Wilde's Salome as Femme Fatale

  

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.  Thus, Salomé’’s behavior is first of all titillating with little or no moral implication. 

     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).