Salome

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer born in 1854 in Dublin. He was educated in classics at Trinity College and Oxford University. Wilde was associated with the philosophy of aestheticism—a movement that considered the beauty of an artistic work to be more important than its moral or didactic purpose. Wilde’s only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), explores the concepts of beauty and morality through the titular character’s portrait, which becomes ugly and decrepit while he remains youthful. After the prohibition of Salomé, Wilde would go on to write several successful comedies that satirized Victorian high society. His play Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) was massively popular, and he followed it with other successful comedies such as A Woman of No Importance (1893) and An Ideal Husband (1894). Wilde’s final play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), exemplifies his witty style, his interest in alternative personas and hidden identities, and his satire of Victorian morals.

Through this period in the 1890s, Wilde met and befriended Lord Alfred Douglas. They began an affair and Douglas introduced Wilde to the Victorian gay subculture in London. Wilde kept his private rendezvous with gay male sex workers hidden from his circle of literary friends, but his connection to Douglas was less discreet. Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, feuded with Wilde over his relationship with his son. He confronted Wilde and Douglas several times, but Wilde sought to deescalate the quarrel. However, after the Marquess of Queensbury left a calling card for Wilde claiming that he was a “sodomite,” Wilde decided to prosecute the Marquess for libel. Queensbury hired detectives who uncovered evidence of Wilde's association with gay sex workers. Wilde lost the libel trial and then was arrested for “gross indecency.” While Wilde argued at this trial that centuries of literature depicted intimate relationships between men, suggesting that it is not unnatural, he was sentenced to two years of hard labor in prison. After he was released from prison in 1897, he lived in poverty in France. He died of meningitis in 1900 at the age of 46. Wilde’s trial brought awareness of gay culture to the general public, and he became an important figure in the early LGBTQ movement. In 2017, he was officially pardoned when Britain passed the Policy and Crime Act 2017, sometimes known as the Alan Turing Law, which stated that sexual acts between men were no longer considered criminal offenses.

After Oscar Wilde first wrote the play Salomé in 1891, he offered the script to the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt. The plan was to premiere the play in 1892 at the Royal English Opera House, but during the Victorian era, all plays needed the approval of the Lord Chamberlain. The Lord Chamberlain’s office refused to license the play on the grounds that it was not permitted to depict biblical figures on the stage. A letter from Edward F. S. Pigott, the Examiner of Plays at the time, referred to the play as pornographic because of its depiction of Salomé’s sexual desire for Jokanaan’s decapitated head. While the play was eventually performed in Paris in 1896, Wilde was in prison at the time and never saw a production. Salomé was performed in England privately in the early 20th century but would not be publicly performed in England until 1931. British critics disparaged the play as degenerate and immoral because of Wilde’s controversial depiction of sexual desire for a biblical figure. The French, however, saw this reception as prudish. Salomé would also find success in Germany, eventually serving as the basis for an opera by Richard Strauss in 1905.

An English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas was published in 1894, but the shocking Art Nouveau illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley that accompanied this edition were considered lewd and only added to the play’s scandalous reputation. Beardsley was an English illustrator whose art often depicted grotesque and erotic subjects. The images he created to accompany Salomé featured nude figures, sometimes with exposed genitalia, scandalizing readers. Beardsley and Wilde were both affiliated with the Decadence Movement, an artistic ideology that sought to depict fantastical and hedonistic subjects rather than the realistic natural world. The concept of decadence was popularly associated with social decline, particularly the dissolution of the Roman Empire, indicating why many Victorian critics objected to Wilde and Beardsley’s work. Because neither Wilde nor Beardsley sought to represent the natural world as it truly appeared, instead distorting and altering their depictions of nature to create a more extreme effect, their critics affiliated them with the dissolution of logic, orderly society, and moral rules.