Salomé
A Tragicomedy of
Gender Performativity and
Patriarchal Subversion in
One Act
Kristin M. Stelmok
Professor Jack Wilson
English 557
December 16, 2005
Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity provides a useful framework for understanding Salomé, the collaborative effort of playwright Oscar Wilde and illustrator Aubrey Beardsley. According to Butler, the categories of gender and sex are merely performances which gain their authority through reiterative practice. In other words, that which we think of as feminine and masculine, or as woman and man, are not based on ideal forms, but are rather the “sedimented” effects of the reiterated practices of “doing” gender and sexuality. Through generations of reiterative performance, the binaristic categories of sex and gender have settled in our culture as conceptual norms. However, the very reiterative and performative nature of the law that enforces such norms creates an opportunity for disruption of that law. Read in conjunction with Butler’s seminal works, Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, Salomé is exposed as a subversive work that attempts to overturn the law of the heterosexual patriarchy – the law which reinforces gender binaries – through performative gestures. Wilde and Beardsley use images of masks and veils, ideas the ambiguity of gender, and a redefinition of the phallus to confuse and undermine the repressive Victorian law that placed both gender and sexuality in such binaristic opposition. Understood through the lens of Butler’s theory of gender performativity, Salomé is revealed as a subversive parody of repressive Victorian sexuality.
A highly cerebral philosopher, Butler struggles with her desire to deny the materiality of the body. Although she would like to consider sex as a purely linguistic construct, it is difficult (if not impossible) to deny the materiality upon which such construct is based: “For surely bodies live, and die; eat and sleep; feel pain, pleasure; endure illness and violence; and these ‘facts,’…cannot be dismissed as mere construction” (Bodies xi). However, Butler reconciles this conflict by considering “that bodies only appear, only endure, only live within the productive constraints of certain highly gendered regulatory schemas” (ibid.). In this way, Butler can consider both gender and sex as largely constructed through cultural (and thus linguistic) performances. For Butler, gender is “a corporeal style, an ‘act,’ as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where ‘performative’ suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning” (Trouble 177). There is no ideal form behind those performances: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results” (Trouble 33, italics mine). These social constructions, however, are unattainable: “…heterosexuality offers normative sexual positions that are intrinsically impossible to embody, and the persistent failure to identify fully and without incoherence with these positions reveals heterosexuality itself not only as a compulsory law, but as an inevitable comedy…a compulsory system and an intrinsic comedy, a constant parody of itself” (Trouble 155). In Salomé Wilde and Beardsley examine the performativity of gender and sexual constructions. For them, the binaristic duality of men and women is blurry, and Salomé reflects their vision of what sexuality could attempt outside of the heterosexual and patriarchal hegemony of Victorian society.
According to the psychoanalytical tradition, the symbolic order which places men in the position of power and women in the position of objects of that power is based on the Law of the Phallus. According to this asymmetrically binaristic conception, men are said to “have” the phallus and women are said to “be” the phallus. For Lacan, the phallus is not to be confused with the anatomical penis, but is, instead, a “privileged signifier.” However, according to Butler, the phallus, although not the penis, does signify the penis, and also the law. Those that have the phallus/penis (men) also have the law, but live in constant threat of losing it. This castration anxiety is complicated by the fact that the penis can never live up to the ideal of the phallus, and thus men are constantly anxious about the lack that they possess, and always desire more. Women, on the other hand, are in the position of “being” the phallus. That is, women are the phallus to the extent that they are the objects of men’s desire. When men have the phallus, they have the power of the law, the power of naming. Thus, they are always trying to get more of the phallus. The woman is transformed into the object of that desire, the phallus. By naming women as objects of desire, men can control them and can have more power, more phallus. Butler calls this the “comedy of heterosexuality.” She finds it amusing that the masculine subject is always based on lack (the fear of castration and the desire for the Other, the woman as object or phallus).
