Embellishing Salome: Wilde, Huysmans and Moreau.

Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1891) is a play imbricated in a rich creative tradition that rallies
diverse practitioners of both the visual arts and literature around its enigmatic heroine.
Her treatment has been more of that of an artistic subject than a literary one before the
second half of the 19th century, having gained traction in representation from the
Renaissance onwards and being depicted by masters such as Masolino da Panicale,
Rubens, Henri Regnault and Klimt throughout history. She was then immortalised
further by the French Symbolists and takes centre stage in Mallarmé’s Herodiade and
Flaubert’s Salammbô. Wilde’s play was written originally in French, in order for the play
to brace the less prudent French theatre scene, having been banned in London,1 and
also to engage in the parisian Symbolist movement at the fin de siecle. Salomé's life
does not end after Wilde and was again illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley for the
playwright’s purposes and later adopted into an opera by Richard Strauss.

In contributing to the Salomé tradition, Wilde recognises her dynamic intertextual and
intermediary life outside of his own lines while creatively ornamenting his essential
source; the brief cameo appearance she makes in the Gospels of Mark (6:14–29) and
Matthew (14:1–12). The Bible here details solely that John the Baptist is imprisoned by
Herod Antipas because he denounces his marriage to the divorced wife of his half
brother. The king is nevertheless afraid to have the prophet killed. Salomé, the queen’s
daughter, dances before the king at a festival and he promises to give her whatever she
desires. While Matthew exaggerates Queen Herodias’ prompting of Salomé to ask for
the head of John the Baptist on a platter out of spite for his condemnation of her
marriage, Herod’s oath to the girl forces him to have the prophet beheaded. Salomé
presents the head in triumph to her mother. To this skeleton Wilde adds the elusive
‘Dance of the Seven Veils’, peripheral figures, symbols, imagery, cultural mixity and is
unwaveringly keen to exaggerate that his Salomé requires the head of John the Baptist
“not to obey her mother, but out of unrequited love.”2 The playwright “complained of the

1
Ostensibly on the grounds that it was forbidden in England to represent a Biblical figure on the stage.
Cave, ‘Notes’, 378.
2
Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 325
docility of the Biblical Salome”3 and constructs a character in her stead that delicately
embodies both sensuality and naïvité, power and vulnerability, grotesqueness and
sublimity.

This Salomé’s propensity to subversively embrace ambiguity is, in part, the product of
Wilde’s regard for his sources. Thus my main focus will be two which triangulate his joint
occupation with the literary and visual arts; Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel, À Rebours
(1884) and Gustave Moreau’s paintings Salomé Dansant Devant Herode (1876) and
L’Apparition (1876).4 Engagement in the two media render Salomé a work of “art
literature of the nineteenth century” which Wilde so revered in such influences as Pater
and Ruskin, although we will see here that Wilde emulates it to a completely different
end.5 Isobel Murray maintains that Wilde must have come into contact with the paintings
first before the novel, since they were exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877 as part
of an exhibition which he himself reviewed,6 yet his acquaintance with À Rebours is
famous as it is widely accepted as the poisonous ‘yellow book’ that catalyses Dorian
Gray’s moral corruption by the decadent and aesthetic.7

