‘The shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver’
Oscar Wilde’s Salome
Reconsidering Salome
Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894) represents one of the many incarnations of the biblical figure who became the archetypal nineteenth-century fatal woman.1 But Wilde’s Salome is inconsistent with the femme fatale stereotype.2 Her presence in the text suggests something other than the bodily and embodied beauty of previous nineteenth-century femmes fatales. Wilde’s Salome needs to be reconsidered; critics are too keen to categorise her as yet another femme fatale, a position which she currently occupies in literary critical studies.3 In Petra Dierkes-Thrun’s recent study, Salome’s Modernity:
Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (2011), she refers to Salome as a femme fatale, calling upon the term as a universal type of which the reader is already aware, in order to describe Salome’s attributes. According to Dierkes-Thrun, Salome possesses ‘strong femme fatale traits inspired by Huysmans’s decadent imagination’
and ‘asserts self-confidence and independence’.4 She reads Salome in metaphysical terms as a modernist narrative of secularity and individuality.
My study is focused primarily on Salome’s body, her physicality – or lack thereof – in Wilde’s play, and the implications of her disembodiment. Her shadowy bodily presence in the text, I argue, complicates readings of Salome as an authoritative or powerful figure. It is easy to overlook the fact, as many critics have done already, that in the textual version of the drama Salome’s body is nowhere to be seen at the moment the threat of her power is traditionally located: the moment of the dance. The reader does not know what they are supposed to envisage when Salome ‘dances the dance of the
1 A note on the spelling of Salome: I refer to the 1894 edition of the text, and therefore use its spellings of Salome and Iokanaan. In subsequent editions these characters’ names are often spelled ‘Salomé’ and
‘Jokanaan’. In the case of critical quotations I have left the spelling consistent with the original.
2 Certain elements of the femme fatale are recognisable in Wilde’s Salome, such as her beauty, her unity with nature, and the inevitable fatal request for Iokanaan’s head. However, elements are also lacking: the masochistic ‘game’ structure, and the body of the princess.
3 As a femme fatale in critical thought, Salome is either imagined to be a misogynistic creation calling for an ‘understanding of the need for woman’s immediate physical destruction’ (Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity, p. 396) or a feminist icon. An extreme version of the feminist argument comes from Toni Bentley: ‘Salome became feminist through Wilde, achieving her emancipation by embracing her own exploitation.’ Toni Bentley, Sisters of Salome (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), p.
30. 4 Petra Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), pp. 35-6, p. 42.
seven veils’, because Wilde has provided no description of the movements of Salome’s body as she dances, nor of what the seven veils are supposed to represent. Because of the lack of emphasis on her body and what it can do, and because of an absence of masochistic submission on the part of the drama’s male characters, Wilde’s Salome needs to be repositioned outside the boundaries of the femme fatale type. However, this is not to say that she should be considered to be the same kind of Decadent cruel woman as we find in the poetry of Swinburne. This exploration of Wilde’s Salome is less concerned with repositioning her as a cruel woman (since she lacks an accompanying masochistic creator figure) than with arguing against her conception as a femme fatale.
The text of Salome is being studied separately from the rest of Wilde’s work because it is an example of cruel female sexuality written by one of the figureheads of the Decadent movement. Wilde also published a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), poetry, and a series of society comedies including The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and Lady Windermere’s Fan (1893). Salome is the clearest instance of a Decadent cruel woman in Wilde’s work; the comedies are characterised by their light-hearted epigrammatic wit, and although Dorian Gray is a Decadent novel it centres around the relationships between men. It is shrouded in ‘vagueness and indeterminacy’
as Kirsten MacLeod points out, so Dorian’s hedonistic and decadent lifestyle is largely hidden from the reader.5 There are few female characters in the novel, and the most noteworthy of them, Sibyl Vane, is killed off half way through. I examine the significance of Sibyl’s death in connection with Salome’s femaleness and the imagery of mirrors and roses, but I do not explore the work in any further detail. This investigation focuses on Salome in textual form, in its English translation of Wilde’s original French (1893), as illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley.6 The English-language version is under examination because this is a study of English Decadence, and because
5 MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence, p. 126.
6 The translation of Salome was originally supposed to be undertaken by Lord Alfred Douglas, but Richard Ellmann considers that Wilde disliked Douglas’s translation so much that he undertook the task himself, settling instead for a dedication to Douglas as ‘the translator of my play’. The title page of the 1894 edition of Salome makes no reference to Douglas, but reads ‘Salome, A Tragedy in One Act:
Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde: Pictured by Aubrey Beardsley’. For documentation of the quarrel between Douglas and Wilde on the matter of translation, see Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, pp. 379-81.
