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

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

When Salome focuses her desire on Jokanaan, she pointedly appropriates Herod's seductive discourse, as if by doing so she gets to appropriate his power. Like Herod's fixation on her mouth and teeth, Salome's desire for Jokanaan takes the form of ever-increasing synecdoche, first concentrating on his body, then his hair, then his mouth. Salome also speaks in the aesthetic discourse used by the men in the play: "Thy hair is like the cedars of Lebanon . . . that give their shade to the lions and to the robbers who would hide themselves by day" (559). Salome purposefully ignores what Jokanaan is saying in order that she may look at him. Like Herod, Salome overlooks Jokanaan's subjectivity in favor of an appreciation of his body, an aggressive move that she is clearly not that comfortable with, since she appears to be unsure of which tack she should take in her attempt at seduction. Jokanaan's body, to Salome, is "white like the lilies of the field" (558), then it is "like a leper" and "like a whitened sepulchre full of loathsome things" (559), moving from an image of fertility to an image of decay. His hair is first "like clusters of grapes" (559), but Salome changes this description to "a crown of thorns which they have placed on thy forehead" and "a knot of black serpents writhing around thy neck" (559). In her attempted seduction, Salome draws her imagery from Jokanaan's Biblical story. The leper is obviously Lazarus, raised by Christ from the dead. The "whitened sepulchre" is a reference to Christ's criticism of the Jewish practice of painting tombs white in order to purify them; Christ chastises the Jews for this practice because the coat of paint provides a superficial veneer of cleanliness. He rebukes the Jewish elders by claiming that they "are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men's bones and all uncleanness" (Matthew 23:27). With this allusion, Salome turns the words of Christ back onto Jokanaan, focusing not only on his surface qualities but implicitly accusing him of believing that her surface beauty necessarily conceals a degenerated interior.

Salome's description of Jokanaan's hair contains, besides the clear reference to Christ's crown of thorns worn at the Crucifixion, another allusion to the Biblical story of John the Baptist. In the gospel according to St. Matthew, John is preaching in the wilderness of Judea, clad, as the First Soldier in Salome reiterates, in "camel's hair, and round his loins he had a leathern belt" (554).4 The "knot of vipers" refers to the epithet "brood of vipers" hurled by John at the Pharisees and Sadducees, who insincerely request to be baptized (Matthew 3:7). In Salome's description, however, the vipers are crawling around Jokanaan's neck, threatening to strangle him. Salome mocks Jokanaan's intolerance; the infidels that he sought to bar from God's grace literally return to kill him.

When Salome shifts her gaze to Jokanaan's mouth, the instrument for both his prophecies and his censures, she has no need to draw a Biblical analogy. Salome's images of Jokanaan's mouth are a mix of sensuality-she compares his mouth to pomegranates and precious stones-and, when she compares his mouth to the blast of military trumpets and the feet of a hunter, violence. As an object of sexual desire in Herod's court, Salome is well aware that passion is fraught with danger, and Wilde also uses the combination to point out that every passion contains within it its own potential for destruction. It is in these successive attempts of Salome's to seduce Jokanaan that Wilde inserts his most blatant autobiographical allusion. Constantly quarreling with Alfred Douglas and still well aware of the stigma attached to his relationship with Douglas, Wilde gives Salome the knowledge that passion is both unstable and dangerous. More importantly, though, as Eibhar Walshe notes, "Salome offends against a traditional system of male desire by articulating her own, independent desire for the body of the Prophet" (31). As Salome becomes more passionate, she also becomes more subversive, and her power over her own image (as the subject rather than the object of desire) palpably grows until Herod quashes it with his gaze.