Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s Salome

Written in French and translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas with the help of the author himself at a time when novelists, poets and playwrights celebrated artifice and started revolutionising the forms of their art, Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) created a new language and located radical repr...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Sébastien Salbayre
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2006-12-01
Series:Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/cve/13340
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1832581326620852224
author Sébastien Salbayre
author_facet Sébastien Salbayre
author_sort Sébastien Salbayre
collection DOAJ
description Written in French and translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas with the help of the author himself at a time when novelists, poets and playwrights celebrated artifice and started revolutionising the forms of their art, Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) created a new language and located radical representational possibilities. If the play was considered outrageous in Victorian Britain it was obviously because of the author’s use, appropriation and transformation of Biblical sources. Indeed, in Salome, the extremely short accounts of the beheading of John the Baptist that can be found in the Gospels turn into a sexual tragedy in which lust, perversity and frustration are the main motivating forces behind the characters’ actions. But Wilde’s impertinent originality does not only lie in his departure from the factual biblical accounts of the events and the presence of a sexual subtext. It also rests upon his linguistic use of the Authorized Version of the Bible the style, rhythm and cadence of which are resorted to in the play. Among the main linguistic and stylistic features that are reminiscent of biblical language, obsessive repetitions produce a narcissistic text in which words neither reproduce nor refer to anything but themselves. Oscar Wilde’s tragedy of repetition reflects the cultural change that is associated with the transition from Victorianism to Modernism, the text pointing up the incapacity of language to transcend itself.
format Article
id doaj-art-c0968d63d7944f729e2678d7a6dcbdb8
institution Kabale University
issn 0220-5610
2271-6149
language English
publishDate 2006-12-01
publisher Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
record_format Article
series Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
spelling doaj-art-c0968d63d7944f729e2678d7a6dcbdb82025-01-30T10:21:02ZengPresses Universitaires de la MéditerranéeCahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens0220-56102271-61492006-12-016310.4000/cve.13340Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s SalomeSébastien SalbayreWritten in French and translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas with the help of the author himself at a time when novelists, poets and playwrights celebrated artifice and started revolutionising the forms of their art, Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) created a new language and located radical representational possibilities. If the play was considered outrageous in Victorian Britain it was obviously because of the author’s use, appropriation and transformation of Biblical sources. Indeed, in Salome, the extremely short accounts of the beheading of John the Baptist that can be found in the Gospels turn into a sexual tragedy in which lust, perversity and frustration are the main motivating forces behind the characters’ actions. But Wilde’s impertinent originality does not only lie in his departure from the factual biblical accounts of the events and the presence of a sexual subtext. It also rests upon his linguistic use of the Authorized Version of the Bible the style, rhythm and cadence of which are resorted to in the play. Among the main linguistic and stylistic features that are reminiscent of biblical language, obsessive repetitions produce a narcissistic text in which words neither reproduce nor refer to anything but themselves. Oscar Wilde’s tragedy of repetition reflects the cultural change that is associated with the transition from Victorianism to Modernism, the text pointing up the incapacity of language to transcend itself.https://journals.openedition.org/cve/13340
spellingShingle Sébastien Salbayre
Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s Salome
Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
title Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s Salome
title_full Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s Salome
title_fullStr Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s Salome
title_full_unstemmed Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s Salome
title_short Biblical Turns of Phrase, Repetition and Circularity in Oscar Wilde’s Salome
title_sort biblical turns of phrase repetition and circularity in oscar wilde s salome
url https://journals.openedition.org/cve/13340
work_keys_str_mv AT sebastiensalbayre biblicalturnsofphraserepetitionandcircularityinoscarwildessalome