textual project makes for the freedom of its Model

Reader”183 (1979, 10). Beardsley foresees a model of the Salomé reader who is “able to

deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author (in this case the

illustrator) deals generatively with them” (Eco 1979, 7). Beardsley’s “List of Pictures”

disclose the action of the play “by clearly calling for a very specialized kind of reader”

(Eco 1979, 7), nourished by the ambivalent nature of the play’s paratext. Beardsley’s

illustrations and Wilde’s text “combine to invite us to formulate reactions through a

revision of typical aesthetic standards. Both modes refuse to employ conventional

images of eroticism or conform to the concept that their dialogues and drawings should

illuminate one another in a linear way” (Gillespie, 141).

In a similar fashion to Salomé’s frontispiece and title page, the “List of Pictures”

is encased within the depravity of Beardsley’s underworld. Beardsley creates a similar

connection and effect upon the reader just as “the ostensibly unequivocal figures of the

title page turn out to be highly ambiguous” so too do the more “subtle and elegant

                                                                                                               182 Furthermore, as Allen suggests, Beardsley’s “List of Pictures” reinforce the theory that “decisions as to what paintings are to hung together, or what paintings to reproduce within a book, set up relations between individual paintings which normally could not have been part of their original design and intention” (Allen 2011, 172). 183 See Introduction.

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design of the List of Pictures turns out to be almost equally perverse and scandalous”184

(Snodgrass 1995, 63). The overpowering figure that is the sexually suggestive Salomé,

her formfitting dress accentuating her elegant yet foreboding stance, is sexually

intensified by her concealed hands and inward angle of her arms “a position Beardsley

repeatedly employed in other pictures to suggest masturbation” (Snodgrass 1995, 63).

Her over shoulder provocative smirk shuns “the grotesque molten wax on the phallic

candle” (Snodgrass 1995, 63). She is no ordinary woman but a dangerous femme fatale,

threatening in her omnipresence.

As Salomé shuns the phallic candle, she supersedes the hermaphrodite deity

from the previous title page hijacking its feminine attributes. The hermaphrodite who is

flanked by two candles becomes a woman, as Beardsley “seems to have addressed a key

problematical element, in effect splitting the hermaphrodite in half” (Snodgrass 63).

Seated beside her, the kneeling yet fallen angel appears monstrous. Her aged and

sagging breasts perpetuate the theatricality of the occult. A horned and winged angel,

she emerges as the perverse and animalistic seraph to demonize the validity of ancient

wisdom. Wearing a mask, she hides her identity prompting Snodgrass to suggest that it

“presumably connotes feminine deceit” (1995, 63).

When Salomé leers with lascivious interest, glancing maliciously towards the

“List of Pictures”, she attracts yet repels. Her sly look peers menacingly through the

multitude of surrounding roses that are not simply woven throughout her tresses but

become a large ornamental headpiece. As a result an element of artificiality heightens

her intrigue when Beardsley adorns her with a large obscure crown. Salomé averts her

glance to the ambiguous titles enticing the reader to step over the threshold as he or she

decides to either turn back or venture forth into Salomé’s tale of perversion. If the

reader does decide to venture forth into the Salomé story, he or she encounters an

obscure text. The English translation destabilizes the reader with its inherent ambiguity.

When one transforms the original Douglas translation in order to modernize the

English language and moreover employs decorative illustrators to provide the visual

accompaniment, we see a significant decline in the levels of ambiguity. Both the play’s

poetics and aesthetics are altered in a compelling way. The modern English editions of

1957 (Holland and Martin) and 2011 (Donohue and Moser) depart from Wilde’s initial

goal of experimentation and therefore yield to a semiotic reduction which, in turn,                                                                                                                184 In Aubrey Beardsley: Dandy of the Grotesque (1995) Chris Snodgrass provides a thorough examination of Beardsley’s illustrations.

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drastically restricts the reader’s interpretative possibilities. In order to remain consistent

with a symbolist inspired work such as Salomé, the published editions of the play

benefit from employing illustrators who work in harmony with the intentio operis (the

text’s intention) and the intentio auctoris (the author’s intention). Contemporary artists

who have excelled in this manner have often engaged in an intertextual dialogue with

Beardsley’s original work.

The Intertextual Dialogue Between the Perverse and the Obscure When we consider that intertextuality can often radically challenge established accounts

of non-literary art forms (Allen 2011, 171), it seems logical that artists who have been

inspired by the Salomé story have often engaged in a semiotic dialogue with Wilde’s

text through the imitation of Beardsley’s illustrations. Beardsley’s illustrations,

therefore, prompt reflections on the nature of intertextuality. Allen reminds us that it is

possible to speak of the ‘language’ of painting as it is also possible to use this term

when examining the intertextual relationship of both cinema and architecture (2011,

169). The language of painting involves “productions of complex patterns of encoding,

re-encoding, allusion, echo, transposing of previous systems and codes” (Allen 2011,

169). Allen further elaborates: To interpret a painting or a building we inevitably rely on the ability to interpret that painting’s or building’s relationship to previous ‘languages’ or ‘systems’ of painting or architectural design. Films, symphonies, buildings, paintings, just like literary texts, constantly talk to each other as well as talking to the other arts (2011, 169-170).

A cross-disciplinary approach allows theoretical interests to overlap. In this regard,

applying theories of intertextuality to the study of non-literary arts offers an invaluable

insight into an artist’s dominant influences and the way in which such influences

engage in a critical dialogue with one another. Wilde’s Salomé seems especially well

adapted to this type of study when we consider the number of illustrated published

editions of Wilde’s Salomé both in the original French185 and various English and

                                                                                                               185 Alastair, a pseudonym for Hans Henning Voight (1887-1969) was the first artist other than Beardsley to provide illustrations for the French edition of Wilde’s Salomé (1922). Although his artistic style bears a compelling resemblance to the art of Beardsley, “it remains unmistakably original and personal: unlike the conventionalized features of Beardsley’s drawings, Alastair’s faces are tragic masks, eyebrows languishing downwards; wide, flat noses, wide, scarlet gashes for mouths” (Arwas 1979, 6). French novelist and biographer, Philippe Julian describes Alastair’s drawings and illustrations as: “His drawings - more cruel than Beardsley’s - could illustrate a fashion magazine in Hell, with the Marquis de Sade as editor-in-chief and La Casati as its only model” (Quoted in Beronä 2011, iii).

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German186 translations. While the two illustrated English editions of 1957 and 2011

departed from Beardsley’s skilful intratextual dialogue with Wilde’s text, artists such as

Alastair (Fig. 9) or Behmer (Fig. 10) remained faithful to their predecessor and

consistent in establishing the required visual poetics of ambiguity. As previously

discussed, Salomé’s original illustrated English edition offers a unique relationship

between word and image. Wilde’s text and Beardsley’s illustrations are interconnected

and are closely related to one another as the intratextual element initiates a

complementary dialogue to illuminate the subtextual codes of interpretation within the

play. Taking this into consideration, Japanese illustrator Takato Yamamoto is one living

artist in particular who possesses the diegetic technique to engage the reader in an

innovative multiplicity of interpretations while remaining faithful to Salomé’s poetic

and visual obscurity.

Born in Akita, Japan in 1960, Yamamoto is an artist whose work has been

profoundly influenced by Beardsley and provides an excellent example of an

intertextual dialogue between two artists. In Yamamoto’s work, Steiner’s discussion of

intertextuality comes into play as she views that “it is only by viewing paintings in light

of other paintings or works of literature, music, and so forth that the ‘missing’ semiotic

power of pictorial art can be augmented – which is to say that the power is not missing

at all, but merely absent in the conventional account of the structure of art” (1985, 58).

Yamamoto has yet to publish an illustrated edition of Wilde’s Salomé.

However, his two paintings entitled Salome (2005) (Fig. 13) and J’ai Baisé Ta

Bouche Jokanaan (2005) (Fig. 12) resonate with Beardsley’s controversial and

troubling beauty. Beardsley’s work bears a strong resemblance to Japanese art and

although Wilde himself was initially expecting a Byzantine187 style similar to Gustave

Moreau, he found the Japanese style “quite wonderful’ and recognized the homicidal

energy of Beardsley’s work” (Ellmann 1988, 376). Yamamoto, within the context of his

cultural inheritance, pushes the taboo of erotic art to the extreme. Although perhaps not

unique to the Japanese tradition of depicting images of women in severe and sexually

explicit drawings, Yamamoto’s translation of the Salomé story transgresses the

boundaries of the illustrated book.                                                                                                                186 The first German edition was published by Insel Verlag in 1902, newly translated by Hedwig Lachmann and illustrated by Marcus Behmer in the style of Beardsley (See Tydeman and Price 1996). 187 “They are all too Japanese, while my play is Byzantine. My Herod is like the Herod of Gustave Moreau - wrapped in jewels and sorrows. My Salome is a mystic, the sister of Salammbô, a Sainte Thérèse who worships the moon” (Julian 1969, 257, quoted by Ricketts in Recollections of Oscar Wilde (1932).

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The painting which best illustrates Beardsley’s profound influence on

Yamamoto’s work captures Wilde’s iconic closing monologue where Salomé addresses

the severed head of the prophet. The composition of J’ai Baisé Ta Bouche Jokanaan is

a direct parody of Beardsely’s tenth and last full-page illustration entitled The Climax

whereby Salomé appears to be suspended in air, gazing with intensity at the bleeding

head held between her hands. Yamamoto replicates Beardsley’s gender inversion

whereby “the two feminized faces closely resemble rather than exactly reflect one

another” suggesting “female homoeroticism” (Fernbach 2002, 57). While Beardsley

obscures Salomé’s hair to depict “locks… dancing like two snakes” (Kuryluk 1987,

237) Yamamoto relies on the traditional tightly bound Japanese hairstyle, accentuating

her feminized features. The free flowing hair of Jokanaan also reinforces his feminine

attributes. Both Beardsley and Yamamoto engage in gender ambiguity as they abandon

“the grotesque in favour of mythical pathos” (Kuryluk 1987, 237).

Similar to Beardsley, Yamamoto’s drawings invite the reader to view his work

as part of a visual translation to the play. It is not surprising that Beardsley’s

illustrations form the perfect accompaniment to Wilde’s text. The repetitive language

becomes a sensual cantata, the repeated metaphors strengthening the visual imagination

making the transition to the visual narrative a harmonic process. The numerous and

repetitive descriptions of the moon, for example, establish a narrative arch while

illuminating Salomé’s character as she journeys from virginal white to murderous red.

Yamamoto supports the moon narrative in his work. As Salomé holds the severed head

in her hands, the prophet’s head appears to be on a red bloody platter as the moon has

the dual purpose of depicting both death and beauty. Yamamoto evokes both erotic

sensuality and horror as the dominant colour pattern within the picture evokes

metaphysical qualities of both physical and spiritual desires.

While Beardsley’s The Climax depicts the prophet’s blood as it drips from the

Iokanaan’s severed head, Yamamoto’s prophet almost seems as if his head is served on

a bloody platter. The black coils of free flowing hair conjure up images of Beardsley’s

snake-like locks. The red of the moon stands in stark contrast to the composition’s black

and white tones. Yakamoto’s J’ai Baisé Ta Bouche Jokanaan serves as an example of

the illustrator’s illicit intertextuality with Beardsley’s art, seeking to derive its meaning

through referencing The Climax. Salomé’s final monologue is transcended at a symbolic

level to capture the grotesque intensity of Wilde’s text.

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In Salome, Yamamoto takes the near naked princess from J’ai Baisé Ta Bouche

Jokanaan and thrusts the female image into the extremes of illicit and pornographic sex.

Her eyes are no longer closed while floating in the midst of ecstasy, rather Salomé

stares intently at the reader in an almost provoking manner. While pushing her bare legs

apart, her naked sex is salaciously hidden by the prophet’s severed head as Yamamoto

alludes to the debased act of necrophilia. Engaging in cunnilingus, the androgynous

head drips blood onto a small plater. The scarlet moon hovering in the background

mirrors the prophet’s blood. This is the lascivious Salomé at her most diabolical. She

relishes in the combined pleasure of murder and erotic sexuality.

Having produced two illustrations inspired by Wilde’s Salomé, Yamamoto

excels in capturing the essential core elements of ambiguity residing in the text. The

Douglas translation certainly requires few amendments when one considers such

obvious mistranslation as “fléau” by “fan”188. However, the translation serves as the

most linguistically effective in interpreting Wilde’s ambiguous and obscure symbolist

text. Combined with Yamamoto’s striking and provoking illustrations, a new and

improved English edition would serve as an exquisite volume and state-of-the-art

publication.

Despite critics’ caustic reactions to the original English translation, Douglas

recreated a powerful and synthetic rewriting of Wilde’s original symbolist style French.

Douglas’s employment of archaic biblical rhetoric furnishes the language of Salomé

with an element of estrangement and ambiguity that destabilizes the modern reader

aligning the play with the original French symbolist text. If one is to comply with this

assertion then one is also persuaded to acknowledge that Wilde in fact sanctioned such

stylised speech. This theory is supported by Davray’s account of Wilde’s fastidious

investment in the French translation of The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Not to mention

Wilde’s meticulous devotion to the published book.

The dynamic effect of the Douglas translation should in fact not be

underestimated. The modern and critically received productions of Berkoff and Pacino

certainly support the original English translation’s alluring and curious effect.

Especially when one considers the professional actor’s interpretation of exaggerated

                                                                                                               188 “Quoiqu’elle ne se repentira jamais, mais restera dans ses abominations, dites-lui de venir, car le Seigneur a son fléau dans la main” (S, 75) is translated by Douglas as: “Though she will not repent, but will stick fast in her abominations, go bid her come, for the fan of the Lord is in His hand” (S, 74). Aquien points to the confusion in translating “fléau” pointing out that it should be the plague as God's punishment [le fléau en tant que châtiment divin] (2006, 171n36).

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speech and slow enunciation of the strange language. Such advocacy of the original

Douglas translation demonstrates the compelling consequence in the amalgamation of

language and performance art to produce a stimulating aesthetic effect upon the Salomé

spectator and/or reader189.

This study also demonstrates that the artists who provided the visual dialect for

the two subsequent Salomé editions (1957 and 2011) also deviated from the high level

of ambiguity originally established by Beardsley. This can be seen particularly in the

blurring of gender. Both Martin’s and Moser’s depictions of the various characters in

Salomé remain within the patriarchal confines of masculinized males and subservient

females. The most significant example of such a closed work is the play’s paratext.

While Beardsley offers the reader an array of possible interpretations due to the visual

ambiguity of the grotesque, both Martin and Moser offer purely decorative illustrations

that diminish the number of possible readings. If we take for instance Eco’s description

of an open work in the visual arts: “the kind of painting that thrives on ambiguity,

indeterminacy, the full fecundity of the informal, the kind of painting that wants to offer

the eye the most liberating adventure while remaining a form of communication” (1989,

98), we receive a more stimulating experience from Beardsley’s masterful visual

translation of Wilde’s work. Gillespie encapsulates this view when he convincing states: Just as the illustrations make interpretative comments on Wilde’s writing, the dialogue of Salome lays down a critique of drawings: As the reader encounters the illustrations imbedded within the published version of the play, judgment of Beardsley’s efforts grows out of impressions made by Wilde’s dialogue. Lines within the play offer their own direct, indirect, expository, and digressive commentaries on the drawings (1996, 139).

The original published English edition of Wilde’s Salomé is a unique assault on the

senses both linguistically and visually. Despite autobiographical evidence of various

documented disputes between Wilde and both translator and illustrator, Douglas and

Beardsley have succeeded in providing a triumphant artistic rendering of Wilde’s

treatment of the biblical myth. In the proceeding chapter we shall see such a successful

artistic collaboration continue as we venture forth in discovering the mythical and

obscure legend that is the Dance of the Seven Veils.

                                                                                                               189 Degroisse supports this assertion when she states: “Language in theatre is not simply a matter of textuality but of orality as the playwright insists and plays on the phonetic and rhythmic effect of the cues, while exploring the plurality of meaning” (2014, 17).

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3.

THE DANCE OF THE SEVEN VEILS: Elucidating Wilde’s Invisible Dance

“I am ready, Tetrarch”. Salome dances the dance of the seven veils

When Salomé utters the much-anticipated words “I am ready, Tetrarch”190 (S, 140)

followed by one of the most provocative and iconic characterizations of the enticing

dance “Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils”191 (S, 140), the reader has been

driven to an anticipatory curiosity by Herod’s continual pleas and Salomé’s insolent and

defiant refusals. Considered to be “one of the most notorious narrative ellipses of the

late-nineteenth century” (Maier 2006, 221), this terse yet shrewd stage direction solicits

the most commentary, despite, or perhaps because of the fact that “although central to

the plot of the play, it is the action least elaborated by Wilde” (Hartwig 2002, 25). It

therefore calls for the most varied of interpretations as demonstrated by more than a

century of diverse balletic readings in theatre, opera and dance.

One of the many reasons why this laconic and ambiguous stage direction has

baffled critics and artists alike is that it appears abruptly after the vacillating discourse

primarily between Salomé and King Herod with irritated interceptions by Queen

Herodias: Herod: Dance for me, Salome. Herodias: I will not have her dance. Salome: I have no desire to dance, Tetrarch. Herod: Salome, daughter of Herodias, dance for me. Herodias: Peace. Let her alone. Herod: I command thee to dance, Salome. Salome: I will not dance Tetrarch192 (S, 126).

After the obstinate Salomé continues to reject the Tetrarch’s incessant pleas, Herod goes

so far as to even offer her half of his kingdom, “Whatsoever thou shalt desire I will give

it thee, even to half of my kingdom, if thou wilt but dance for me. O Salome, Salome,

                                                                                                               190 “Je suis prête, tétrarque” (S, 141). 191 Salomé danse la danse des sept voiles (S, 141). 192 Hérode: Salomé, dansez pour moi. Hérodias: Je ne veux pas qu’elle danse. Salomé: Je n’ai aucune envie de danser, tétrarque. Hérode: Salomé, fille d’Hérodias, dansez pour moi. Hérodias: Laissez-la tranquille. Hérode: Je vous ordonne de danser, Salomé. Salomé: Je ne danserai pas, tétrarque (S, 127).

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dance for me!”193 (S, 134). Salomé reiterates his offer, “You have sworn an oath,

Tetrarch”194 (S, 134) so that his statement is undeniably witnessed by fellow invitees

dining at the royal banquet. When Herod responds, “I have sworn an oath, Salome”195

(S, 134) he becomes unmistakably ensnared in her trap. The price of the dance is to

ultimately serve as the murderous reparation in the death of the sacred prophet.

