Abstract
In 1894, The Bodley Head of John Lane and Elkin-Mathews in London, and Copeland and Day in Boston published the first English edition of Oscar Wilde’s play Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act, accompanied by illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.1 The Art Journal described it as “a book for the strong-minded alone, for it is terrible in its weirdness and suggestions of horror and wickedness.”2
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Notes
Aubrey Beardsley’s mature period as an artist is usually considered to comprise a six-year period beginning in 1892, which was brought to an end by his premature death from tuberculosis in 1898 (H. C. Marillier [1899] The Early Work of Aubrey Beardsley [London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head[, pp. 4–5). The artist was 21 years old when his designs appeared for the first time in print in February 1893 in Pall Mall Budget Magazine, only a short time after he had definitively come to devote himself to art while still working as a clerk at an insurance company in London, during which period he had befriended key artists of the period such as Edward Burne-Jones and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
See R. Ross (1921) Aubrey Beardsley (with Sixteen Full-Page Illustrations and a Revised Iconography by Aymer Vallance) (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head), p. 78; Marillier, The Early Work, p. 5. Even before his works appeared in print, he had drawn enough attention to himself to receive a commission from J. M. Dent & Co. to illustrate Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a project intended to rival the efforts of William Morris’s Kelmscott Press (Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 42). The volumes illustrated by Beardsley appeared in two installments in June 1893 and 1894 (Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 78; Marillier, The Early Work, p. 6). According to Robert Ross, a close friend of Oscar Wilde’s as well as Beardsley’s, the young artist entered a phase of stylistic maturation during the period he worked on Le Morte d’Arthur, as he came under the influence of japonisme, and shed the self-conscious archaism of his early drawings that emulated Renaissance masters such as Andrea Mantegna as well as Pre-Raphaelite Art, and especially the work of Edward Burne-Jones (Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 43–44). The drawings Beardsley prepared for the English edition of Wilde’s Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act, his next book project following Le Morte d’Arthur and Bon Mots, were hailed by some of his contemporaries as “the consummation of the new convention he created for himself” (Ross, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 45), and the attainment of “pure beauty”;
see A. Symons (1918) The Art of Aubrey Beardsley (New York: Boni and Liveright), p. 30.
See Johannes Burgers’s essay “The Spectral Salome: Salomania and Fin-de-Siècle Sexological and Racial Theory” in this volume for an analysis of the trope of Salome in the art and literature of the nineteenth century. See also R. Garelick (1998) Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton: Princeton University Press), pp. 128–53;
B. Bucknell (1993) “On ‘Seeing’ Salome,” English Literary History, 60.2, pp. 503–26.
On Wilde’s Salome, see N. Frankel (1997) “The Dance of Writing: Wilde’s Salome as a Work of Contradiction,” Text, 10, pp. 73–106.
L. G. Zatlin (1997) Beardsley, Japonisme, and the Perversion of the Victorian Ideal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 209.
E. Showalter (1992) Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago), pp. 149–50.
For an account of the first-stage production of Salomé that took place in Paris in 1896 at the Théâtre de l’Œuvre see R. Ellmann (1987) Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage), p. 496.
On science and female sexuality in the nineteenth century, see J. Conway (1970) “Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution,” Victorian Studies, 14.1, pp. 47–62;
R. Rosenberg (1975) “In Search of Woman’s Nature, 1850–1920,” Feminist Studies, 3.1/2, pp. 141–54;
C. E. Russett (1989) Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press);
T. Laqueur (1990) Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), especially pp. 193–243;
S. S. Mosedale (1978) “Science Corrupted: Victorian Biologists Consider ‘The Woman Question,’” Journal of the History of Biology, 11.1, pp. 1–55.
Three of the original drawings excluded from the first edition were added to the second edition that came out in 1907. As Joan Navarre notes, the play had 27 editions in English. Navarre’s analysis of the impact of internal and external censorship, and multiple editions deftly complicates the question of authorship of both the text and the images. See J. Navarre (1995) The Publishing History of Aubrey Beardsley’s Compositions for Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (unpublished doctoral dissertation. Marquette University, Milwaukee).
See M. P. Gillespie (1996) Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida) for an extended analysis of the placement of Beardsley’s illustrations in the 1907 edition of Salomé.