Wilde himself recalls the translation debacle in De Profundis (1897), his letter to Douglas from Reading Gaol. Here he states that they had ‘not unnaturally indeed, differed on the question of the artistic value of your translation of Salome’, and refers to ‘my pointing out the schoolboy faults of your attempted translation of Salome. 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.’ Oscar Wilde, Letter to Lord Alfred Douglas (January-March 1897) in The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Rupert Hart-Hart-Davis, 1962) p. 426, p. 432.
this was the version which was accompanied by Beardsley’s illustrations which bring an added dimension to the question of gender in the play.
I begin this chapter by considering the misinterpretation of Salome as a femme fatale, addressing the issue of her disembodiment in the play. Wilde diminishes the power and sex appeal of the ‘typical’ femme fatale by diminishing the power of her body. She is anatomized by the male characters in their descriptions of her body parts as delicate and natural. This is similar to the strategy used by Swinburne in his masochistic monologue poems in which the female image is conjured into being as a series of disconnected fragments which do not form a substantial whole. Many male voices describe Salome in the play, and, as Charles Bernheimer points out, their dialogue is disconnected. As a result, Salome’s body is abstracted. Any power inherent in her female nature is transposed on to the moon, an image Helen Tookey considers to be an emblem of dangerous female sexuality. The moon is blood-red and seemingly more fatal than the white and delicate Salome. The disembodied Salome reflects Wilde’s different attitude to the typical Decadent masochistic ambivalence. Pleasure and pain are mutually exclusive in Salome; there is none of the voluptuous surrender to sexualised female cruelty that we find in Swinburne’s poems. Wilde does not play by the rules of the masochistic ‘game’.
Salome’s power traditionally comes from her body and her sexualised dance. Wilde does not provide a full description of this dance, thereby intensifying her disembodiment. However, I maintain that Salome is intended to be a distinctly female presence in the play even if we do not get a sense of her physical form. Eliot L. Gilbert comments upon the sense of female nature in the play as animalistic and dangerous. I consider various critical responses to the ambiguity of gender in Salome, particularly Amanda Fernbach’s notion that Wilde allows for the destabilisation of heteronormativity and the enactment of homosexual desire in Salome’s dance. I also examine several of Beardsley’s illustrations which depict androgynous, shapeshifting characters, and Wilde as ‘The Woman in the Moon’. Analysis of the text of the play provides further evidence that Salome’s gender may be questioned. She uses language in the same way as the male characters do, echoing their male, if not masculine, discourse. She describes Iokanaan in the same way that the characters speak of her, anatomising his body. However, Salome ultimately lacks the power that the male characters possess. She is unable to entice Iokanaan to look at her, nor can she
ventriloquise his decapitated head once he is dead. Amy Koritz analyses the play in terms of a division between body and spirit. Salome is female, driven by her animal urges, and cannot transcend the realm of the body. This is a body that is definitely female; Salome’s sexuality is destructive but she is ultimately destroyed as male power is restored.
Salome: Wilde’s femme fatale?
Salome, as one of the most popular nineteenth-century femmes fatales, was adopted from the biblical Gospels of Matthew 6. 21-29 and Mark 14. 6-11.7 The ‘daughter of Herodias’, named as Salome by Flavius Josephus in Jewish Antiquities (A.D. 93-4), but not mentioned in this text as responsible for the death of John the Baptist, is a girl whose dance pleases her stepfather (and uncle) Herod Antipas so much that he promises her whatever she desires.8 On her mother’s advice, she requests the head of John the Baptist. From these short biblical and historical passages a whole host of Salomes emerged in visual art and literature. In the nineteenth century, Salome attained the characteristics of the Decadent femme fatale, becoming the emblem of female nature in its most fearful and appealing state. Her dance became the dance of a sexually alluring woman, and the fatal request for John the Baptist’s head was reinterpreted according the stereotype of fatal female sexuality. The fact that this is a holy man’s head only intensifies the Decadent perversity of the tale.
