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Who Was Salome?
by Mary Gordon
Salome was a bad girl. A very bad girl. Or was she just a sexy girl? Or was she a cold-hearted tease maddened when she couldnt seduce a man of God? Or was she the victim of a dirty old stepfather and a manipulative, vengeful mother?
Her story brings together perhaps the most potent elements that move human beings: sex, religion, kinship, and political power. No wonder, then, that she has inspired a powerful legend. The makers of the legend have made a lively tapestry out of a few slender threads. The biblical accounts of her dont even mention her nameand this is perhaps representative of the fate of women whose fame rests on their sexuality. The fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew and the sixth chapter of Mark refer to her only as the daughter of Herodias, the wife of Herod, and clearly place the blame for the beheading of John in Herodiass hands, not her daughters. The biblical account tells us that John was imprisoned by Herod. Among other seditious ideas (preparing for the imminent coming of the kingdom of God, repairing to the desert), John was spreading the word that Herods marriage to Herodias (the widow of his brother, whom he may or may not have had killed) was incestuous, and therefore not only unlawful but sinful. According to the Gospel accounts, while John is imprisoned, Herod grows delighted by Salomes dance, the dance of a girl who was not only his niece but his stepdaughter. He tells her that he will give her anything in his kingdom; she consults her mother. Herodias, furious at having been accused of adultery by the prophet, asks for the head of John the Baptist.
The writers of the nineteenth century were particularly drawn to re-creations and embellishments of this legend, and their particular spin on it was tied to their appetite for the darker elements of sex, its connection to death, and their fascination with virginity and its corruptions. Wilde follows the tradition of Heine, Flaubert, and Maeterlinck in his choice of the Salome legend; his inclusion of a lengthy, overwrought if not hysterical seduction attempt by the girl, the climactic scene in which she kisses the severed head of John, brings together many fin-de-siecle preoccupations. It is no wonder the illustrations for Wildes text were made by Aubrey Beardsley.
Many late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century femmes fatales, including Sarah Bernhardt, Mata Hari, and Colette, portrayed Salome on the stage. Certainly, the appeal of Orientalism must have moved them: the golden eyelids Wilde described. And there are not many nameable historical figures who are associated with blatant sexual power. Helen, in the imagination, is static. She is moved, she does not move; certainly, she does not dance.
It is interesting to think of Salome as the opposite pole to one of the other most popular female icons of the time: Joan of Arc: boyish, armored, sitting astride a horse rather than wriggling before a throne. The two figures point to the kind of desperate quest that powerful women embark upon to create an image of female power, a power that is perceived to be weakened or tainted by sexuality itself. Certainly, in the cases of Joan and Salome, a radical relationship to sexuality is involvedin one case, the submersion of the entire female identity to its sexual aspect; in the other, the rigid repression of the same aspect. Both Salome and Joan die violently and youngat the hands of official male authority. Joan is condemned by the Church, and Wildes Salomé is put to death by her stepfather, the king repulsed by the perversity of her sexual expression. His desire for her, nearly a child, and his kin, is, of course, not seen by him as perverse.
Is it possible to feel pity rather than condemnation or revulsion for Salome? Wildes representation of her makes it difficult, because his Salomé does not get the idea of Johns beheading from her mother: it is simply her response to sexual rejection. But is not her very passion, and her passionate language, so reminiscent of the language of the Song of Songs, the stuff of Romantic heroism? And who would not have been maddened by such self-righteousness as Johns in the face of overmastering desire? And why would we be surprised by her perversity: was she not brought up in a perverse environment, a court ruled by a tyrant, a tyrant who arranged for the Slaughter of the Innocents some years before, a tyrant whom she is meant to please, not only by dancing for him but by putting her little lips into his wine cup, by biting his fruit with her little teeth? Is it not possible to see Johns radical ascetic rejection of the flesh and her connection of it with death as part of the same story? And is it not possible to interpret her refusal of Herods requests, her use of her power to get what she wants, as a kind of balked impulse to self-determination in a context in which she has no other weapons?
Like Nabokovs Lolita, Salome has IT, that thing, sex appeal, and its stronger than she is, and she doesnt know what to do with it. But our culture has always felt that it knows what to do with itthat the best, indeed the only thing to do with the power of female sexuality, is to put it to death.
Mary Gordon is the author of five novels, two books of short fiction, a collection of essays entitled Good Boys and Dead Girls, and an acclaimed memoir about her father, The Shadow Man. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Lila Acheson WallaceReaders Digest Writers Award. She lives in New York, where she is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College.
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