These of Wilde’s Salomé sources are not only connected in terms of content but also
share an economy of reference within themselves. The novel follows aesthete,
aristocrat, recluse and sole character, Jean des Esseintes on his quest for sensual
regeneration from his moral and physical decay via the Decadent.8 The ‘narrative’ itself
is essentially plotless and is formed of a pastiche of the protagonist’s musings on
religion, literature, art and design and the sensual transcendence derived from his
consumptive engagement with them. In chapter five of À Rebours, des Esseintes
positions himself, as is his nightly custom, in front of his two paintings of Salomé by
Gustave Moreau for the purpose of them rousing him to “raptures of delight” (Rebours,
50). He then undertakes a voyeuristic reception of the figure, one that, unlike so many
3
Ibid.
4
See Appendix.
5
Unlike his influences, Wilde turns away from Naturalism. See Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 327.
6
Murray, The Major Works, xviii.
7
Mighall, Robert. ‘Notes’, 244.
8
Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 325. It was Wilde’s own admission that “I flee from what is moral and what is
impoverished…I have the same sickness of des Esseintes.”
critics and presenters of Salomé, does not neglect “the subtle grandeur of the
murderess[.]” (Rebours, 52-3) In des Esseintes’ reception of Moreau’s Salomé, she
exudes a monstrous sense of female sexuality which then makes its way into Wilde’s
work. The wealth of artistic representation and reception at work upon the figure of
Salomé means that she becomes a work of art within herself, transcending the page or
canvas not only because of the diverse treatment she’s had throughout history but
because each reception of her is fundamentally the same and entails an artistic
embellishment upon her original Biblical source. Perhaps nowhere are these
embellished, ‘overreadings’ undertaken in such symbiotism as in the creative dynamic
between Wilde, Huysmans and Moreau. The way in which Wilde allows each
constituent of this dynamic to speak through his work reveals much about his approach
to art and its nature, particularly the paradigm of autotelism in his famous allegiance to
the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’.

It is essential to uncover the mechanisms with which Huysmans himself translates

Moreau’s paintings into the written word before we trace Wilde’s astute use of them in
Salomé. Huysmans captures the very essence of Moreau’s decadent oeuvres on the
page and writes to emulate the aesthetic overstimulation they provoke. Des Esseintes
commences his study of the two works with Moreau’s oil painting, Salomé Dansant
Devant Hérode and the intensity in which he is consumed by the work is reflected in a
style that evokes Moreau’s own. A repetition of details and motifs build up this painting;
the arches, columns and statues of the ideologically incompatible, Islamic cathedral
setting makes for symmetrical surrealism, flowers litter the floor and countless jewels
adorn both Salome and Herod. The effect is sumptuous and the compilation of endless
details makes for an opulence that stifles, one that is so incredibly saturated that it
verges on the grotesque. In addition to the compositional saturation, Moreau applies his
paint thickly, leaving the painting’s surface textured and encrusted. ‘More is more’ is
pushed to its limits at every level of artistic production and Huysmans’ cumulative
description similarly builds detail upon detail in order to reproduce this effect. All the
senses are evoked to recreate a sense of synesthesia harboured by the painting and
mere observation yields to rapture in the description of Salomé herself:
 “She begins the lascivious dance which is to rouse the aged Herod’s dormant
senses; her breasts rise and fall, the nipples hardening at the touch of her
whirling necklaces; the strings of diamonds glitter against her moist flesh; her
bracelets, her belts, her rings all spit out fiery sparks; and across her triumphal
robe, sewn with pearls, patterned with silver, spangled with gold, the jewelled
cuirass, of which every chain is a precious stone, seems to be ablaze with little
snakes of fire, swarming over the mat flesh, over the tea rose skin, like gorgeous
insects with dazzling shards, mottled with carmine, spotted with pale yellow,
speckled with steel blue, striped with peacock green.” (Rebours, 51)

Placing this passage alongside Moreau’s actual work reveals that des Esseintes’
reception of it transcends simple description; he adds his own detail to it, going far
beyond what’s there. He applies movement to the painting in his focus on her “whirling
necklaces” and scintillating jewels that isn’t implied in her poised and rigid stance in the
painting. This impression of fleetingness is then attached to a moment that is eternally
suspended in Moreau. Likewise, Salomé’s body is completely covered in the painting;
her nipples aren’t exposed as des Esseintes imagines. Collectively this accumulation of
excess detail portrays Salomé herself as fostering a neurotic autoeroticism that simply
isn’t as demonstrative in Moreau and exposes the extent to which the viewer is
subjectively transported by the work.

