You accept the love you think you deserve

I was at first surprised to see the subject matter Wilde chose for this play. It felt out of place to me, especially in comparison to the other pieces we have already studied, which focused more on Victorian society. But, as I continued to read, I could see the connections between this subject matter and Wilde’s own life, notably when considering the ideas of desire and indecency. 

The play Salome centers itself on the action of desiring, looking, and lusting after. Herod and the Syrian captain both look at Salome with sexual desire. This gaze is condemned by others, with the feeling that “something bad” happening being reiterated over and over again. And, that prophecy is fulfilled, as the Syrian kills himself and Herod is forced by his oath to Salome to behead Jokanaan. Salome also lusts after Jokanaan, which is condemned by almost everyone in the play. For her display of unacceptable lust, and her display of power in being able to get Jokanaan beheaded, she is killed herself. 

The lust that these characters exude is considered to be “wrong.” This makes me think of Wilde and his homosexuality. As we discussed in our last class, Wilde was told that his natural attraction and feelings of love were unnatural, gross, and indecent. Since Salome, the Syrian, and Herod had tragic ends (though Herod doesn’t die, just is forced to behead Jokanaan), Wilde is saying that unnatural lust results in bad things happening to you, either by yourself (in the case of the suicide), or by others. And we see this in Wilde’s case with his imprisonment.


We asked the question in class: what does thinking your natural attraction is wrong do to one psychologically? What does it make you feel that you deserve out of a relationship? I think it would make you think that you do not deserve a traditional, healthy relationship, and this makes sense to me in the context of Wilde and Bosie. Being told you are a bad person may make you think that you deserve bad things being done to you, like Bosie did to Wilde.

The Act of Looking: Salome

It’s interesting reading Oscar Wilde’s Salome as we see once more, a theme of physical attractiveness and beauty. There has been a similar theme with The Picture of Dorian Gray in the sense that Gray carries an obsession with preserving his beautiful physical appearance. However, there lies a difference in the direction of the plot and such themes, as Salome carries a much darker lesson/theme of finding pleasure in viewing or looking at beauty. There is a revolution of this theme, with Syrian and Herod’s somewhat sickening lust for Salome which ultimately results in Syrian’s own suicide as well as Herod’s fall as well as murder of Salome. Salome’s obsession with Jokanaan also depicts a similar obsession with viewing and physical obsession. It seems that Wilde is criticizing the action or tendency to view others; finding pleasure in viewing others is often what brings a character’s downfall in this story. Perhaps such is a reflection of his own experience as a homosexual man living in a publicized life. It seems that Wilde is warning against the action of looking; it makes us wonder whether Wilde was warning against what seems to be a harmless activity anyone, homosexuals and heterosexuals alike, could take part in. Wilde writes, “Neither at things, nor at people should one look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks.” Such once again, accentuates this warning against “viewing.” As a whole, the text of Salome, along with Oscar Wilde and his history, portrays the dangers of looking as the action of looking could very well, in many cases, result in much more for such a harmless act.

Enjoying vs. Interpreting Art

One of the most impactful moments in the play is when, after a number of characters spend much time fashioning detailed and meaningful allegories concerning the moon, Herodias dismisses them all, saying “the moon is just the moon, that is all.” I feel that this dismissal of there being a deeper meaning behind the moon’s appearance, while certainly serving as character development for the princess, also serves as a reflection of the opinions of the Aesthes on art as a whole, and perhaps Wilde’s criticism (or support, it can be hard to keep track) of these views. It seems to me that a central battle that is being waged in the background of all of Wilde’s works is whether art exists to be interpreted, or appreciated, and whether those two actions are mutually exclusive. 

For many, interpretation of art is not necessary to fully enjoy it, and even the most pretentious of art critics will agree that there are certain attributes of truly great art that lend themselves to surface level enjoyment of the work. Those critics will also likely argue that, while great works of art can provide surface level enjoyment, those works can only be enjoyed to the fullest extent after carefully analyzing and understanding every element of the art. However, this logic assumes that there is a direct correlation between information known about something, and one’s enjoyment in that thing, which is obviously not always true. For instance, one’s enjoyment of a particular music artist can be completely destroyed if they investigated their personal lives, and found that they were a horrible person. Despite the enjoyment being destroyed, many would still argue that it is better to know the truth about said artist, which suggests that increased information on a subject does not necessarily increase one’s enjoyment, something anybody who has ever watched a Marvel movie with a film major undoubtedly already knows. 

