Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression (review)

For every "Oscar Wilde" may be found infinite other Wildes. Enigma, paradox, and multiplicity were his stock in trade. He was, among many other things, a remarkably accomplished dilettante, meeting success of various degrees with a relatively scant but remarkable oeuvre of public lectures, poems, essays, epigrams, a novel, short stories, and plays, not only ranging across genres but hybridizing a vast array of historic and contemporary models and styles. Indeed, it was precisely the undecidability of his work and life that fueled his fame, and his notoriety. That was both cultivated and not; he wrote intensively but sporadically, in between competing distractions. His pithy epigrams, with their tricksy doublings and inversions—some of which were read aloud, in one of the trials that would lead to his "gross indecency" conviction, as evidence of dangerously deviant thought structures, both in content and in form—were deftly engineered for productive perplexity. Yet many of his other works, such as the play Salome, combine hodgepodge conflicting impulses and far-flung influences in a manner indicating less evident design. The same may be said in terms of his career at large: heuristically, he tended to seize upon what worked, or seemed as if it ought to work, at a given moment, then to move on to the next plan. For over a century, artistic interpreters and critics have labored to impose order upon the chaotic collection of works, traits, and ideologies adherent to Wilde, casting him variously as an Irish radical, an Anglophilic runaway, an ardent socialist, a crass capitalist, an unregenerate elitist, and more. It is a testament to his inconsistency that few can be proven fully wrong or right. Pegging Wilde as anything, at all, is a difficult task.

The author of this lively, expansive investigation energetically takes on the challenge, claiming a formative position in the modern canon for Salome, Wilde's flamboyant, hyper-sexual, gory tragedy—first mounted privately in Paris in 1896, while Wilde was in jail—as well as for its seductive, self-actualized eponymous woman protagonist and for the later echoes of the Salome story and character in music, dance, film, and popular culture. The book begins with an argument about the play itself: that "simply looking at Salome in . . . [its] nineteenth-century context disregards [its] truly innovative, subversive, forward-looking features" (16)—features that would form the foundation of a "modernist aesthetics of transgression" through the twentieth century and the first decade of our own (2). It then proceeds to an intricate analysis of the 1905 opera Richard Strauss based on the play, explicating problems of what one critic has discussed as the incongruous conglomeration of Wilde's "delicate" fin-de-siècle text with Strauss's "brutal" modernist score (56). Two following chapters—on Maud Allen's loose 1908 adaptation of the play to modern dance, which led to the sensational Pemberton-Billing obscenity case, and on Russian émigré star Alla Nazimova's 1923 transformation of the play into a cross-gendering, exoticist, bizarre fantasia of a film—provide a great wealth of historical information on fascinating, under-studied phenomena. The final chapter, a look at appearances of Wilde, the play, and the Salome character in popular culture since the 1980s, well traces the ways in which these have come to reflect and to be utilized in discourse surrounding queer and feminist issues in the contemporary age. The book is especially useful as a semi-comprehensive study of modern and postmodern incarnations of the Salome tale and figure. While not all instances are covered—an endeavor handled ably by William Tydeman and Steven Price in their solid reference volume, Wilde: Salome,¹ and less so by Toni Bentley in the strenuously salacious Sisters of Salome²—the in-depth analysis accorded those that are covered provides a firm structure for examining related cases.

Wilde—who died in 1900 at forty-seven years old, shortly after his release—remains the most iconic...