Wilde’s creation of the Dance of the Seven Veils is “a pivotal display of deviant

desires that exemplifies Salome’s sexual power and control” (Garland 2011, 125). It is

an exotic dance that while prioritizing the aberrant interests of Herod, highlights the

inevitability of the tragic consequences of the play in order to engage the audience in a

celebration of deviant sexuality (Garland 201, 125). Garland cites the complete absence

of details to have “an immediate and evocative effect” that “relies upon a cultural

appreciation of the connotations connected to the Salome story” (125). Why then does a

simple stage direction create such an immediate and evocative effect upon the reader?196

The answer lies in the enigmatic and ambiguous naming of the dance: The Dance of the

Seven Veils.

An original invention by Wilde, the naming of the dance has become so iconic

that Salomé’s dance of seven veils has become synonymous with the biblical myth

today. However, within the historic transtextual study of the Salomé corpus, unfortunate

errors emerge that deny attribution to the author himself in the naming of the dance.

One such example is the highly regarded and much consulted scholarly work by

Barbara Walker entitled The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (1983) where

Walker mistakenly attributes the naming of the dance to the biblical account of Matthew

in the New Testament. She inaccurately states: “The Bible presents the Dance of the

Seven Veils as a mere vulgar striptease performed by Salome to ‘please Herod’” (885-

6). Walker refers to (Matthew 14: 6-8) when quoting the aforementioned biblical

citation “please Herod”. While the quotation seems to validate her interpretation, it does

not however present a complete account of all the details she attributes to the biblical

source. The short passage in the Bible, which relates to the death of John the Baptist,

refrains from naming the dance while also declining to name the Judean princess,

                                                                                                               193 “Tout ce que vous voudrez je vous le donnerai, fût-ce la moitié de mon royaume, si vous dansez pour moi. Oh ! Salomé, Salomé, dansez pour moi. Oh ! Salomé, Salomé, dansez pour moi” (S, 135). 194 “Vous avez juré, tétrarque” (S, 135). 195 “J’ai juré, Salomé” (S, 135). 196 “For the reader, the dance is invisible, the most powerful because of its invisibility. Was it not Mallarmé who contended that the most beautiful theatre is the imagined one? Borrowing a symbolist technique, Wilde provided the reader with illusions only” (Eynat-Confino 130-131).

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Salomé. Instead, the biblical account refers to the princess simply as “the daughter of

the said Herodias”. In fact, René Girard points out that “[o]f all the arts, only dance is

mentioned in the gospels, and then in only two of them, Mark and Matthew, which

relate the story of the beheading of John the Baptist” (1984, 311). Although Girard

describes Mark’s account as the “richer text” (1984, 311) quoting, “the daughter of

Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and his guests,” he reminds us that

“[t]here is nothing further on the dance itself. It is not described in our two gospels, nor

is the dancer's name mentioned. Our direct information is minimal, and yet the dancer

and her dance have always fired the erotic and aesthetic imagination of the West”

(1984, 311).

This ignition of erotic and aesthetic imagination would not have transpired if it

were not for Flavius Josephus’s first-century AD Antiquities of the Jews197 where the

historian christened the dancing princess with the name of Salomé for the very first

time. Furthermore, the Bible does not indicate Salomé’s strong desire for the prophet

and his rejection of her advances, which, in Wilde’s version, marks the personal

motivation for the dance. For Salomé, the outcome of the dance is a gift that she turns

into a vengeful request for the Baptist’s head. In both the Bible and in all literary

treatments of the Salomé story that precede Wilde, there is no mention of seven veils of

any kind. Such absence of details beckons one to ask: Why does Wilde reference the

use of veils and, moreover, why did he associate such veils with the number seven? To

explore this query one must look at the symbolic meaning attributed to the dance. Elliot

Gilbert sees Wilde’s Dance of the Seven Veils as “the drama’s most complex and

suggestive metaphor” (1983, 157). Yet, Joseph Donohue sees it as an explanatory and

expository solution: “Salome as dancer, and Salome’s dance, together set the keynote

for understanding the play” (1997, 121). Taking such statements into consideration, it

seems therefore paramount to examine Wilde’s choice in the naming of the dance.

The Cryptic Seven and the Ambiguity of Naming

There are a number of possible hypotheses for the evasive and metaphoric naming of

the dance if we review some of the associated motifs connected to the number seven198.

Just as the paradoxical naming of the princess Salomé (in Hebrew meaning

                                                                                                               197 See Antiquities of the Jews (XVIII, 136) whereby Josephus attributes the name Salomé to the dancing princess: http://lexundria.com/j_aj/18.136/wst. See also Claudel (2013, 50-59). 198 For a detailed analysis of the number seven refer to Chevalier & Gheerbrant (1982, 994-1000).

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peaceful)”199, who is initially chaste and virginal then swiftly turns to murderous

seductress, the number seven is characterised not only as the celestial number of purity

corresponding to seven days of the week, to seven planets and to seven degrees of

perfection but also to the Satanic number of depravation. The number seven is

frequently employed in the Bible. Among the many references to the number seven

include God creating the heavens and the earth in seven days, Salomon building his

temple in seven years, and the number seven is specifically utilised seventy-seven times

in the Old Testament200. However, seven is also the number of Satan as he attempted to

copy God: “le singe de Dieu” (Chevalier & Gheerbrant 1982, 996) while also

corresponding to the infernal beast of the Apocalypse who possessed seven heads.

Gilbert further references the Bible when he points out that “perhaps Wilde has

in mind here the passage from Revelation, itself an account of the ultimate unveiling:

“And when he had opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven about the space

of half an hour” (1983, 158). Gilbert additionally explains “clearly, the playwright is

ambivalent about Salome’s own silent apotheosis, in part seeing in it proof of her

inwardness” (1983, 158). Kuryluk identifies the way in which Wilde’s Salomé portrays

love, “exactly as in the Revelation, love equals annihilation” (1987, 220). Kuryluk

draws attention to the fact that John the Evangelist is obsessed with the number seven in

his Revelation and asserts “it is most likely that Wilde has taken the idea of seven veils

from this very text (1987, 221).

Besides references made in the Bible, critics have often referred to ancient

mythology to interpret the naming of the dance. Despite Walker’s inaccuracy in

attributing the Dance of the Seven Veils to the Bible, she offers an intriguing

explanation to expound on the theory that the seven veils also refer to “the death of the

surrogate-king”. She states: “the Dance of the Seven Veils was an integral part of the

sacred drama, depicting the death of the surrogate-king, his descent into the underworld,

and his retrieval by the Goddess, who removed one of her seven garments at each of the

seven underworld gates” (1983, 885-6). She continues to describe the veils as signifying

“the layers of earthly appearances or illusions falling away from those who approach the

central Mystery of the deeps” (1983, 885-6). Citing Walker, Chris Snodgrass underlines

“by thus linking Salome’s dance to the sacred Dance of the Seven Veils, Wilde suggests

                                                                                                               199 “En hébreu: la paisible” (Aquien 1987, 137). 200  See Chevalier & Gheerbrant (1982, 996).

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that her dance is less a femme fatale’s display of animal sexuality than some quest to

grasp life’s “central mystery” (2003, 186).

However, one cannot discount the display and therefore, the celebration of

deviant sexuality within the performed dance as it makes reference to the semantic

representation of the number seven. Deviant sexuality is driven to the extreme when the

number seven takes on a lewd sexual quality as canonised in the mysterious and

enigmatic 1893 novel Teleny. This 19th century gay erotic novel has been attributed to

Oscar Wilde and friends. It chronicles, in explicit sexual detail, the carnal relationship

between two men, Camille Des Grieux and Rene Teleny. In one of many sexual

confessions, Camille attributes the number seven to a night of unbridled ecstasy: I passed that night with him, a night not of unbroken slumbers, but of inebriating bliss. As true votaries of the Grecian god, we poured out seven copious libations to Priapus-for seven is a mystic, cabalistic, propitious number-and in the morning we tore ourselves from each other’s arms, vowing everlasting love and fidelity; but, alas! what is there immutable in the ever-changing world, except, perhaps, the sleep eternal in the eternal night (2006, 87).

If Wilde did indeed write such a provocative attribution to the number seven, it is

interesting to note that although this number is often associated with holy and sacred

religious doctrine, in the case of Wilde’s Salomé and his invention of the now iconic

Dance of the Seven Veils, the number seven is seductively cryptic in its carnal and

sexual ambiguity.

A number of critics have sought to decode Wilde’s cryptic association to the

number seven. Toni Bentley, like Walker, also connects the Babylonian myth to the

dance in order to interpret its meaning. She states that “[f]our thousand years ago,

Ishtar, the great goddess of Babylon, performed the first documented striptease when

she descended to the underworld to retrieve her lover-son-husband, the mortal

Tammuz” suggesting that “Oscar Wilde assigned this symbolic descent to the

underworld of the unconscious, a ceremony that equates stripping naked to be in a state

of truth, the ultimate unveiling to Salome” (2002, 32). In this sense, the veil conceals

yet reveals. “The great paradox of the veil” she explains, “that which conceals yet

invites revelation - is crucial to the meaning of Salome’s dance” (Bentley 2002, 32).

Bentley additionally suggests, “Veils conceal but are penetrable. Opaque, translucent,

and diaphanous, they allow light to be filtered through the threads, building illusion

while implying truth. They allow for fantasy and mystery and suggest the ultimate

veiling” (2002, 32). This fantasy becomes highly eroticised in a male dominated setting

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as “the veil prevents men from seeing and thus desiring women. A dance performed

with veils has a highly erotic character: the veiling and unveiling of the different parts

of the body increases its sex appeal and raises the expectations of the viewer” (Kuryluk

1987, 221).

Wilde mirrors this view in Herod’s speech as, having just watched Salomé

perform her veiled dance, he is driven to the point of unbridled ecstasy. As a result he is

ready to offer Salomé whatever her soul desires: “Ah! Wonderful! Wonderful! You see

that she has danced for me, your daughter. Come near, Salome, come near, that I may

give thee thy fee. Ah! I pay a royal price to those who dance for my pleasure. I will pay

thee royally. I will give thee whatsoever thy soul desireth. What wouldst thou have?

Speak”201 (S, 140-142). Kuryluk makes reference to the fact that the dancing princess,

as she is introduced in the beginning of the play, is essentially a virgin. It therefore

seems quite appropriate to veil her. “However, equipping her with not one but seven

veils is one more device that helps to set the play against a universal background”

(1987, 221). From the seven wonders of the ancient world, to the ancient Babylonian

myth of Ishtar and to biblical narratives, the number seven becomes veiled in its

ambiguous signification. In Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils, these two ambivalent

metaphors, the veil and the number seven, coincide beautifully as the perfect

metaphorical pas de deux to offer the reader a multitude of interpretations.

In order to elucidate Wilde’s invisible dance and seek to discover the author’s

intention in prescribing a cryptic single-line stage direction, this chapter examines the

rich and colourful narrative of Salomé’s dance as it appears in Flaubert’s Hérodias

(1877) before analysing two very distinct treatments of Wilde’s infamous Dance of the

Seven Veils. Within the context of two diverse theatrical domains of performance art:

theatre and opera, this study will demonstrate the manner in which spectators can “study

the dancer’s various attitudes and transpose what they see into the conceptual languages

of their own imaginations. The spectators hold within themselves the key to the

significance of the dance” (Shaw 1993, 54).

                                                                                                               201 “Ah! C’est magnifique, c’est magnifique! Vous voyez qu’elle a dansé pour moi, votre fille. Approchez, Salomé! Approchez, afin que je puisse vous donner votre salaire. Ah! Je paie bien les danseuses, moi. Toi, je te paierai bien. Je te donnerai tout ce que tu voudras. Que veux-tu, dis?” (S, 141-143).

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Flaubert’s Dance of Amplification It is not known whether Wilde’s ambiguous description of the dance was inspired by the

Babylonian myth of Ishtar but he was undoubtedly influenced not only by the Bible but

also by Gustave Flaubert who portrayed a veiled dancer coinciding exotically with the

Oriental spirit so coveted during the second half of the nineteenth century202. Wilde

stated: “My Salome is a mystic, the sister of Salammbô203, a Sainte Thérèse who

worships the moon” (Ellmann 1988, 376). Wilde may have regarded his creation of

Salomé to be the “sister of Salammbô”, but it was Flaubert’s Trois Contes (1877)

[Three Tales] containing the story of Hérodias that was set to become “one of the most

important sources for Wilde’s play Salomé” (Wright 2008, 104). Thomas Wright

explains in Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (2008) that

the young Oscar Wilde received a copy of Flaubert’s Three Tales from Walter Pater

“which the don lent to his disciple in November 1877” (104). Wright further indicates,

“it is fitting then that Wilde would send Pater an inscribed copy of the original French-

language version of his drama” (2008, 104). In fact, Flaubert’s Three Tales had such a

profound effect upon Wilde that it was included in the list of titles he requested from

Robert Ross during his imprisonment at Reading Gaol (CL, 791).

In Hérodias, Flaubert utilises the image of the veil to conceal the dancer’s chest

and head yet reveals just a hint towards the alluring penetration of her eyes and a

suggestive glimpse at the whiteness of her skin: “Under a bluish veil, which concealed

her head and chest, one could make out the arches of her eyes, the chalcedony stones in

her ears, the whiteness of her skin”204 (H, 101). Due to the exotic concealment of the

‘bluish veil’, the reader only marginally perceives Salomé’s feminine physiognomy and

bejeweling stones. The sheer transparent aspect of the veil affirms Salomé’s seductive

power as the “veil is the optimal, symbolic extension of the dancing persona, because,

like her, it embodies a mysterious, intermediate transparency that simultaneously

                                                                                                               202 See section Idées et visions in Gustave Flaubert, Trois Contes, introduction et notes par Pierre-Marc de Biasi, Paris, Le Livre de Poche Classique, 1999, p. 34-5. 203 See Chapter 2 for French literary influence: “Il y eut Salammbô (1862) tout d’abord, pour son nom, avec ses lettres initiales, l’arabesque, serpentine du S, ses trois syllabes et sa forte puissance évocatrice. D’autre part, l’atmosphère érotique et cruelle du roman ne pouvait que séduire Wilde qui semble s’en être inspiré jusque dans les détails” (Aquien 2006, 16). [First and foremost, there was Salammbô (1862), for the name, its initials, the arabesque, the serpentine S, three syllables and its strong evocative power. On the other hand, the erotic and cruel atmosphere of the novel could only seduce Wilde who seems to have been inspired in every detail, my translation]. 204 “Sous un voile bleuâtre lui cachant la poitrine et la tête, on distinguait les arcs de ses yeux, les calcédoines de ses oreilles, la blancheur de sa peau” (He, 170).

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separates and rejoins the real and the illusory, the sensory and the imagined”205 (Shaw

1993, 63). Through the enticing use of the veil, Salomé seduces as Flaubert transports

the reader to the Orient and into the arms of the young femme fatale. In doing so, he

presents the reader with a dancer’s body “that often becomes the fetishized sign of

eroticism, passion, unbridled sexuality, or even a symbol of savagery and brutality”

(Karayanni 2004, 46).

Flaubert’s account was detailed, rich in descriptive imagery that highlighted

Salomé’s female and erotic sensuality as the author associated “the Orient with the

escapism of sexual fantasy” (Said 1995, 190). Bertrand Marchal points out that Flaubert

considered Salomé’s dance to be the greatest challenge to the author who confessed in a

letter to his niece Caroline dated January 28, 1877: “I am sick with fear at the thought of

Salomé’s dance. I’m afraid to spoil it”206. However, in overcoming his fears, Flaubert

was the first author to offer a protracted narration of the dance prompting critics to view

Salomé’s performance to be “at the heart of the tale; it is that focal point in the genesis

towards which all attitudes and events seem to converge” (Brombert 1966, 253). Atsuko

Ogane views Flaubert’s description of Salomé’s dance to not only be the climax of the

piece but to serve as the reason why Hérodias occupies a prominent place in Flaubert’s

canon207 (2006, 6). Flaubert delivered colour and sound to the voiceless dancer for “She

did not speak. They looked at each other”208 (He, 102) enticing curiosity, capturing the

attention of the reader who, like the ardent spectator gathered at the banquet, gazes upon

her exotic beauty with a sense of eagerness and hunger while the musical narration

infused by depictions of Phoenician instruments breathed life into her movements.

From the moment the young Salomé appears there is a sense of awe and

admiration “But coming from the far end of the hall could be heard a buzz of surprise

and admiration. A young girl had just come in”209 (He, 101). Flaubert adorns the

dancer’s body with the sumptuous colours of the Orient: “The jewels in her ears leaped

about, the silk on her back shimmered, from her arms, her feet, her clothes invisible

                                                                                                               205 Although Mary Lewis Shaw’s study of the veil concerns itself with the element of performance in the texts of Mallarmé, I found her observations to be also applicable to Flaubert in my current investigation. 206 “Je suis malade de la peur que m’inspire la danse de Salomé! Je crains de la bâcler” (2005, 111). 207 “Il ne faut pas oublier qu’Hérodias occupe une place très importante, à cause de la présence de la description de la danse de Salomé, qui constitue l’acmé du conte” [One should not forget that Herodias occupies a very important place because of the presence of the description of Salome’s dance, which is the climax of the story, my translation]. 208 “Elle ne parlait pas. Ils se regardaient” (H, 173). 209 “Mais il arriva du fond de la salle un bourdonnement de surprise et d’admiration. Une jeune fille venait d’entrer” (H, 170).

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sparks shot out, firing the men with excitement”210 (He, 102) to further incite a sense of

eroticism. For Mario Praz, exotic and erotic ideals go hand in hand as he suggests that

“a love of the exotic is usually an imaginative projection of a sexual desire” (1970,

207). Lucette Cyzba also points out that “Salomé’s dance completes the effect produced

by her costume. Its only function is erotic to exhibit the female body in order to arouse

the spectator’s desire rendering it irresistible” (my translation)211. Besides soliciting the

reader’s attention through the enchanting descriptions of Salomé’s oriental dress,

Flaubert’s dancer captivates through a musical narrative in three distinct stages

providing sound to the dance with a detailed musical accompaniment.

