Gender Image And Mood At The End Of The Century

The word "Salome" calls up a tradition of representations in the visual,verbal,and musical arts,and seeing "Salome" requires looking at this tradition,this series of repetitions which constitutes the word.The Salome story is embedded in our visual imaginations so effectively that,in a way,she(for Salome is surely [a] Woman)can be thought of as a sign of the visual as such.It is the assumption of Salome's visuality,the assumption that she is available to the(male)gaze,which constitutes the ground of representing,and thus "seeing" her,in both verbal and visual mediums.The creation and representation of Salome clearly relies upon the interplay of verbal and visual signifying practices.The texts that I will focus on are the Gospel stories of the beheading of John the Baptist,Huysmans' s A Rebours(Against Nature)and the reading presented there of Gustave Moreau's "Salome Dancing Before Herod" and "The Apparition," and finally,Wilde's drama Salome and the illustration of the drama by Aubrey Beardsley.Most importantly,with these late nineteenth-century versions of the story,we witness the insertion of the gaze itself into the discourse,producing a kind of unconscious revelation of the power,and anxiety,of seeing Salome.This text would set about doing from the content,combined with the history background,Reveal the progression of the Salome figure from unnamed obscurity in the biblical representations,to fully realized "femme fatale" in Wilde's late nineteenth-century drama,to explore the sexual concept and cognition of sexuality in Fin de siècle,a progression that relies upon the interplay between written and visual signs and which constitutes the misogynistic subtext of manifesting Salome to the eye of viewer,reader,and,of course,writer.