Patrick Bade, in Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women (1979) acknowledges the recurrence of images of Salome during the 1800s to the point where she has become a universal female figure whose connotations are instantly recognisable at the sight of an image or the sound of her name. He observes, ‘Salome exercised the most powerful attraction of all [...] in the second half of the nineteenth century she was elevated to the status of an archetype.’9 Wilde provides an exception to this rule, but paradoxically his exceptional text proves to be the most enduring literary version of the fatal princess. As Dierkes-Thrun demonstrates, Wilde’s version of the myth was the inspiration for numerous twentieth-century reworkings, such as Richard Strauss’s opera,
7 Charles Bernheimer calls Salome ‘the favourite femme fatale of the fin de siècle’ in Decadent Subjects, p. 104.
8 Sections 136 – 137 mention Herodias’ marriage to Herod Antipas and Salome as Herodias’ daughter.
Sections 116 – 117 mention that Herod slew John the Baptist because he was afraid of his power and influence. Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities trans. William Whiston (A.D. 93-4; Ware: Wordsworth, 2006), pp. 786-8.
9 Bade, Femme Fatale, p. 7.
and performed interpretations of the Dance of the Seven Veils. Later Wilde’s Salome was committed to film, for example Salomé (1923) directed by Charles Bryant and starring Alla Nazimova, and Salome’s Last Dance (1988) directed by Ken Russell, in which the play is performed in front of actors playing Wilde and Douglas. It is therefore Wilde’s Salome which is called to mind, even indirectly, when the princess’s name is mentioned. This is possibly because of the ‘celebrity’ of the text; Salome caused controversy from the moment it was published.10 Dierkes-Thrun believes the popularity of Wilde’s play is related to what she sees as its forward-looking modernity. She therefore attempts to distance it from readings which exclusively examine it in terms of nineteenth-century socio-historic context.11 However, it is still necessary to re-examine the original English version, rather than concentrating on the versions it inspired. It is important to revisit the play as a product of the Decadent fin de siècle, looking at the text itself, in order to understand how Wilde really presents Salome.
Modern ideas of Salome as femme fatale are based on Wilde’s play, but revisiting the text itself will help to disprove this notion. Karl Toepfer notes the difference between the dramatic text and the text embodied by actors: ‘With drama, it is never entirely clear if the linguistic signifier is the image of the word on the page or the voicing of the word in performance. The dramatic text “writes” the body as another text called
“performance”, which one “reads” according to different rules than [those which]
prevail in the reading of image linguistic signifiers.’12 In the case of Salome, according to the interpretation of the princess’s ‘disembodied’ presence within the text, there is a problem of staging the play, which means that Salome must be embodied by the actor playing her. There is obvious potential for variations between directors’ interpretations of the play. However, it is common for directors to emphasise the ‘femme fatale’
elements of Salome, transforming her into a character at odds with the similes used to describe her within the text.13 In spite of her delicacy and disembodiedness in the text, Wilde’s Salome has frequently been made into a dominant presence on stage or screen.
10 Anecdotally it was banned because of excessive focus on (female) sexuality, but the ‘official’ reason was that the presentation of biblical figures on stage was considered blasphemous.
11 Dierkes-Thrun, Salome’s Modernity, p. 2.
12 Karl Toepfer, The Voice of Rapture: A Symbolist System of Ecstatic Speech in Oscar Wilde’s Salome (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 39.
13 For example, Salomé directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Hampstead Theatre (22nd June – 17th July 2010) emphasised all the dialogue by having characters shouting the lines rather than speaking them, particularly in the case of Salome herself, played by Zawe Ashton, who was imagined as a wilful and domineering adolescent girl, shouting at her stepfather until her demands were met. See also the filmic adaptation by Ken Russell, Salome’s Last Dance (1988), in which Salome is a coquettish and dominant figure.