Bertrand Marchal makes reference to Flaubert’s preparatory manuscripts of

Salomé’s dance, which is comprised of three distinct passages corresponding to each

musical instrument, “so as to mark a psychological progression”212. Flaubert was very

specific when constructing the musical framework of the dance in order to mark a

varied psychological progression for each juncture. The manuscript held at the

Bibliothèque Nationale de France shows Flaubert’s inscriptions: “She dances. 1. A

graceful dance, light, like a butterfly, with a small flute accompaniment. 2. A

languorous dance, voluptuous, with gingras. 3. A disorderly dance, with flute,

tambourines and harp (…) A different psychology and progression to each dance” (my

translation)213. Marchal draws attention to the fact that within the three passages, the

first two exactly mirror the captivating dance of Kuckuk-Hanem214, a dancing courtesan

whom Flaubert encountered during his travels to Egypt. Brombert supports Marchal’s

idea stating that Salomé’s dance holds intimate significance as “it rehearses, after an

interval of twenty-five years, the dances of the Near-Eastern prostitutes Flaubert and his

                                                                                                               210 Les brillants de ses oreilles sautaient, l’étoffe de son dos chatoyait; de ses bras, de ses pieds, de ses vêtements jaillissaient d’invisibles étincelles qui enflammaient les hommes (H, 172) 211 “La danse de Salomé achève l’effet produit par son costume. Sa fonction exclusivement érotique est d’exhiber le corps féminin de façon à susciter le désir du spectateur au point de le rendre irrésistible” (Cyzba 1983, 295). 212 “De façon à marquer une progression psychologique” (Marchal 2005, 112) 213 “Elle danse. 1) Une danse gracieuse, légère, comme un papillon, avec accompagnement d’une petite flûte. 2) Une danse langoureuse, voluptueuse, avec la gingras. 3) Une danse désordonnée, avec flûte tambourins et harpe. (…) Psychologie différente & progression à chaque danse” (Manuscrits d’Hérodias, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Mss, N.a.f. 23 663, Corpus flaubertianum, tome I, p. 225 (Quoted in Marchal 2005, 112). 214 “Kuchuk offers him (Flaubert) the perfect opportunity for Oriental spectacle as well as sexual fulfillment, alluring him with the eroticism that Flaubert seems to find implicit in her dance. In her movement he sees reified a sexual invitation evoking the desire to possess the body whose ontological existence and performance find their meaning only in the evocation of his pleasure” (Karayanni 2006, 46).

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friend Bouilhet had witnessed in the house of the courtesan Kuchiouk [sic] Hanem

during their journey through Egypt” (1966, 253).

In Voyage en Égypte (1851) Flaubert described Kuckuk-Hanem’s enticing dance

as she disrobed until the dancer was naked 215 . When Flaubert described her

characteristic movement “de ce fameux pas, les jambes passant l’une devant l’autre”

(1991, 285) Kuckuk-Hanem’s description precisely reflects Salomé’s first steps: “Her

feet slipped back and forth”216. As Flaubert scrawled notes in his original manuscript for

Hérodias he attributed Salomé’s dance with such adjectives as graceful and

light “comme un papillon” [like a butterfly], it is evident that the dancer Kuckuk-

Hanem provided him with the appropriate source to fire his imagination. Flaubert

described Kuckuk-Hanem’s dance as:

She squeezes her bare breasts together with her jacket. She puts on a girdle fashioned from brown shawl with gold stripes, with three tassels hanging on ribbons. She raises first on one foot, then on the other – marvelous movement: when one foot is on the ground, the other moves up and across in front of the shin-bone-the whole thing with a light bound. I have seen this dance on old Greek vases (Steegmuller, Flaubert 1972, 115)217.

In Mimesis in a Cognitive Perspective: Mallarmé, Flaubert, and Eminescu (2011),

Nicolae Babuts notes that while Salomé’s dancing steps recall those of the Egyptian

dancer so too do Kuchuk-Hanem’s steps remind Flaubert of the dance on Greek vases

and states that “one can see the path of memory, linking the three dance events and

noting their affinities” emphasizing “that the referents in the story and in the notes are

not the same. But the mimetic process does establish relations” (2011, 135).

Kuckuk-Hanem’s dance is light and graceful as the Salomé depicted in Hérodias

who, like her predecessor, passes one foot before the other, accompanied by the music

of a flute and a pair of castanets. As the dancer, with her arms rounded seems to pursue

an unknown who has fled, she is: "lighter than a butterfly, like some curious Psyche,

like a wandering spirit”218 (He, 101), appearing “ready to fly away”219 (He, 101). This

                                                                                                               215 “What he seems to perceive is that having sexual access to the body whose serpentine movements and formidable agility achieve a divine ecstasy means, ultimately, possession of timeless Oriental magic” (Karayanni 2006, 54). 216 “Ses pieds passaient l’un devant l’autre” (H, 171). 217 “Elle se serre la gorge dans sa veste de manière que ses deux seins découverts sont rapprochés et serrés l’un près de l’autre - pour danser, elle met comme ceinture pliée en cravate un châle brun à raie d’or avec trois glands suspendus à des rubans – elle s’enlève tantôt sur un pied, tantôt sur un autre, chose merveilleuse: un pied restant à terre, l’autre se levant passe devant le tibia de celui-ci, le tout dans un saut léger. J’ai vu cette danse sur des vieux vases grecs”. (1991, 283). 218 “Plus légère qu’un papillon, comme une Psyché curieuse, comme une âme vagabonde” (He, 171). 219 “Prête à s’envoler” (Flaubert 1999, 171).

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description furnishes her dance with an element of the spiritual. The butterfly represents

hope, a metamorphosis and is considered to be a symbol of resurrection (Chevalier &

Gheerbrant 1982, 841). Chevalier and Gheerbrant also note that the symbol of the

butterfly is not only used in the Greek myth of Psyche but it also represents traveling

spirits whose sight announces a visit or a death of a loved one (1982, 841). This

spiritual connotation offers significant overtones when we recall the motive behind

Salomé’s dance. The sight of the dancing “papillon” or butterfly in the guise of the

dancing Salomé announces the imminent death of John the Baptist. Flaubert’s dancing

papillon is therefore a premonition and a precursor to the annihilation of the sacred

prophet.

Atsuko Ogane makes reference to the butterfly as an introduction to the

spiritual: The butterfly, as Psyche, represents the soul. It is an introduction of the spiritual in this romantic contest. Moreover, rattlesnakes were instruments by priests and priestesses of Cybele. Presumably the author chose this term intentionally, to also provide the dance a spiritual dimension (my translation)220.

 This supports the argument that in order to insert a spiritual dimension to the piece,

Flaubert was intentional in his use of musical instruments and lepidopteron imagery.

The spiritual dimension evoked by Ogane offers an interesting approach to analysing

the paradoxical characteristics of Salomé221. Like Wilde’s, Flaubert’s Salomé is at once

chaste and virginal as the “enfant-séductrice”. She is ethereal and celestial in her

dancing flight reminiscent of a butterfly. The instruments used by the priests and

priestesses of Cybele anoint the commencement of the dance with a religious subtext.

Dierkes-Thurn views Flaubert’s first progression of the dance as “the movement of an

innocent soul searching for a lost god” (2011, 30) and reminds us that Flaubert was

interested in religious subjects throughout his career. She states: “Religious mysticism

often described the religious progression toward the divine in strikingly erotic terms by

employing sexual language and imagery when describing supreme religious ecstasy or

the imagined union with God” (2011, 26).

                                                                                                               220 “Le papillon, de même que la Psyché, représentent (sic) l’âme. C’est une introduction de la spiritualité dans ce contexte amoureux. D’ailleurs, les crotales étaient des instruments dont se servaient en particulier les prêtres et les prêtresses de Cybèle. On peut penser que l’auteur a choisi ce terme intentionnellement, pour donner aussi à la danse une dimension spirituelle” (2000, 7). 221 “The overall tone of the Flaubert has particular affinities with Wilde’s, and there are many verbal echoes. It is, perhaps, in Flaubert’s description of the dance, which he holds back until the close of the story, that one may recognise the semi-mystical quality which Wilde developed in his own concept of Salomé” (Raby1988, 104).  

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The second phase of the dance seduces the reader as Salomé’s performance

moves from the spiritual to the sensual. However, during this time “the mournful

sounds of the gringas replaces the castanets”222 (He, 101) to initiate a change in the

dance’s tempo advancing and stimulating sexual tension. Ogane describes the

movement as becoming more “saccadé” [jolting or jerky] (2006, 115). During this

phase, Flaubert characterizes the sentiment as “despair had followed hope”223 (He, 101)

while “the religious imagery soon merges into forceful, impressive erotic language”

(Dierkes-Thrun 2011, 30). Flaubert describes the dancing princess in luscious detail:

“With eyes half closed, she twisted her waist, made her belly ripple like the swell of the

sea, made her breasts quiver, while her expression remained fixed, and her feet never

stood still”224 (He, 101). Dierkes-Thrun analyses this alteration as “from the dancer’s

spiritual yearning, Flaubert shifts the focus toward Salomé’s erotic poses and the

wielding of her feminine power, which seduces Herod and the rest of the male audience.

At this point, Salomé’s provocative dance becomes more directly sexual and almost

pornographic” (2011, 30). Yet the musical accompaniment of mournful sounds

produced by the gringas, furnishes the dance with an ominous fatality paradoxically

produced by the converging of Salomé’s sensual movements and the solemnity of

Phoenician instruments. Such an amalgamation adds to the corrupt eroticism of her

undulations and therefore the voluptuousness of her dance.

Salomé’s movements become reminiscent of a snake as the dancing princess

becomes coextensive with the symbolic image of the serpent, a common artistic

personification of women during the second half of the nineteenth century. Dijkstra

recounts “among the terms to a woman’s appearance none were more overused during

the late nineteenth century than “serpentine,” “sinuous,” and “snake-like” (1986, 305).

Flaubert’s creative and illustrative choreography225, his imaginative use of imagery in

symbolically representing the dancer’s luxurious movements brings to mind the

serpentine-woman. “Being a true daughter of Eve, the animal-woman of the turn of the

century thus had a special appreciation for the erotic abilities of the snake. She liked to

be with serpents, use them in strange rituals, and generally become involved with them

                                                                                                               222 “Les sons funèbres de la gringas remplacèrent les crotales” (H, 171). 223 “L’accablement avait suivi l’espoir” (H, 171). 224 “Les paupières entre-closes, elle se tordait la taille, balançait son ventre avec des ondulations de houle, faisait trembler ses deux seins, et son visage demeurait immobile, et ses pieds n’arrêtaient pas” (H, 171-2). 225 The word choreography literally means “dance-writing” from the Greek "χορεία" (circular dance, choreia) and "γραφή" (writing).

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in the most dubious ways” (Dijkstra 1986, 306). Dijkstra points towards “Flaubert who

brought into focus this element of late nineteenth-century lore” (1986, 306).

The intertextual nature of the dancing Salomé leads the reader towards the

interconnection of Flaubert’s earlier treatment of this traditional “lore” when we recall

Salammbô (1862) and the erotic encounter between its female protagonist and the

serpent, “her partner in the rituals she performs as a priestess of Baal, a god representing

the male exterminating principle” (Dijkstra 1986, 306):

The music outside continued; there were three notes, always the same, headlong, frenzied; the strings grated, the flute boomed; Taanach kept time by clapping her hands; Salammbô, her whole body swaying, chanted her prayers, and her clothes, one after another, fell around her. The heavy tapestry shook, and above the cord holding it up the python’s head appeared. It came down slowly, like a drop of water running along a wall, crawled among the scattered garments, then, its tail stuck against the ground, reared up straight; and its eyes, more brilliant than carbuncles, fixed on Salammbô. (Flaubert, quoted in translation in Dijkstra 1986, 306).

Once again Flaubert utilises musical accompaniment to shroud the scene with a

rhythmic and suggestive fatal force. He allows Salammbô and, some fifteen years later,

Salomé, to dance off the page and into the reader’s pictorial imagination. Nonetheless,

while Hérodias’s Salomé is introduced to the reader, as she does fellow male attendees

who are submerged in her captivating dance, subliminal undertones gather momentum.

While King Herod is lost in reverie, bewitched by the dancer’s swooning and

rippling body, he assumes he sees Herodias: “The Tetrarch was lost in reverie, and had

forgotten about Herodias. He thought he saw her, over by the Sadducees. The vision

receded”226 (He, 101). However, “It was no vision”227 (He, 101). The Queen is always

lurking on the peripheral, an extremely calculating and pernicious deceiver who is

invariably composed as she watches her planned event unfold. Nothing is “more

deceptive than the apparent dryness and impartiality of the tone in Hérodias” (Brombert

1966, 254). Brombert elaborates, “The colors of the “Orient” and the tensions of the

human drama are suggested in condensed, muscular, almost elliptic sentences. These

sentences are remarkable for their impeccable sobriety, which only stress the latent

violence of the atmosphere” (1966, 254). Brombert’s assumption is clearly evident as

Flaubert strikes the reader with definitive and pronounced sentences to describe

Herodias’s diabolical psyche: “She had arranged instruction for her daughter Salome,

                                                                                                               226 “Le Tétrarque se perdait dans un rêve, et ne songeait plus à Hérodias. Il crut la voir près des Sadducéens. La vision s’éloigna” (H, 172). 227 “Ce n’était pas une vision” (H, 172).

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far from Machaerus; the Tetrarch would fall in love with her; it had been a good idea.

She was sure of that, now!228 (He, 101-2) Flaubert skilfully intercepts these elliptical

sentences, which seem to ricochet against Salomé’s choreographed moves. The

juxtaposition of Salomé’s dance with audacious descriptions of her mother’s hidden

agenda propels the performance towards the staccato styled abruptness that the third and

final musical phase reaches in its erotic climax.

The dance’s third and final phase transports the reader to a primitive locale

through the frenetic pulsations, of “the wild passion of love demanding satisfaction”229

(He, 102) as Salomé “danced like the priestess of India, like the Nubian women from

the cataracts, like Bacchantes of Lydia”230 (He, 102). Flaubert once again plunges into

an exotic pool of anamnesis as he recalls the tall Nubian girl, named Azizeh, whose

dancing was “more expert than Kuchuk’s” (Steegmuller, Flaubert 1972, 121). Flaubert

recounts that encounter in his travel diaries: “She begins. Her neck slides back and forth

on her vertebrae, and more often sideways, as though her head were going to fall off;

terrifying effect of decapitation. She stands on one foot, lifts the other, the knee making

a right angle, then brings it down firmly. This is no longer Egypt; it is negro, African,

savage - as wild as the other was formal”231 (Steegmuller, Flaubert 1972, 121).

Similarly, Babuts asserts that “in Salomé’s dance the recall of Nubian women is not

simply a tacit subterranean understanding: it intervenes openly to reinforce the intensity

of, and modulate, her dance” adding that “the reference now is both to Salomé and to

the Nubian women, and is used to place the two in a metaphoric relation. Flaubert

speaks with the authority of one who had seen the dance of the Nubian Azizeh” (2011,

135).

The frantic and turbulent dance explodes as the dancer is “bent over in every

direction, like a flower tossed by a storm”232 (He, 102). Flaubert masterfully engineers

the dance’s erotic turbulence through his description of Salomé’s wild performance:

“The jewels in her ears leaped about, the silk on her back shimmered, from her arms,

                                                                                                               228 “Elle avait fait instruire, loin de Machaerous, Salomé sa fille, que le Tétrarque aimerait; et l’idée était bonne. Elle en était sûre, maintenant!” (H, 172). 229 “Ce fut l’emportement de l’amour qui veut être assouvi” (H, 172). 230 “Elle dansa comme les prêtresses des Indes, comme les Nubiennes des cataractes, comme les bacchantes de Lydie” (H, 172). 231 “Elle s’y met – son col glisse sur les vertèbres d’arrière en avant, et plus souvent de côté, de manière à croire que la tête va tomber – cela fait un effet de décapitement [sic] effrayant. Elle reste sur un pied, lève l’autre, le genou faisant angle droit, et retombe dessus – ce n’est plus de l’Égypte, c’est du nègre, de l’africain, du sauvage. C’est aussi emporté que l’autre est calme” (Quoted in Marchal 2005, 113-4). 232 “Elle se renversait de tous les côtés, pareille à une fleur que la tempête agite” (H, 172).

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her feet, her clothes invisible sparks shot out, firing at men with excitement”233 (He,

102). The erotic tension continues to build as Salomé approaches her orgasmic

capstone: “Opening wide her legs, without bending her knees, she bowed so low that

her chin brushed the floor”234 (He, 102) when all of a sudden Salomé “sprung up on her

hands, heels in the air, crossed the dais in that way, like some great beetle; and suddenly

stopped”235 (He, 102). Salomé approaches the Tetrarch with tiny glistening beads of

sweat that sensually appear “like a vapour on white marble”236 (He, 102).

Enveloped in a succulent web of lust, Herod surrenders to her desires as he

awaits her request. Salomé’s demand is made deceptively monstrous by Flaubert’s

characterization of the enfant-séductrice: “I want you to give me on a dish the head…’

She had forgotten the name, but then went on with a smile, ‘Iokanaan’s head!’”237 (He,

103) The casualness and frivolity in which the child-like Salomé forgets the prophet’s

name yet once she recalls her lapsed memory, deviously smiles and triumphantly

pronounces, “Iokanann’s head” fiendishly sets into opposition her sadistic demand.

Salomé’s dance is pivotal in Flaubert’s tale, as the performance holds the key to

securing her mother’s agenda while at the same time possessing the power to take full

advantage of Herod’s audacious offer.

Wilde’s Anticipatory Dance of Desire

In Flaubert’s tale, “Salome’s dance occurs before Herod’s reckless offer to grant her

whatever she desires, which suggests that Herod is carried away under the spell of her

sensual physical display” (Snodgrass 1995, 185). Wilde, on the other hand, “places the

dance after Herod has already made the fateful offer, making the dance itself merely the

culminating component of Herod’s already–established bribe rather than the

determinant cause of Iokanaan’s death” (Snodgrass 1995, 185). Snodgrass suggests that

“Herod may well have been driven over the edge by lust, but it is not the dance’s carnal

exhibitionism that does it” (1995, 185). While Snodgrass may offer a valid assessment,

                                                                                                               233 “Les brillants de ses oreilles sautaient, l’étoffe de son dos chatoyait; de ses bras, de ses pieds, de ses vêtements jaillissaient d’invisibles étincelles qui enflammaient les hommes” (H, 172). 234 “Sans fléchir ses genoux en écartant les jambes, elle se courba si bien que son menton frôlait le plancher” (H, 172). 235 “Elle se jeta sur les mains, les talons en l’air, parcourut ainsi l’estrade comme un grand scarabée; et s’arrêta, brusquement” (H, 173). 236 “Semblaient une vapeur sur du marbre blanc” (H, 173). 237 “Je veux que tu me donnes dans un plat, la tête…” Elle avait oublié le nom, mais reprit en souriant: “La tête de Iokanaan!” (H, 173).

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his view reinforces the idea that the power of Wilde’s dance lies not in a detailed

description but in an anticipatory tension produced by the ambiguity of a single-line

description. The fact that Herod’s intense and extreme desire to see Salomé perform

forces him to offer her “unto half of his kingdom”, exhibits the power of Wilde’s

cryptic dance of seduction from which the reader is able to produce multiple meanings:

“Seduction re-turns as a liberated practice. Seductiveness in performance becomes an

interactive, interchangeable, pleasurable play of multiple meanings and identities

between performers and spectators - a physical action of desiring” (Claid 2006, 203).

By the prospect of watching Salomé dance and the sheer mystique of her performance,

Herod had therefore already perceived an insatiable hunger that was more than he could

ever desire.

Snodgrass may suggest that it was not the “dance’s carnal exhibitionism” which

would have “driven him over the edge with lust”, but this study advocates that Herod’s

desire was fuelled by the idea, the thought, the dream and the fantasy of the dance that

proved to be ever more powerful than any descriptive account Wilde could have

provided. In Wilde’s reading Salomé’s dance already possessed all the anticipatory

sexual drives and fantasies well before the naming of the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Herod’s continual pleas and Salomé’s insolent refusals therefore build in expectancy.

