Cultural and Erotic Encounter in Oscar Wilde's Salome Dhee Sankar College

In every system of cultural meaning-making, there occur certain words and names which are connotatively "loaded," which have an "emotional valence" in excess of their denotations. Such was the word "Salome" in late nineteenth-century western Europe. Although artistic investment in the narrative, and especially the character, has a very long history beginning in early medieval church sculpture, literature began to obsess over the subject only during this period, in the context of the advent of Decadent literature. The story "Hérodias" in Gustave Flaubert's Three Tales published in 1877, was the trendsetter in many respects. It directly influenced the other two seminal representations of Salome in French literature — Joris-Karl Huysmans's À Rebours (Against Nature) in 1884 and Oscar Wilde's play Salomé, which is our primary focus in this paper.

Before delving into this text, we must explore the provenance of the mythemes constituting its fabula. The Gospels of Mark and Matthew are the Ur-texts which give the sequence of events : the prophet John the Baptist being beheaded after "Herodias's daughter" demands his head on a platter from her stepfather King Herod as reward for her dancing. The "daughter" is unnamed in both the...