Des Esseintes treats Moreau’s watercolour, L’Apparition, in the same respect by

exacerbating her reaction to the severed head of John the Baptist. In Moreau’s
rendition, her direct regard towards it is soft and loving, subdued and seduced while des
Esseintes fabricates a fearful and hysterical reaction; she does not claw at her neck or
gesture in horror at the sight as he claims.9 Despite des Esseintes’ acute attention to
detail in his attempt at ekphrasis, there’s an undeniable divergence present between
what is real and what is imagined attached to the figure of Salomé which elevates her to
an elusive, mythic status. While mystic lighting and temporal ambiguity in Moreau aids
this, Salomé’s apotheosis as myth largely takes place within the neurotic psyche of des
Esseintes. In this way, a reflective concord is constructed in the mutual responsiveness

9
Huysmans, À Rebours, 54.
between artefact and viewer which is fostered by subjective ‘over reading’ of the art
object; each has a cumulatively animating effect upon the other.

Depravity of the human woman is primarily what fascinates des Esseintes about
Salomé, especially in L’Apparition. Yet, knowingly or not, he embellishes the figure with
a nexus of meaning that reflects his own soul that foregrounds a neurotic sensuality and
a dark, perverse delight in the Decadent. To des Esseintes, Salomé is “the symbolic
incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immoral hysteria” (Rebours, 52-3) and he
thus interprets her not as she is but with a hermeneutic economy that is entirely his
own. It is thus fitting that he is repeatedly aligned to Herod throughout his reception of
Salomé,10 as this is exactly how the King is presented in the play; who, if judged by the
paradigms of Wilde’s own dialogues on the nature of art, such as The Decay of Lying
(1891), is a misled aesthete or spectator whose judgement is hampered by a need to
attach external, subjective meaning onto the art object and refuses to reconcile with the
notion of l’art pour l’art. However, Wilde’s Herod and Huysmans’ des Esseintes are not
the sole culprits of this interpretive fault; so are both the Young Syrian and, the ever
subversive, Wilde himself. In the play, the Young Syrian conducts his interpretation in a
similar, yet less voyeuristic, manner than Herod. While Wilde, like his sources, adorns
Salomé with creative method, ‘over-reading’ her by taking her brief appearance in the
Bible to fabricate a fuller narrative with her figure at its core. While contentious debate
could be conducted over whether Wilde maps himself onto his Salomé, she certainly
denies attempts at such by characters in the play by way of her innate
transgressiveness.11

Huysmans’ portrayal of Salomé falls short only in terms of his creative medium as
literary description is, by nature, more of a ‘slow burn’; producing its effects cumulatively
and progressively over time. Painting, then, is perhaps a more effective medium in
invoking Decadence as it is able to place all sensations at the fore simultaneously.

10
See quote above, À Rebours, P51. See also P55: “Like the old King, des Esseintes invariably felt
overwhelmed, subjugated, stunned when he looked at this dancing-girl, who was less majestic, less
haughty, but more seductive than the Salome in the oil painting.”
11
See Donohue, “Distance, Death and Desire in Salome.”, 134.
Wilde then seeks to straddle these two mediums by placing his heroine on the stage,
rendering his Salomé a product of all the senses and of both words and images. She
demands to be viewed as art; her abstract aloofness, insularity and constant subjection
to external gaze renders her as such. She is a product of symbols and is instantly
doubled with her deity, the moon from the very start of the play which quickly constructs
the notion that a natural phenomenon can act as an aesthetic artefact.

In the play’s opening lines, discussion between the Young Syrian and the Page of
Herodias undertakes a dual focus on Salomé and the moon in which the ‘she’ pronoun
used for them both is left purposefully ambiguous. To further align the heroine with her
symbol, it is also shown to preempt her two most preeminent acts within the narrative;
her dance (“You would fancy she was dancing”) and request of Jokanaan’s head (“You
would fancy she was looking for dead things.”) (Salomé, 69) Now that the dualism is
corroborated, voyeuristic agents such as Herod and the Young Syrian map their more
complex interpretations of Salomé onto the moon and this completely colours their
interpretation of her until they are disbanded in the play’s climax. For the Young Syrian
she is “like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and who’s feet are of
silver.”(Salomé, 69) For Herod she is a drunken, nude “mad woman…seeking
everywhere for lovers.”(Salomé, 80) While Herod’s interpretation is somewhat sobered
compared to that of des Esseintes, he is nevertheless similarly adopting a view of the
princess as an emblem of hysteric and neurotic female sexuality, adding an urgency
that isn’t immediately distinguishable in her. Salomé also identifies herself with the
moon which suggests that she is aware of her status as a symbol and reveals her
agency later when she utilises its veneer to ensnare Herod. To her it represents
virginity; she is “cold and chaste[…]she has a virgin’s beauty[…]she has never defiled
herself.” (Salomé, 73) Herodias, however, has no need for this projection of fantasy and
views the moon solely as it is “the moon is like the moon, that is all.” (Salomé, 80) The
notion of Salomé as symbol, constructed by this imagistic doubling, problematizes
subjective interpretation of symbols, implying that in this practice the meaning derived
reflects more on the viewer than the art object. As Wilde famously maintains in the
Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, by way of both defence and provocation;
 “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface
do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the
spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.” (Dorian Gray, 4)

