Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression

265 Pages·2014·1.95 MB·English

by  Petra Dierkes-Thrun

Salome's Modernity
Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression

Petra Dierkes-Thrun

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2011
All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper
2014 2013 2012 2011 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dierkes-Thrun, Petra, 1968–
Salome's modernity : Oscar Wilde and the aesthetics of transgression / Petra Dierkes-Thrun.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-472-11767-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-472-02754-5 (ebk.)
1. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900. Salomé. 2. Wilde, Oscar, 1854–1900—Influence. 3. Salome
(Biblical figure)—In literature. 4. Deviant behavior in literature. 5. Modernism (Aesthetics) I.
Title.
PR5820.S23D54 2011
822'.8—dc22 2011000474
For Sebastian and Jasper, with love
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
—Oscar Wilde, “Hélas!”
[P]hilosophy has been, up to this point, as much as science, an expression of
human subordination, and when man seeks to represent himself, no longer as a
moment of a homogeneous process—of a necessary and pitiful process—but as a
new laceration within a lacerated nature, it is no longer the leveling phraseology
coming to him from the understanding that can help him: he can no longer
recognize himself in the degrading chains of logic, but he recognizes himself,
instead—not with rage but in an ecstatic torment—in the virulence of his own
phantasms.
—Georges Bataille, “The Pineal Eye”
Acknowledgments
Salome's Modernity would not exist without the people who accompanied and
nurtured it as mentors, colleagues, and friends over the years. It started as a
dissertation in the English Department at the University of Pittsburgh, and to my
teachers there, I owe my deepest intellectual debt. My heartfelt gratitude goes
out to Paul A. Bové, who made the thinking and writing of this book possible
through unfailing intellectual challenge and support. He has exemplified all the
inspiration, trust, and skeptical rigor a true mentor and partner in critical
dialogue can offer. Jonathan Arac, Lucy Fischer, and the late Eric O. Clarke
served as committee members at the dissertation stage and spent much time
talking and throwing around ideas about books, films, and feminist, queer, and
critical theories with me in their offices and classrooms. They have been
indispensable role models for me in countless ways throughout the years. Eric O.
Clarke tragically passed away just a few months before this book was going to
press, and I will miss him always. Philip E. Smith II supervised earlier stages of
this project and published a pedagogical article of mine in his edition
Approaches to Teaching the Works of Oscar Wilde (2008); I benefited greatly
from his personal and professional support and deeply admire his scholarship on
Wilde. Herbert S. Lindenberger (Stanford University) exhibited amazing energy,
enthusiasm, and generosity in sharing his scholarly and pedagogical expertise
and his love of opera with me, at the dissertation stage and ever since.
To Susan Teuteberg, Martina Gschell, Judy Suh, Eleni Anastasiou, Saeeda
Hafiz, Beth Wightman, and Dorothy Clark, I say a special thank you for the best
of friendship and shared love of people, books, and culture. David C. Rose,
editor and founder of the Oscholars Web site and group of journals, gave me the
opportunity to take charge of The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies, and
to expand my professional horizons in the realm of online publishing. As I was
putting the finishing touches on Salome's Modernity, I was teaching a seminar at
Stanford University entitled “Salome, Modernity, Transgression,” and I
sincerely thank the students in that class for making the last stages of writing this
book not only bearable but fun. One of them, the artist Dorian Katz, contributed
an illustration to this book, for which I am especially grateful.
An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared in Modern Language Quarterly 69.3
(September 2008): 367–89. For crucial institutional and financial support, I
would like to acknowledge the Comparative Literature Department at Stanford
University; the English Department and College of Humanities at California
State University, Northridge; the English Department at Santa Clara University;
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the
University of Pittsburgh; and the German Catholic fellowship organization
Cusanuswerk. For patient and helpful research support at various stages of the
project, I am grateful to the staff at the William Andrews Clark Memorial
Library (University of California, Los Angeles), the British Library, the Library
of Congress, and the Theatermuseum Köln-Wahn, Germany. At the University
of Michigan Press, my editor Tom Dwyer, editorial associate Alexa Ducsay, and
managing editor Christina Milton were indispensable sources of support, and I
thank them for their professionalism and enthusiasm in bringing this project to
fruition.
Very special words of love and thanks go out to my family, especially to my
husband, Sebastian Thrun, and our son, Jasper; my father, Rainer, and
stepmother, Susanne Dierkes; and my brother, Sebastian, and his family.
Without their unconditional love, unflagging support, and sense of humor, life
