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  • Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression by Petra Dierkes-Thrun
  • Jason Boyd (bio)
Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression, by Petra Dierkes-Thrun; pp. x + 247. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011, $65.00.

Petra Dierkes-Thrun’s Salome’s Modernity is a study of the “rich afterlife” of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1894). The book’s goal is to answer the question, “What were the historical and cultural forces that established Wilde’s Salome 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?” (1). The book’s answer is that Wilde’s play and the reworkings examined express a modernist “aesthetics of transgression”: in her triumphal moment, Salome achieves individualist utopian and apocalyptic fulfillment—ecstasy and death—by means of erotic and aesthetic transgression rather than through pre-modernist metaphysical transcendence.

Salome’s Modernity not only argues that Salome inspired modernist “reinscriptions, adaptations, and transformations,” but also that the play itself is a “truly innovative, subversive, forward-looking” modernist text (16). In arguing that Wilde and his play are a part of twentieth-century avant-garde modernism, Dierkes-Thrun is confronted with a common conundrum in Wilde scholarship: to what extent are Wilde’s various perceived radicalisms the result of a retrospective revaluation and remaking of Wilde as the precursor of various forward-looking twentieth-century artistic, intellectual, and social movements? While Dierkes-Thrun acknowledges “anachronistic readings” that assume Wilde understood himself as a radical queer writer (177), she does not confront the related anachronistic reading, pertinent for her argument, that presumes Wilde was a highly original and socially iconoclastic writer and theorist before his time. Perhaps recognizing this problem, the argument in chapter 1 never makes explicit whether the conception of the play it expounds is to be taken as an elucidation of Wilde’s own [End Page 535] conception of his play. In Dierkes-Thrun’s reading, based on broad intertextual parallels and patterns, Salome is the expression of the modernist zeitgeist, the unique synthesis of the (proto)modernist aspects of previous Salome treatments by Stéphane Mallarmé, Gustave Flaubert, and Joris-Karl Huysmans; the epicurean philosophy of Walter Pater; and the postreligious philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (although there is no evidence Wilde knew Nietzsche’s writing). As if to prove Salome as a modernist text, the chapter ends with a discussion of the perceived parallels between the play and Georges Bataille’s modernist pornographic novella Madame Edwarda (1941).

The subsequent chapters—on composer Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera (the libretto of which was based on Wilde’s play), Maud Allan’s solo dance piece The Vision of Salomé (1908), and actress and producer-director Alla Nazimova’s 1923 silent film adaptation—argue that each of these works, in their own fashion, gave expression to the modernist aesthetics of transgression. These chapters draw extensively on previous scholarship, largely to provide the broader contexts in which these works emerged, although Dierkes-Thrun strikes out on an original path in chapter 2 by arguing, against predominating critical opinion, for “the essential compatibility between Wilde’s and Strauss’s projects” (58). These works are linked by being instances of “popular avantgardism,” a seemingly oxymoronic term. Dierkes-Thrun notes that both Wilde and Strauss “acted as modern artist-marketers interested in producing innovative art that would titillate, dazzle, and sell” (73). Of course, this raises the issue of how truly innovative and radical a work can be when the creator’s goal is to unite “avant-garde ambition with commercial appeal, catering to the audience’s popular, political and religious tastes” (75), a question that should have been raised in chapter 1. Besides Strauss’s opera, both Allan’s dance piece (by helping to create and capitalizing on Edwardian “Salomania” [94]) and Nazimova’s film (by using the newest popular medium and capitalizing on her status as a Hollywood film star) also exemplify popular (rather than radical) avant-gardism.

As Salome’s Modernity shows, lurking in the background in each of these cases is the tantalizing threat posed by Wilde as...

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