Oscar Wilde, Salomé, and Orientalism
This chapter discusses the historical story and background of Salomé, Wilde’s relationship with the Orient, the concept of Said’s Orientalism, and the feature of Wildean Orientalism. The play Salomé begins with a conversation between some soldiers and a young Syrian in King Herod of Judea’s palace. They relate about the moon and Salomé’s beauty. The prophet Jokanaan’s (known as John the Baptist in the Bible) voice comes from the cistern. The prophet claims that Herod and Herodias’
marriage is illegitimate, so he is captured by the king as a prisoner. Salomé, despite being a princess and stepdaughter of King Herod, is entirely fascinated by the prophet after seeing him and wants to kiss him. However, Jokanaan refuses to look at Salomé.
The young Syrian kills himself after seeing his beloved princess is intrigued by Jokanaan. Later during the banquet, Herod is attracted to Salomé’s body and asks Salomé to dance. She rejects the king, so Herod swears that he will give her whatever she wants if she will dance for him. After the dance, Salomé asks for Jokanaan’s head as the reward. She holds the prophet’s head and kisses his mouth. Terrified by
Salomé’s action, Herod demands the soldiers to kill the princess.
Historically, Salomé was the daughter of Herodias, and the stepdaughter of Herod Antipas, the ruler of Galilee, in Palestine. Salomé married her uncle, Philip the
Tetrarch, and later her cousin Aristobulus of Chalcis, then became the queen of Chalcis and Armenia Minor.9 The original Salomé story is from the Gospels of Matthew (14:1–12) and Mark (6:14–29). In Matthew 14, Salomé is required to give Herod a dance: “But when Herod’s birthday was kept, the daughter of Herodias
9 The region now is near Palestine and Israel today.
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danced before them, and pleased Herod” ; “Whereupon he [Herod] promised with an oath to give her whatsoever she [Salomé] would ask. And she [Salomé], being before instructed of her mother, said, Give me here John Baptist's head in a charger” (King James Version, Matthew 14: 6-8). The same plot appears in Mark 6: “And he (Herod) sware unto her (Salomé), Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom”; “And she (Salomé) went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist” (King James Version, Mark 6:
22-24). Salomé is referred to as “the daughter of Herodias” in the New Testament, and her name is not mentioned in the original Bible story. Though Salomé plays a minor role in the Bible, her story has gained enormous attention because of its Oriental features.
Salomé was published in 1891 but was banned by the Lord Chamberlain’s licensor due to a law stating that biblical characters were not allowed on stage during that time. After its world premiere in Paris in 1896, Salomé received disparate
repercussions. In his book, Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage, Karl Beckon
demonstrates the public’s comments on Salomé. Max Beerbohm, an English essayist, praised Wilde’s Salomé as “a marvelous play” and “a lovely present,” and he
commented “Oscar would re-write all the Bible, there would be no skeptics” (134). As one of the play’s translators, in his review of Salomé, Douglas supposed Salomé was
“unhealthy, morbid, unwholesome” because it was an abnormal French play for an Englishman. Because of the unique characteristic of Salomé, Douglas said that it was
“the beauty of a perfect of art, a joy for ever, ambrosia to feed their souls with honey of sweett-bitter thoughts” (139).
While Salomé was a brand-new kind of production during the Victorian era, it was also an abnormal and unexpected play. In his article “Distance, Death and Desire in Salomé,” Joseph Donohue points out the reason Salomé was a “betrayal” (Beckon
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123) for upper-class Londoners, due to the unfamiliar idiom and the sinister plot. The upper-class Londeners used to watch comedies and dramas about modern life and upper-class society, and the Oriental Salomé was divergent from their experience. Plus, many critics attacked Salomé for its perceived immorality, believing that Wilde had distorted the Biblical story. When The Times posted a review of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé on the 23rd of February 1893, an anonymous reviewer described Salomé as
“an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive and very offensive”
(123); another reviewer on the 27th of February 1893 on Pall Mall Gazette said Salomé was a “mosaic produced by many masters” and considered that Wilde had borrowed the Oriental color from the previous works adopted from Salomé story (123).