Focusing back on Wilde, what are his opinions on the topic? Does he believe that art should be enjoyed, but not interpreted? That doesn’t seem to make much sense, given the layered nature of most of his art. However, I believe Wilde would certainly argue that art’s main purpose is to be appreciated, rather than put under a microscope. In the end, I find it hard to nail down exactly what Wilde believes concerning the relationship of appreciation and interpretation in art, though I hope I’ll attain a better understanding of it as the course progresses. 

Dance of the Seven Veils

The act of dancing, which allows Salomé to bargain for what she so deeply desires—the head of Jokanaan—intrigued me while reading “Salomé.” When Salomé and Herod reach their sworn oath of giving Salomé her desire if only she will dance, there is only one stage direction: “Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils” (570). She does this solely for Herod’s pleasure, a dance for him and his consumption alone. What surprised me about this part of the play is that we have seen through our close reading of Wilde’s other plays how his way of writing stage directions can be prose-like, as if it has come straight out of a novel. While Salomé dances for everyone at the feats at Herod’s request, Wilde abandons his usual prose-like stage directions. Instead, Salomé dances the dance of the seven veils, and its description passes uneventfully. The audience doesn’t know if she’s dancing with grace, seduction, nervously. Wilde is purposefully leaving these details and the description of her dance out of the play, but why?

            The word “veils” is fascinating here. There have been many other blog posts about how we can arrive at a deep reading to where Wilde’s homosexuality manifests in the act of looking. Similar to staying in the closet, hidden by a “veil,” Salomé slowly unveils herself and her nature through the dance of the seven veils. When she unveils herself and says what she truly wants, Herod no longer gains sexual satisfaction from looking at her; instead, he is terrified at her request to behead Jokanaan so she can have his head. He realizes her true nature after she dances for him. I wonder why Wilde chose “the dance of the seven veils” for Salomé to dance, as this was the first recorded instance of this phrase. Can we read this in terms of Wilde’s homosexuality and the act of unveiling, or are we reading too deep into it all?

If Looks Could Kill

After taking a deeper look into the man behind the works we have been reading this semester, it was interesting to read Salomé, which is all about the act of looking and the consequences of taking pleasure in that looking. Already, this connects back to Wilde and his wild life as a homosexual man constantly in the spotlight for his curious actions. In the play, the consequence of those guilty of taking pleasure in looking at others is ultimately death. The young Syrian cannot resist his lustful looks at Salomé and kills himself when he cannot take her lust for Jokanaan. The investment in his looking seals his fate, but when he dies no one takes care except for the page, who with trademark Wilde style, laments him heavy homoerotic undertones. The other man who falls prey to looking at Salomé is Herod. His incestuous lust for her leads him to the execution of Jokanaan to satisfy Salomé. Being so obsessed with looking at her, he does not realize the consequences of promising her anything she wanted. The culmination of looking comes with Salomé’s disgusting lust for Jokanaan resulting with her kissing the severed head of the prophet. Focusing on this voyeuristic idea of looking, we can see how this reflects Wilde’s own life being sexually attracted to men. Even though looking seems like a passive activity, there is discomfort when that lustful look is focused on someone who society deems you should not be attracted to. Of course this play was written before Wilde ever went to prison, but we can see the consequences of looking which leads to fatal action. In general, looking is the only activity a homosexual person can enjoy without being immediately judged for their desires since there’s no harm in looking. But here we see Wilde highlighting how there is harm in looking. Once we start, there’s no stopping and the desire for something will grow until it must be acted on. We see this not only in the play, but reflected in the events of Wilde’s life being imprisoned for gross indecency. By sticking a foot in the door, Pandora’s box is effectively opened and you must be prepared to face the consequences. Wilde could not deny who he was, and because he was determined to be himself he was arrested. There is harm in a look because a look always leads to something more. Salomé reveals to us the danger of taking a peek into the more curious parts of life.