It would seem that Beardsley and Wilde also found the exaggerated performance of the heterosexual law a scene of amusement. According to the Lacanian/ Butlerian formulation, Herod would be the enforcer of the patriarchal and heterosexual law. He would also, according to this formulation, be constantly desirous of the phallus, and in fear of losing it. Herod apparently has appropriated his position of power through marriage to Herodias (70). The Tetrarch seems to always be in a position of wanting more than he already has. In the play, his desire for his brother’s power (conflated with his desire for his brother’s wife and her royal lineage,) led him to imprison and finally to execute his brother: “the Tetrarch’s brother, his older brother, the first husband of Herodias the Queen, was imprisoned…At the end of the twelve years he had to be strangled” (37). Although Herod now has the throne and the Queen, he is still not satisfied, and still desires more – her daughter (his niece and step-daughter): “Salomé, come and sit next to me. I will give thee the throne of thy mother” (70). Herod is constantly desirous of more (sex, power, phallus), to the point that sometimes he is not even sure what it is that he desires, only that he is desirous: “Bring me—what is it that I desire? I forget” (70). He also lives in fear that he may lose his power, and specifically forbids the Messiah from raising the dead, presumably because he fears that his murdered brother, if reinvigorated with life, might reclaim the throne. Herod is also sensitive that he is either impotent or sterile, although he tries to lay that blame on his wife. She responds: “It is absurd to say that. I have borne a child. You have gotten no child, no, not even from one of your slaves. It is you who is sterile, not I” (91). This is the comedy, Herod’s power depends upon his phallus, his male potency, but he is not potent, he is always afraid of his own lack and of losing what he does have. He can never fully be the ideal man, because he can never really own the phallus.
In these instances, it is clear that Herod both has and desires the phallus. He has the throne (another symbol of the law), but he desires more than that. He also desires Salomé, the representation of more power (through her sexuality). The women in this play are in the position of being the phallus, the objects of desire. Herod, presumably, at one time desired Herodias, the phallic symbol of the throne. By possessing her, he possesses the power of her royal status. She is phallic because she is a representation of the law. Likewise, he desires Salomé because of her position as a powerful sexual object. Power, law, and sexuality here become conflated. The phallus is a “synecdochal” representation of the law, a substitute of the part for the whole. Men have the phallus (and the penis) and they have the law, but they also desire the phallus and the law (the woman, as a symbol of this law, is also a symbolic phallus). Beardsley’s illustrations serve to conflate the female form and the phallus. In each image of Salomé before she receives the head of Jokanaan, her arms are tucked into her sides, and her head is made very large and round with her hair or some kind of ornamentation (for example, see Figures 1 and 2).
Salomé is a representation of the penis, the phallus, and the power of the law that comes with possession of that phallus. Herod desires to possess her, probably as a substitute for his own sterile organ. Herod has the phallus – the throne, but also desires the phallus – Salomé, who is the phallus, potent sexuality.
In this way the binary of gender is reinforced, Herod has the phallus, and Salomé is the phallus. However, Beardsley and Wilde realized that such binaristic distinctions – between men and women, subject and object, masculine and feminine – were actually extremely vulnerable in their rigidity. Such distinctions are constructed through repeated performances. Herod must continually act the role of the desirous male; Herodias and her daughter continually act as objects of that desire. According to Butler, women are feminine because they continue to act in the culturally prescribed role that dictates what “femininity” is, and men are masculine to the extent to which they fulfill society’s expectations of what “masculinity” is. According to Butler, there is nothing that is essentially “masculine” or “feminine,” these concepts are only culturally reiterated practices that are constantly in flux. This is what it means to “perform” gender: “Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (Trouble 173). Because identification is constructed through repeated performance of cultural norms, and because cultural norms are vulnerable to constant fluctuation, “[t]his perpetual displacement constitutes a fluidity of identities that suggests an openness to resignification and recontextualization; parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essentialist gender identities” (Trouble 176). Thus, because gender is merely a reiterated performance, it is open to a change when that reiteration changes and becomes a new kind of iteration. Wilde and Beardsley explore the performativity of gender and the places in which that performativity is susceptible to disruption and change.