As Herod becomes enflamed with desire so too does the reader. In doing so, Wilde “by

giving Salome her own motive for dancing before Herod, gives back to the princess a

measure of subjectivity that had been denied her since the Bible omitted her name from

its tale of John the Baptist’s beheading” (Marcovitch 2004, 89). In doing so, Wilde not

only left the dance “open” to provide a forum for intense theatrical interpretations, but

also challenged the choreographer or director to conceive a dance that in turn warrants a

King to be ready and willing to depart with half of his kingdom. It is no simple task as

shown by Steven Berkoff’s apprehensive attitude towards the dance.

Varty not only sees director Steven Berkoff’s 1989 production of Salomé for the

Royal National Theatre in London as taking “much inspiration from the symbolist

origins of the play and from the design of Beardsley’s pictures” (1998, 153), but she

also sees the director’s account of his choice of style adopted for Salome’s dance as

setting the tone for the entire production. She quotes Berkoff:

Salome’s dance became yet another problem to be dealt with since it so talked about, and begged for such a mythic image, that who or what could possibly live up to its reputation? What does it mean? Is it a stripping off of all our vanities and pretentions? Is it just a dance? It usually means some erotic

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striptease where a poor singer or actress bares all and grits her teeth in the alleged name of art. We decided that like everything else it had to be an illusion (1998, 153).

Wilde’s interpretation of Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils is an enigmatic dance

shrouded in mystery but as a director, Berkoff realised it “could not possibly live up to

its reputation” and instead opted for it “to be an illusion”.

Critics have found the terse stage direction “so vague as to be irresponsible”

(Cave 2011, 145) or even “perfunctory” (Davies 2011, 65). Katherine Brown Downey

goes so far as to exclaim “for the narrative it does not seem to matter” (2004, 101) and

proceeds to offer a rather irrational explanation for Herod’s fascination with the

princess: “one feels she (Salomé) could have performed the Macarena and he would

have been enraptured” (2004, 101). It seems difficult to support Downey’s claims when

we consider that Salomé’s dance appears at the critical junction of the Salomé narrative.

While the dance “precipitates the action and seals Iokanaan’s destiny […] it also charts

the protagonist’s transformation from wilful adolescent into passionate woman”

(Santini 2011, 234). For Santini, only Salomé’s dance “can bring about the

transformation that leads to Salome’s dissociation from the world around her and to the

paroxysm of her final monologue” (2011, 237). Salomé may dance to please Herod but

in Wilde’s play Salomé’s dance is also “Salome’s supreme moment of self-expression”

(2011, 233), it is “the act of dancing (which) releases her vitality as a primitive impulse

– an impulse in which, as in Dionysian ecstasy, vital energy and longing for death are

intertwined” (2011, 237).

Critics have certainly been puzzled by Wilde’s laconic tone of direction in the

naming of the dance by such a terse description actually, seems aligned with Wilde’s

tastes for paradoxes. Amy Koritz exemplifies stripping bare any details of the

performed dance by refusing to provide any descriptions: “any concrete sense of its

form, length, or style is elided in the one-sentence stage direction, “Salomé danse la

danse des sept voiles”. That this exclusion was deliberate is clear from Wilde’s

inscription of a copy of the play to Aubrey Beardsley” (1995, 82). Koritz is referring to

the original edition of Salomé held in the Sterling Library in the University of London

where the copy dated March 1893 is inscribed with the following, “For Aubrey: for the

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only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see

that invisible dance. Oscar”238 (CL, 578n).

Such a cryptic inscription by Wilde deserves critical attention as it supports the

notion of ambiguity in the play. Considering Wilde believed Beardsley to be the only

artist who, beside himself, knew what the Dance of the Seven Veils was, and also, the

only artist to ever be able to truly see the invisible dance, demonstrates Wilde’s implied

intention to cloak the dance in confidential mystery. Through his dedication, he

therefore confirms a multitude of readings and artistic interpretations. The dance is

fundamentally invisible and as such, it is not surprising that those artists who wish to

interpret Wilde’s enigmatic dance “have gazed into this void and seen an intriguing

panoply of meaningful color, gesture, and movement” (Jeffery 2007, 228). The fact that

the dance is invisible should offer no reason to reject or dismiss the importance of its

theoretical or hypothetical implications. While Salomé’s dance certainly propels the

narrative plot, precipitating the act of murderous revenge for the princess’s unrequited

love, Wilde’s elliptical description remains the most explicit case for multiplicity and

polysemy in the play.

The diversity of meanings associated with Wilde’s Dance of the Seven Veils

exists as a satisfying artistic vehicle for any director or choreographer wishing to

interpret a bold, new and original reading of the dance. When doing so, he/she innately

initiates a reciprocal interaction between the dancer and the spectator as: Dance is not, strictly speaking, a gestural form of language. Its symbolism does not develop, as that of poetry does, from a codified semiotic system. Dance movements may constitute signs for the spectator, but unlike most linguistic signs these are inherently open-ended. Only the signifier is given; the reader is free to choose the signified (Shaw 1993, 55).

In taking the aforementioned remarks into consideration the following two productions

which this chapter shall analyse will illustrate that the stage direction, set against

Wilde’s symbolist dialogue, becomes a dance that is not merely “just a dance” but a

highly sensual mythic and penetrable dance that solicits countless original

interpretations. “At crucial junctures Wilde relies upon apposition and omission. All

who encounter the play note that there is no dance described, and instead readers,

                                                                                                               238 Wilde clearly felt a certain affinity with the young artist well before Beardsley was commissioned to illustrate the English edition of Salomé as Gilbert states that “it must be noted that Wilde’s inscription appears in a copy of the French version of the play, dated some three months before Beardsley received the commission from Lane to illustrate the English translation” (1983, 135).

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performers and viewers are invited to translate for themselves “Salomé dances the

dance of the seven veils” into a scene” (Richmond-Garza 2011, 34).

Although Kemp and Abbey exhibit diverse interpretations of the famous dance

within the contrasting mediums of theatre and opera, their shared examinations of

performance art both explore the frenzied desire of erotic male and female sexual

fantasy. Lindsay Kemp and Kelley Abbey brilliantly illuminate how the Dance of the

Seven Veils exists as a pivotal point in the drama that changes the course of events

significantly and in doing so highlight the sexual nature of the dance.

Both productions certainly highlight the sexual nature of the dance, they each

equally appeal to the intellectual process of decoding the dancer’s sign-function to

interpret the unspeakable nature of Wilde’s enigmatic dance. Through diverse and

original readings, both Kemp and Abbey initiate the junction between spectator and

dancer to allow “the ambiguous and seductive tension of performing presence - the

moment of engagement - that enlivens performer-spectator relations” (Claid 2006, 4). In

doing so, they deliver “the visual analogue of the linguistic dance into the hands-and-

feet-of the performer” (Varty 1998, 143). Varty further explains: If Wilde’s direction seems curt it is because dance is the business of performance. Wilde controls the metaphorical dance within the dialogue of the play, the linguistic concealments and revelations, and he controls the position of the dance in the drama. But he delivers the visual analogue of the linguistic dance into the hands-and feet-of the performer (1998, 143).

Taking Varty’s claim into consideration, when Wilde delivers the visual analogue into

the “hands and feet” of artists such as Kemp and Abbey, their performance reading of

Salomé’s dance produces a profound effect which ultimately prompts the spectator to

engage in a multitude of interpretive possibilities. Specifically, Kemp and Abbey

deliver the message through the dancer to the reader/spectator. In other words, the

dancer transforms the coded message through their dancing bodies to that of the

spectator. Shaw brilliantly described the process of deciphering the relative codes in the

relationship between poetics and dance performance in the texts of Mallarmé: The reader/spectator of the poetic or balletic art work always already carries within, as it were, the art work’s other half. The reader reacts to poetry sensorially, and the spectator, to dance intellectually. This does not mean that poetry is directly experienced as sensorial or dance as intellectual. Rather, the text appeals directly to the reader’s intellect, which calls on his or her imagination to re-create the sensory impressions produced by the spectacle of dance. Conversely, when witnessing dance, the spectator’s senses are appealed to directly, but in such a way as to provoke the intellectual process of meaning deciphering implicit in the reading of poetic texts (1993, 56).

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Shaw asserts an active participation between dancer and spectator similar to that of a

poetic work when the addressee is forced to decipher codes. However, while “dance is

certainly experienced by both dancers and spectators as being far more tangible than

literature…what is tangible in dance is generally more relevant to its aesthetic impact

than are the concrete aspects of a text” (1993, 59). However, in the case of Wilde’s

Dance of the Seven Veils the tangibility of which Shaw writes has a greater and more

profound effect than merely existing as being relevant to its aesthetic impact.

The stage direction not only forces a live production of Salomé to identify the

wordless gestural performance with praxis but also the terse stage direction’s ambiguity

insists on an original creative interpretation (a dance) within the context of a

performative medium239. In the case of Lindsay Kemp’s 1977 London production of

Salomé, the Dance of the Seven Veils was an opportunity to challenge gender norms

through stylised movement and homoeroticism under the guise of drag.

Lindsay Kemp’s Appropriation of the Dance of the Seven Veils  

Considering the onerous and problematic relationship between Salomé and the London

stage, it is not surprising that the first professional staging to be produced in London for

over two decades, was staged by the Lindsay Kemp Company at the Roundhouse in

1977240 . Salomé’s intrinsic association with the violation of English sensibilities

remained true: the notorious play did not disappoint in producing its indispensable

consternating effects upon British theatregoers. Such a contravention was achieved

through Kemp’s original postmodern theatrics and unrestrictive foregrounding of

homosexuality through the guise of drag.

Lindsay Kemp gained notoriety by injecting into the serious world of 1960s and

1970s British theatre “a huge dose of camp, with productions drenched in blood and

glitter, full of pansexual orgies and naked young men” (Smith, The Guardian 2002). His

trademark style has been described as an “exotic blend of danger and innocence, of

palpitating femininity and sturdy athleticism”. His art being “not quite dance, not quite                                                                                                                239 In “Dancing for an Oath: Salomé’s Revaluation and Gesture” (2002), Heidi Hartwig asks “Is it merely an illusion of agency or does it ask us to identify the wordless gestural performance with effectual action, with praxis? The dance of Salomé in Wilde’s play is the representation of a dance within the action of the play and not merely a dance performed for the sake of the audience” (31). 240 Since the initial banning of Wilde’s Salomé in 1892 by the Examiner of plays, Edward F. Smyth Pigott, Salomé was “denied public presentation in Britain until 1931” (Tyddeman & Price, 1996) despite enjoying success throughout much of Europe.

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mime, occasionally spoken (and) often crazily sung” has been described as digging

“deep into the subconscious” (Independent 31. 08. 1996).

Installing homosexual themes centre stage, which previously had “almost

invariably been treated with extreme caution,” (Tydeman & Price 1996, 98) the Lindsay

Kemp Company’s production of Salomé consisted of a variety of transvestite roles. Such

roles included a bald ghoulish queen Hérodias sporting plastic breasts, a bare chested

yet ivory powdered prophet feminized by richly painted lips and eyes, a Syrian soldier

whose only costume was that of a gold lamé jockstrap and of course, the princess

Salomé herself played by Lindsay Kemp in flagrant drag, adorned with a large,

burlesque-styled, feathered headdress (Fig. 14).

Tydeman and Price claim that Kemp’s decision to insert elements of Wilde’s

original French text into a predominantly English language production perhaps

encourages “us to recall certain aspects of the play’s history, and in particular the

problematic role of Sarah Bernhardt in its origins” (1996, 100). If true, such an

innovative approach to Salomé would also endorse the sonic qualities the language

provided, paying homage to the rich French transtextual history so enthusiastically

revered by Wilde. However, in a personal interview with Lindsay Kemp on January 06,

2016, he specifically stated that: “I certainly don’t recall using any of the French text

and as I don’t speak French, I didn’t”241. Additionally, both critics assert that there was

a drastic cutting of Wilde’s original text so that “barely a third of the lines were

retained” (1996, 99) resulting in the role of Salomé securing an even greater decisive

and prominent function in the play. In response to such claims of textual editing, Kemp

explained, “I certainly didn’t cut it, I love the text so much” and continued “I’m so used

to critics reading interpretations of my work or Salomé reviews and it becomes

abundantly clear that the critic in question hasn’t seen the work at all”242. When

asserting their claim perhaps Tydeman and Price are referring to Katherine Worth’s

Macmillan Modern Dramatist’s series Oscar Wilde (1983), first published six years

after Kemp’s radical all-male reinterpretation of Salomé where she states: The all-male company, half acting, half dancing the play, speaking now in English, now in French, created some unforgettable images – the ravaged splendour of Herodias, Herod’s sinister seductiveness, the transvestite Salomé,

                                                                                                               241 Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016. 242  Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  

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whose stripping of the veils243 was in the nature of things obliged to be a revelation of spirit rather than body the ‘idea’ or essence of Salomé. (1987, 72)

Although Tydeman and Price highlight elements that Kemp himself contradicted, their

appreciation of the production’s sensory impact reveals “the very eclecticism of the

production [that] challenged any simple interpretation” (1996, 99). They characterize

Kemp’s rendition of Salomé as “an assault on the senses, with deafening drumming,

green and blood-red lighting, joss sticks in the hair of the slaves, incense burning in

braziers, a live snake and a live dove, smoke, feathers, snatches of Wagner and Mozart

and more besides” (1996, 99). It is within Kemp’s dramatic eclecticism, an intentional

radicalisation of Wilde’s drama that promotes a very high degree of ambiguity allowing

enormous scope for possible interpretations. These interpretive possibilities are made

abundantly clear in Kemp’s approach to the art of dance.

Dance was incorporated throughout the production as Kemp stated: “dance is an

integral part of everything I do”244. However, it was during Salomé’s Dance of the

Seven Veils that the subversion of preconceived conventions was enriched and

deepened, underpinned by a new homoerotic reading of the play. In Kemp’s rendition of

Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils there is a definitive challenge to established

patriarchal gender norms. In taking the notion that “in Wilde’s Salome the Dance of the

Seven Veils is also the dance of gender and desire” (Fernbach 2002, 54), Kemp pushed

the concept of gender ambiguity to the extreme while providing an element of the

surreal. His characterisation of Salomé’s dance offered a plethora of interpretations

from the incongruously absurd and bizarre to a finale that could be perceived as

perverted, freakish and even monstrous.

Worth describes Lindsay Kemp as giving “a completely Wildean interpretation”

by effecting “the transformation of a middle-aged, balding dancer into the young

princess by the strength of his vision of the Salomé in himself” (1987, 67). Such a

destabilizing reading of the dance was achieved in a provocative burlesque styled strip

tease: an improvised dance, which was “lacking all conventional signs of artistic

excellence” (Tydeman & Price 1996, 102) and was “seemingly unchoreographed”

(Tydeman & Price 1996, 102) as Kemp twirled “flat-footedly on the spot, registering

                                                                                                               243 Kemp used a single veil. Further evidence to support that perhaps Worth also didn’t see the production live.    244  Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  

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his unusual facial expressions of hope, despair, panic and vulnerability” (Coveney,

Financial Times, 1977).

When interviewed, Kemp stressed that his reading of Wilde’s enigmatic dance

was completely improvised and would range anywhere from ten, twelve to even fifteen

minutes depending on the performance. However, “everything is structured with set

choreography in case I am not in the mood but I usually am and I tend to depart from

the original”245. Kemp’s ambiguous response offers a compelling insight that nuances

the notion of improvisation. Here, “improvisation is a spontaneous putting together of

arbitrary things and letting them go again. Improvisation releases the fixed sediment

trapped between body and mind” (Claid 2006, 86) to allow for the imaginary to surface.

Claid clarifies: “The imaginary is the body’s key to improvisation. Improvisation in

performance offers a performer and spectator a unique sense of self” (2006, 86). When

Kemp releases and destabilizes the ordered sequence of set choreography by

relinquishing his control of a preconceived choreographed dance, the performed order is

undermined as he attains a sign-function that is sui generis. In this case, “Spectators are

engaged by a practice of ‘not knowing’ but desiring to know – a play between a

multiplicity of perceptions and interpretations rather than a fixed single truth about a

performer” (Claid 2006, 6). Claid further explains: However, the ambiguous ‘not knowing’ that engages spectators has nothing to do with vagueness or inexactness. Rather, it is the spectator’s knowledge of possible identifiable points that make the play of not knowing possible. And it is the performer’s attention to precisely defined action that evokes the ambiguity of meaning for the spectator (Claid 2006, 6).

Kemp’s decision to improvise Salomé’s dance was not his only departure from the

familiar criteria usually associated with the Dance of the Seven Veils. Curious though it

may seem, Kemp opted for one long white veil in preference to the use of the traditional

seven veils. When asked about the significance of the number seven, Kemp declared: “I

never thought about the number seven. In all the many productions I’ve ever done of

Salome, I have never used seven veils”246. Kemp refuted Lawrence Senelick’s claim

that “Kemp had his Salome despoiled by seven ravishers to seven times seven

climaxes” (2000, 410). In response, Kemp asked, “Who had the seven climaxes? Was I

around? That was simply his [Senelick’s] interpretation”247. However, when the large

                                                                                                               245  Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  246  Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  247  Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  

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veil ultimately did fall the audience was compelled to gaze upon, what was certainly

already established once Kemp made his majestic entrance, a middle-aged man in a

sequinned body stocking who made “no pretence at conventional sexual attractiveness”

(Tydeman & Price 1996, 102). Tydeman and Price suggest that “the implication is that

this was an unveiling of the self, an honest exposure of the actor’s essential being”

(1996, 102). While Claid describes gender ambiguity of male dancers as displacing

“fixed subjects and objects through a seductive play of femininity and masculinity on

their bodies” (2006, 5) that in turn “evoke a multiplicity of meanings” (2006, 5). In the

case of Kemp’s characterization of the female dancer, the spectator engages in

indeterminateness through a distinctly queer aesthetic, which is not only alluring but

also puzzling and thought-provoking. Claid explains:

Men performing, dancing the same internally focused, fluid movement language as women, do not become invisible in performance as other-of-the-other. Quite the opposite: watching qualities of feminine on masculine bodies is intriguing. The seduction between real and illusion, which eludes female bodies in the Western post-modern attention to absence, comes into play at the site/sight of male dancers (2006, 160).

 If we concur with Claid’s analysis, Kemp did not intend to deceive the audience by

shrouding his male body in convincing apparel of extreme femininity. Rather, during

the dance sequence his bold and brazened drag that was ultimately shed exposed the

actor as a man, allowing for a “masked expression of gay erotics” (Fernbach 2001, 54).