With the same essence Wilde renders Salomé’s character transgressive and Herod
vulnerable to her charms. In Herod’s deception, the play acts as a heuristic device,
teaching that art has its own intrinsic meaning divorced from moral, political, didactic or
utilitarian function and that it is a fault to force symbols to bear our own external
interpretations.

Yet what is the nature of the penetrative gaze that acts upon Salomé? It is initially
gendered, with male agents being afforded the liberty to look at the female who is
merely seen. While this dynamic is ultimately subverted, it is initially facilitated by the
way in which she is constantly kept at a distance, particularly from Herod, and all
instances of contact and engagement are carried out through sight alone.
Communication, action and interaction in the play is largely propelled the threat or
desire of vision; Salomé’s reason for entering stage is to avoid the gaze of the tetrarch
and Jokanaan is taken out of the cistern so that she can look at him which only occurs
as a result of her promises to look at the Young Syrian. While, again, this insistence on
vision secures her status as art object or spectacle, it is also something that Wilde
employs flexibly as upon sight of Jokanaan she employs her own sexual gaze. This
realisation of agency later leads to an explosion of her status as object when she finally
embraces Jokannan’s head and engages in tactile life for the first time, shedding the air
of virginity that she attributes to herself as a visual symbol.12

In her study of gendered Biblical exchanges, Glancy argues;

“To see is to control; to have one's vision represented is to have one's

perception of the world ratified. To be seen is to be subject to control; to
represent women solely as objects of others' vision denies women their
subjectivity”13

12
“I was a virgin, and thou didst take my virginity from me.” (Salomé, 98)
13
Glancy, J. A. ‘The Accused: Susanna and her Readers.’, 290.
The ‘male-gaze’, as it is initially presented, seeks to dictate Salomé’s ability to outwardly
present as what seems to be her essential character is dictated by the viewer’s
interpretation. Herod later seals her fate by ordering her to death as he is the one that
most actively construes the image, interpreting her, like des Esseintes’, through the lens
of his own desire. Power in Salomé is largely exerted through the eyes and it hangs in
the balance until the very end.

Both Herod and Salomé exert power, whether through force or seduction, and yet both
are found to be powerless in the face of desire. Salomé ensures that she is not eternally
confined to the object position as she applies her own desirous female gaze onto
Jokanaan, asserting her agency to look as men are able. This aligns her again with the
moon which is both subject and object, which enacts the power to look while being
constantly looked at, searching for dead things and lovers.14 Yet Salomé’s agency
wanes when the purely visual is usurped by a need for the tactile. As soon as she
embraces Jokanaan’s severed head she is expelled from the realms of the symbolic,
showing herself as monstrous before Herod who has previously misinterpreted her all
along. She is rendered a Medusa figure in the way that her gaze is found to be
destructive. Before his death, John the Baptist is anxious at the power of her sexualised
gaze upon him and contends “She is monstrous, thy daughter, she is altogether
monstrous.” (Salomé, 98) which prefigues its savage potential. At the allure of her
gilded eyelids he complains “I will not have her look at me” (Salomé, 76) which suggests
that here, to gaze is to engage in a binding dynamic that implicates and potentially
transforms both parties. Just like that between des Esseintes and his paintings by
Moreau, this visual contract exposes a flawed dynamic that threatens the independent
life of an art object by the force of the extrinsic life given to it by an onlooker.