Dangerous Attraction in Salomé

I found Salomé to be quite different than any of Wilde’s other prose works. The diction of the play had a very hypnotic quality as certain ominous phrases were often repeated (ex: Salomé’s paleness and the depictions of the moon) and as certain object were described in vivid and poetic detail (ex: Salomé’s descriptions of Jokanaan’s appearance). The theme that stood out most to me was that of a dangerous or deadly attraction. This idea is connected to both the Syrian’s and Herod’s lust for Salomé as well as her own infatuation with Jokanaan. In the Syrian’s case, Salomé is considered beautiful because he views her “like a woman who is dead” (552) – being specifically attracted to her “paleness” (553) and the fact that “she is like a woman rising from a tomb” (552). Here, Wilde seems to subvert traditional beauty standards (brightness and vibrant colors, vibrant energy, etc.) by connecting death and decay with attractiveness, which could represent how certain kinds of love or lust are be deadly or even corrupting in some way. Additionally, the page even criticizes the Syrian’s feelings for the princess by saying, “You look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at people in such fashion. Something terrible may happen” (553). This foreboding warning turns out to be prophetic and reinforces the theme of the dangers of attraction as the Syrian “kills himself” after Salomé expresses her lust for Jokanaan (560). This example is eerily repeated when Herod expresses his infatuation with Salomé. Like the page, Herodias warns Herod about looking upon his daughter and stresses the potential dangerousness of his feelings. However, Salomé’s interest in Jokanaan might be even more similar to the Syrian example. She is obsessed with this prophet’s beauty and proclaims that he was “the only man that [she] has loved” (574). Unfortunately for her, Jokanaan wholeheartedly rejects her advances and views her attraction towards him as being unnatural or “accursed” (560). This rejection causes Salomé to resort to ordering his death, so that she can finally “kiss his mouth” and give into her lust (575). Like the Syrian, Salomé’s willingness to give into her feelings is considered to be dangerous and destructive, which causes Herod to execute her at the end of the play. After thinking through this theme, I wonder if Wilde was reflecting upon his own challenges with having homosexual desires when writing this play. In a way, his infatuation with Bosie was unhealthy as most people considered it to be a toxic relationship. Additionally, Wilde seems to suffer a similar fate to the characters of the play. His feelings for Bosie were (wrongly) seen as unnatural and dangerous, which would lead to his demise as he was sent to prison because of this desire.   

Femme Fatale-ity

Salomé is the perfect architype of a femme fatale: a beautiful, mysterious woman with nefarious intentions for the men she attracts. She outwits all of the men in the play, brazenly defying their commands and desires, occasionally to the point of causing their demise. And yet, I cannot help rooting for her as I read the play. She is an intoxicating character. I was tempted to believe that this sympathy was coming from my own modern perspective, but I don’t think that that is the whole picture.

There is a definite feeling of sympathy for Salomé when we first see her in the play. Her very first lines are about the way in which Herod has been looking at her all night. This gaze is implied to be some form of sexual desire, which continues throughout the play. However, unlike conventional femme fatale roles, Salomé is not blamed for Herod’s sexual desires. Instead, Herodias chastises Herod directly, and not her daughter. Herod even admits to his blame late in the play when he says, “It may be that I have loved you too much” and “I have looked at you too much. But I will look at you no more” (601). This is a more open-minded take on the femme fatale, who is usually demonized for her sexuality by men and especially by other women.

However, it is not a completely open-minded take, as Salomé is still criticized by Jokanaan, and still dies in the end. But her death at the end of the play feels to me very abrupt and out of place. Surely, Herod has some desire to kill Salomé, but after the long speeches and fervent arguing that takes place between the trio earlier in the play, the simple command “Kill that woman!” feels rather out of place (605). I’m interested in hearing everyone else’s thoughts on this ending and how it affects your thoughts on the play’s characters.

