Salome

In the New Testament, Herod Antipas's stepdaughter dances for him. The dance pleases him, and he offers her whatever reward she names. Prompted by Herodias, her mother, she asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter (Matthew 14:1-12; Mark 6:14-19). The first-century Jewish historian Josephus refers to Herodias's daughter, unnamed in the Gospels, as Salome, the name by which she is known to later tradition. Herodias's dancing daughter should not be confused with the only Salome named in the Bible, a disciple of Jesus who followed him from Galilee to Jerusalem and who, with Mary Magdalene, discovered the empty tomb (Mark 15:40, 16:1). While Salome, as Herodias's daughter is referred to herein, plays a small but significant role in Gospel narrative, her importance for gender studies far exceeds her limited role in first-century history. Salome is an exotic cipher on whom artists, writers, and scholars project their fantasies about femininity, especially Oriental femininity. She has also offered a veiled alter ego to creative men, most notably Oscar Wilde, who seek to act out alternative gender identities.

John the Baptist won the enmity of Herodias by condemning her marriage to Herod, her second husband. Her first husband, Philip, was Herod's brother. Levitical law forbade a man from marrying the wife of a living brother (Leviticus 18:16). Herod imprisoned John to appease Herodias, who would have preferred that Herod execute him. According to Mark, however, "Herod feared John, knowing that he was a righteous and holy man, and he protected him. When he heard him, he was greatly perplexed, and yet he liked to listen to him" (6:20). The Herodian family was infamous for its ruthless appetite for power; the Gospel according to Matthew, for example, claims that Herod the Great, unsettled by inquiries by wise men from the East about the birth of the king of the Jews, ordered the slaughter of all male babies in the vicinity of Bethlehem (2:16-18). Herodias perceived the prisoner, probably rightly, as a threat to her power. As a Herodian, she saw one option: eliminate her enemy. Biblical tradition implies that the enmity between John the Baptist and Herodias is political. In popular imagination, however, the demand of Herodias for John the Baptist's head, a demand mediated through Herodias's daughter, derives from the depraved femininity of mother and/or daughter.

Two details of the biblical account have riveted the imaginations of visual artists, writers, and musicians. The first detail is Salome's dance itself, and the second is the head of John the Baptist, usually depicted with the full beard and wild locks of desert dweller, bloodied, on a platter. The biblical accounts are laconic and thus allow the imagination free play. Mark refers to Herodias's daughter as a korasion, a girl on the cusp of adulthood, but those who flesh out the scene in painting, on stage, or in film often depict a fully fleshed woman performing an erotic striptease. Indeed, although Richard Strauss thought of his operatic Salome as a budding adolescent, the vocal demands of the role require a mature woman. On Salome, the Eastern princess, are projected Western male fantasies about Oriental femininity as tantalizing, mysterious, and dangerous. Wilde famously depicted Salome performing a dance of seven veils. The dance of the seven veils is crucial to cinematic adaptations of the Salome story. Unveiling can be a metaphor for self-revelation, as layers of artifice are stripped away. Unveiling is also seductive, intensifying the viewer's desire, teasing the viewer to want to see more. In literature, visual art, film, and music, Salome thus embodies a powerful, dangerous, and sexualized femininity.

In Wilde's play Salomé, Herodias is not behind Salome's demand for John's head. Rather, Wilde depicts Salome as consumed by desire for John. Sexually frustrated, Salome's desire is transformed into a castrating desire, a desire for John's beheading. Wilde anticipates Sigmund Freud's question, "What does woman want?" and proposes a response, "The head of John the Baptist," thus linking femininity and female desire to male destruction. In the play's final scene, Salome kisses the severed head of the man who refused to kiss her, a head grotesquely displayed on a platter. She says, "Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now. I will bite it with my teeth as one bites a ripe fruit." In his writings, Wilde, once photographed in the garb of Salome, played with the desire both to veil and to unveil his homosexuality. With Wilde, as with many other creative interpreters of Salome, when the last veil is removed, the artist is finally revealed.

see also Camp; Folklore; Legends and Myths; Sex, Race, and Power: An Intersectional Study; Wilde, Oscar.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bach, Alice. 1996. "Calling the Shots: Directing Salomé's Dance of Death." Semeia, no. 74: 103-126.

Glancy, Jennifer A. 1994. "Unveiling Masculinity: The Construction of Gender in Mark 6:17-29." Biblical Interpretation 2(1): 34-50.

Showalter, Elaine. 1990. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking.

                                           Jennifer A. Glancy