Fernbach states: Whereas the emphasis in classical fetishism is on veiling the corrupt nature of women’s sexual difference, in Wilde’s play the veil becomes a prop to fantasize Salome as a male transvestite. Her dance signifies gender undecidability and subsequently allows for the masked expression of gay erotics, as the body of a potentially male Salome is eroticized through the sexually charged dance. As a fetishistic or male homosexual fantasy, Salome’s dance has the power to seduce only while a veil remains. (2001, 54)

Kemp took the notion of gender undecidability to its ultimate expression. If one is to

correlate Fernbach’s interpretation of Salomé’s dance and the eroticisation of the

fetishistic veil as a masking of homosexual fantasy, then Kemp’s removal of Salomé’s

veil, a blatant divulging of a near naked man in a sequinned body stocking, leaves the

interpretation of the dance almost as open and ambiguous as Wilde’s terse one-line

stage direction. In this regard, transvestism in theatre, by its mere existence, offers an

array of inventive possibilities. Senelick clarifies: The transvestite in performance rarely displaces dichotomous systems of sex and gender; and to look at the cross-dressed actor solely in that light runs the

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risk of accepting uncritically, even bolstering conventional concepts of sexual dimorphism. To define the stage transvestite solely as a third alternative and to relegate fluidity and ambiguity exclusively to such an alternative is to overlook the wide range of reinventions of masculine and feminine within the theatrical frame (2000, 11).

In applying Senelick’s analysis of the transvestite performance to Kemp’s Salomé, this

study argues that Kemp employed the guise of drag to not only evoke a destabilizing

reading from his audience but to also challenge gender norms and invite the spectator to

interpret and engage in the alluring nature of gender ambiguity.

The attraction of Kemp’s brazen styled drag and his flirtatious approach to

gender was also ever present in the characters of Herodias and Iokanaan. In Kemp’s

production British dancer and mime artist Jack Birkett, who was often billed as “The

Incredible Orlando”, played Queen Herodias. Birkett’s “stylised theatrical language

permitted him to blend ferocity with camp comedy, tragedy with menace, and lyricism

with grotesqueness” (Haughton, The Guardian, 2010). In 1966 Birkett began to lose his

sight. By the time Kemp’s original Salomé was staged in 1977, the actor was almost

completely blind. “After he had become entirely blind, he grew more extreme in his

performance and his persona. His change of name to The Incredible Orlando mirrored

his transformation” (Haughton, the Guardian, 2010). Birkett’s Hérodias was described

as “a black-lipped, bald-headed monster, contemptuous of Herod’s sexual attraction to

her daughter; but her crude, tyrannical appearance and cruel laughter were ironised by

the huge plastic breasts projecting from a chest of a man in drag” (Tydeman & Price

1996, 104).

Tydeman and Price further explain that this absurd caricature “creates a double

response: evidently playful and celebratory, the figure could nevertheless be taken as a

parody not of Herodias but of her sex” (1996, 104). While Herodias attracts yet repels,

offering an ambivalent and unstable allusion of seduction, this antithetical presentation

of the monstrous-feminine from a disturbing and abject angle of gender undecidability

comments predominantly on the diversity of sexual practices beyond the

authoritarianism of the heterosexual norm. Senelick defines the function of drag as “not

so much to mock female anatomy but to exaggerate it and reveal the absurdity of social

values; it also plunders the rich legacy of past artistic and emotion types to engender

new forms” (2000, 409). Senelick further explains that “in the theatre, camp can be

heightened to a level where it projects a kaleidoscopic array of references: it can create

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both a critique of sophistication and a theatrical synthesis of high and low culture”

(2000, 409).

Just as Kemp’s and Birkett’s virtual circus-like drag reinterpretation of Salomé

and Herodias supports a camp and homosexual carnivalesque reading of the play,

Iokanaan, played by David Haughton, offers an androgynous and homoerotic

interpretation. This style alluded to the ancient and mythical gay fantasy while also

coinciding with the glam rock scene of the 1970s248. Claid clarifies that “the particular

paradigm that androgyny attempts to embrace, through the transcendent union of

masculine and feminine qualities on one body, offers Western culture a resolution to the

ancient philosophical enquiry into the conflict between physical passions and spiritual

purity” (2006, 29).

Chris Snodgrass extrapolates upon the theory that “the androgyne – from the

Greek andro, meaning male, and gyne, meaning female – had generally been employed,

particularly in the early and middle part of the nineteenth century, as a benefic metaphor

for ideal sexual union and for the reunion of the soul with God” (1995, 58). Androgyny

is represented by the prophet’s feminized characteristics which are aestheticized and

heightened to such a degree as to correspond to the romantic blazons bestowed upon the

epicene prophet by the seducing Judean dancer: “I am amorous of thy body, Iokanaan!

Thy body is white, like the lilies of a field that the mower hath never mowed. Thy body

is white like the snows that lie on the mountains of Judaea”249 (S, 82) and again “Thy

mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory…Thy mouth is redder than the feet of

those who tread the wine in the wine-press. It is redder than the feet of the doves who

inhabit the temples and are fed by the priests”250 (S, 84). Dark rich red painted lips,

contoured black smoke eyes, thin powdered ivory body and possessing long coiled

locks of black hair, Iokanaan also portrays a near naked Dr Frank n Furter reminiscent

of the Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) or David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust which

Lindsay Kemp staged and performed in at the Rainbow Theatre, London in 1972. By

engaging in an ambivalent reading of androgyny, Haughton’s portrayal of Iokanaan

                                                                                                               248  The ancient and mythical gay fantasy refers to “the Western love of the androgynous male body” which “emerges from the homoerotic world of Athenian culture, around 400 BC” (Claid 2006, 28).  249 “Je suis amoureuse de ton corps. Ton corps est blanc comme le lys d’un pré que le faucheur n’a jamais fauché. Ton corps est blanc comme les neiges qui couchent sur les montagnes, comme les neiges qui couchent sur les montagnes de Judée” (S, 83).  250 “Ta bouche est comme une bande d'écarlate sur une tour d'ivoire… Ta bouche est plus rouge que les pieds de ceux qui foulent le vin dans les pressoirs. Elle est plus rouge que les pieds des colombes qui demeurent dans les temples et sont nourries par les prêtres” (S, 85).

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reinforced the notion of gender confusion depicted in Beardsley’s accompanying

illustrations of the feminized prophet. Claid points out that “[a]ndrogyny, like beauty,

upholds the traditions of classical Greek aesthetics. It materializes through its

signification as a harmonized union of masculine and feminine qualities in and on one

body” (2006, 27). Therefore, by offering an array of homosexual archetypal and

performative variances, Kemp’s Salomé was not simply an example of camp drag but a

synthesis of configurative gay sexual identity.

Gay sexual identity was also ever so subtly evoked by the implicit stage design.

Throughout the production the homosexual emphasis was chromatically intensified by

the colour green from Kemp’s first appearance as Salomé, adorned in an exotic

feathered green cape, his head “covered in a riot of painted green feathers” (Coveney,

Financial Times, 1977) to most notably the Dance of the Seven Veils which was

sublimely bathed in green tones. Kemp’s seductive use of the colour green holds

subliminal reference to Wilde and decadent aesthetics, heightening and exemplifying

the coded homosexual subtext in the play to offer a veiled colouring of mystic and

sexual ambiguity. In Wilde’s Salomé, the young princess uses her power of seduction to

satisfy her lustful ambition in attaining what she wants; Salomé promises the Young

Syrian “a little green flower”: “Thou wilt do this for me, Narraboth, and to-morrow

when I pass in my litter beneath the gateway of idol-sellers I will let fall for thee a little

flower, a little green flower”251 (S, 70). In the attention to green, spectators observing

Kemp’s dance may often side with Wilde scholars such as Aquien, Ellmann, and

Bartlett among others, who acknowledge the green carnation as an “insignia to

homosexual men” (Bartlett 1988, 50).

However, as Dierkes-Thrun points out that although Salomé’s promise to drop

Narraboth a “little green flower” “has often been interpreted as Wilde’s allusion to the

green carnation he was fond of wearing, reportedly a nineteenth-century code signalling

homoeroticism among gay men in Paris” she also indicates that “interpretations of the

green carnation as a sign of homosexuality also differ widely” (2011, 143)252. Ellmann

makes reference to Wilde wearing a green carnation to the premiere of “Lady

Windermere’s Fan”, a distinctive buttonhole worn also on the same evening by Cecil                                                                                                                251 “Vous ferez cela pour moi, Narraboth, et demain quand je passerai dans ma litière sous la porte des vendeurs d'idoles, je laisserai tomber une petite fleur pour vous, une petite fleur verte” (S, 71). 252 Dierkes-Thurn references Karl Beckson’s authoritative article on the subject “Oscar Wilde and the Green Carnation” (2000) and points out that the green carnation was also the central literary symbol in two fictional accounts of Wilde’s life and trials, the 1894 novel The Green Carnation by Robert Hitchens (2011, 213n13).

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Graham on stage and by Wilde’s inner circle of friends in the auditorium. When asked

what was the significance of the green carnation, Wilde responded with an air of

nonchalance, “Nothing whatever, but that is just what nobody will guess” (Ellmann

345). Varty explains Wilde’s enigmatic response: This is sheer mischief, for the green carnation was a badge of homosexuality, but it is made by someone who takes calculated pleasure in exclusiveness and provocation, in self-advertisement, and in complicating the distinction between art and life. Subjected to this off-stage drama, the audience was also being teased by secrets kept and broken on stage (1998, ix).    

By wearing a green flower “Wilde ceased to be an individual homosexual with a flair

for creating his own public image, and subscribed to a homosexual fashion. He declared

himself to be one of an anonymous group of men for whom the wearing of the green

carnation meant homosexuality” (Bartlett 1988, 50). Wilde scholars are correct to make

reference to the fact that Wilde had shared a “curious love of green” as he described in

his essay “Pen, Pencil and Poison: A Study in Green” (1889).

When characterizing the personality of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, Wilde

writes: “He had that curious love of green, which in individuals, is always a sign of

subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence

in morals” (CW, 324). Donohue speculates that Salomé’s offer of the ‘little green

flower’ to the young captain could possess “a coded significance identifying Salomé’s

sexuality as perversely and clandestinely male, suggesting that the Syrian thus kills

himself out of homosexual jealousy over Salome’s infatuation with Iokanaan” (1997,

127).

Wilde places further emphasis on the green flower as Salomé seductively repeats

the phrase luring the Young Syrian into her web of deceit: “Thou wilt do this thing for

me, Narraboth. Thou knowest that thou wilt do this thing for me”253 (S, 70). Salomé

becomes the temptress; fixating upon the Yong Syrian a Medusa like trance of

tantalising persuasion, “Look at me, Narraboth, look at me. Ah! Thou knowest that thou

wilt do what I ask of thee. Thou knowest it… I know that thou wilt do this thing”254 (S,

70) after which she has already tantalizingly promised him a glimpse into her sexual

world: “And on the morrow when I shall pass in my litter by the bridge of the idol-

buyers, I will look at thee through the muslin veils, I will look at thee, Narraboth, it may

                                                                                                               253 “Vous ferez cela pour moi, Narraboth. Vous savez bien que vous ferez cela pour moi” (S, 71). 254 “Regardez-moi, Narraboth. Regardez-moi. Ah! vous savez bien que vous allez faire ce que je vous demande. Vous le savez bien, n'est-ce pas ?. . . Moi, je le sais bien” (S, 71).

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be that I will smile at thee”255 (S, 70). Spånberg256 states that “the green flower in

Salome may be inconspicuous but it has a powerful effect since the princess’s promise

to give it to the officer in charge, the Young Syrian, causes him to let her see the

prophet Jokanaan, against Herod’s express commands” (2009, 63-4). Thus Spånberg

alludes to the fact that “it seems to stand for a potential bond between them, a promise

of understanding, perhaps an admission of complicity” (2009, 64).

The chromatic intensity of the colour green used in Kemp’s production sheds

some light on Umberto Eco’s notion of open work. When an artist such as Kemp leaves

the arrangement of his aesthetic reception to an audience, he engenders a multiplicity of

possible interpretations. For example, the notion of code and decoding can be applied to

the visual reception of Kemp’s reading of Wilde’s Salomé.

As discussed in previous chapters, “poetic language deliberately uses terms in a

way that will radically alter their referential function (by establishing, among them,

syntactic relationships that violate the usual laws of the code)”, which in turn

“eliminates the possibility for a univocal decoding” (Eco 1989, 195). As the Salomé

reader can be seen as a “cryptographer forced to decode a message whose code is

unknown, and who therefore has to learn the code of the message from the message

itself,” (Eco 1989, 195) the “notions of code and decoding can also be applied to

nonlinguistic communications such as the visual arts” (Eco 1989, 271) or in this case

the visual and aesthetic reception of a theatrical work. Eco asks: “But is it possible to

decode such messages at a semantic level?” (1989, 271) and states: “this should not be

too difficult in the instance of figurative or symbolic painting, since their mimetic

nature can entail semantic references as well as iconographic conventions” (1989, 271).

Eco continues to clarify that “on the other hand, there could very well be an

interpretive code, maybe not quite as cogent as the linguistic system, based on a cultural

                                                                                                               255 “Et demain quand je passerai dans ma litière sur le pont des acheteurs d'idoles, je vous regarderai à travers les voiles de mousseline, je vous regarderai, Narraboth, je vous sourirai, peut-être” (S, 71). 256 As previously mentioned, many critics often alluded to the gay signification of the green carnation in Salomé though very few examine the transtextual elements of the green flower in relation to French literature. However, Spånberg makes an excellent examination of such transtextuality in his article “Green Flowers and Golden Eyes: Balzac, Decadence and Wilde’s Salome” (2009) where he investigates the intertextual and thematic links in Wilde’s Salomé with French Romantic and Decadent literature, focusing on the possible connection between Salomé and two of Balzac’s novellas, Séraphîta (1834) and La Fille aux yeux d’or (1835). He states, “A green flower also occurs in Balzac’s novel Séraphîta. Again, it appears to be small and significant, but it has a strong symbolic import. It is closely related to the protagonist, the androgynous Séraphîta/Séraphîtüs, who changes his/her sex according to whether she/he is the object of male or female desire. The flower itself is a hybrid, unique because it is sterile and can have no offspring, like Séraphîtüs/ Séraphîta herself” (2009, 63). He sees the green flowers as suggesting “tantalising links between the two texts” (2009, 63).

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tradition, in which every color would have a precise referent” (1989, 271). Therefore, in

the case of Kemp’s reading, it is relevant to interpret the aesthetic chromatic

enhancements used while bathing Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils in green stage

lighting as encased in a cultural paradigm of homosocial257 cultural behaviour. A radical

reinterpretation such as Kemp’s reading allows one to move amidst a multiplicity of

meanings. In this regard, Kemp’s Salomé is a production that warrants and moreover

“wants to offer the eye the most liberating adventure while remaining a form of

communication” (Eco 1989, 98). One can agree with Eco when he states “ambiguity is

not an accessory to the message: it is a fundamental feature” (1989, 196).

In establishing the process of receiving a coded message, we have interpreted

Kemp’s artistic use of green stage lighting to render a gay aesthetic reading of Wilde’s

play. However, the “cryptographer”, as Eco describes, is nevertheless faced with a

fascinating prospect of deciphering the enigmatic and coded meaning of the “little green

flower”. Bartlett asks: “Why does she (Salomé) specify that the flower must be green?

Why so precise a detail in such a lurid spectacle, promising everything and delivering

nothing?” (1988, 44) The mystery that shrouds the green flower in numerous

ambivalent connotations is endless and continues to bewilder Wilde’s audience. The

flower is unique, strange, yet exotic and beautiful. Spånberg explains: Green flowers exist, of course, but they are anomalous. The petals of flowers should form a contrast to green leaves and stalks and therefore be of a different colour from them. A green flower confuses sameness and difference and consequently questions the binary oppositions that usually underpin our thinking in categories, categories like male and female for instance (2009, 68).

Bartlett offers further commentary on the green flower: “It is the most unnatural flower

possible. It is an artist’s flower; luxurious, fantastic, beautiful. It is a work of art. It will

never come to fruition” (1988, 44) as he aligns the symbolic order to that of the

homosexual. Bartlett explains, “A homosexual, like a hothouse flower, declares his

superiority to the merely natural. He is unnatural, and as monstrous as he is necessarily

beautiful. He is the result of laborious cultivation; if not an artist, then at least a work of

art” (1988, 46).

Taking Bartlett’s comments into consideration prompts one to ask if Wilde

intentionally chose the green flower to embrace a homosexual subtext to the play? We

will never know, as Wilde remains ambiguous, the symbolic mystery of the green                                                                                                                257 Eve Sedgwick first popularized the term ‘homosociality’ in literature in her book Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire (1985) to define homosociality as the same sex bonds and associations notwithstanding any romantic or sexual nature.

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flower is emblematic of Wilde’s taste for paradoxes as illustrated in The Critic As Artist

(1891) when he states, “I live in terror of not being misunderstood” (CW, 1114). Faced

with such ambiguity the reader is subsequently free to interpret the text as “constituting

a flexible type of which many tokens can be legitimately realized” (Eco 1979, 3). Eco

further explains:

The existence of various codes and sub-codes, the variety of sociocultural circumstances in which a message is emitted (where the codes of the addressee can be different from those of the sender), and the rate of initiative displayed by the addressee in making presuppositions and abductions-all result in making a message (insofar as it is received and transformed into the content of an expression) an empty form to which various possible senses can be attributed (Eco 1979, 5).

Kemp’s reading of Salomé offers the audience yet another opportunity to produce

multiple interpretations by delving into Eco’s concept of an “empty form” when Kemp

aligns the dancing princess with a reptilian aesthetic. Just as Wilde envisioned his

Salomé to be “green like a curious and poisonous lizard” (Ellmann 1988, 372) so too

did Kemp as he declared the green lighting “was more for highlighting the snake”.

However, Kemp pushed this notion to the extreme by performing with the live

snake (Fig. 15) often highlighting the reptile’s sexual symbolism. Never one to avoid

testing the sensibilities of a London audience Kemp wholeheartedly embraced the

sexual symbolism of the snake, a symbolism that “seems to rest primarily on the fact

that the serpent, with head erect, ready to strike, resembles the erect phallus” (Pedrini

1966, 5). Once the large white veil was removed, Kemp took hold of the live snake and

with outstretched arms raised the reptile above his head in a symbolic act of worship.

Rather than dance, Kemp subdued his choreography to allow the audience to focus on

the snake’s serpentine movements. Possessing neither arms nor legs, the movement of

the snake is strange, significantly unusual yet remarkably phenomenal in its varied

locomotion. “Serpent comes from the Latin serpens, serpent-, from the root meaning

“crawl” or “creep” (Ferber 2007, 187). Often leaving a “serpentine” trail in the sands of

the dessert, “there is a quasi-circular rhythm to the movement” (Charlesworth 2010, 44-

45).

