Wilde’s French Salomé

Abstract

This paper focuses on Wilde’s use of French in his dramatization of the Biblical story, Salomé. It argues that Wilde adopted the foreign language as a strategy for representing the taboo of incestuous and homoerotic desire, murder and necrophilia. His aesthetic objective was to produce a work belonging to the school of French decadentism and adhering to its principles of symbolism. He uses the French language as if it were a system of signs divorced from their semantic meaning, creating as pure a musical notation as verbal language can allow. A study of the manuscript versions of his play reveals his limited knowledge of French, though this paper interprets the mistakes as key to his poetic achievement. Wilde’s play is untranslatable: both the illustrator Aubrey Beardsley and the composer Richard Strauss recognized the quintessential French quality of the script, and respected it in their creative translations into another artistic genre.