Abstract
The ethical dimensions of Decadence, of navigating the world and generating meaning from reality by cataloging its surfaces, face a challenge when opposing perspectives are introduced. In Wilde’s play, Salome embodies a Decadent style while Iokanaan articulates the Symbolist worldview. In the cosmopolitan and multicultural setting of ancient Judea, Symbolism presents the unseen and intangible as a frightful and unsettling force. The play’s long and ornate speeches juxtapose these alternative aesthetic systems and inscribe an ethical component onto the characters’ precious words and ornate images. The play’s complex representation of identity, in the context of modernist rhetoric and epistemology, draws out the moral implications of Symbolism and Decadence. The numerous moments of miscommunication and unreciprocated gazes throughout Salome affirm the deepest anxieties of modernity. The failures of both Symbolism and Decadence to compensate for this loss perpetuate a cycle of meaningless superficiality and depth.
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Notes
- 1.
Fyodor Sologub, The Petty Demon, trans. S.D. Cioran (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1983), 235.
- 2.
See David Weir, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 23.
- 3.
Barbara Spackman links the perceived incoherence of Decadent language with their affiliation with illness and degeneracy. Barbara Spackman, Decadent Genealogies (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). See also Charles Bernheimer, “Unknowing Decadence,” in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylavania Press, 1999), 52–55.
- 4.
Lothar Hönnighausen, The Symbolist Tradition in English Literature: A Study of Pre-Raphaelistism and Fin de Siècle, trans. Gisela Hönnighausen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 149.
- 5.
Gustave Flaubert, Salammbô (1862), trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1977), 123.
- 6.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 383.
- 7.
Peter Cooke, Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 84.
- 8.
Stephen Bronner, Modernism at The Barricades: Aesthetics, Politics, Utopia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 14.
- 9.
Patrick McGuinness, Poetry and Radical Politics in Fin-de-siècle France: From Anarchism to Action française (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 31.
- 10.
Ibid., 34. See also Pamela Genova, Symbolist Journals: A Culture of Correspondence (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2002) and David Sweetman, Explosive Acts: Toulouse-Lautrec, Oscar Wilde, Félix Fénéon and the Art & Anarchy of the Fin de Siècle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999).
- 11.
Matthew Potolsky, The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community From Baudelaire to Beardsley (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 8–9.
- 12.
Cooke, Gustave Moreau: History Painting, Spirituality and Symbolism, 86. A detailed account of the Salome paintings can be found in Cynthia Burlingham, A Strange Magic: Gustave Moreau’s Salome (Los Angeles: Hammer Museum, 2012).
- 13.
Matthew Sturgis, Passionate Attitudes: The English Decadence of the Eighteen Nineties (London: Macmillan, 1995), 98. See also Rozina Nezhinskaia, Salomeia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2018), 191–4.
- 14.
Eugen Weber, France, Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 11.
- 15.
Austin Quigley, “Realism and Symbolism in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé,” Modern Drama 37 (1994), 104. Kerry Powell shows the multitude of contemporary cultural and literary influences that shaped Wilde’s approach to the Salome theme. Kerry Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45–54. Ellmann places Salome in Wilde’s own bi-cultural identity, Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage, 1998), 335–61.
- 16.
Kyle Mox, “Decadence, Melancholia, and the Making of Modernism in the Salome Fairy Tales of Strindberg, Wilde, and Ibsen,” in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 127. In addition to Moreau’s paintings, Wilde was in dialogue with Flaubert’s Herodias and Mallarmé’s Hérodiade. For further discussions of Wilde’s place in the canon of writing on Salome (dubbed Salomania by scholars of the late nineteenth century) see Joseph Donohue, “Salomé: Introduction,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. V (Plays I), ed. Joseph Donohue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 365–91. Meltzer, Dijkstra, and Nezhinskaia show the intense interest in Salome in the mid- to late-nineteenth century.
Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13–46; Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 352–401; and Nezhinskaia, Salomeia.
- 17.
On the textual and material complexities of Wilde’s play, see Nicholas Frankel, Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 47–76.
- 18.
Sos Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996).
