Salome and the Wildean Art of Symbolist Theatre

Salome and the WildeanArt of Symbolist Theatre JOSEPH DONOHUE I "My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment," Yeats recalled in his autobiography; "I never before heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all over night with labour and yet all spontaneous."I Readers of Wilde's writings, and audiences of his plays, have often had this same paradoxical impression of evident craft and spontaneity. For generations , those same readers and audiences have consistently associated the man with the writings and the writings with the man. Walter Pater described this viva-voce quality in his review of The Picture of Dorian Gray, where he praised Wilde for writing like the voice of a man speaking. "There is always something of an excellent talker" about his writing, Pater said, "and, in his hands, as happens so rarely with those who practise it, the form of dialogue is justified by its being really alive.,,2 Writing like talk, and talk like writing, have continued to be perceived as distinguishing features of Wilde's work. It is a commonplace of Wildean criticism that the aphorisms, epigrams, and witticisms he invented, adapted, adopted, or purloined, repeated in company, and occasionally set down in collections such as Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young, turn up again and again in his plays, usually in the mouths of characters intelligent enough to merit implied association with the author himself. "Do you always really understand what you say, sir?" a disgruntled Lord Caversham asks his resourceful son Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. "Yes, father," Goring replies after a moment's hesitation, "if I listen attentively."3 Goring'S smart answer, the third paradox in as many speeches, is clearly a mounting irritant to Lord Caversham, who has just gone on record as hating paradoxes. Goring, who pretends to agree, in fact holds other, more complex views of the nature and power of speech. Someone who listens to himself speaking paradoxes is someone who has developed a highly self-conscious sense of his own objectification in a character he can simultaneously inhabit and observe. Adopting an Modern Drama, 37 (1994) 84 The Wildean Art of Symbolist Theatre appropriately ambiguous stance, Goring projects an implied association with the author of the play himself. Contemporary reviewers were quick to notice this connection in each of Wilde's dandyesque dramatic characters. The resemblance is easy to spot. For Goring, functioning partly as an avatar of the author, embodies the quintessential Wildean pose of carefully studied nonchalance . These two ideas - the paradoxical quality of spontaneous yet carefully crafted, nicely calculated language, and the related paradox of a liminal authorial presence in an objectified dramatic text - offer helpful interpretive strategies in approaching almost any aspect of Wilde's work. Here, I propose to put them at the service of a more particular purpose, an examination of the originality of Wilde's most singular work for the theatre, Salome. Salome holds a curious place in Wilde's oeuvre: it has consistently been viewed as an anomalous work, and yet from its first appearance the play fueled accusations, already rife, of the alleged derivativeness of Wilde's writings . As a first-time published poet Wilde had offered a copy of his 188I Poems to the Oxford Union, only to be refused on the grounds that the Union library already contained "better and fuller editions" of poems by Shakespeare , Sidney, Donne, Byron, Morris, Swinburne, and "sixty more."4 Later, reviews of the first production of The Importance of Being Earnest would identify various authors of farces and farcical comedies, from W.S. Gilbert on, who· seemed to loom paternalistically in the dramaturgical shadows of the play. No more serious allegations of this kind surfaced in Wilde's lifetime than in the case of Salome. The anonymous Times review of the first edition, accomplishing a blanket condemnation, ridiculed the opening scene for reading like textbook French, "very like a page from one of Ollendorff's exercises ."5 The unsigned review in the Pall Mall Gazette pronounced the play "a mosaic" and asserted that Wilde had many masters, including Gautier, Maeterlinck, Anatole France, and Marcel Schwob: But the...