Wilde’s Prophesy in Salomé

After I finished reading Salomé, I wondered why we read it at this point in the semester. While we are focusing on Wilde’s plays right now, on first glance, it is very different from An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. For one, it is very light on the aphorisms, which I appreciated. More seriously though, the play explores the consequences of desire and the question of why there is evil in a world where there is a God. There are threads of Catholicism in many of Wilde’s works, but thus far, we have mainly seen Wilde using the more aesthetic elements of the religion and the ideas of mystery and predestination. In Salomé, Wilde’s characters discuss profound questions in theology. The instance that struck me the most was when the Jewish characters discuss who has seen God. A Third Jew says, “God is at no time hidden. He showeth Himself at all times and in everything. God is in what is evil, even as He is in what is good” (594). The other characters disagree with this, especially regarding God’s role in what is evil. In Wilde’s poems, An Ideal Husband, and even his “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” he deconstructs moral binaries, describing wickedness as “a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others” (1244). However, in Salomé, Wilde calls attention to the wickedness of his characters and their evil deeds.

            A case can be made for a queer reading of Salomé, especially building off our discussions in class this past week. We talked about the psychological and emotional consequences of constantly being told your desires and identity are immoral or “grossly indecent.” In Wilde’s case this is his relationships with men, specifically Bosie. However, Salomé and Herod experience this too. They are constantly told by Herodias and The Voice of Jokanaan that terrible things will happen to them, specifically that God will smite them, but they cannot stop themselves. This reminded me of how Wilde could not stop living his double life, even as he faced public scrutiny and was treated terribly by Bosie. We discussed in class how Wilde essentially prophesied his own death and destruction in his works, and this play is a prime example of that. The saddest part of reading Salomé from this perspective is that there is no resolution for Wilde. Parts of Wilde are in both Herod and Salomé, and as a result, Wilde accepts his own suffering and recognizes that much of it is self-inflicted.  

            In addition to the allusions to Wilde’s repressed homosexual desires in the dialogue of the play itself, the play was translated from French to English by Bosie. I am interested as to what other people make of this. Is the play addressing Bosie? Along these lines, this play is symbolic of how Wilde and Bosie’s secret lives and time abroad is mediated by Bosie to an English audience. Is it possible that Bosie’s translation changes the tone of Wilde’s original writing?

Reading Into Identity

After our class conversation on Wednesday, I do think I look at The Importance of Being Earnest a little differently. Not that my earlier readings of the play, as a critique of Victorian society and a commentary on Englishness, have any less valence, but that there is an expanded sense of what the play speaks to, sitting more directly within the full nexus of Wilde’s identities. My first instinct, when reading Wilde, isn’t to focus on the queer aspects of his narratives, favoring instead his aestheticism and the Irish/English aspects of his works. But Colm Tobin’s piece helped me to see, even more, how each of those aspects of Wilde inform each other as a part of his whole person — particularly in The Importance of Being Earnest. The hidden identities that both men take on, the secret lives they lead, become particularly poignant in light of Wilde’s struggles with his identity and the way he shrugged them on and off — adding that tinge of darkness amongst the humor and social jibes.  As Tobin aptly puts: “The problem about all of Wilde’s work, but his plays especially, is that they are forced to compete with the drama of his own last years” (Tobin, 71). The heightened, though comic, drama of mistaken identity and misreading in the play then becomes a way of reading Wilde as well, for good or ill, and the play’s final lesson about the certain inevitableness of being earnest, suggests the then inevitable outcome of Wilde’s life, that there is an inescapable truth of self that comes to the fore no matter what you do, or perhaps despite it.   

Tobin sums Wilde up well at the close of his piece: “The personal became political because an Irishman in London pushed his luck. He remains a vivid presence in the world one hundred years after his death. He played out the role of the tragic queer. He was witty, the greatest talker of his generation, skilled in the art-of the one-liner, the quick aside. But he was also untrustworthy and he was doomed” (Tobin, 84). Such a long string of adages seem necessary to fully encompass the life and tragedy of such a dynamic figure and there is no better space to locate that attempt than in Wilde’s work itself, throwing away all pretense that the art doesn’t reflect the artist.  (When I initially wrote this last line, I wrote Wilde’s work himself, as opposed to itself… a mistake, but a rather apt one for showing how easy it is to conflate the art and the artist — in a large sense, Wilde today is in fact his work.)

