IllustratingSalome: perverting the text?

Abstract

Oscar Wilde’s Salome is built around a series of visual metaphors, and the play explores the obsessive desire to gaze upon the body: to see, for example, the imprisoned body of Iokanaan, and the veiled body of Salome. Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for Salome “give body”, so to speak, to this desire, offering visual images of grotesque and exposed bodies to the text’s perverse desire to look. These illustrations seemingly respond to the desire for vision expressed in the play, by offering up perverse bodies for our own gaze; the illustrations help us to “picture” the perverse nature of the desires expressed in the play. But what is this textual desire for vision, and what would it mean for the illustrations to satisfY this desire? Is it a desire to see sexualized bodies, to look at that which is conventionally veiled or covered? Or is it a desire for images, for aesthetic representations of bodies? And do the illustrations primarily “unveil” physical bodies, or is it rather the meaning of unarticulated ...