- 19.
Powell, Oscar Wilde and the Theatre of the 1890s .
- 20.
Joseph Donohue, “Salome and the Wildean Art of Symbolist Theatre,” Modern Drama 37, no. 1 (1994), 92–3; Julia Prewitt Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
- 21.
Quigley, “Realism and Symbolism in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé”; Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing; Ellis Hanson, “Salome, Simile, Symboliste,” in Decadent Poetics: Literature and Form at the British Fin de Siècle, ed. Jason David Hall and Alex Murray (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
- 22.
Kirsten MacLeod, Fictions of British Decadence: High Art, Popular Writing, and the Fin de Siècle (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 37.
- 23.
Ibid., 35–6.
- 24.
See Eltis, Revising Wilde: Society and Subversion in the Plays of Oscar Wilde and Brown, Cosmopolitan Criticism: Oscar Wilde’s Philosophy of Art.
- 25.
Magali Fleurot, “Decadence and Regeneration: Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales as a Tool for Social Change,” in Decadence, Degeneration, and the End: Studies in the European Fin de Siècle, ed. Marja Härmänmaa and Christopher Nissen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 78.
- 26.
Robert Ross, “A Note on “Salome” [1930],” in Salome (New York: Dover, 1967), xvii.
- 27.
Quigley, “Realism and Symbolism in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé,” 108.
- 28.
Ibid., 112.
- 29.
Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. III. The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 168.
- 30.
Hanson, “Salome, Simile, Symboliste,” 143.
- 31.
All citations from Salome refer to the following edition: Oscar Wilde, “Salome: A Tragedy in One Act,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. V (Plays I), ed. Joseph Donohue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
- 32.
Charles Bernheimer, Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the fin de siècle in Europe (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 135.
- 33.
Quigley, “Realism and Symbolism in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé,” 108.
- 34.
Hanson also notes the fundamental differences in their discourse, aligning it with an eroticized Lacanian psychoanalytical structure. Hanson, “Salome, Simile, Symboliste,” 148.
- 35.
Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Vol. IV. Criticism, ed. Josephine Guy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- 36.
Hanson, “Salome, Simile, Symboliste,” 156.
- 37.
Ross, “A Note on “Salome” [1930],” xv.
- 38.
Quigley, “Realism and Symbolism in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé,” 117.
- 39.
Max Nordau, Degeneration [1892] (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), 39.
- 40.
Hema Chari, “Imperial Dependency, Addiction, and the Decadent Body,” in Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, ed. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff, and Matthew Potolsky (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 216. Denise Murrell’s superb work on “posing modernity” offers another powerful perspective on the centrality of the other in modernist art and culture. Denise Murrell, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
- 41.
Even for his contemporaries, Kipling was a troubling poet. See Harry Ricketts, “‘Nine and sixty ways’: Kipling, ventriloquist poet,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rudyard Kipling, ed. Howard J. Booth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Jan Montefiore, Rudyard Kipling (Devon, England: Northcote House Publishers, 2007), 103–122.
- 42.
Gunga Din’s nearly mute presence in the poem is integral with his othered status as a subaltern. See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Jan Montefiore presents Kipling’s use of Indian vernacular as a familiarizing strategy, bringing the other close to home, Montefiore, Rudyard Kipling, 31–47.
- 43.
Rudyard Kipling, The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, Vol. I, ed. Thomas Pinney, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 189–92.
- 44.
Ibid., 207–9.
- 45.
Patrick Williams, “‘Simultaneous uncontemporaneities’: Theorising Modernism and Empire,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 20.
- 46.
Denise Murrell reveals the complexities of Baudelaire’s relationship with the non-Western other in her discussion of Jeanne Duval. Murrell, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today, 62–66.
- 47.
Paul Verlaine, Selected Poems, trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130–31.
- 48.
Rod Edmond, “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard J. Booth and Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 44.
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Stone, J. (2019). The Danger of Seeing Too Much: Fin-de-siècle Ethics and Aesthetics in Oscar Wilde’s Salome. In: Decadence and Modernism in European and Russian Literature and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34452-8_4
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