Costumes, masks, and cosmetics figure largely in the
illustrations Beardsley produced for Wilde’s play.[1] Simple black masks, worn or held by
servants, appear in five of the illustrations (see, for example, figures 3, 4,
and 5).
Above,
figure 3, from The List of Pictures.
Below
figure 4, Cul de Lampe.
Figure
5, from Enter Herodias.
Two of the illustrations depict Salomé at her toilette (The Toilette of Salomé I. and II.). In each of these two illustrations, her cosmetologists (two different, sexually ambiguous beings) wear masks as they apply her make-up and dress her hair. In the final illustration, miniaturized versions of her beautician (still masked) and a satyr place Salomé’s body in a powder-box (figure 4). Even her aureoles are bejeweled almost every time they are exposed in Beardsley’s illustrations (see figures 1, 6, and 10). All of this preparation contributes to the “performance” of her gender.
In the illustration on the
right (figure 6, The Stomach Dance), we see that femininity quite
literally performed. Salomé is a
model of feminine objectivity in this illustration, as suggested by the
barely disguised erection of the creature accompanying her dance.
Salomé’s makeup and costumes are crucial to her performance of femininity.
This performance, “the dance of the seven veils,” represents an important shift in the structure of power between the Tetrarch and Salomé. Much has been made of this dance and its accompanying veils. Elaine Showalter makes an important contribution to understanding its significance when she states that the dance “is the dance of gender, the delicacy and permeability of the veil separating masculine from feminine, licit from illicit desire” (152).[2] Brad Bucknell, in his examination of the Salomé myth, argues that in the Biblical story, “[i]n the confrontation between Herodias and John (and Herod) the realm of the symbolic (of language, of ‘paternal law’) manifested in the law of the word is in direct conflict with the semiotic. Herodias, unable to compete within the word, resorts to the rhythmic dance of the daughter, the realm of ‘repetitive sonority’ in order to gain power” (504). In other words, the feminine realm of language (the semiotic, or poetic language), overturns the domination of the masculine realm of language (the symbolic, the law of signification represented by the phallus). In Wilde’s play, Salomé is not her mother’s pawn, but a woman acting of her own volition. She uses her own “semiotic” power, her femininity, to subvert the domination of her lustful father-in-law. As Bucknell puts it: “Salomé unveiled and in the moment of the completion of her work, becomes…the icon of destructive femininity, or the projection of the male gaze viewing itself in inverted form” (523). Salomé’s performance of her femininity has revealed the power she holds latently. She has exchanged her performance of femininity for her step-father’s masculine authority. Salomé is determined to use that power to its fullest extent.
While the illustration of The Stomach Dance is important, it more significant that Beardsley chose to illustrate Salomé at her toilette twice after that, scenes which did not occur in the text. In these illustrations, Salomé seems to be removing the “costume” of her femininity (figures 7 and 8, The Toilette of Salomé, I. and II.).
In the first of the two pictures, she is dressed in a long gown and her hair is
done up carefully. In the second, she is
naked again, and her hair is down. Her
hand is “resting” in her lap, or, as her smile suggests, this hand is between her
legs and she is masturbating. In either
case, she has removed the garments and accoutrements that helped to identify
her gender. She has pleased Herod, and
is preparing to exchange her role as feminine object for masculine power.
As mentioned above, Butler locates the possibility for
subversion of patriarchal power in subversive performances of gender. “The more insidious and effective strategy
[for subversion of the patriarchal power structure] is a thoroughgoing
appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves, not
merely to contest ‘sex,’ but to articulate the convergence of multiple sexual
discourses at the site of ‘identity’ in order to render that category, in
whatever form, permanently problematic” (Trouble 163). This subversion of gendered roles recurs
throughout the text, especially in the confused gendered identities of
hermaphrodites and androgynous beings.
Both Herodias and Salomé appear with somewhat aged and masculine facial
features in the illustrations
Figure
9, Enter Herodias. Figure
10, The Eyes of Herod.
(see figures 9 and 10). Their servants are almost always ambiguously gendered (see figures 7-10). Even the servants with penises appear rather masculine (note the servant with the tea set on the right side of The Toilette II. [figure 8]), the contours of his profile, even his “breasts,” mimic Salomé’s very “feminine” form.
