Victorian Visual Culture

After reading The Portrait of Dorian Gray, I revisited Salomé to chart where there might be queerness encoded in the play’s language. To do so, I began with the conversation between The Young Syrian and The Page of Herodias during which they speak of a desire for Salomé and the moon. Within this conversation, they repeatedly describe her beauty as having a “strange look.” This language of strangeness resurfacing when Salomé looks upon her objects of desire, ultimately fixing her sight onto Jokanaan. When first hearing his voice she remarks “What a strange voice!” and then later after he has been beheaded “thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music.” For a play rooted in similes and descriptions, I find it interesting that at the moment of desire unraveling, in which it is actually named, it is never identified beyond this feeling of strangeness. She cannot express her desire or place its difference because she hasn’t been given the language to do so.

Yet, she shares a language with The Young Syrian, her words of desire the same as the ones he projects onto her. When holding Jokanaan as her object of affection, she uses the language of men to express her attraction. She is described by The Young Syrian as “like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver” or “like a silver flower,” and when she turns to Jokanaan, she remarks that “He is like an image of silver…He is like a moonbeam, like a shaft of silver.” Naturally, silver is a coveted material and so it makes sense that it would represent a sort of exchange of attraction. But in the play, silver also represents chastity and purity, tied to the moon, herself, and Jokanaan. She covets what he fundamentally has, a wish to distance herself from the men around her who force their sexual impulses onto her image. This comes to a head when she asks for “the head of Jokanaan in a silver charger” a direct manifestation of her want for equal exchange.

The type of attraction explored in Salomé is inherently displaced. It cannot be fully identified and so is made strange, only described in similes that struggle with placing what the essence of this attraction is. I would argue that Salomé herself is an embodiment of queerness, likening herself to the men of the play through the language she uses. This is especially seen when she does finally receive the head of Jokanaan. Her language is violent, penetrative, kissing his dead lips and swearing to “bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit” saying she will “do with it what I will.” She perpetuates the same objectification that was done onto her, onto the only other body that is believed to be chaste in the play. This is where I have a reservation calling her attraction queer. It is clear to me that Wilde’s Salomé is one that has been abused on the basis of her sexuality and body, objectified by her father and all the men around her. This moment with Jokanaan serves as the only moment where she can exercise this same desire herself. It is violent and masculine in the world of the play, but it is also born from the abuse done to her. 

This is part of what transforms her into the “monstrous” towards the end of the play. She usurps a masculine sexual role and is therefore deviant and dangerous. Whether or not she is actually masculine is arbitrary, what matters is that she is expressing the language of forbidden desire and is then punished for it. This is most obvious in Herod’s declaration that “what she has done is a great crime.” It is almost impossible to not read queerness coded in her expression of a desire that is criminalized, even if she herself is a woman experiencing a sexual awakening for a man.