Wilde wrote Salomé in French, then worked with Lord Alfred Douglas to produce an English translation. Strauss's opera uses a German version by Hedwig Lachmann. My comments apply equally to each of these dramas.
Salomé has
little in common with Wilde’s other plays, those drawing room comedies
with witticisms and ironic inversions falling thick and fast. Salomé is less a play than it is a sustained
tone poem on the theme of erotic desire, ratcheted up to such an intensity that
the sudden murder at the end seems the only way out. Herod, of course, obsesses over Salomé’s
charms, while the young Syrian captain is driven by her to suicide, and the
incestuous Herodias grouses with sexual jealousy in the background. Salomé herself exhibits perhaps the most
perverse and ardent compulsion of all, with her
insistence on kissing Iokanaan against his will, whether he be alive or
dead.
Even without the masterful illustrations by Beardsley and such fevered
later re-imaginings as Ken Russell’s 1988 film, the focus of the play is unquestionably
desire. Salomé’s
transgressive character was recognized by the censors, and the play was
initially banned by the Lord Chamberlain and later performed in a modified
version. When Mahler sought to stage
Strauss’s opera in Vienna at the Staatsoper, he was blocked by the
censors. Widely admired by musicians
and composers though with a dubious reputation among others, the opera was
chosen as the benefit show at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, but the reaction
of prudes on the opera’s Board of Directors led to the show’s cancellation. [1]
But what is the meaning of all
this pent-up desire? Perhaps the core
motive, underlying the harmonics and variations, is the archaic masculine fear
of female sexuality expressed in the African practice of female genital
mutilation, in the orthodox Jewish idea of a niddah, and in legendary figures such as
Lamia, the sirens, Lilith, and Melusina.
In the neolithic period, fertility goddesses seem to have been at the
center of religious activities, but later, under monarchies with pantheon
headed by a male ruler, the sexual Other was revalued. Men’s marvel at childbirth combined with
helplessness in controlling lust, the predictable anxieties of courtship, and,
in many cases, guilt for oppressing women to generate a fear of female
supernatural power. The gift of Eden’s
fruit, which doubtless originally signified the good things of the earth,
became the cause of a calamitous Fall.
The course of the Odyssey is basically a route around one
dangerous female after another in search of the positive example of Penelope as
the loyal wife. Morgan le Fay, succubi,
and the real-life persecutions of accused witches
This archetype descends through myth and then legend into fiction over
the centuries without losing popularity.
At the time of Wilde’s play, the mere choice of Salomé as theme was
provocative. By the late nineteenth
century her story had become a favorite theme of Symbolist and Decadent
authors, notably in Moreau’s paintings and Huysmans’ fiction, but also in works
by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Massenet.
Salomé provided a theme lurid enough to satisfy transgressive tastes,
yet remaining largely within Biblical tradition.
This notoriety is, in fact, however, only half of the dialectic. The story in the gospels of Mark and Matthew,
though they do not name her, tell the tale of Herodias’ daughter asking for the
head of John the Baptist in a narration clearly meant as a sort of lesser
crucifixion, a contest of good against evil in which the saints’ martyrdom
serves a Providential purpose. Josephus
mentions her as the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas [2], but does not relate the
story about John. Though the princess of
Herod’s court is not named until centuries after her time, a certain Salomé,
identified in the late Book of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, by
Bartholomew the Apostle, and called “Salomé the temptress” is named among
those visiting Christ’s empty tomb.
Unsurprisingly, she is made a heroine even a sort of feminist by a good
many recent critics. The lead
perhaps is taken by Kate Millet in her ground-breaking Sexual Politics (1970)
when she notes Wiilde’s own identification with the temptress and characterizes
the play as a whole as a drama of “homosexual guilt and rejection.” Before long one critic declared "The
Jewish Princess Was a New Woman" and another argued that the play was
"a devastating fin-de-siecle attack on the conventions of patriarchal culture." This attitude influenced views of the
politics of the piece, and it became possible to redeem even the ethnocentric stereotypes by claiming that Wilde had written “an Orientalist play that
questions the very premises of Oriental discourse.” [3]
In fact, however, Salomé’’s actions are irredeemably reprehensible. She is selfish and her passion perverse. The aesthetic glow that lingers about her derives
from sexual energy heightened by the late nineteenth century Romantic notion of
the wicked that descended from the popular taste for the Gothic some decades
earlier. [4] Evident in Baudelaire’s
title Fleurs du Mal, Verlaine’s poètes maudits, and the slightly
later career of Aleister Crowley, the aesthetics are in fact not far distant
from the fondness for Nazi imagery among outlaw bikers or for Satanist
pentangles among heavy metal fans.
