Removing the Veils: Censorship, Female Sexuality, and Oscar Wilde's Salome

Removing the Veils: Censorship, Female Sexuality, and Oscar Wilde's Salome MATTHEW LEWSA DDER In studies of Oscar Wilde's play Salome, it is de rigueur to note that the play was refused a license for production in [892 because it violated the ban of plays based upon biblical subjects. Continuing this account, we might recall Wilde's empty threat that he would move to France if the play was not licensed and the English press's titillation at the prospcct of Wilde being subject to military service as a French citizen. We might also rehearse Wilde's indignant self-defense through aestheticism. Accusing the Examiner of Plays, Edward F.S. Pigott, of "panderlingl to the vulgarity and hypocrisy of the English people" (531), Wilde righteously smoldered at Pigott's philistinism: though the refusal of the Licenser 10 allow the performance of my tragedy was based entirely on hissilly vulgar rule about no Biblical subject being treated. I don't fancy he ever read the play, and if he did, I can hardly fancy even poor Pig~ oU objecting [Q an anist treating his subject in any way he likes. To object to that would be 10 object to Art entirely. (Letters 534. emphasis in original)1 Undoubtedly, such observations make interesting footnotes and engaging openings to essays; having participated in this wonted citation of the more piquant moments in the initial censorship of Salome, I would like to consider at length the salacity of Salome herself and the even more scandalous history of the play's censorship from 1892 to 1931. Considering the Lord Chamberlain's consistent refusal to license biblical plays until 1912, it may not be surprising that Salome was censored in 1892.' The continued censorship of this play two decades beyond the lifting of this ban on biblical plays should, however, raise a few questions. To understand why the play was not granted a license for production until [931, I argue that it is necessary to take into account the sexual desire of Salome. To be sure, this tum to Salome's sexuality has been suggested by a few perceptive stuModern Drama, 45:4 (Winter 2002) 519 520 MATTHEW LEWSADDER dents of the play's censorship, but the relationship between the sexuality in the play and its censorship continues to retain the elusiveness of insinuation.3 In a letter that emblematizes the enigmatic relationship between Salome's sexuality and her censorship, Pigott wrote to Spencer Ponsonby, the Comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, that Salome's love turns to fury because John will not let her kiss him in the mouth-and in the last scene, where she brings in his head-if you please---on a 'charger'-she does kiss his mouth, in a paroxysm of sexual despair. The piece is written in French- half Biblical, half pornographic- by Oscar Wilde himself. Imagine the average British public's reception of it. (qtd. in Stephens 112, emphasis in original) Given the successful censorship of Wilde's Salome, it goes without saying that we can do little more than imagine the average British public's reception of it upon the stage before 1931, but it seems to me that scholarship thus far has been rather unimaginative in such attempts. In this paper, I would like to "imagine" - or, to use a more academically decorous term, reconstitute - what Pigott imagined such a reception would be and, in so doing, reconsider the play's censorship . In this regard, I hope to illuminate the ways in which the conflicting demands of censure and censorship apropos of female sexual desire informed the responses of different institutions to figurations of Salome. Formulating this as a theoretical question, I ask: given the discourse of female passionlessness and the investment of a patriarchal system in this figuration of women, how could one censor female sexual desire without conferring discursive recognition upon that desire?4 That is, if censorship is truly invested in suppressing a particular form of discourse, it is placed in the tenuous position of suppressing that discourse without discursively recognizing it, even in a negative fonnulation .' The London stage, we should note, was not completely bereft of Salome before 193I; and...