Warning as to the danger of regarding Salomé as image is uttered before she even
enters stage and, as it is left unheaded, is the force that propels the tragedy.15 Later, at
the monstrous sight of Salomé dancing on blood, Herod attempts to deny the very

14
Salomé, 69, 80.
15
“You look at her too much. It is dangerous to look at people in such fashion. Something terrible may
happen” (Salomé, 69)
paradigm that dictates the play’s power dynamics in preemptive anxiety at its impending
climax. Resonant of Wilde’s maxims in the Preface to Dorian Gray, he states “[y]ou
must not find symbols in everything you see. It makes life impossible.” (Salomé, 90) The
irony here is that Herod’s interpretation of this particular symbol is correct and this
complicates Wilde’s approach in a rhetorical flourish that is characteristic of his society
plays. Herod ultimately realises the error in applying his own meaning to Salomé and
pleads;

“I will look at you no more. Neither at things, nor at people should one
look. Only in mirrors should one look, for mirrors do but show us masks”
(Salomé, 93-4)

This rather Platonic utterance can perhaps be unpicked with a quote from Wilde’s The
Decay of Lying;

​“Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not
to be judged by any external standard of resemblance. She is a veil, rather than
a mirror.”16

Without assuming the existence of a direct dialogue between the two texts, they
certainly share the commonality of veil and mirror imagery, which is attached to Salomé
and Herod respectively. Comparison here again corroborates Salomé’s existence as art,
as something that harbours self-contained, intrinsic meaning and perfection. If Salomé’s
veil is, in Wilde’s mind, the ‘correct’ way to envisage art, Herod’s mirror is a flawed
approach. In viewing Salomé solely as he desires her to appear, he misinterprets her
‘Dance of Seven Veils’. While in his wishful thinking, the dance implies submission by
her unveiling before him, yet as the veils are lifted, the true Salomé appears and grossly
diverges from the fabricated girl of his fantasies. Herod’s final retreat to mirrors is
perhaps a coping strategy after the monstrous revelation as there is a certain comfort
and ease in applying one’s own subjective meaning to symbols as, however mistakenly,
if one controls symbols, one can manipulate perceptions of reality. Yet navigating the
world by such means is as flawed as it is familiar.

16
Wilde, Decay of Lying, 9.
An exploration of Huysmans and Moreau as two of Wilde’s sources for Salomé exposes
the flaws in embellishing art with too much of the ‘self’. It is arguable that this approach
to reception encourages us to wrongly self-mediate our interpretation of art when, to
Wilde, it is to be received ideally as unmediated from time, place and social mores.17
Whether or not Wilde evades this in his own embellishment of the Salomé figure will
perhaps eternally be up for debate yet this is characteristic of his innate subversity.
Poignantly, reading Wilde’s philosophy on art into Salomé is intensely liberating for the
figure herself as she is able to deflect her status as a femme fatale, the embodiment of
monstrous sexuality, adopted from the likes of Huysmans. Moral readings then, just as
any other interpretive approach, are vested more in the eye of the beholder than the
object. Salomé is thus quintessentially wildean in the way that an innately sensual figure
is conjured with the facility to subversively evade censure. Wilde allows Salomé to
deflect the patriarchal gaze to which her figure has been historically subjected as a
product of art and literature.

Appendix:

17
Wilde, Decay of Lying,p. Q
Salomé Dansant Devant Hérode, 1876, Gustave Moreau. Oil on Canvas. Hammer
Museum, Los Angeles.
L’Apparition, 1876, Gustave Moreau. Watercolour. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
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Decadent, and Modernist Aesthetics.” In Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the
Aesthetics of Transgression, 15–55. University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Donohue, Joseph. “Distance, Death and Desire in Salome.” Chapter. In The Cambridge
Companion to Oscar Wilde, edited by Peter Raby, 118–42. Cambridge Companions to
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Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde / by Richard Ellmann. London: Hamilton, 1987.

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