Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist tragedySaloméhas had a rich afterlife in literature, opera, dance, film, and popular culture.Salome's Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgressionis the ...first comprehensive scholarly exploration of that extraordinary resonance that persists to the present. Petra Dierkes-Thrun positions Wilde as a founding figure of modernism andSaloméas a key text in modern culture's preoccupation with erotic and aesthetic transgression, arguing that Wilde'sSalomémarks a major turning point from a dominant traditional cultural, moral, and religious outlook to a utopian aesthetic of erotic and artistic transgression. Wilde andSaloméare seen to represent a bridge linking the philosophical and artistic projects of writers such as Mallarmé, Pater, and Nietzsche to modernist and postmodernist literature and philosophy and our contemporary culture. Dierkes-Thrun addresses subsequent representations of Salome in a wide range of artistic productions of both high and popular culture through the works of Richard Strauss, Maud Allan, Alla Nazimova, Ken Russell, Suri Krishnamma, Robert Altman, Tom Robbins, and Nick Cave, among others.
The familiar scholarly view of Richard Strauss's modernist opera
is that it overturns the original aesthetics of its libretto source, Oscar Wilde's 1891 symbolist-decadent drama. A close ...reconsideration of the presumed opposition between the two works, however, shows that despite seemingly divergent styles, they share major formal and thematic characteristics. Responding in tandem to the metaphysical crisis of modernity, both aim systematically to replace metaphysical purpose and sublime religious experience with physical sensation and secular ecstasy, to corporealize affect, and to glorify amoral modern individualism as embodied by the perverse Salome. Some important yet little-analyzed contemporary reviews of the play and the opera in Germany and Austria from 1905 to 1907 already noted such correspondences. They interpreted Strauss's choices as direct aesthetic corollaries to Wilde's, illustrating that contemporary audiences understood Wilde's and Strauss's projects as compatible and complementary rather than divergent, as later scholars have argued. At a time when the relationship between the symbolist-decadent and modernist aesthetics was very much in flux, Wilde's and Strauss's goal in
turned out to be the same: to manufacture secular sublimity by modern aesthetic means.
is assistant professor of English at California State University, Northridge. She has published articles on the aesthetics of transgression in Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Arthur Symons and is working on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled
Mrs. Warren's Profession, the third play in George Bernard Shaw's Plays Unpleasant trilogy, provoked Victorians by putting two taboo topics on the public stage: prostitution and incest. Dierkes-Thrun ...examines the plays' topics. Instead of unequivocally condemning the individual figure of the prostitute as a scapegoat for moral hypocrisy and sexual promiscuity, the play critiqued the ideological and economic system that produced her, attacking the problematic double standard of male privilege and the deeply entrenched objectification of women, which Shaw saw pervading all levels of Victorian society down to its most basic nuclear element, the family.
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By the time Oscar Wilde got to the story of Salome, such writers as Heine, Flaubert, Mallarmé, Laforgue, and Huysmans (together with Moreau, Regnault, and other visual artists) had already ...fundamentally transformed the sparse biblical account of John the Baptist’s martyrdom in the gospels of Mark (6:14–29) and Matthew (14:1–12). From the tale of a nameless, innocent daughter who obediently helps her power-hungry mother get rid of her dangerous personal and political opponent John the Baptist, who had denounced Herodias’s incestuous marriage to Herod, the story had morphed into a lurid tale of dangerous female sexuality and cunning,
In October 1905, two months before the astounding premiere of hisSalome, Richard Strauss received an enthusiastic letter from friend and peer composer Gustav Mahler, who had just reviewed the ...completed score.
I absolutely must tell you of the overwhelming impression your work made on me when I recently read through it! . . . Every note hits its mark! As I have known for a long time, you are a born dramatist! I admit that through your music you have made me understand for the first time what Wilde’s play is all about. (Quoted in Grasberger,Der Strom der
In this final chapter, I turn to recent adaptations of Wilde’s Salome figure in film and popular literature and culture since the 1980s. There was a decades-long lull since the 1950s, after Billy ...Wilder’s classicSunset Boulevard(1950, now also a Broadway musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber), in which an aging film actress (Gloria Swanson) imagines and acts out her comeback as Salome, and Wilhelm Dieterle’s technicolor spectacleSalome(1953), starring Rita Hayworth. Neither film was a direct adaptation of Wilde’s play, but both probably benefited fromSalomé’snotoriety.Sunset Boulevardbuilds some elements of Wilde’s symbolism into its plot,
Perverts in Court Petra Dierkes-Thrun
Salome's Modernity,
06/2011
Book Chapter
This chapter considers the first influential modernist female interpreter of Wilde’s play, the Canadian American dancer Maud Allan, who shot to international fame withThe Vision of Saloméin London in ...1908. Scholars studying dance or lesbian legal and cultural history and scholars of Wilde’s cultural afterlife have been very interested in Allan because of her tragic involvement in the 1918 Pemberton-Billing Trial, in which Allan and the avant-garde theatrical producer and director J. T. Grein became the targets of a sexual-political smear campaign against their private staging of Wilde’sSalomé.Despite the well-established scholarship on the trial and Allan’s
Four years after Maud Allan’s public disgrace in the Pemberton-Billing Trial, Russian-born actress and Hollywood movie star Alla Nazimova (1879– 1945) decided to adapt Wilde’s drama in her striking ...art filmSalomé: An Historical Phantasy by Oscar Wilde.¹ Aided by Natacha Rambova’s extraordinary, Beardsleyesque set designs and costumes,Saloméinvoked both the symbolist-decadent fin de siècle context of Wilde’s play and its reputation as an avant-garde work, courtesy of Reinhardt’s and Strauss’s censorship scandals and successes. Although Wilde’s play had never caused as much controversy in the United States as it did in England, Strauss’s opera remained banned in Chicago,
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