Princess, Persona, and Subjective Desire: A Reading of Oscar Wilde's Salome, The

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2004 by Marcovitch, Heather

Of course, the only character who steadfastly refuses to look at Salome is Jokanaan. Jokanaan is often read as an oral rather than a visual character, but, while this is true to a great extent, Jokanaan is actually more image-sensitive than he is usually given credit for being. Jokanaan speaks in images; his prophecies of the coming of Christ are evocative word-paintings. "The son of man hath come," he intones. "The centaurs have hidden themselves in the rivers, and the sirens have left the rivers, and are lying beneath the leaves of the forest" (555). More importantly, as Jokanaan is forced to engage with Herod's court, his language becomes even more descriptive. He cries about Herodias,

Where is she who gave herself unto the Captains of Assyria, who have baldricks on their loins, and tiaras of divers colours on their heads? Where is she who hath given herself to the young men of Egypt, who are clothed in fine linen and purple, whose shields are of gold, whose helmets are of silver, whose bodies are mighty? (557)

Jokanaan's aesthetic prose ties him to the men of Herod's court, particularly Herod himself and, to a lesser degree, the Page. He speaks about Herodias in terms of commodities, categorizing her and by extension Salome as the sum of her material goods. This is where Jokanaan errs with respect to Salome and where precisely he makes the same mistake as Herod: by being unable to see Salome as anything other than a materialistic creature, he dismisses the passion and the rage underlying Salome's actions and therefore underestimates her reaction to him.

For the one thing that characterizes Salome above all else is her resentment about being limited by her visuality, particularly when this visuality fragments her into fetishized parts. Herod, for instance, is fixated upon her mouth. To him, it is a symbol of sexual orality, and Herod heightens his desire of Salome by both infantilizing her and linking her mouth directly to intoxicating wine and fertile fruit. About the wine, Herod says, "Dip into it thy little red lips, that I may drain the cup" (562), and, when he asks her to eat some fruit, he asserts, "I love to see in a fruit the mark of thy little teeth. Bite but a little of this fruit and then I will eat what is left" (562). With these requests, Herod makes clear that Salome is an object of desire that he, as king, has the power to consume sexually, by literally consuming the fruit and wine bearing the mark of Salome's fetishized mouth. When Salome resists Herod's advance by maintaining that she is neither thirsty nor hungry, Herod petulantly turns on her mother and then offers Salome Herodias's throne to sit on. His implication is that if Salome allows her beauty to be exploited, then she can achieve the power of a queen. The power that Herod offers Salome is qualified, however, since she can only flourish by being bounded by the parameters of his desire for her. Moreover, Herod makes it plain that his desire, by focusing exclusively on her sexualized parts, dismisses Salome as a subjective entity. By treating Salome as an object, Herod neglects the fact that Salome too can see, can desire, and can use the power she possesses as princess of the court to her own ends.