The contemporary readings of Wilde’s protagonist derive from two new
complementary innovations he had introduced into the old story. On the one hand, Wilde emphasizes Salomé’’s agency by stressing her independence from
her mother who in the gospels is responsible for asking for John the Baptist’s
death. In the play Salomé acts like a
willful teen-ager and ignores her mother (who does ultimately endorse her plan). This strengthening of her character allows
some to see her as an admirable heroine, yet it is decisively undercut by her
sudden and violent death at the end ordered by Herod who had earlier seemed
quite under her control. Thus the
prerogatives of the patriarchy are reasserted, and the possibility emerges of treating
the princess as a tragic hero.
Such a treatment, though, is unlikely to occur to the viewer whose
appreciation of the play more likely resembles that of the listener to a formal
concert piece setting forth a theme followed by variations, all charged with emotional
electricity. The image clusters occur and revur like leitmotifs; mentions of the moon, doves, flowers, and the gaze that fixes the other come and go like the corridors and the verbal phrases in Last Year at Marienbad. The play as a whole may arise, as some have
said, from Wilde’s own “forbidden” loves, seen as vicious by the homophobic,
but in the end it is a sustained meditation on the dynamo of erotic power
itself, whatever the origin or object,
here so dramatically explosive as to ruin the protagonist. Plato himself, to whose loves Wilde appealed
so ingenuously in court, would have recognized the “madness” in which the
characters are caught. [5] In the end Wilde’s Salomé is a sensual
and emotional experience far more than an intellectual one. It is less a cautionary parable of a femme
fatale than it is a dramatic simulation of sexual excitement, no less
powerful for the fact that it is all but universal.
1. Among those shocked at
Strauss’s opera was J. P. Morgan’s daughter Louisa. The work finally came to the Wiener
Staatsoper in 1918 but the Metropolitan did not stage it again until 1934. Apart from wealthy board members, reaction in
New York included the reviewer from the Musical News to whom the
“conception of the story is repugnant to Anglo-Saxon minds (“Comments on Events: Salome in New
York,” 32 [March 9, 1907]). This article
also quotes several other opinions, among them a writer in the New York
Musical Courier who supported the play and feared that its cancellation
would make New York a “laughing-stock” in Europe.
2. Josephus, Antiquities
of the Jews (Book XVIII, Chapter 5, 4).
3. See Jane Marcus’ essay
in the Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78 (1974). The next quotation is from Elliot I. Gilbert,
“’Tumult of Image’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Victorian Studies 26
(1983) and the last from Yeeyon Im “Oscar Wilde's "Salomé":
Disorienting Orientalism,” Comparative Drama, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter
2011). For a more subtle reading see Helen
Tookey, “’The Fiend that Smites with a Look’: the Monstrous/Menstruous Woman
and the Danger of the Gaze in Oscar Wilde’s Salome,” Literature and Theology
Vol. 18, No. 1 (March 2004).
4. Wilde was far from alone
in finding the theme attractive. There
was in fact a bit of a vogue for Salomé during the period, expressed in poetry
by Heinrich Heine, Stephane Mallarmé and William Butler Yeats, fiction from Joris-Karl
Huysmans, Gustave Flaubert, and Jules Laforgue, and visual art by Gustave
Moreau, Lovis Corinth, and Henry Ossawa Tanner.
5. In the Phaedrus
Plato explicitly says that love is madness, yet he adds that it may nonetheless
bring the greatest of blessings (sec. 244).
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