The act of dancing, which allows Salom\u00e9 to bargain for what she so deeply desires\u2014the head of Jokanaan\u2014intrigued me while reading \u201cSalom\u00e9.\u201d When Salom\u00e9 and Herod reach their sworn oath of giving Salom\u00e9 her desire if only she will dance, there is only one stage direction: \u201cSalom\u00e9 dances the dance of the seven veils\u201d (570). She does this solely for Herod\u2019s 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\u2019s other plays how his way of writing stage directions can be prose-like, as if it has come straight out of a novel. While Salom\u00e9 dances for everyone at the feats at Herod\u2019s request, Wilde abandons his usual prose-like stage directions. Instead, Salom\u00e9 dances the dance of the seven veils, and its description passes uneventfully. The audience doesn\u2019t know if she\u2019s dancing with grace, seduction, nervously. Wilde is purposefully leaving these details and the description of her dance out of the play, but why?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The word \u201cveils\u201d is fascinating here. There have been many other blog posts about how we can arrive at a deep reading to where Wilde\u2019s homosexuality manifests in the act of looking. Similar to staying in the closet, hidden by a \u201cveil,\u201d Salom\u00e9 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 \u201cthe dance of the seven veils\u201d for Salom\u00e9 to dance, as this was the first recorded instance of this phrase. Can we read this in terms of Wilde\u2019s homosexuality and the act of unveiling, or are we reading too deep into it all?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The act of dancing, which allows Salom\u00e9 to bargain for what she so deeply desires\u2014the head of Jokanaan\u2014intrigued me while reading \u201cSalom\u00e9.\u201d When Salom\u00e9 and Herod reach their sworn oath of giving Salom\u00e9 her desire if only she will dance, there is only one stage direction: \u201cSalom\u00e9 dances the dance of the seven veils\u201d (570). … Continue reading Dance of the Seven Veils<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4163,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4163"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions\/336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.nd.edu\/oascarwilde\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}