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

This engaging genealogical meditation on Wilde’s Salome presents, seriatim, an ambitious, multifaceted claim that the play embodies a forward-looking aesthetics of transgression that is distinctive compared with antecedent versions of the narrative, in service of a revolutionary ideal of agency that is both female and queer and strongly influential on later cultural productions in various genres and media that draw on its transgressive attitudes with variable success. As the title implies, the book argues that the direction set by Wilde’s play is still with us; it was modern then and continues to be.

The study provides a worthy, theoretically committed, updated complement for William Tydeman and Steven Price’s stage history, Wilde – Salome (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996). Necessarily treating some of the same material, Salome’s Modernity devotes considerably more attention to Wilde’s precursors, provides more detailed treatment of Strauss’s opera and of early-twentieth-century interpretations by female artists, pays little attention to English stage productions from 1930 to 1990, and evaluates works of recent decades influenced by Salome. Its bibliography is admirably substantial. The paratactic title of the earlier volume suggests an alignment between Wilde and his play, or between Wilde and his character. That identification emerges regularly in Salome’s Modernity, regarding a biographical link that critics have sometimes made between playwright and character to which Dierkes-Thrun cogently objects, but also concerning the play’s implications as representative of Wilde’s attitudes. She argues for that latter form of alignment as part of her salutary claim that Salome is more important in the Wilde canon than has been widely recognized. In the interest of full disclosure: Dierkes-Thrun cites an article of mine to support her claim about the play’s importance, especially in relation to later modernist writing. Although she does not put it this way, we can conclude from her argument that both Wilde and Salome have become modern myths that are actually one, a joint myth of aesthetic transgression and agency involving the contradictions and persistent retellings that accompany all myths.

Dierkes-Thrun pursues the interlocking aspects of her multiform claim in an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction presents Wilde as future-oriented, anticipating or initiating modernism, which she characterizes as intent on achieving physical and aesthetic sublimity. She traces her sense of transgression as productive and expansive, not primarily destructive, to Foucault, a significant, though not overbearing, theoretical presence in the study. Chapter one argues for Wilde’s crucial refashioning of works by his precursors, including Mallarmé, Flaubert, and Huysmans, into a modernist form that “is distinctly more utopian and individualist” (43) in its sensuously sublime attempt to address the crisis of the subject. The section concerning the play’s final scene is memorable. It adduces both Pater (erroneously identified as Wilde’s teacher at Oxford [44]) and Nietzsche to evoke the intense complexity of the action as providing an ecstatic limit experience and an opening for agency. Less effective is the turn to Bataille at the chapter’s end, though the discussion there does contribute to projecting the relevance of Wilde’s perspectives into the early middle of the twentieth century.

The second chapter provides a revisionary reading of the relation of Wilde’s play to Strauss’s 1905 opera, “the first modernist music drama” (11). In this strong-minded reading, rather than going against the grain of the play, the opera carries its aesthetic direction forward. Chapters three and four concern two female modernist artists, Maud Allan, the North American dancer who made her career in Europe and England, and Alla Nazimova, the Russian actress and filmmaker who worked in the United States. Chapter three focuses on Allan’s highly successful dance performance, The Vision of Salomé (1908), and on the career-destroying Pemberton- Billing Trial (1918) that resulted from her involvement in a private production in England of Wilde’s play, which was still banned...