What Makes a Tragedy?

While reading Salomé, I found myself coming back to the same question: what makes a tragedy? In my edition of Oscar Wilde’s complete works, the play is introduced with the following information: “A Tragedy in one Act. Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas” (583). The fact that it is called a tragedy put preconceived notions in my head about what the play would be like, which I didn’t fully notice until finishing the play, when I found myself unsatisfied with the ending. That dissatisfaction did not come from the quality of the play itself, but from my ideas about what tragedy should be.

We are aware of comments people make frequently about tragedy and comedy and the way in which they are connected. “Comedy is tragedy plus time” or “A tragedy ends in death, a comedy ends in marriage” are two common ways of saying that tragedy and comedy lie on a razor’s edge and the difference between the two is in how they make us feel. For example, over spring break, I saw comedian Mike Birbiglia perform his new show, “The Old Man and the Pool.” The show is stand-up comedy, but it is also a story about fearing death and the belief that we only have one chance on this planet so we need to learn how to use it for others. In a different context, the show would have been tragic and almost uncomfortable as the audience was forced to consider their own mortality, but because of the framing of the show as comedy, we laughed throughout, even in serious moments.

That experience offers an insight into how closely comedy and tragedy exist, which is important to remember when dealing with anything that is meant to be a pure comedy or is meant to be a pure tragedy. When I read that Salomé is a tragedy, I expected there to be death in the play, but part of me also expected to grow a deep connection to the characters, which I did not. Because the play is so short, I felt a bit of whiplash when reading. The Young Syrian kills himself only seven pages into the play, and it comes with almost no warning. This death startled me more than it made me feel anything for the characters, which then clouded my reading of the rest of the play. After the Young Syrian dies, he is not seriously considered by the other characters, whose focus is entirely on Jokanaan. It seemed as if the Young Syrian was meant to be forgotten as a kind of nameless victim of Salomé’s desire for Jokanaan, but, because his death was so sudden, I couldn’t let it go.

Salomé is undoubtedly a tragedy from a technical standpoint. Death is a driving factor in the plot, and the play ends with one of the most brutal deaths of all. However, I did not feel a real emotional attachment to any of the characters involved which made it hard for me to care about the death beyond a basic human level. That made me think about what the purpose of tragedy is. Is it meant to make us feel deeply, or do something else? After comparing Salomé to other tragedies I’ve read, I came to the conclusion that tragedies are meant to reveal something dark in ourselves. We connect to the tragedy and we care about the tragic hero because they seem like someone we know or someone we could be and we see the way in which they can avoid their fate. For example, Hamlet is a particularly interesting tragic hero because he seems so thoughtful and reasonable in his fears about killing Claudius until the end of the play, when he seems to have actually gone slightly mad. We understand every action that Hamlet does, in part because he tells us what he wants and why he is scared. The audience walks away from the play moved and even disturbed because we understand Hamlet on a basic level, and it is worrying to understand a person who leaves so much destruction in his wake. Hamlet is a tragedy because of the brutality involved, and it is a successful tragedy because it makes us look at ourselves and question whether we are capable of such brutality.

In that sense, I think that Salomé is a successful tragedy, even though I did not connect with any of the characters. The play seems to advocate for tolerance towards other people’s wishes. Salomé is insistent that Jokanaan must die, which leads to her own death, and Herod is tricked into promising that Jokanaan will die because he refuses not to get what he wants. The death in the play comes from characters refusing to bend their will, which can be a lesson for audiences. Stubbornness is very common among people, and this play shows the extreme version of such obstinance. Herodias repeatedly tells Salomé not to make a deal with Herod, yet she does anyway, which leads to her own downfall. The warning is the reminder to the audience that the play does not have to end the way it does: if only Salomé backed down, she and Jokanaan would both be alive. That is an important reminder for the audience to get, which makes the tragedy feel rooted in reality even though there are moments that feel over the top.