Consequently, the snake “dances”, its action is diverse. While Kemp’s snake

engaged in a slow and hypnotic fluid movement, the snake can also move “rapidly and

without making a sound. That attribute could symbolize swiftness and dexterity”

(Charlesworth 2010, 46). The snake’s mere existence is that of an energized dance.

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Cirlot states: “if all symbols are really functions and signs of things imbued with

energy, then the serpent or snake is, by analogy, symbolic of energy itself - of force

pure and simple; hence its ambivalence and multivalencies” (1967, 272).

There is a fixed duality to the symbol of the snake. It possesses a majestic

beauty yet portrays erotic danger and forbidden desire. Cirlot views one of the many

reasons the snake’s “great variety of symbolic meaning derives from the consideration

that these meanings may relate either to the serpent as a whole or to any of its major

characteristics” (1967, 272). He references such attributes as the snake’s “sinuous

movements…the way it sheds its skin, its threatening tongue, the undulating pattern of

its body, its hiss, its resemblance to a ligament, its method of attacking its victims…and

so on” (1967, 272). Kemp exhibits these attributes to their fullest extent as he engages

in the intimate yet ominous and disturbing act of intertwining the snake’s tongue with

his own. Kemp replicates the snake as his own tongue flickers feverishly in a reptilian

movement. Displaying the snake above his head, Kemp exaggerates the erotic

demonstration as he releases his neck, gazes upward to welcome the snake’s split

tongue258. Charlesworth cites the male snake as possessing two penises (the term is

‘hemipenes’) and suggests, “The bifid tongue, along with the two penises, can

symbolize duality. It can denote duplicity and the ability to say two things at the same

time. Thus, the snake can symbolize lying” (2010, 46). This duality resonates within

Salomé’s dance, as the Dance of the Seven Veils was fundamentally a dance of

deception. Salomé never disclosed her murderous plot to take possession of the

prophet’s head upon completion of the dance and her key to her ultimate act of revenge.

Salomé knew that Herod would give her anything she desired. For centuries, the snake

has embodied temptation, evil and death in Christian mythology. Wilde embraces the

snake’s nefarious nature as Salomé silences the prophetic voice of truth during her final

monologue to the Baptist’s bloody severed head when she states: “And thy tongue, that

was like a red snake darting poison, it moves no more, it speaks no words, Iokanaan,

                                                                                                               258 Kemp’s performance mirrors that of Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) where the protagonist “wound it round her waist, under her arms, between her knees; then taking it by the jaw she brought its little triangular mouth to the edge of her teeth, and half closing her eyes, bent back under the moon’s rays. The white light seemed to envelope her like a silver mist, her wet footprints glistened on the floor, stars shimmered in the depths of the water; it tightened round her its black coils stripped with golden patches (Flaubert, quoted in Dijkstra 1986, 307).

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that scarlet viper that spat its venom upon me. It is strange, is it not? How is it that the

red viper stirs no longer?”259 (S, 160).

The killing of the prophet possessed a further degree of intense cruelty by the

visual amplification of Iokanaan’s angelic virtues. From the moment Iokanaan made his

celestial entrance, the stage was set for metaphysical drama and flamboyancy. As Kemp

descended a majestic staircase centre stage, his Folies Bergères showgirl-styled walk

that could be characterised as courtly, dignified and ceremonious, Iokanaan’s flight

almost eclipses Salomé’s theatrical staging by descending from the skies adorned in

white feathers to accentuate the ivory pallor of his skin. The Times describing him as

“an angel brought down by Herod’s archers” (Wirdle, 1977). The ambiguity of this

vision “creates all sorts of conflicting interpretative possibilities” (Tydeman & Price

1996, 101), as “the ominous sound of mighty wings which so disturbs Herod in Wilde’s

version could now be associated even more dubiously with the prophecies of Jokanaan”

(Tydeman & Price 1996, 101). Tydeman and Price state, “the dove-like descent

inevitably suggests the descent of the Holy Spirit, as if Jokanaan were a presiding angel

of love” (1996, 101). Elevating the prophet to the ethereal position of the Holy Spirit

heightens the notion of saintly adulation making way for Salomé’s unending worship of

sexual advances, which now appear even more demonic.

Kemp’s transgression of religious iconography was pushed to the extreme in the

death of the prophet. Before severing Iokanaan’s head, Kemp chose to prolong his

sacrificial execution by evoking an angelic crucifixion, which while enhancing the

prophet’s martyrdom, allowed for a flirtatious yet blasphemous play with religion. This

was certainly a departure from Wilde’s interpretation of the sacred prophet’s death. In

Wilde’s Salomé, death is silent, hidden from the audience; the execution is left open to

the imagination as it compels images of a beheading only too gruesome to be presented

on stage. Salomé leans over the cistern and listens: “There is no sound. I hear nothing.

Why does he not cry out, this man? Ah! If any man sought to kill me, I would cry out, I

would struggle, I would not suffer… Strike, strike, Naaman, strike, I tell you…No, I

                                                                                                               259 “Et ta langue qui était comme un serpent rouge dardant des poisons, elle ne remue plus, elle ne dit rien maintenant, Iokanaan, cette vipère rouge qui a vomi son venin sur moi. C'est étrange, n'est-ce pas? Comment se fait-il que la vipère rouge ne remue plus?” (S, 161).

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hear nothing. There is a silence, a terrible silence”260 (S, 156). However, in Kemp’s

reading, the death of the prophet is far from silent.

Kemp embraces the concept of death to employ a sacrificial execution, “an

iconographic tableau as the prophet died in a flurry of arrows, an image which calls to

mind the death not of John the Baptist but of Saint Sebastian” (Tydeman & Price 1996,

102). Saint Sebastian is considered a homosexual icon carrying a distinct significance

for gay men (Reed 2011, 100-2). In Kemp’s dramatic execution, the prophet, or in this

case an overly feminised version of Saint Sebastian becomes the patron saint of

homosexuals. There are a number of interpretative possibilities to Kemp’s portrayal.

Wilde took the name Sebastian as an alias when he moved to France following his two-

year prison term for the crime of homosexuality and Richard Ellmann also notes that

Guido Reni’s renowned masterpiece, San Sebastian (1616), was one of Wilde’s

favourite paintings (1988, 71).

After Iokanaan was shot with arrows, Kemp as Salomé approached the prophet

with a large silver cape, which she threw over the prophet’s head. Kemp explained to

me in detail the way in which he envisioned receiving Salomé’s gift of the sacred yet

severed head: “The great silver cape had a slit in it where Iokanaan’s head went

through. He fell on his knees and I threw over the cape so that his head was sticking

through the hole. It looked like he had his severed head on a vast silver charger”261.

Once Salomé had delivered her now iconic and deeply disturbing necrophilic address to

the prophet’s severed head and hears Herod’s fateful order to the guards, “Kill that

woman!”262 (S, 164), Kemp refused to shy away or merely allude to the princesses’

death, but rather displayed it in the most graphic and brutal way. Kemp took full

advantage of Wilde’s final climatic stage direction and noteworthy departure from

fellow decadent treatments of the Salomé story: “The soldiers rush forward and crush

beneath their shields Salome, daughter of Herodias, Princess of Judaea”263 (S, 164).

While previous incarnations of Wilde’s drama use the stage direction’s

acknowledgement of the soldier’s shields to crush Salomé to death, most directors have

opted to obliterate this powerful death scene by hiding Salomé behind the shields or

                                                                                                               260 “Il n'y a pas de bruit. Je n'entends rien. Pourquoi ne crie-t-il pas, cet homme? Ah! si quelqu’un cherchait à me tuer, je crierais, je me débattrais, je ne voudrais pas souffrir… Frappe, frappe, Naaman. Frappe, je te dis… Non. Je n’entends rien. Il y a un silence affreux” (S, 157). 261 Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  262 “Tuez cette femme!” (S, 165). 263 “Les soldats s’élancent et écrasent sous leurs boucliers Salomé, fille d’Hérodias, princesse de Judée” (S, 165).

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declining to display Salomé’s death at all, thus safeguarding the audience’s sensibilities

in camouflaging the gore and diluting the scene264. However, Kemp pushed this original

juncture to the utter extreme. He explained: “When Salome was crushed by the shields,

there were mirrors in fact, mirrors so you saw my reflection drenched in blood,

twitching madly”265. Kemp explained how he took his inspiration from the 1955 film

Richard III starring Lawrence Olivier based on Shakespeare’s play where, like Salomé,

King Richard was mercilessly crushed to death by an onslaught of armed soldiers. “I

have stolen a lot from many different sources, particularly from cinema”, he said, “I’m

like a magpie, I steal anything that glitters”266.

Salomé’s final scene contains death, desire and surprisingly, music. Richard

Strauss, whose operatic interpretation of Wilde’s Salomé, “shook the musical world and

brought extraordinary fame to its author” (Santini 2011, 233), had been inspired to

compose the opera “at least in part because of its inherent musicality” (Koritz 1995, 84).

Koritz cites Strauss as expressing in his memoirs that “the dance and especially the

whole final scene is steeped in music”267. Strauss was introduced to the “recurring

motifs (that) make Salomé so like a piece of music and bind it together as a ballad” (CL,

740) after attending the Max Reinhardt production of Wilde’s Salomé in Berlin during

November 1902, with Gertrud Eysoldt in the title role.

Dierkes-Thrun points out that “Reinhardt’s avant-garde and visually beautiful

interpretation made the play an exhilarating experience and an instant smash hit” (2011,

65). Reinhardt’s reading of Wilde’s play left a lasting impression on the German

composer who, like Wilde, “had written no instructions as to how the dance should be

performed, the composer left this section of the opera to his imagination” (Santini 2011,

233). Strauss was ultimately seduced by Wilde’s verse since “Wilde’s poetry did not

need music; it was the musician who needed the poetry” (Ziolkowski 2009, 67) and as

the composer embraced Wilde’s lyrical poetics, he created what many regard as

Salomé’s “most exciting and enduring artistic transformation” (Tydeman & Price 1996,

122).

                                                                                                               264 One such example is Al Pacino’s 2014 film based on his live theatrical Los Angeles production starring Jessica Chastain in the title role and Al Pacino as King Herod. In Pacino’s reading, once King Herod has given the order to kill the princess, he turns and leaves. The final shot is Salomé, her lips covered in blood as she stares directly into the camera, eerily awaiting her death. 265 Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  266  Interview: Lindsay Kemp January 06, 2016.  267 Richard Strauss. Recollections and Reflections. Ed. Willi Schuh. Trans. L. J. Lawrence. London: Boosey and Hawkes, (1953, 150)

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In transcribing Salomé’s mysterious dance to the operatic stage, Strauss

musically expanded Wilde’s terse single-line stage direction into a scene lasting a little

over nine minutes. As Richard Allen Cave points out, there is “no indication as to the

style of movement (balletic, free, improvised, ethnically traditional)” and there is also

“no indication as to content” prompting him to ask “is the dance to be abstract or to

convey a narrative of some kind?” (2011, 145). Furthermore Cave acknowledges that

“for the director, choreographer and actress the instruction is almost wilfully

challenging: a formidable test of their taste and scruple” (2011, 145). However,

choreographer Kelley Abbey embraced this “formidable test” and delivered one of the

most sublime paradoxical amalgamations of deathly desire, sexual fantasy, feminine

archetypal imagery, and taboo abject themes.

Kelley Abbey and the Dancing Sexualized Archetype  Opera Australia’s 2012 controversial interpretation of Strauss’s iconic opera Salomé

was an abject staging dripped in blood as large shanks of meat encased the proscenium

to envelop Wilde’s drama with a sense of foreboding death. While the production was

directed by Gale Edwards, it was choreographer Kelley Abbey’s original and innovative

interpretation of the Dance of the Seven Veils that was the focal point among critics and

opera enthusiasts alike providing a scintillating and striking reinterpretation of Wilde’s

terse one line stage direction. Peter McCallum’s review for the Sydney Morning Herald

October 15, 2012 entitled “Fresh Twist Lifts Essay In Desire and Decadence” described

Abbey’s new translation of the dance to be “[m]usically powerfully (sic), visually

striking”, and “dramatically gripping”, adding that the production takes “a work that is

sensational rather than truth-seeking, and inserts it garishly into contemporary

mythology”.

Never one to shy away from controversy, Abbey’s interpretation of the dance

included such abject themes as paedophilia, sadomasochism, religious desecration,

through the sexualisation of religious idols and cinematic icons. Abbey decided to

forego the customary yet arduous task of choreographing a nine-minute dance solo for

an opera singer who possessed little or no dance training and instead placed dance at the

forefront by hiring professional dancers also skilled in aerial arts. In doing so, each of

the seven veils was performed by one of the employed dancers. However, Cheryl

Barker who starred as Salomé performed three of the veils, which required less

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technically challenging choreography. Abbey returned the art of dance to Strauss’s

opera as “in the first decades of its performing history, a ballerina was called in to

execute the veiled dance, which was deemed too challenging for the soprano (Santini

2011, 237).

By showcasing seven different archetypal images of the sexualised woman as

seven different dancing veils, Abbey’s inventive and original approach to the infamous

dance challenged and remodelled preconceived notions of seduction in Western culture.

Claid sees that seduction in Western Culture “has signified a variety of elements

relevant to sexual desire without being the sexual act itself” (2006, 7) including

flirtation, temptation, artifice and manipulative wiles, undertaken by both men and

woman. “Seduction,” she explains, “has also suggested a narrative, a subject who

seduces and an object who is seduced, a linear story familiar to most sexual scenarios,

with a goal of conquest” (2006, 7).

However, in the case of Abbey’s portrayal of Salomé’s Dance of the Seven

Veils, the act of seduction is employed to reinforce Salomé’s personal goal of a

homicidal conquest while utilising seven diverse archetypal motifs or fantasies of the

sexualised woman. Salomé’s seduction is dubious and ultimately fatal. In this regard the

act of “seduction is re-figured (…) as a play of desires and meanings between

performers and spectators. Seduction, like ambiguity, becomes an embodied practice

[…] Seduction becomes ambiguous – ambiguity becomes seductive” (Claid 2006, 7)

and it is while imbedded in this seduction that the spectator is prompted to produce

multiple interpretative possibilities.

Abbey challenged the sensibilities of opera enthusiasts who were familiar with

Strauss’s seven-minute instrumental containing “some three-hundred-and-forty-eight

bars of music” (Cave 2011, 145) that accompanies the notorious dance as the audience

engaged in the re-figuration of seduction between the female dancers and Herod.

Abbey’s choreography of the Dance of the Seven Veils, which was described as a

“parade of tawdry male fantasies” (McCallum The Sydney Morning Herald, 2012),

situated the spectator alongside Herod to engage in a seduction of ambiguity. Claid

explains: The spectator’s watching practice embraces ambiguity of meaning, but the performer’s dancing practice is often in contrast to that of the spectator and, subsequently, the writer. In fact, it is frequently the performer’s attention to the full inhabiting of the performed material that instigates the ambiguous surface of meanings. In other words, what the performer does is not what the spectator sees (2006, 7-8).

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The dance in this locale therefore becomes an emblematic illustration of Eco’s notion of

openness as it compels the spectator to derive his or her unique perspective towards an

interpretative analysis of the dance regardless of the dancer’s original intention. The

diverse exegetical conclusions that are formed become instrumental in promoting a

greater degree of collaboration between the artist and the spectator. As a consequence,

the fact that a dancer does not speak, write or read but instead uses his or her body as an

instrument to communicate and transfer meaning to the recipient, offers a greater degree

of ambiguity of translation. Through a nonverbal form of expression to interpret

Wilde’s terse one line stage direction Abbey’s choreography upon seven distinct veils

morphed into a plethora of meanings to challenge social, cultural and political

conventions. In doing so, such meanings were shrouded in a luring cloak of

seductiveness and attraction.

To commence each solo performance, the female dancer initially appeared

covered with a transparent red veil. Riquelme’s article Shalom/Solomon/Salomé:

Modernism and Wilde’s Aesthetic Politics (1995) views the transparency of the veil as

suggesting the possibility of a “penetration”. He states:

The veil in the dance of the seven veils is a thin, even transparent or porous, shifting boundary that always suggests the possibility of a transformation, a revelation, or a penetration. Although it forbids and prevents the gaze in the tradition of Oriental veiling, it also represents through the embodiment of the prohibition the motivating desire to see, and it can invite or incite the satisfaction of that desire. It is the thin membrane belonging to the woman that separates and connects male and female, the desire to look and the object of the look. It is, in short, the sign of the gaze (1998, 603-4).

The choice of the colour red intensified the notion of lust and death as Herod slowly and

ever so carefully removed each veil. When I interviewed choreographer Kelley Abbey

November 7, 2015, she described this as Herod carefully unwrapping a gift to intensify

the sexual desire he felt for each veil and in this case each sexualised woman and male

erotic fantasy. Abbey wanted to demonstrate how some men perceive women sexually.

She stated that “each veil was important as it essentially offered a separate

story”268. When one imagines the Dance of the Seven Veils, one thinks of the erotic

build, the striptease, as each veil falls bringing us closer to the naked and desired

Salomé. By offering a “separate story” for each veil, Abbey endeavours to present the

                                                                                                               268  Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015.  

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audience with a metaphorical guide to the core point of desire, an ecstatic build of

sexual tension that ultimately reaches the extreme sexual climax: an unveiled Salomé.

Shrouding each dancer in a transparent red veil brings into play Riquelme’s idea

that the veil represents a “penetration”. In this regard, red, the colour of blood depicts

the deflowering of the pubescent and virginal Salomé. The breaking of the hymen

represents her swift transformation into womanhood. The Dance of the Seven Veils is

ultimately a dance of sex and desire. Kuryluk points to a rather revealing exchange

between King Herod and Queen Herodias before the seven veils are brought in

preparation for Salome’s dance. Herodias: You are looking again at my daughter. You must not look at her. I have already said so. Herod: You say nothing else. Herodias: I say it again. Herod: And that restoration of the Temple about which they have talked so much, will anything be done? They say that the veil of the Sanctuary has disappeared, do they not? Herodias: It was thyself didst steal it269 (S, 124-6).

Kuryluk views the exchange as “an allusion to the secrets of sex and the equally veiled

mysteries of religion, and like a comparison between the profanation of a sanctuary and

the loss of virginity” (1987, 222) boldly imposing that the temple’s “stolen veil”

“corresponds to the virginity of Salomé, which Herod would like to steal by

deflowering her” (1987, 222). Thus, Kuryluk sees the Dance of the Seven Veils as “an

imaginary erotic intercourse” (1987, 222) for both the Tetrarch and for Salomé. “The

end of the dance is the climax of the play and an orgasm (a small death) for the girl who

danced and the man who watched her. For the absent lover, however, it means death or,

more precisely, beheading - a symbolic castration” (Kuryluk 1987, 222-3). Kuryluk’s

analogy sheds compelling light on the correlation between Salomé’s sexual desires for

the sacred prophet and the dance that represents her first sexual experience and loss of

her virginity when we consider that Iokanaan is imprisoned in the same cistern as

Salomé’s father. Therefore, Salome cannot help but succumb to her desires when she

encounters for the very first time, a male other than her father who emerges from the

dark depths of his prison. For Salomé, the Dance of the Seven Veils was not simply a

carnal striptease, but a dance of insatiable erotic desire and death. For as we see, the                                                                                                                269 Hérodias : Vous regardez encore ma fille. Il ne faut pas la regarder. Je vous ai déjà dit cela. Hérode : Vous ne dites que cela. Hérodias : Je le redis. Hérode : Et la restauration du Temple dont on a tant parlé? Est-ce qu’on va faire quelque chose? On dit, n’est-ce pas, que le voile du sanctuaire a disparu? Hérodias : C’est toi qui l’as pris (S, 125-7).