For Westerners, the Oriental world is always seen as mysterious and fantastic. In
“Orientalism in the Victorian Era,” Valerie Kennedy demonstrates three aspects of Orientalism in the Victorian period, which are “the fascination with The Arabian Nights;10 the Romantic visions of the Orient as represented in the works of Romantic poets;11 and the domestication of opium addiction in Thomas de Quincey’s
Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (1). The Victorians were curious about the alien cultures of exotic people. Kennedy asserts that three versions of Orientalism dominate in Victorian literature: “exoticist Orientalism, imperialist Orientalism, and Orientalism used as part of a critical perspective on Victorian society itself ” (3). The Asiatic Society of Bengal12 and the Great Exhibition (1851) were also “in the light of Victorian imperialist expansion,” and they influenced Victorian perceptions of the Orient by Oriental publishments and entertainment (4). Since then, Oriental resources
10 Translated into French by Antoine Galland in 1704.
11 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, and Thomas Moore, and so on (Kennedy 1).
12 Established by Willian Jones in 1784.
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have increasingly pervaded many works.
In the late 19th century, more and more Western people traveled to the East (Greece, Turkey, and the Middle East), and their interest in the Orient increased.
Wilde is one of the authors who started to include his impression of the Oriental world in their works. Wilde’s works include elements not only from the Middle East but also from China and Japan. According to Kennedy, Wilde’s poems “Ave Imperatrix” (1881) and “Athanasia” (1881) “offer examples of imperialist and exoticizing Orientalist imagery as well as ambiguous critiques of imperialism” (20). Also, in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), “Japan is part of the novel’s eclectic Decadent artistic décor” (23). In the essay “Oscar Wilde’s Radically Revised View of China,”
Cavendish-Jones indicates that Wilde’s Orientalism was “conventional and derivative”
(925) when Wilde published the poem “Ave Imperatrix.” Wilde’s focus was mainly Lord Byron, Benjamin Disraeli, Gérard de Nerval, Victor Hugo, and Gustave Flaubert.
Through their works, Wilde started to notice the Islamic Middle East.
In “Salomé Does Not Dance,” Emese Varga defines “the myth of Salomé is the supreme myth of symbolic castration”(15). Before Wilde, many artists, authors, and poets derived inspiration from the biblical Salomé story, and it has been adapted into various works. In her essay “Lost in Translation: Oscar, Bosie, and Salomé,” Daniel proves that the late 1880s saw the Salomé adaptions as a quintessential “symbol of luxury, opulence, and fatal female sensuality” (62). During this period, the story of Salomé had become famous for writers. In Eleanor Fitzsimons’ Wilde's Women: How Oscar Wilde Was Shaped by the Women He Knew, she lists several works which inspired Wilde: Stéphane Mallarmé’s abstract epic “Hérodiade” (1864-67), Lord Hope’s painting, Gustave Moreau’s painting “Salomé Dancing Before Herod” (1876), and Gustave Flaubert’s “Hérodias” (Walter Pater introduced it to Wilde in 1877).
These previous works included a dramatic poem “Salomé” by an American writer J.C.
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Heywood in 1888, inspired Wilde to adapt Salomé story into a play.
Wilde seems to know Salomé’s history and myth very well. In Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was, Rosina Neginsky quotes the conversation between Wilde and his young friend Gomez Carrillo. Carrillo recalls: “Wilde never ceased to speak of Salomé. One evening after a long empty silence, he suddenly said to me right in the middle of the street:
－Don’t you think she would be better completely naked?
At once I [Carrillo] understood we were talking about Her.
－Yes, he continued, utterly naked. But with jewels, many jewels, interlacing strands of jewels; the gems flashing, tinkling and jingling at her ankles, her wrists, her arms, about her neck, around her waist; their reflection making the utter
shamelessness of that warm flesh even more shocking […] Her lust must be an abyss, her corruptness, an ocean. The very pearls must die of love upon her bosom. The fragrance of her maidenhood must make the emeralds dim, and inflame the rubies’ fire. On that burning flesh even the sapphire must lose the unstained purity of its azure blue”13 (qtd. Neginsky 169).
Unlike his other plays, Wilde wrote Salomé in French, and the play was translated into English by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.14 Eells’s article “Wilde’s French Salomé” elucidates why Salomé was written in a foreign language. For Wilde, French was a “music instrument” (Eells par.4). In Wilde’s letter to Florence, Bram Stoker’s15 wife, Wilde asks: “will you accept a copy of Salomé－my strength venture in a tongue that is not my own, but that I love as one loves an instrument of music on which one has not played before” (Letters 552). Also, Wilde’s dedication to Edmund Gosse16
13 See Pearce, Joseph, The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde. London: Harper Collins Publishers. 2000.192-193.
