Oscar Wilde’s Salomé : Disorienting Orientalism

Abstract

Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salome occupies a puzzling place in late nineteenth-century discourse of Orientalism. One sign of according to Edward Said, is the distillation of essential ideas about Orient--its sensuality, tendency to despotism, aberrant mentality, habits of inaccuracy, backwardness--into a separate and unchallenged coherence, all of which seem to characterize Wilde's drama of excess. In Salome, we have familiar binary oppositions: sensuality/spirituality, Jew/the Christian, Salome/Jokanaan, Orient/ Occident. The Jewish royal family embodies sensuality and irrationality; outrageousness of Salome's desire and cruelty upstages lascivious tyrant and his promiscuous wife. Religious disputes among Jews are belittled as meaningless babble. Herod's kingdom of Judaea is like a treasure island full of perfume and incense, Jewels and exotica. The Oriental cliches Said speaks of in Gustave Flaubert's novels--harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on'--hold equally true for Wilde's play. (2) Salome seems to be every inch an Orientalist work. Given all Orientalist characteristics, it is odd that Wilde's Salome has seldom been regarded as such. Largely dismissed in earlier criticism as a mere pastiche of previous Salome materials from Bible to French symbolist works, (3) play has gained its rightful degree of prominence in Wildean canon only in recent decades. (4) The re-evaluation of play has mainly to do with ascendancy of feminism and queer studies since 1970s, and with rehabilitation of Wilde as sexual martyr for the love that dare not speak name:' Critical opinions vary as to nature of Salome's sexuality and Wilde's attitude toward it. Undeniably, play reveals a great deal about late Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality, in comparison to which, Orientalism seems to be a minor issue. Furthermore, it may sound out of place to speak of Orientalism for such an iconoclastic work, hailed by some critics as an audacious expression of female or gay sexuality. Wilde's marginal status as sexual dissident and Irish in imperial London further complicates matter, as discourses of gender and race share logic of an inferiority/superiority binarism. If Salome were charged with which has not happened so far to my knowledge, then ready defense would be Wilde's positioning himself with subaltern Salome. The complex relationship of Wilde's Salome and Orientalism remains to be explored. Salome is rather an anomaly in works of Wilde, whose forte was in comedy of manners set in high society of Victorian aristocracy. Wilde was in no sense an Orientalist, who teaches, writes about, or researches Orient. (5) Yet images and ideas of Orient in Salome rely on common assumptions and prejudices about this exotic land current at time. As sacrilegious as it may sound to apostles of Saint Oscar,' Salome is Orientalist in makeup. To adopt Said's categorization, Salome operates on Orientalism, or shared ideas about Orient at an unconscious level as Other of Europe that informed any European living in period. (6) As Said asserts, influenced by Michel Foucault's idea of subject as social construct, a Westerner comes up against Orient as a European or American first, as an individual second. (7) Thus in his study of Said prioritizes author's historicity over his or her individuality. In case of Wilde studies, importance of playwright's individuality tends to overshadow his share as a European; Orientalism in Salome has not been properly considered. It is this dynamic of Wilde as both a European and an individual that makes Salome Orientalist, but not quite. Wilde's position as a gay playwright unsettles Orientalist discourse that play reinforces at surface level, conditioned by Wilde's subjection to latent Orientalism and English patronage. …