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climax of the dance was not only the loss of her virginity but with it came an act of

murderous intent: the prophet’s severed head. Through seven different dancing veils,

Abbey was able to entice the audience to participate in the visual poetics of the

sexualised body, which as a result offered a distinct narrative ellipse to arrive at the

point of Salomé’s deathly climax.

The first veil explored the perverted notion of paedophilia between an older man

and a young girl. This character could be conceived as Salomé in her youngest

incarnation. Dressed as a baby doll, her hair adorned in tightly wound pigtails and

holding a teddy bear close to her chest, she sits upon Herod’s knee as he gently caresses

the inside of her thighs. Abbey described this scene as a dangerous place to venture into

as Herod represented a lecherous paedophile: “The young girl thinks it’s play but it is

not”270. This was a confronting way to commence the dance as the character of the baby

doll conveys the paradoxical Salomé who is initially considered to be innocent, chaste,

and virginal to the extreme.

The lecherous way in which the sinister Herod cradles the infant Salomé in his

arms, caressing the inner thighs of an underage and forbidden girl transformed into a

sexual object can allude to the salacious way in which Herod invites his stepdaughter to

eat and drink with him: “Salomé, come and eat fruits with me. I love to see in a fruit the

mark of thy little teeth. Bite but a little of this fruit, that I may eat what is left”271 (S,

102) and “Dip into it thy little red lips, that I may drain the cup”272 (S, 100). Salomé’s

childlike features are also explored when Herod relishes the fact that Salomé will dance

with naked feet, “Thy little feet will be like white doves. Thy will be like little white

flowers that dance upon the trees”273 (S, 138). From the very beginning of the dance the

audience is thrust into a vetoed world of dangerous forbidden sex with a child who

possesses “tiny teeth”, “little red lips” and “little feet” placing the spectator in the thick

of the uncomfortable and destabilising world of the incest and paedophilic taboo.

Following the young, innocent yet violated baby doll, the second veil was the

quintessential French maid offering a playful sense of seductive ambiguity. A staple of

male erotic fantasy and fetishism, the French maid was stereotypically dressed in a

black and white uniform complete with an apron and a feather duster. Consistent with                                                                                                                270 Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015. 271 “Salomé, venez manger du fruit avec moi. J'aime beaucoup voir dans un fruit la morsure de tes petites dents. Mordez un tout petit morceau de ce fruit, et ensuite je mangerai ce qui reste” (S, 103). 272 “Trempez là-dedans vos petites lèvres rouges et ensuite je viderai la coupe” (S, 101). 273 “Vos petits pieds seront comme des colombes blanches. Ils ressembleront à des petites fleurs blanches qui dansent sur un arbre” (S, 139).

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pop-culture’s clichéd French sexiness, the French maid was flirty and easily sexually

excited. No longer the innocent and tampered with baby doll, the second dancer used

the feather duster which is often associated, in psychoanalytic terms, with a phallic

symbol in an explicit and sexual way, not only as she dusted her surroundings, but also

as she caressed her body. Herod looks on languidly as the submissive female is

compelled to do precisely what he desires, in this case, to dance and use the duster to

not only touch herself in a self gratifying manner but also to playfully taunt the

Tetrarch. He responds to her sexual needling in a delirious manner. The seduction of the

dance was explored to the fullest extent as the second veil moved from the innocent and

immobile stance of the baby doll to a solo, which required more dance technique, and

more enticing sexual movements. The choreography is however brought to an abrupt

end as Herod suddenly takes the French maid from behind. Not perturbed in the

slightest, the French maid giggles enthusiastically engaging in an alluring game of

seduction. The French maid revelled in playing the submissive role as Strauss’s

composition slowly advanced in tempo to coincide with the seductive build of the

orchestral music.

The “removal” of the third veil took the audience from the submissive to the

domineering as the element of the striptease was explored to the extreme through the

use of a female pole dancer (Fig. 16). Dressed in sadomasochistic attire, the third veil

initially displayed advanced acrobatic feats high atop a pole securely positioned centre

stage while Herod looked on, overwhelmed with desire. Each athletic move propelled

Herod’s lust and hunger even further as he could merely look but was unable to touch.

Although left to the reader’s imagination, the Dance of the Seven Veils is essentially a

dance of seduction and desire as the young princess used her provocative feminine

power to attain what she wanted. Using this theme, Abbey took full advantage of the

dancer’s enticing gaze. The Tetrarch’s body shook in sexual impatience as the dancer

descended from the pole before approaching him, her spiked boots straddling his head

as she bewitchingly peered into his eyes. Domineering and lecherous, Salomé

aggressively grasped the king by his neck bringing his face towards hers. She was the

femme fatale par excellence and the most tyrannical of all seven veils, relinquishing her

hold upon him mere moments before they locked lips, then forcibly pushing him away.

While Abbey is once again playing with clichés of archetypal images of

feminine sexuality, she uses each veil as a progression to illustrate the arc in Salomé’s

character. From baby doll to the submissive and sexy French maid advancing to

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sadomasochistic dominatrix, the third veil represented Salomé’s passage into

womanhood from chaste virgin to demonic whore. Koritz is convincing in stating that: The traditional critical stance that sees Salomé first and foremost as a fatal woman also constructs the reader as a participant in a conception of sexuality that in its obsessive repetition perpetuates rather than questions a misogynist tradition. It seems therefore imperative to open up the character of Salomé to alternative constructions (1995, 77).

However, one may also agree with Santini when she expands on the theory by

characterising Salomé’s dance as “the dramatic turning point of the opera. It precipitates

the action and seals Iokanaan’s destiny, but it also charts the protagonist’s

transformation from wilful adolescent into passionate woman (2011, 234). Therefore, it

seems paramount to illustrate the protagonist’s transformation regardless of the

probability of its “obsessive repetition”.

The dance is not only one of seduction and sex but is also the precursor to

murder and death. The reward for Salomé’s dance is the beheading of the holy prophet

while also signifying the princess losing her virginity, as it is in fact her first sexual

experience. In using familiar yet cliché motifs characterising the various ways a large

number of men sexually objectify women, Abbey astutely exhibits the transition from

young innocent girl, chaste, pure, and virginal to a sexualised woman who learns rather

rapidly that she can utilize her feminine sexual powers to obtain what she wants. The

fact that the object of Salomé’s desires is a severed head which she in turn uses to

participate in one of the most abject forms of evil: necrophilia, shrouds her dance in a

sinister veil of perpetual maliciousness. She is the demonic dancer, the vampiric harlot

who will stop at nothing to satisfy her desires. Representing this veil as the fetishized

dominatrix, Abbey presented the quintessential erotic male sexual fantasy of the

domineering woman who takes absolute control while also encapsulating Salomé’s

transition from innocence to lewd and shameless enslaver.

Following the latex wearing sadist, the fourth veil paid homage to Hollywood

cinema of the 1950s by showcasing the next dancing role as Marilyn Monroe (Fig. 17)

in her most recognizable scene from the classic film The Seven Year Itch (1955). A

common phrase signifying infidelity, the notion of “the seven year itch” refers to a

spouse engaging in an extra-marital affair after around seven years of marriage. Once

the initial honeymoon period has diminished and a relationship has began to decline, a

spouse is said to experience a “seven year itch”, a restless or anxious desire to engage in

a romantic episode with someone other than his or her partner. Once more, the number

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seven becomes sexualised in its ambiguous semantic reference as to examine this term

in relationship to Wilde’s enigmatic stage direction: “Salomé dances the dance of the

seven veils”.

Marilyn Monroe, the quintessential screen goddess, revels in being worshipped

to the point of adulation by the banquet attendees. As depicted in the film, Marilyn’s

white, now iconic, dress moved as an upward gust of wind from a subway grate wildly

propelled the dress to invoke one of the most iconic moments in cinematic history. In

Robert Kolker’s Film, Form, and Culture (2015), the author views certain screen

players such as Marilyn Monroe, creating “personae, versions of themselves that are

made up of attitudes, gestures, and facial expressions so coherent and maintainable that

they become instantly recognizable and sometimes more interesting than the particular

film they are in” (139). To Kolker, “Marilyn Monroe transcends The Seven Year

Itch…becoming part of the culture’s collective sexual insecurity and its mythologies of

the sexually active, self-destructive woman” (139). Abbey utilised the public’s intimate

relationship with recognisable idolatry to probe the fetishistic and patriarchal male gaze.

However, while exploring this notion, Abbey chose to alter the trajectory of

desire to embolden the dancing veil. She stated that “the audience could perceive that I

was perhaps objectifying Marilyn as a piece of meat but I was more concerned with

Marilyn being manipulative and intelligent enough to make those men look at her, to

make herself a prize and attractive rather than her be a victim of men”274. Abbey

achieved this erotic inversion by also reversing the perception of the veiled woman.

Abbey chose to shroud the veil in duplicity by modifying the iconic scene as Marilyn

wore large black sunglasses; her face obscured as her eyes are hidden from not only the

men who eagerly gazed upon her but also from the audience. Therefore, there is an

element of deception and secretiveness to the starlet, which the original cinematic

treatment did not possess. Doane sees the femme fatale’s representation as “dependent

upon perceptual ambiguity and ideas about the limits of vision in relation to

knowledge” (1991, 3) and sees the veil as “the mark of the precariousness […] a

question of what can and cannot be seen” (1991, 46).

In Abbey’s incarnation, Marilyn was untouchable as the Jews surrounded her,

their frenzied male hands beset upon her in a desperate embrace. The Jews, who in

Wilde’s play are always disputing about their religion: “The Jews. They are always like

                                                                                                               274  Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015.  

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that. They are disputing about their religion”275 (S, 46) are now distracted, thrust in the

throes of the veil’s carnal self-adulation and reverie. By wearing dark sunglasses,

Marilyn is turning her erotic gaze inward. She gains the power of her sight as she can

gaze out at the audience but the audience is unable to peer into her eyes. In this way, the

veil’s (Marilyn’s) gaze is internalised and thus drawing the audience into a web of

intrigue and mystery. As Doane suggests: The veil functions to visualise (and hence stabilize) the instability, the precariousness of sexuality. At some level of the cultural ordering of the physical, the horror or threat of that precariousness (both sexuality and the visible) is attenuated by attributing it to the woman, over and against the purported stability and identity of the male (1991, 46).

It is interesting to note that this masking is in direct opposite to the part of the body

usually veiled as Marilyn displays the flesh of her upper breasts and her plunging

neckline. This modern representation takes the oriental concept of the veil and reverses

it. When one conceptualises the veiled woman, it is her eyes that are revealed while

most of her body is covered. In Abbey’s interpretation of the veiled starlet, the

decadence of the western women is heightened to rival that of a preconditioned oriental

fantasy. Marilyn is flirtatious, revelling in her open and free sexuality. However, at the

same time she is also veiled. Her eyes are covered as she refuses to reveal the “windows

to her soul”. She sees out but we cannot see in. She is therefore untouchable.

Controlling her sexuality in a masterful game of power play, Marilyn is the seductress

who may lure our attention but who will ultimately betray us as she denies us the power

of her sight.

Abbey pushed the blasphemous taboo to the extreme presenting the fifth veil as

the Virgin Mary who, initially appeared as the sacred Madonna adorned in conventional

religious regalia bathed in a celestial light, suddenly strips to reveal herself as a go-go

dancer dressed in salacious attire. Emboldened by a cheering crowd of onlookers, the

Madonna performs familiar moves reminiscent of the 1960s go-go dancing clubs. The

stage lighting swiftly changed to a disco red to coincide with the veil’s abrupt reversal

in character. Abbey explained: “In this respect the dancer was not just dancing for

Herod but for all the men in the room”276. Abbey was attracted by the matriarchal figure

being sexualised. While, the Madonna retained her holy veil and iconic halo, her breasts

and pubic bone were enhanced by ornamental hearts, which were attached to her nipples

                                                                                                               275 “Les Juifs. Ils sont toujours ainsi. C’est sur leur religion qu’ils discutent” (S, 47). 276 Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015.  

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and crotch. Abbey wished to sexualise the mother figure as a matriarchal and religious

archetype. Although, she understood that by doing so she was pushing the taboo of

religious sensibilities, “there was always a gasp from the audience when the Madonna

stripped and started to perform as a go-go dancer”277.

Dijkstra describes the Madonna figure as “the one figure in history who had

clearly managed to be a complete success at being simultaneously virgin, mother, and

wife: Mary, Mother of God” citing that “Woman as the virginal bride of the spirit, the

mother of purity, became the preferred subject of numerous painters toward the end of

the nineteenth century, a time when…the public image of woman as vestal had already

been tarnished quite badly” (1986, 17). By demonstrating an axiological switch within

the dance from the Blessed Virgin to a sexy nightclub dancer, Abbey is shedding light

on the mid-nineteenth century notion of “hoisting of woman onto a monumental

pedestal of virtue” (1986, 19) which as Dijkstra describes as being “all about: a male

fantasy of ultimate power, ultimate control - of having the world crawl at his feet”

(1986, 19).

If we follow Dijkstra’s approach towards the “hoisting of woman onto a

monumental pedestal of virtue” then Abbey’s treatment of the fifth veil perpetuates

rather than questions a patriarchal tradition. The Virgin Mary becomes sexualised as she

entices the male onlookers to a fever of unbridled ecstasy to coincide with Wilde’s

notion of religion for the sake of aesthetics. Dierkes-Thrun supports this assertion by

stating, “In Salomé, it is religion for aesthetics’ sake, not the other way around” (2011,

30).

Following Abbey’s exploitation of religion through exploring the aesthetics in

dance, the proceeding veil retraced Wilde’s Salomé to Flaubert’s dramatization of an

exotic world by probing the late-nineteenth discourse of Orientalism. Karayanni

describes the many travellers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that left the

Christian West to venture the “heathenish” Orient sought encounters with dancers of the

Middle East (Karayanni 2004, 37). He explains: The sensational images evoked by Middle Eastern dancers loomed large in the Western imaginary, yet so did the ambivalent feelings for these performers. This ambivalence seems to derive from a profound need to be implicated in the aberrant spectacle so as to denounce it afterwards, in a cyclical process where disavowal succeeds desire (2004, 38).

                                                                                                               277  Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015.  

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Wilde’s Salomé, as an Orientalist play, questions the very premise of Oriental discourse.

However, as Yeeyon Im points out: “given all its Orientalist characteristics, it is odd

that Wilde’s Salomé has seldom been regarded as such” (2011, 361). Im elaborates

further by drawing attention to her view that the re-evaluation of Wilde’s play “has

mainly to do with the ascendancy of feminism and queer studies since the 1970s, and

with the rehabilitation of Wilde as sexual martyr for the “love that dare not speak its

name” (2011, 361) rather than acknowledging the play’s Oriental attributes.

Nonetheless, Abbey resurrected the neglected theme of Orientalism in Wilde’s play by

choosing to explore the ancient and the exotic. Capturing the dancer in full flight in an

aerial version, Abbey expanded upon the motif of the veil to its greatest extent.

Dressed in Middle Eastern attire, the sixth veil dancer commenced her erotic

dance utilising the silks from her dress as Herod removed them one by one. Once the

dancer was half naked, she took hold of the long black silk veil that was suspended

from the ceiling. Since the colour black is often associated with death (Nassaar 1974,

90), the sixth dancing veil adopted a rather ominous quality as the Dance of the Seven

Veils closely approached its dramatic climax278. Herod lay underneath the spiralling

dancer as she excelled in sublime aerial feats. While she spun in circles, her legs in 180

degree splits, Herod tirelessly yet unsuccessfully attempted to catch her as he engaged

in a voyeuristic power struggle with the suspended silk. Apart from the first veil, which

was the unsuspecting baby doll, the sixth veil was the only veil to dance in naked feet.

When we consider Wilde’s stage direction, which indicated that “[s]laves bring

perfumes and the seven veils, and take off the sandals of Salome”279 (S, 138), the sight

of a dancer baring her feet “is a short-lived concession to Herod. She (Salomé)

transcends her status as a Princess” (Eynat-Confino 1994, 131).

In her article “Oscar Wilde and Dramatic Strategies (1994), Eynat-Confino

explains: “by baring her feet and displaying her nudity, Salomé severs her link with

purity and virginity, as the sandals are the attributes of the Moon, the Goddess of

Chastity” (131). While naked feet are characteristic of exotic dancers of the Orient,

                                                                                                               278 The ominous colour black depicted by the silk veil hovering above the scene depicts the dark and threatening mood of Iokanaan’s prophetic words: “In that day the sun shall become black like sackcloth of hair, and the moon shall become like blood, and the stars of the heaven shall fall upon the earth like unripe figs that fall from the figtree, and the kings of the earth shall be afraid” (S, 120) [“En ce jour-là le soleil deviendra noir comme un sac de poil, et la lune deviendra comme du sang, et les étoiles du ciel tomberont sur la terre comme les figues vertes tombent d’un figuier, et les rois de la terre auront peur” (S, 121)]. 279 “Les esclaves apportent des parfums et les sept voiles et ôtent les sandales de Salomé” (S, 139).

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Eynat-Confino further proposes: “Salomé’s dance is an act that lays bare not only her

body. According to Paul Diel, the foot is an ancient symbol of the soul280. Thus,

Salomé’s barefoot dance is a visualized unveiling of the self, an act of self-

acknowledgement. But the act of unveiling, of unmasking, brings about the negation of

life, death – as if the veil is a prerequisite for living” (1994, 132). Salomé’s near-naked

barefoot dance also becomes “a baptism of blood” (Eynat-Confino 1994, 131) as she

dances in the blood of the Young Syrian who has committed suicide because of

Salomé’s unrequited love. Eynat-Confino references the washing of one’s feet as a rite

of purification but cites Wilde as reversing the traditional symbolism (1994, 131). She

explains, “Polluted with blood, Salomé is, perversely, still a virgin, like Diana the

huntress, Goddess of the moon. Connections - the Symbolist correspondances - are

established between her dancing in a pool of blood and the moon, which has become

‘red as blood’, as Herod says” (1994, 131).