14 Wilde was not satisfied with Douglas’ translation, so he revised and made some changes into Douglas’ version
15 An Irish author (1847-1912).
16 An English poet, author, and critic (1849-1928).
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that Salomé is “my [Wilde’s] venture to use for art that subtle instrument of music, the French tongue” (Letters 553). Eells states that Wilde’s motivation for writing in French was “aesthetic” (n.p.).
Sometimes it is more appropriate to speak out from another language. Salomé is a play that Wilde is willing to “portray the taboo” and “create an aesthetic language comparable to music” through French (par. 10). Indeed, Salomé has a special meaning for Wilde. He speaks his voice through the play. Around the time Salomé was
published, Wilde’s relationship with Douglas was revealed. Their homosexual relationship was unacceptable in Victorian society. French allowed Wilde to obscure the so-called “the immoral and indecent” and “pitting himself against the doxa of Victorian convention and constraint” (n.p.).
Three main differences Wilde made in Salomé
Although Wilde never went to the East during his lifetime, he created his image of an Oriental princess. Peter Raby asserts that Wilde “constructs his [Wilde’s] own apocryphal text, with quotation, semi-quotation and echo ranging from Irish to the Book of Revelation” (qtd. Donohue 125). Wilde’s Salomé has three main differences from the original Bible story: the rich emotion of the characters, Salomé’s autonomy, and the ending of the play. These changes show Wilde’s originality.
First, Wilde constructed Salomé with rich emotions and sentences. Donohue observes the play is “about illicit but overwhelming desire and its fateful clash with ultimate authority” (121). The two relationships: Herod’s incestuous desire for his stepdaughter and Salomé’s love for Jokanaan mingle with “desire and disgust”
(Donohue 126). From Herod’s lines we can see how he is infatuated with Salomé’s body: “Dip into it [the wine] thy little red lips, that I may drain the cup” (Salomé 351);
“I love to see in a fruit the mark of thy little teeth. Bite but a little of this fruit and then
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I will eat what is left” (351). He sees Salomé as a female instead of his stepdaughter:
“Salomé, daughter of Herodias, dance for me” (357). Compare to Herod’s evanescent desire for a young and attractive female body, Salomé’s desire for Jokanaan is
perseverant and overbearing as she says several times: “Let me kiss thy mouth”
(Salomé 347) and “I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan” (348). Salomé is an aggressive love-haunter under Wilde’s pen. Her love is “destructive” not only for Jokanaan but also for herself, which leads her to death (Donohue 126). Salomé’s desire for
Joknaan’s head may be the “immutable strength of that desire itself－so great that it overcomes all the world and life itself－is, fundamentally, what the play is about”
(131). Wilde intentionally emphasizes the importance of love, so he has Salomé say:
“The mystery of love is great than the mystery of death” (Salomé 367) and “Love only should one consider” (367). The context of desire in Salomé will be detailed when discussed alongside Orientalism in Chapter Two.
Second, Salomé’s proactive, or more precisely, aggressive attitude is completely different from the Bible. Initially, Salomé asks for Jokanaan’s head as a reward is on the instruction of her mother. Wilde changes the subject of the demand:
SALOMÉ : [ I want] The head of Jokanaan.
HEODIAS: Ah! That is well said, my daughter.
HEROD: No, no!
HERODIAS: That is well said, my daughter. (Salomé 362)
Wilde portrays Salomé as a love warrior against Victorian society. Salomé says: “I do not heed my mother. It is for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of Jokanaan in a silver charger,” “ I demand the head of Jokanaan,” and “Give me the head of
Jokanaan” (362-64). Salomé, an Oriental female with a strong personality, challenges the Victorian value of “angel in the house.” Regenia Gagnier asserts that Salomé is Wilde’s “personal fantasy of the triumph of sexual love over the repressive force of
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society” (qtd. Donohue 135). For Wilde, the Oriental princess speaks out love, autonomy, and freedom for him.
Third, Wilde has Salomé killed by King Herod’s demand at the end of the play, which is different from the historical story situation, where Salomé lived for a very long time. Im’s paper gives this reason for Wilde to have changed the plot in this way.
According to Im, some scholars believe King Herod represents Wilde’s alter ego, while showing the aesthetics and morality of Victorian society, and that this is what Wilde’s mentors, Pater and John Ruskin, taught him (373). At the end of the play, Salomé reveals women’s desire, which is threatening and dangerous. Therefore, sentencing the female protagonist to death gives Victorian society a reasonable ending (The Picture of Dorian Gray also has a similar ending). Salomé’s death makes her become “the victim of an embattled patriarchal society’s remorseless revenge”
(Donohue 135). However, Herod killed Salomé because he is afraid of her: “She is monstrous, thy daughter, she is altogether monstrous” (Salomé 367). In this case, Donohue says, “far from having been defeated, it is she [Salomé] who has defeated the patriarch” (134).
