Wilde and Wilder Salomés: Modernizing the Nubile Princess from Sarah Bernhardt to Norma Desmond

“But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it.”

—Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance

Reminiscing on his friendship with Oscar Wilde, the artist W. Graham Robertson recalls his ill-judged amusement on first hearing the playwright read aloud to him in French from the unfinished composition Salomé: “[Wilde] had been reading his magnum opus,” Robertson recollects, “and I had found it funny.” Robertson, allowing that he quickly grasped his error, goes on to observe of the play this incongruity:

Salomé, the schoolgirl, just home for the holidays, showing off her accomplishment at her mother’s bidding, all unwitting of what “that one dancing of her feet” would bring forth, is an arresting little figure; Salomé, the wanton, dancing away the life of the man who scorned her and gloating over his severed head, is a theatrical commonplace.¹

Even for the inimitable Sarah Bernhardt, who, at the height of her celebrity, agreed to premiere Wilde’s Salomé at the Royal English Opera House in June 1892, the role of guileless-princesscum-wily-harlot presented a challenge. To Robertson’s query on whether the French actress would have a figurante dance in her place, Bernhardt countered, “I’m going to dance myself.”² That spectacle, as we know, never took place, as the Examiner of Plays Edward Pigott refused to license the drama then in rehearsals on the grounds of its profane biblical portrayals.³ By the 1930s, however, the play, with its disparate figure “Salomé the schoolgirl” and “Salomé the wanton,” Robertson observed at the time, had “taken hold upon the public imagination [and was] widely accepted as Holy Writ.”⁴ The irony of this volte-face shouldn’t be overlooked. In the course of some four decades, Wilde’s drama, with its seductive princess that the young Robertson thought amusingly discordant and the examiner of plays judged patently blasphemous, had moved from sacrilege to sacred “high art” text.

The story of Wilde’s provocative grain of sand twirled, as it were, into cultured pearl has, of course, never wanted for critical or scholarly attention. From the 1890s onward, the play has served as a lightning rod for divisive cultural issues: in its own time, over whether it should be performed as art or banned as sacrilege, and then and since, over its aberrant and unrestrained sexual exhibitionism. Yet Robertson’s initial difficulty in reconciling royal schoolgirl and feral seductress, the one arresting, the other commonplace, gestures to a turn in sexual modernity whose cultural impact has still not been fully plumbed, either by scholars’ work on art’s secular trespass of the sacred or by their work on the play’s arguable destabilizing of gender and sexual hierarchies. There is still more to the dissonance of schoolgirl turned voluptuary, especially considering the doyenne Bernhardt’s resolve to dance the part compared with the censor Pigott’s alarm over the biblical princess’s sexual precocity. Indeed, I would go further to say that Wilde’s two most outrageous and iconic figures of the 1890s, the literary siblings Dorian Gray and Salomé, point in tandem to a turn in sexual modernity that undercuts both religious and sexual orthodoxies foundational to the dominant ideology of a firmly ascendant bourgeoisie at the close of the nineteenth century. Wilde’s pair of rebellious youths sensationalize the cultural disarrangement arising in the 1890s that would profoundly affect what it means to be a subject in post-industrial, post-consumerist late modernity.⁵

Nor were the sensational antics of this literary pair alone in publicizing a modern sexual turn. The new subject formation that Wilde’s novella and drama exposed to public scrutiny was being propounded as objective knowledge in the social sciences emergent in Wilde’s time. Though attracting far less uproar, they too were instrumental in instigating this sexual modernization. On Wilde’s behalf, we might say, to extend one of his better-known maxims, that when life imitates art, art is at least alert to the transaction. As Wilde expressed it near the end of...