Just as Herod is finally about to connect with the sixth veil, she swiftly snatches

the black silk she used throughout her aerial performance, which obscurely appears in

mauve due to the considerable inundation of red stage lighting, and runs for the wing of

the stage. Herod chases after her, but is engulfed in the enormous gust produced by the

traveling veil as to create the illusion of a stage curtain, which reveals the seventh and

final veil. The final veil served as a paradigm of balletic drama in that it seemed to not

only encapsulate the preceding six veils exhibiting Salomé’s evolution, her desires and

intentions but the seventh and final veil also represented the decisive point when Herod

decisively succumbed to his desire as the dancing princess secured her ultimate

murderous quest in attaining the head of the Baptist. Moments before the sixth veil exits

the stage, she coquettishly looks over her shoulder towards the seventh veil’s dramatic

revel. In doing so, she relinquishes the seduction to the final veil. The seventh veil

walks towards Herod. He takes her hand and triumphantly parades her across the front

of the stage. Proud of his prize, he believes he is about to take possession of Salomé. He

embraces her and the couple begin to waltz. The seventh veil was the only veil to allow

Herod to touch her. The couple begin to perform a romantic waltz to coincide with

Strauss’s smooth progressive music. Abbey describes the scene as deceptive when she

                                                                                                               280 See Diel, Le Symbolisme dans la mythologie grecque (1966, 87).

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states: “It’s the romantic veil, and at the end Herod feels as if he has succeeded in

possessing Salomé but as we know, this is not the final outcome”281.

In Salomé’s final act of evil duplicity, the princess uses her feminine wiles as

the final enticement to take possession of Herod’s desires. The last veil is intriguing

when one recalls the King’s last desperate attempt to persuade Salomé’s murderous

request in the death of the prophet Iokanaan. Herod offers Salomé a vast array of rare

jewels in the hope that the majestic beauty of unprecedented and exotic gifts will

enchant her. Although the list of endowments is rather protracted, it is important to list

them in order to illustrate the enormous and desperate lengths Herod scrupulously and

determinedly went to in order to not only cajole Salomé and save the prophet from

impending death but also to validate the last offering as the most prized of all the King’s

possessions.

Herod offered Salomé pearls, amethysts, topazes, opals, onyxes, moonstones,

sapphires, chrysolites, beryls, chrysoprases, rubies, sardonyx, hyacinth and chalcedony

stones, crystals, turquoises, amber, fans fashioned from the feathers of parrots, a

garment of ostrich feathers, sandals incrusted with glass, mantles and bracelets decked

about with carbuncles and with jade. However, the last and most precious gift Herod

offered Salomé was “the veil of the Sanctuary”: “I will give thee the mantle of the high

priest. I will give thee the veil of the Sanctuary”282 (S, 154). When Salomé rejects his

offer and demands for the final time: “Give me the head of Iokanaan!”283 (S, 154)

Herod is completely defeated and at last utters the decisive words, which finally seal the

prophet’s fate, “Let her be given what she asks! Of a truth she is her mother’s child!”284

(S, 156). When referring to the “veil of Sanctuary”, Ziolkowski offers a compelling

insight: This blasphemous association of Salome’s veils with the veil of the sanctuary implies quite clearly that both veils conceal “the holiest of holies” – in the one case, the Ark that contains the Torah scrolls and symbolizes God’s presence in the Temple; in the other, the raw sexuality that for the Décadents of the fin-de-siècle represented the destructive female power (2009, 64).

Once the waltz draws to a close, Salomé and Herod suddenly cease dancing as they

dramatically grip one another in a tight embrace. Overcome with desire, Herod begins

to unravel her dress. Small magnets were attached to the garment so as to make the

                                                                                                               281 Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015.  282 “Je te donnerai le manteau du grand prêtre. Je te donnerai le voile du sanctuaire” (S, 155). 283 “Donnez-moi la tête d’Iokanaan” (S, 155). 284 “Qu’on lui donne ce qu’elle demande! C’est bien la fille de sa mère!” (S, 157).

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removal effortless. “As Salomé spun around in circles”, Abbey explained, “Herod

unpeeled the dress like an orange rind”285. When asked if the final veil represented

Salomé, Abbey responded, “Yes, it does. As soon as it unravels and she falls to the

floor, that is her, that is Salomé”286.

Abbey showcased all the female sexualized archetypes as they were previously

presented in the preceding six veils. However, the final veil morphed into Salomé

herself in order to delineate her character’s evolution and to illustrate the dramatic arc

of her elusive character through the progression of a nine-minute dance instrumental.

Toepfer suggests that: That the veils should reveal seven distinct facets of the dancer’s fragmented identity is indeed remarkable and certainly a task of immense difficulty for the actress. Wilde does not identify the nature of these distinct facets, yet spectators seem fond of the phrase, dance of the seven veils, without having any clear idea of what either the phrase or the dance attempt to represent” (1991, 137).

Although the true “nature” of Wilde’s veils is indeed ambiguous and therefore a

mystery to all who attempt to elucidate its meaning, Abbey takes up the ambitious task

of translating Toepher’s notion of “seven distinct facets of the dancer’s fragmented

identity” in order to offer a fresh insight that challenges the social, cultural and religious

conventions of today.

Claid declares “Strategies for engagement depend on a reading of ambiguity on

a performer’s body, enticing the spectator to search for meanings and interpretations.

Performance has become a spectator’s art” (2006, 203). Abbey’s original reading of

Salomé’s Dance of the Seven Veils initiates a fluid and intellectually satisfying

interaction between performer and spectator to allow him or her to decipher their unique

interpretation(s). Through an interchangeable dialogue between choreographer and

dancer, Abbey is able to transmit her “pleasurable play of multiple meanings and

identities” (Claid 2006, 203) to that of the spectator through the dancer’s performing

body. Claid’s notion of engagement relates to Barthes’s “Death of the Author” when he

claims: A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures, and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is the space on which all quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal:

                                                                                                               285  Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015.  286  Interview: Kelley Abbey November 7, 2015.  

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the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted…the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author (quoted in Allen: 2000, 73).

Claid astutely adapts Barthes’s notion to align the performing artist to that of the author

when she states: For performers, it is about being very much the author, in each moment, with body-mind intelligence and focused physical work. Whether driven by somatic internal intelligence, cross-disciplinary partnerships, emotions, person-as-political agendas, narratives or articulate codified dance skills, most artists have something they desire to say (2006, 203).

As spectators, we decode the dancer’s language to arrive at our own individual

receptive interpretation. Dance is unique in that it is “the most physical or objective of

the arts”, and “may also be considered the most individual and subjective, since it is

inseparable from, and in the case of Salomé is the creation of, its performer. In dance,

then, the realization of an aesthetic ideal of unity of being in which the body is the soul

becomes possible” (Koritz 1995, 83). However, as spectators, we engage in an active

participation in order to interpret our individual meaning. Claid explains: As spectators we are enticed back into the oscillating act of watching the performer’s real body become surface illusion as an ambiguity between one and another. But the illusion is not out there, created by the performer. Creating the illusion is our work, as spectators. We desire the images on a performer’s body to change and dissolve and re-emerge differently. Achieving this is our practice, our responsibility. The practice of seductive ambiguity, as relations of engagement, is our physical activity. The performers are doing something different in order to allow us to practice our art (2006, 205).

In the light of Claid’s theory, we can see the Salomé spectator engages in the role of co-

creator, reader and collaborator.

Abbey and Kemp both used dance as a medium and a language to communicate

their unique and desired interpretation of Wilde’s enigmatic single-line stage direction,

“Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils”. However, it is the “work” of the spectator

to engage in an interchangeable dialogue in order to fully appreciate the critical practice

of interpretation. Modern dance legend Martha Graham is quoted as saying “Dance is

the hidden language of the soul”287 and it is evident that both Abbey and Kemp do not

just speak this implicit language, they sing and shout its body of words at full voice for

all to hear. Through Kemp’s improvised foray into decadent aesthetics and Abbey’s

multi faceted exploration into male and female sexuality, these very different

                                                                                                               287 See Kessel (2006, 9).

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interpretations from two very distinct mediums: opera and dance, demonstrate how the

Dance of the Seven Veils exists as an ingenious puzzle from which to derive multiple

interpretations. Both Kemp and Abbey’s original readings reinforce Wilde’s taste for

mystery and paradoxes.

Wilde’s ambiguous naming of the dance has led critics on a quest to decipher

the mystery of its erotic meaning. This study argues that while critics have often

focused on the study of transtextuality, misconceptions emerge due to the play’s

complex intertextual history288. While the biblical accounts of both Matthew289 and

Mark present the reader with an unnamed dancer and an unnamed dance, Wilde

attributed symbols such as the veil and the number seven to cloak the mysterious dance

in further intrigue. The information provided is minimal, if not non-existent, yet for this

reason alone the dance and the dancer have always inflamed the reader’s aesthetic

desires and curiosity.

The number seven is cryptic in its ancient and sexual ambiguity prompting

critics to sort mythological readings in an attempt to derive meaning from Wilde’s

ambitious naming. However, what remains paramount is the fact that the Dance of the

Seven Veils is very much an open work, which will continue to illicit varied

interpretations. Flaubert elaborated on the scant biblical narrative to offer a detailed and

protracted description of Salomé’s dance. Despite a comprehensive account, Flaubert’s

dancing princess still remained silent290. However, Flaubert’s dancer further captivates

the reader through a musical narrative and enchanting descriptions of a rhythmic

accompaniment furnishing the dance with visual movement.

Inspired by Flaubert, Wilde reduced Salomé’s dance to a single-line stage

direction. As a result the profound ambiguity such an artistic choice creates incites

multiple readings to forever endure as the most “open” of all his works, bestowing upon

the reader and the spectator an invitation to derive divergent translations for original and

dramatic interpretation.

                                                                                                               288 See Chapter 1 (Price and Tydeman 1996, 12). 289 The book of Matthew presents a narrative that “implicates Salome in a complex of sexual, familial and political relations, within which she is a kind of go-between, transmitting and activating the desire of others in ways that cause and resolve a crisis in the story and in the social network it represents. She is not, in the biblical account, the agent of her own desire” (Burns 1994, 30-31). 290 “Elle ne parlait pas. Ils se regardaient” (H, 173) [“She did not speak. They looked at each other” (He, 102)].  

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CONCLUSION THE EIGHTH VEIL OF AMBIGUITY

“I had until then utilized the French language as a veil. A veil over my individual person, a veil over my woman’s body; I might almost say a veil over my own voice”

Assia Djebar291

Wilde’s Dance of the Seven Veils embodies the essence of his ambition to engage with

ambiguity. Those seven veils are concentrated in a one-line stage direction, whereas

ambiguity covers the entire play. Salomé the dancer wears seven veils, while Salomé the

text wears the eighth, the veil of ambiguity. This eighth veil is woven from many

threads: from biblical intertextuality and abjection, from Wilde’s use of the French

language and its open translations and illustrations, from open interpretations and

creative performances. Like a veil that conceals yet reveals, ambiguity has represented

an impediment to fully understanding Wilde’s Salomé and, as this thesis has argued, it

is also the key to penetrating its true meaning.

The fundamental element that allowed Wilde to make such a departure from his

success as a renowned Victorian playwright of satirical humour was the French

language. The French language was therefore the first layer of the ambiguous veil that

enabled him to articulate taboo themes. The strange anglicised symbolist style language,

in part influenced by the French writers he so admired, provided the mask that allowed

Wilde to express his own ideas with his authentic voice in order to speak the

unspeakable. As a corollary, he was able to achieve his dream of joining the French

literary elite of the late nineteenth century French symbolist movement.

Salomé is a daring, morbid and decadent text whose strange and unusual foreign

French often disturbs the traditional Wildean reader, or any reader of French. As a

result, the play stands alone as an unfamiliar companion to his fellow society plays.

This study has demonstrated that, as the reader penetrates the French veil of ambiguity,

he or she explores the ambivalent mysteries residing in Salomé’s decadent text. Through

an exploration into the examination of the poetics and aesthetics of ambiguity in

Salomé, this thesis has examined, using Genette’s theory of transtextuality, the play’s

complex French literary and biblical intertextuality that ultimately inspired further

original interpretations of the Salomé story.

                                                                                                               291 Quoted in “Writing in the Language of the Other” in Switching Languages: translingual writers reflect on their craft ed. Steven G. Kellman (2003, 312).

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This study has demonstrated the importance of the Song of Songs, a biblical

hypotext inverted by Wilde in Salomé, as a source that had never previously been fully

explored in such an overt manner. Wilde chose this particular book as the catalyst to

indulge in his phantasms. In rewriting the sensual poetics of the Song, Wilde was able

to remove the biblical book’s ambiguity and extract the raw sexual themes, exposing

them with a newfound reality that at the time was extremely confronting for Victorian

audiences. The Song of Songs proved to be the main model that Wilde subverted to

derive his approach to create a veil of ambiguity. The banning of the production

illustrates just how shocking a departure this text was from the norm of the time.

Furthermore, Nick Cave’s intricate tapestry of the abject, demonstrated Salomé’s

enduring legacy for causing shock and controversy over one hundred years after

Wilde’s publication. This study has shown that, by transgressing the biblical book of

Song of Songs and injecting a vivid reality of sex, murder and death, Wilde created a

distinct narrative to serve as a mask to his phantasms. In turn, Cave’s enterprise is also

entwined in the Song’s mosaic, with even less ambiguity or reserve. This literary

transformation demonstrates the potential and skill of the artists’ postmodern rewriting

of Wilde’s text.

Following the original French edition of Salomé, the English translation that was

published a year later, has unsettled native English speakers when confronted with

Salomé’s strange symbolist text. As this study illustrates, Douglas’s original translation

has provoked a number of caustic reactions whereby critics and translators have been

swift to attack Douglas’s archaic form of speech in order to explain the reasons why

Salomé has not enjoyed the success of Wilde’s acclaimed society comedies in the

English speaking world. When translators have endeavoured to provide updated

versions in an attempt to appeal to a contemporary audience and gain a new favourable

reception of the play, they have lost the crux of Wilde’s initial goal of experimentation.

As a result, the play’s strange and ambiguous poetics was diminished. In going against

the grain to investigate and reinstate Douglas’s translation, this study has demonstrated

the way in which Salomé requires archaic rhetoric and biblical borrowings to stay true

to the text’s rich ambiguity. Otherwise there is a decisive and diminishing effect on

Wilde’s symbolist voice.

This study has also demonstrated that the relationship between word and image

provides further interpretive possibilities as the reader engages in a dual semiotic

decoding of both the play’s text and its illustrations. Eco’s theory of open work,

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according to which “every work of art, even though it is produced by following an

explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to virtually unlimited range

of possible readings” (1989, 21), allowed to better understand the illustrative work of

Aubrey Beardsley. Beardsley’s extreme originality to create illustrations illuminated

Wilde’s symbolist text while simultaneously commenting on it to provide a heightened

degree of possible readings. What Wilde achieved in words, Beardsley achieved in

pictures.

However, as this study has also shown, just as the modern translations depart

from Wilde’s original textual ambiguity, so do some artists such as Martin and Moser

who have provided a visual accompaniment to the play. Their work offered purely

decorative images, which do not necessarily relate to Wilde’s text, appearing

ornamental rather than complementary and as a result, neglect to provide a sound visual

narrative to the play.

Finally, Eco’s notion of open work proved clearly relevant when analysing

Wilde’s elliptic single-line stage direction: “Salomé dances the dance of the seven

veils”. This original extension of the performative aspect of the text in the naming of the

dance has become synonymous with the myth today. No other version of the Salomé

story has created such a strong and lasting embodiment of desire. Critics have been

puzzled by such a terse description of the dance’s title. In stripping bare any details of

the performed dance and by refusing to provide any descriptions, Wilde has incited

artists ranging from directors and choreographers to dancers and musicians to interpret

this most ambiguous naming. As a result, artists are able to fuse together their talents to

derive divergent adaptations for original and dramatic interpretation.

This study has chosen two modern day artists who have both used dance as a

medium and a language to communicate their unique interpretation of Wilde’s

enigmatic single-line stage direction. Lindsay Kemp and Kelley Abbey offer two very

modern adaptations based on their own interpretation of Oscar Wilde’s elliptic line.

Kemp’s improvised foray into decadent aesthetics and Abbey’s multifaceted exploration

into male and female sexuality demonstrate how the Dance of the Seven Veils exists as

an ingenious puzzle through which to derive multiple interpretations. Through the

interchangeable dialogue between artist and reader, both Kemp and Abbey are able to

transmit their “pleasurable play of multiple meanings and identities” (Claid 2006, 203).

Salomé is an “open work” providing the reader with multiple interpretations.

The play’s strength lies in its ability to suggest rather than to prescribe a univocal

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reading. Salomé “relies upon the imagination of the reader to complete the aesthetic

experience that the work itself only suggests” (Gillespie 1996, 153). This study has

promoted an insistence on pluralism to enhance such an aesthetic and interpretative

experience of Wilde’s work. Oscar Wilde is an artist who will forever remain as an

enigma, a person of puzzling and contradictory character. Salomé, as his most

misunderstood play, is indicative of such a paradoxical and mysterious personality.

Salomé, like the rest of Wilde’s canon, “survived as he (Wilde) claimed it would”

(Ellmann 1988, 589) and as this thesis concludes, it seems appropriate to leave the

reader with the words of Ellmann’s elegiac lines: We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria’s. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right (Ellmann 1988, 589).

Wilde is a luminary who will continue to bewilder all those who wish to lift Salomé’s

eighth veil, the veil of ambiguity.  

 

 

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1. Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898) The Beheading of St John the Baptist, 1869 The Henry Barber Trust, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham

2. Cheryl Barker and John Pickering in Richard Strauss’s Salomé, Opera Australia 2012

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3. Aubrey Beardsley: Title Page (1894) 4. Aubrey Beardsley: The Woman in the

Moon (1894)

5. Frank Martin: (Frontispiece, Salomé, 1957) 6. Barry Moser: (Frontispiece, Salomé, 2011)

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7. Aubrey Beardsley: The Stomach Dance 8. Aubrey Beardsley: List of Pictures (1894) (1894)

9. Alastair (Baron Hans Henning Voigt): 10. Marcus Behmer: Untitled illustration from Untitled illustration from Salomé (1925) Salomé (1903)

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11. Barry Moser: The young Syrian & Herodias’s Page (Salomé, 2011)

12. Takato Yamamoto: J’ai Baisé Ta 13. Takato Yamamoto: Salomé (2005) Bouche Jokanaan (2005)

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14. Lindsay Kemp as Salomé (1977)

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15. Lindsay Kemp as Salomé (1977)

16. The Dance of the Seven Veils in Richard Strauss’s Salomé Opera Australia (2012)

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17. The Dance of the Seven Veils in Richard Strauss’s Salomé Opera Australia (2012)

18. The Dance of the Seven Veils in Richard Strauss’s Salomé Opera Australia (2012)

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The Eighth Veil: the poetics and aesthetics of ambiguity in Oscar Wilde's Salomé

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The Eighth Veil: The Poetics and Aesthetics of Ambiguity in Oscar Wilde's Salomé

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