Orientalism and Wildean Orientalism
To demonstrate that Wildean Orientalism represents a new feature from Said’s Orientalism, I would first like to discuss the concept of Orientalism Said promotes. In Orientalism, the Orient is described by Said as “[…] almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences” (1). As I mentioned in the Introduction, Said states three meanings of Orientalism: first, the academic study of the Orient which including the studies and the scholars who study the Orient; second, “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident,’” hence many poets, novelists,
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philosophers, and others. are considered belongings to this group of Orientalist; third,
“a Western-style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient”
(Orientalism 2-3). Valerie Kennedy gives a close analysis of Said’s theory in Edward Said: A Critical Introduction. Kennedy describes Said’s Orientalism is both “an institution and a style” (21). She also illustrates that, for the second point, Said remarks another three comments: “first, the Orient was not only or ‘essentially and idea’ since it was and is also a reality; second, the Orient’s status as an idea is
intertwined with the domination of non-European countries by European ones; third, Orientalism ‘is not an airy European fantasy about the Orient, but a created body of theory and practice in which, for many generations, there has been a considerable material investment’” (22).
In Kennedy’s other article, “Orientalism in the Victorian Era,” Said is on safer ground, however, when he observes that the distance between the Occident and the Orient was often “expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise,”
(Kenndy 2). Said proposes that many types of Orientalist representation rely on the
“textual attitude,” whereby a phenomenon is perceived through its textual
representations rather than its objective reality (Kennedy 2). Due to Said’s statement and Kennedy’s analysis, we can see that the main target of Orientalism is “textual and historical features” instead of finding the representation and truth” of the real Orient (28). Said views the Orientalist texts as “representations” not as “natural depictions of the Orient” (28). More precisely, Orientalism’s “internal consistency” is what Said wants to discover and discuss (28).
Colonialism usually follows imperialism. Kennedy states that “the use of
imperialist rhetoric and representations that implied the superiority of Western culture and the inferiority and barbarity of other cultures had existed” since the 15th century (Kennedy 18). Although Said does not define imperialism and colonialism in
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Orientalism, we can still understand his meaning of colonialism is “the domination of a distant territory by a Western metropolitan centre, which implies varying degrees of economics, political and military control, as well as cultural dominance” and
imperialism is “embodied in the discourses of the various domains associated with imperialism: trade, travel, and exploration, science, and humanitarian and missionary activities” (18). Said “provides examples of the interrelations of imperialism,
colonialism, and the discourses of domains associated with them” in Orientalism (Kennedy 18). Later, Said offers a double definition of Orientalism. Orientalism is
“the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery, and practice” (Orientalism 73). Besides, Said has been using the word to “designate that collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies available to anyone who has tried to talk about what lies east of the dividing line” (73). Shehla Burney interprets Said’s idea in her essay “Chapter One: Orientalism: The Making of the Other” that the Orientalists had no hesitation in discriminateing the Oriental language, literature, culture, and religion as inferior. This is the power of empire and colonialism Said suggests. It can “destroy the cultural identity, language, and land of the colonized Other through the practice and power of Orientalism” (Burney 39).
Kennedy observes that although Said does not find a place for this double definition,
“the historical perspective soon re-emerges as Said describes how the relationship between Europe and the Orient was the product of the European expansion wich came with imperialism and colonialism” (22).
Said demonstrates the characteristics of Orientalism’s thought in Orientalism. He lists four elements of 18th century thought, which were the basis of modern
Orientalism: “[European] expansion, historical confrontation, sympathy, [with the non-European and] classification” (120). Westerners treat the Orient as a secondary position, like Said says, “The Orient that appears in Orientalism is a system of
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representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, the Western empire” (Said 203).
Orientalism is hierarchical, and it is “a political doctrine willed over the Orient” (204).
Said states that “The Orient was weaker than the West, which elided the Orient’s difference with its weakness” (204). In another publication, Culture and Imperialism, Said also states the superiority of the West and the inferiority of the Orient that
Westerners are “rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, [and]
Westerners are “rational, peaceful, liberal, logical, capable of holding real values, [and]