Salome is amplified on stage where she is silenced in text. Subsequent critical interpretations have been influenced by performances that include interpretations of the invisible dance. Indeed, the dance itself took on a life of its own in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with performances by Loïe Fuller and Maud Allan achieving notoriety.14 Before Wilde’s trial in 1895 Salome was only realised visually and attenuatedly in Beardsley’s illustrations. The play was banned from performance by the censors and only performed after the trial and Wilde’s subsequent disgrace.15
In Wilde’s play, Salome is elusive from the moment we are introduced to her. The Young Syrian describes her as being ‘like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver’.16 This phrase is an example of Wilde’s use of highly refined, artificial symbols in simile. This imagery suggests more than it reveals.17 The ‘white rose’ is a misleading image, since it suggests a delicate, pure beauty. However, Salome is not compared to the rose, but its shadow. No matter what colour the rose, the shadow would remain the same in its blankness. The ‘silver mirror’ is similarly confusing; is the silver descriptive of the reflective surface of the glass, or of the mirror’s frame? Like Salome herself, whose bodily form is not revealed to the reader in spite of numerous references through simile, the shadow is secondary to the description of artifice surrounding it. Yet even though Salome is a shadow, the association of the purity, coldness, and refinement of the white rose and the silver mirror are relevant to her; she is associated with whiteness and fragility, and remains just as shadowy throughout the drama. In contrast to the apparently embodied ‘fleshly’ cruel women such as those who appear in the poetry of Swinburne, Salome is figured as an incorporeal and therefore insubstantial being, nothing more than a reflection of the darkness cast by a rose in the way of the light.
Wilde’s Salome exists as an image of something fragile, which can be destroyed as easily as it is created. She has little hands which are ‘just like white butterflies’.18 These fluttering, trembling appendages are not consistent with the bodily powers traditionally
14 Allan’s dance in particular achieved notoriety, and she was tried for lesbianism in the Pemberton-Billing trial of 1918, a trial reminiscent of Wilde’s own.
15 The play was produced by Aurélien-François Lugné-Poë at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in Paris on 11th February 1896. Source: Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 466.
16 Wilde, Salome, p. 3.
17 The ‘shadow of a white rose...’ is a simile also used by Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (which will be examined further on) and in his short story ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ (1888), to describe the paleness and fragility of the rose, which the nightingale feeds with her life-blood: ‘Pale it was, at first [...]
As the shadow of a rose in a mirror of silver’. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’ in The Happy Prince and Other Stories (London: Penguin, 1994), pp. 28-9. In all three instances, the phrase connotes paleness, beauty, and fragility.
18 Wilde, Salome, p. 8.
placed in the hands of the femme fatale. Dierkes-Thrun acknowledges that the similes Wilde uses to describe Salome are, in fact, more consistent with the opposite nineteenth-century stereotype, the femme fragile. She observes that ‘Throughout Wilde’s play, Salomé is presented in symbolic terms that indicate fragility, vulnerability, and preciousness [...] these are also typical traits of the femme fragile, another popular stereotype of femininity during the period.’19 But neither the fragility nor the stereotyping interfere with her interpretation of Wilde’s Salome as a dramatic heroine of modern individualism. However, I read these similes as suggestive of a disengagement between the author and his supposed ‘heroine’.
The traditional image of the femme fatale locates her allure and her power in her body, for which she is celebrated but figured as cruel because of the power of nature within her form. Writing a femme fatale requires an engagement with this body. Wilde, however, disengages from Salome by disembodying her and eventually destroying her.
Salome’s white delicateness finds its contrary in the imagery of rapacious, heated desire in the vampiric woman of Swinburne’s ‘Satia Te Sanguine’: ‘You thrill as his pulses dwindle, / You brighten and warm as he bleeds’.20 Salome’s beauty is cold, she is colourless, and does not create the impression of a ‘flesh-and-blood’ creation. The vampire-like woman seems to gain vitality according to Swinburne’s use of imagery of
Salome’s white delicateness finds its contrary in the imagery of rapacious, heated desire in the vampiric woman of Swinburne’s ‘Satia Te Sanguine’: ‘You thrill as his pulses dwindle, / You brighten and warm as he bleeds’.20 Salome’s beauty is cold, she is colourless, and does not create the impression of a ‘flesh-and-blood’ creation. The vampire-like woman seems to gain vitality according to Swinburne’s use of imagery of