Featured White Papers
- Choosing the best CRM for your organization (Oracle)
- CRM your salespeople will love (Oracle)
- PCI DSS therapy for the smaller retailer (McAfee)
Content provided in partnership with
Princess, Persona, and Subjective Desire: A Reading of Oscar Wilde's Salome, The
Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2004 by Marcovitch, Heather
Oscar Wilde began to write Salome still enjoying, but being frustrated by, the critical attention given to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. The summer of 1890 had been exhausting for Wilde: Dorian Gray had been published in shorter form, and Wilde had written many letters to disgruntled reviewers defending the work, reluctantly pointing out the moral qualities in an art form he had previously claimed was incompatible with moralistic purposes. The newspapers' focus on whether Wilde lauded or deplored Dorian's actions directed public attention away from the novel's critique of image and desire. Dorian Gray actually is highly skeptical about the aestheticism Wilde represented in the eighties, treating it, as Richard Ellmann put it, as "not a creed but a problem" (310). Specifically, Wilde's problem with aestheticism is that, following Pater, the self cultivates and expresses itself through both physical and intellectual experiences, and that gives rise to the danger that either the physical or intellectual experience will be valued at the expense of the other. Aestheticism allows individuals to transcend the Philistinism within their own culture, but it also narrows the cultural experiences open to them. In particular, aestheticism runs the risk of robbing sexual desire of its power by attempting to transform all walks of experience into contemplative acts.
Salome in fact extends this critique of aestheticism. Like Dorian, Salome is trapped in her persona-an aestheticized image of herself that she projects to the public-as an object of desire. Because Salome, like Dorian, can only function as an object of desire, she is afforded no psychic space to develop subjective desire. As Freud notes, the repressed endeavors to break through the pressure of the ego and either forces its way into consciousness or reveals itself through action (20). The resulting action invariably throws out of balance the ego's role of stabilizing the individual; in other words, the individual's desire becomes perverted. In Salome, Wilde gives us direct access to the princess's perverted desire. (And this intimate view of Salome paradoxically makes her less attractive than Dorian Gray but slightly more sympathetic.) In the double play of worshiping and fearing Salome's image, Herod's court fails to take into account what she represses in order to project her image. The result is a Salome using the power gotten from her persona to destroy the very system that imbued her with this power.
Although Oscar Wilde began writing Salome in 1891, he had toyed with the idea of contributing to the vast body of nineteenth-century literature on the Biblical figure for some time. Wilde was familiar with the iconography that had sprung up around Salome in the decades prior to his drama, from Flaubert's "Herodias" to Mallarme's unfinished poem "Herodiade" to the Moreau paintings of Salome immortalized by J.K. Huysmans in A Rebours, to name a few. From the beginning, however, Wilde planned to distinguish his portrayal of Salome from those of the writers and painters before him. He found, for example, previous depictions of the princess by artists such as Leonardo and Durer unsatisfactory (Ellmann 342). The Salome of Wilde's drama differs also from her previous literary incarnations. In Flaubert's story, for instance, Herodias is the instigator of both Salome's dance and request for John the Baptist's head. Salome is merely a pawn in Herodias's struggle for power with Herod in Flaubert's story. 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.
Of all the previous depictions of Salome, the paintings by Gustave Moreau, and especially Huysmans's description of them, influenced Wilde the most in his conception of the princess. According to Richard Ellmann, Wilde liked to recite the passages in A Rebours about the Moreau paintings (342). From the beginning, then, Wilde conceived of Salome in aesthetic terms. Wilde saw Salome as the representation of all the unspoken impulses and desires in Donan Gray. Yet Wilde takes his character of Salome further than he does Dorian. Not only does his Salome articulate the motivations that are kept concealed in Donan Gray, but Wilde gives her a justification for her actions that he deliberately keeps ambiguous with Dorian.
Indeed, Wilde's conception of Salome attributes to her a great deal more subjectivity than Dorian. Originally, Wilde intended to call his drama The Decapitation of Salome and planned to have Salome become a saint at the play's end (Ellmann 344). Although he abandoned that idea in favor of exploiting the legacy of Salome as a femme fatale, vestiges of the more hagiographic version remain in the play. Wilde's Salome is an attempt to combine her iconic reputation with a more psychologically-based portrait. It is sometimes an uneasy mix in the play; the aesthetic discourse and intoning language of the play diverts from Salome's character and encourages looking at her only as an image rather than as a motivated character. Jean Paul Riquelme, representing the views of several critics, argues, "Any interpretation that understands Salome's language as realistic, that is, as a transparent vehicle for rendering the thoughts of a psychologically believable character, presents a distorted view of the play" (582). Such a view overlooks the point Wilde is making in the play about the dangers involved in treating Salome exclusively as an image. While Riquelme is right in cautioning against looking at Salome as realistic discourse, he dismisses the possibility that Wilde is juxtaposing psychological realism with aesthetic discourse in order to argue that, by privileging the effects of the language over its content, the audience commits the same errors against Salome that the other characters in the play do, appreciating her image at the expense of her subjectivity. Thus, in examining the consequences of such a view, Wilde includes the audience as being complicit in the fundamental problem of the play, overlooking the anger and destructiveness inherent in Salome's persona.
Find Research Guides for:
Most Popular Articles in Reference
- The importance of understanding organizational culture
- Credit card attitudes and behaviors of college students
- What factors attract foreign direct investment?
- Libraries Need Relationship Marketing - mutual interest marketing concept, ...
- How to set performance goals: employee reviews are more than annual critiques
- More »