The Inner Psychological Structure Of Salome-Salome Reflected In Or Remodelled By Three Male Characters

The one-act play Salome is based on a biblical story in which a Jewish princess obtains the head of John the Baptist for her mother the Queen. In Wilde's version the focus switches from the mother to the daughter and the latter experiences a rapid transition from a pure chaste girl to a lustful aggressive woman. The intensity of love and hate and the highly decorative language entitle the play to the epithet of 'aestheticism', which none of Wilde's other complete plays are linked with. Apart from these characteristics, the play displays an elaborate structure which the more strengthens the bizarre atmosphere and highlights the dramatic unity.The artistic value of Salome was not acknowledged universally from the start. Both the publication and the production of Salome are a history filled with ridicule, contempt, abhorrence and prohibition. Admittedly, the play has enjoyed immense popularity on the European Continent from a very early time, but even there it has met critical and popular denunciation. In England it was even worse. Its originality was frowned at, its fiery passion made light of, and the aesthetic and symbolist implications overlooked. Traditional criticism of Salome has focused mostly on its intense sensuality and the critics have adopted more or less a biographical approach so that its value in itself is often underestimated. More often than not, they looked at the play only in an attempt to decipher the author's personality, life experience or inner psychology. Serious textual analysis only became dominant in the 1980s and since then cultural criticisms have provided new perspectives.In China, the Salome criticism has gone through a drastic change from extolment to total oblivion. The 1920's and early 1930's saw many Chinese scholars in earnest praise of Salome and its illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley and the 'New Play School' enthusiastically imitated the play. The next sixty years, though, it sank into intentional neglect. Even now there are not many research papers, not to say manuals, are published, paying due and in-depth attention to the play itself.Beardsley's illustrations for the first English edition of Salome and Richard Strauss's opera are also important components in the Salome literature. In view of the currently rather superficial Chinese Salome criticism, this thesis delves into the text and analyses the inner psychological structure of the characters, hoping to contribute to a more profound and text-relevant criticism.First it categorises the characters in the play into three layers and attempts to prove that the title figure Salome confronts a web of centripetal and centrifugal forces from the three major male characters, Jokanaan the Prophet, the young Syrian Narraboth and the Tetrarch Herod. In the second part the analysis classifies the four characters on a spectrum of sensuality—the driving force behind the plot development progresses. The thesis proceeds to point out in the third part the close relationship between Salome and the other three, in which Salome's original sexual position is consolidated by Narraboth and Herod on one hand and negated in her encounter with Jokanaan. Besides the motive of sex, there is another important link between these figures, namely the adhesive power of vision, which either confirms or negates the presence of a party in a relationship. Such a relationship in which Salome experiences two opposing forces and undergoes a drastic psychological transformation is named by the author as the'Centripetal-Centrifugal Psychological Structure of Characters'. In putting forth the above-named structure analysis, the thesis establishes Salome as the central character of the play, opposite to some critics'persistence. The last section of Chapter Three sums up Salome's transcendent position, who, in accordance with Wilde's theory of self-expression, takes the challenge life offers in the form of an unrequited love and finally realises herself after ruthlessly manipulating her admirers and having the beloved beheaded. Through her perverse actions, Salome comes to a developed appreciation of both the limitation and the significance of love.