Realism and Symbolism in Oscar Wilde's Salomé

Realism and Symbolism in Oscar Wilde's Salome AUSTIN E. QUIGLEY Although Wilde's Salome (1893) has justly been described as "the only completely successful symbolist drama to come out of the English theatre, [one that] has haunted the European imagination ever since," it is a play that has yet to receive a convincing performance on the English stage.I The odd combination of historical and avant-garde features that caused it to be banned by the Lord Chamberlain has provided recurring but different problems for others more favorably disposed toward the play. A radical split has evolved in critical discussion between those, like the anonymous writer for the Pall Mall Gazette, who regard the playas a variant on previous and superior work on the Salome theme and those, like Ellmann, who regard it as "anticipatory rather than derivative," and praise it for its incipient modernism.2 The persisting difficulty is one of deciding just what kind of play this is and what Wilde sought to achieve by writing it. To describe it as a "symbolist drama" is neither untrue nor all of the necessary truth, for Wilde's play is both related to that movement and critical of it. Indeed Wilde's capacity to connect convention to invention is fundamental both to his success as a dramatist and to his interest in what symbolism in general and the Salome story in particular had to offer.3 For Wilde, an old story and an evolving aesthetic movement could prove equally valuable as points of departure for an inventive imagination, but selecting points of departure has an importance that is not to be underestimated . Indeed, given the far-off destinations to which Wilde's imagination was likely to lead him, an anchor in what other people might regard as the real world was of the utmost importance. Though Wilde was happy to present himself in anarchistic terms as someone "made for exceptions, not for laws," his aesthetic aim was, as Worth rightly points out, to enlarge the world "for others," to reach toward "a higher state of consciousness" on behalf of those who have not yet achieved it.4 The exploratory self-realization of the "exceptional " artist was thus, for Wilde, related to, and not just opposed to, the attiModern Drama, 37 (1994) 104 Realism and Symbolism 105 tudes and interests of others. The conversion of the Salome material into dramatic form was therefore carried out with deliberate designs upon the audience and its mode of engagement with the action. The choice of some important cultural material, already well worked over by others, was thus a happy one for Wilde. The material had acquired, in its biblical versions, a cultural significance that invited further consideration; it supplied, in its many variants, the opportunity for even further imaginative reconstruction; and it provided, in the topicality of its recent reworkings, a mode of engagement with contemporary aesthetic concerns. As Rose puts it, "the motif is so prevalent in painting, literature, and music of the French-oriented Decadence, 1870-19I 4, that it has to be considered a significant cultural phenomenon, a symptom before becoming a simple fad."5 The contemporary cultural prominence of the historically important Salome material provided an instance of the interaction between invention and convention that was, for Wilde, central to the significance of the story itself. Though the biblical origins of the Salome story can be traced to Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities of the first century AD, Shewan draws attention to an earlier secular context which suggests that it has an even more extensive cultural significance: The tradition of the Latin rhetoricians had preserved several versions of a story concerning the decapitation of a military hostage to gratify a general's mistress or minion, and the elder Seneca, in the ninth book of his Controversiae, had fixed the tale for the historical imagination by introducing the first recorded mention in it of a dance. The story was designed as a subject for learned dispute on the concept of /esemajeste . ... Not until the sixteenth century did religious painters succeed in emancipating the story from its long-standing admonitory and prudential functions; not until the nineteenth century was its symbolic...