For French literary influence on Beardsley’s Salomé, see J. Higgins (2011) “Unfamiliar Places: France and the Grotesque in Aubrey Beardsley’s Poetry and Prose,” The Modern Language Review, 106.1, pp. 67–69.
See Gillespie, Oscar Wilde, p. 147; J. A. W. Heffernan (2006) Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Waco: Baylor University Press), p. 202.
See C. Snodgrass (1990) “Decadent Mythmaking: Arthur Symons on Aubrey Beardsley and Salomé,” Victorian Poetry, 28, p. 71;
and L. G. Zatlin (1990) Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press), p. 95.
As Rita Felski argues, “underlying the apparent subversion of gender norms is a persistent identification of women with vulgarity, corporeality, and the tyranny of nature, allowing the male aesthete to define his own identity in explicit opposition to these attributes.” See R. Felski (1991) “The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch,” PMLA, 106.5, p. 1104.
See also L. K. Hamilton (1999) “New Women and ‘Old’ Men: Gendering Degeneration,” in T. Schaffer and K. A. Psomides (eds.) Women and British Aestheticism (Charlottesville, Virginia: University Press of Virginia), pp. 62–80.
C. Darwin (1909) The Origin of Species (New York: Collier), p. 22.
C. Darwin (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton), vol. 1, pp. 249–50.
C. Vogt (1864) Lectures on Man: His Place in Creation, and in the History of the Earth (London: Published for the Anthropological Society by Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, Paternoster Row), p. 81.
S. J. Gould (1996) The Mismeasure of Man: The Definitive Refutation to the Argument of the Bell Curve (New York: Norton), p. 136.
G. Le Bon (1879) “Recherches anatomiques et mathématiques sur les lois des variations du volume du cerveau et sur leurs relations avec l’intelligence,” Revue d’Anthropologie, 2, p. 102.
B. A. Morel (1857) Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles et morales de l’espèce humaine et des causes qui produisent ces variétés maladives (Paris: Baillière), p. 15.
For an account of the state of research on degeneracy, heredity, and atavism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, see E. Talbot (1898) Degeneracy: Its Causes, Signs, and Results (London: Scott), pp. 40–78.
On Morel, see D. Pick (1989) Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), especially pp. 44–59.
M. Nordau (1968) Degeneration (NewYork: Fertig), pp. 175–76.
As Stephen Jay Gould argues, “evolutionary theory quickly became the primary weapon for many efforts in social change.” See S. J. Gould (1977) Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), p. 120.
On the role played by the new visual technology of photography in quantifying crime and other social deviations, see A. Sekula (1986) “The Body and the Archive,” October 39, 3–64.
Originally published in Italian in 1893, La donna delinquente: la prostituta e la donna normale was, within two years, translated and published in France and England. Also see D. Horn (2003) The Criminal Body : Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 52–57; Russett, Sexual Science, pp. 70–74.
C. Lombroso and W. (G.) Ferrero (1895) The Female Offender (New York: Appleton and Company), p. 150. Also see Russett, Sexual Science, pp. 56–57.
Lombroso, The Female Offender, p. 151. For another iteration of this trope, see H. Campbell (1891) Differences in the Nervous Organisation of Man and Woman: Physiological and Pathological (London: Lewis), pp. 153–65.
C. Snodgrass (1989) “Beardsley’s Oscillating Spaces: Play, Paradox, and the Grotesque,” in R. Langfeld (ed.) Reconsidering Aubrey Beardsley (Michigan: UMI Research Press), p. 32.
Lombroso, The Female Offender, p. 112. See also B. Dijkstra (1986) Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 212–13.
Harry Campbell argued that “there is not the slightest doubt that a large proportion of women do not experience the slightest desire before marriage.” See Campbell, Differences, pp. 200–01. For a historical overview of the trope of women’s lack of passion, see N. Cott (1978) “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs, 4.2, pp. 219–36.
O. Wilde (1907) Salome: A Tragedy in One Act, Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde, with Sixteen Drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, trans. A. B. Douglas (London: Lane, The Bodley Head), p. 7.
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Çakmak, G. (2014). “For the Strong-Minded Alone”: Evolution, Female Atavism, and Degeneration in Aubrey Beardsley’s Salomé. In: Härmänmaa, M., Nissen, C. (eds) Decadence, Degeneration, and the End. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137470867_11
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