The Daughters of Herodias in Hérodiade, Salomé, and A Full Moon in March

Abstract

Salome or Herodias she goes by both names was almost a fetish to Arthur Symons and his generation in the nineties. Stephane Mallarme^ their adored magus, had given them an exquisite precedent in his Herodiade, a dramatic fragment over which he worked for more than three decades. He even moved from province to Paris in his unsuccessful search for leisure in which to complete Herodiade and the Grande Oeuvre. Wilde's Salome, rewritten in French to assure its performance (so he said), created a furor; while he was in prison, it was finally staged at the Theâtre de l'Oeuvre, Paris, in February, 1896, and only later translated into English by none other than Alfred Lord Douglas. The paintings and drawings of Beardsley, Gustave Moreau, and Charles Ricketts reflect her impact upon the artistic imagination, and they found analogies to her fabled undulations in the dancing of their contemporaries, Jane Avril and Loie Fuller. Close to the consciousness of William Butler Yeats, Salome would epitomize a period of history for him: When I think of the moment before revelation I think of Salome she, too, delicately tinted or maybe mahogany dark dancing before Herod and receiving the Prophet's head in her indifferent hands, and wonder if what seems to us decadence was not in reality the exaltation of the muscular flesh and of civilisation perfectly achieved.2 Whether Yeats discerned in this event a moment of historical