could not be half as wonderful.
Contents
Introduction
1 Dancing on the Threshold: Wilde's Salomé between Symbolist, Decadent, and
Modernist Aesthetics
2 “The Brutal Music and the Delicate Text”? Richard Strauss's Operatic
Modernism in Salome
3 Perverts in Court: Maud Allan's The Vision of Salomé and the Pemberton-
Billing Trial
4 Alla Nazimova's Salomé: An Historical Phantasy by Oscar Wilde
5 Portraits of the Artist as a Gay Man and Salomé as a Feminist Icon: Wilde and
Salomé in Popular Culture since the 1980s
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedy Salomé has had a rich afterlife in
literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture. Even though the literature and
art of the European fin de siècle produced many treatments of the famous
biblical story of Salome and Saint John the Baptist, virtually every major version
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been some creative adaptation of
or critical reaction against Wilde's Salomé, with its infamous Dance of the Seven
Veils and Salomé’s shocking final love monologue and kiss to the bloody,
severed head of John the Baptist. For a work banned from the English stage by
the theater censor before it was even produced, a play whose author remained
intensely controversial for several decades after his notorious 1895 trials, this is
a curious legacy. Why was it specifically Wilde's play, among the many
provocative literary and artistic versions of the story of Salome, that proved so
popular and fascinating? Why would Wilde's conception of a sexually anarchic,
aestheticized Salomé speak so importantly to artists and audiences of the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What were the historical and cultural forces
that established Wilde's Salomé as a canonical text that, in turn, inspired more
than a century's worth of creative cultural reinscriptions, adaptations, and
transformations in many different genres and media? Finally, what can Western
culture's ongoing fascination with figures like Salomé and Wilde tell us about
ourselves and about modernity? These are the some of the central questions
Salome's Modernity sets out to answer.
In recent years, the bulk of Wilde's work has come into the purview of
modernist studies, and Wilde is often discussed as a modernist as a matter of
course,1 yet Salomé is often still seen as an idiosyncratic stand-alone within the
body of his work. Although Jean-Paul Riquelme's mid-1990s article
“Shalom/Solomon/Salomé: Modernism and Wilde's Aesthetic Politics” opened
up the subject of Salomé‘s general relation to modernism, Wilde's play continues
to be examined almost exclusively through the lens of fin de siècle aesthetics,
historical and biographical details of Wilde's contact with the French symbolists
and decadents, and aspects of gender and sexuality related to this period (e.g.,
the femme fatale and the dandy).2 In writing his version of the popular Salome
myth as a French symbolist tragedy in 1891, Oscar Wilde was undoubtedly
inspired by literary-philosophical themes, concepts, and stylistic ideas in
previous versions, as well as by his vast knowledge of Salome in the visual arts
from the Renaissance to his present.3 But Wilde developed and exacerbated his
literary and artistic influences to a point that also marks a radical departure from
his predecessors. Wilde's Salomé defines a complex cultural tradition of ideas
about aesthetics, eroticism, and transgression, a tradition that forms an important
undercurrent in the development of twentieth-century modernism and modernist
aesthetics.
Building on an innovative reading of Salomé as a forward-looking modernist
text rather than a backward-looking compendium of fin de siècle themes and
styles, Salome's Modernity argues that Wilde's play and the cultural reception of
Wilde's homosexuality after his 1895 trials helped fuel and express the rise of a
new type of modernist aesthetics in early twentieth-century literature and
culture. I call this the “modernist aesthetics of transgression,” by which I mean a
replacement of traditional metaphysical, moral, and cultural belief systems with
literary and artistic discourses that develop utopian erotic and aesthetic visions
of individual transgression and agency. With roots in literary symbolism and
decadence,4 Salomé participates in the modernist field of radical thought and
aesthetic practice symbolically marked by the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, on
the one hand, and Georges Bataille's and Michel Foucault's literature and
philosophy of transgression, on the other. In Wilde's play, we find a unique
pairing of utopian and apocalyptic elements that embody both a sense of crisis
and a rebellious commitment to human agency in response to the fundamental
shattering of worldly as well as transcendental authority and truth that is
modernity. It develops a fierce, shocking, and alluring vision of erotic and
aesthetic transgression as an ecstatic new realm for modern individualism and
transformed secular humanism. Wilde directs artistic violence against the
traditional institutions of moral, religious, and philosophical authority with his
seductive, spectacular staging of a perverse, larger-than-life, yet deeply human
Salomé. Salomé finds a way out of the misery of pitiful modern humanity by
fearlessly establishing her own rules and committing to the beauty of immanence