Equally ambiguous are the two figures in The Woman in the Moon (figure 11—which was originally titled The Man in the Moon). Although it has been suggested that the two figures represent John and Salomé, this reading is completely inconsistent with the text, for at no point does John/Jokanaan want anything to do with Salomé. Elaine Showalter identifies this image as a representation of a homosexual couple: “The Page is on the right, androgynously dressed in a flowing robe with a triangular dark fan hanging down (the fan he carries for Herodias) that could be either masculine or feminine, phallic or pubic. Narraboth, the naked male figure on the left, holds out one arm in a gesture of protection or prevention…” (152). Although her reading is almost convincing, I believe that it is, in fact, the Page (on the left) who holds a protective posture toward the object of his infatuation, the Syrian Captain Narraboth. The moon looks on with desiring eyes. This “reading” of the picture is more consistent with the story, in which the Page worries about the “strange” look of the moon, and the danger it portends. A few pages into the play, the young Page laments the loss of his lover:
The young Syrian has slain himself! The young captain has slain himself! He has slain himself who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and ear-rings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself! …Well I knew that the moon was seeking a dead thing, but I knew not that it was he whom she sought. Ah! Why did I not hide him from the moon? (61)
Beardsley’s androgynous figures under a moon gendered by name only would certainly confuse the heterosexist Victorian audience. Although Beardsley has been criticized for the inconsistency of his illustrations to match with Wilde’s text,[3] it is conceivable that this was intentional, a way to force the viewer into reconsidering the gendered-ness of what was happening in the play. One is confused by the illustrations that seem to have no place in the text, so one looks at them carefully to make sense of them. In this way, the viewer is forced to question the gender and position of each of the figures in each of his drawings.
Showalter, in her very
queer reading of the Salomé project, posits that in this particular
illustration “Wilde is represented as a huge moon-face, his heavy-lidded eyes
gazing languidly at the frightened couple….Wilde here is both a specter of
judgment and a gay god of the night who looks down on the lovers” (152). Again, I would disagree with Showalter and
offer instead that Beardsley’s moon’s gender is deliberately ambiguous. Over the course of three important illustrations
the “Woman” in the moon seems to morph into King Herod. In The Woman in the Moon (figure 11),
the moon is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s “…envious moon,/ Who is already sick and pale with grief,” (Romeo
and Juliet II, ii, 4-5). Although
the title of the illustration tells us she is a woman, there is little else to
suggest that gender specificity. In The
Platonic Lament (figure 12), the moon is lower in the sky and the defining
circle has been removed. Then, in the
only illustration of Herod (figure 13 The Eyes of Herod), his round face
is
disembodied, floating, and his eyes and the lines around his mouth reflect the
lines around the face and mouth of the moon in the earlier pictures. The transition of the moon from woman to king
is also a reflection of the changing balance of power in the play. There is always one possessor of the law, but
that position of power is constantly in flux.
In the text, the moon appears differently to each person who views it. “Her” appearance changes to reflect the desire or fear of her viewer. The Page is afraid of the moon: “She is like a dead woman. You would fancy she was looking for dead things” (25). To Salomé, she appears like “a piece of money…a little silver flower….she is a virgin…She has never abandoned herself to men…” (40). The Syrian sees “a little princess, whose eyes are eyes of amber” (46). To Herod, she first appears as “a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. She is naked, too” (64). Then, just before Salomé’s dance, Herod is alarmed to see that the moon “has become red as blood” (101). Herodias seems to be the only one not affected by the moon’s aspect: “the moon is like the moon, that is all” (65). The changing appearance of the moon, depending on who sees her, raises the question of how one’s perception of the Other is sometimes reflective of oneself. Butler’s theory often finds itself in the uncomfortable position of defining identity as repudiation of the Other. This position is frustrating to Butler because the necessity of an “Other” requires that someone or some group is always in the position of being alienated. However, Wilde and Beardsley here open the possibility of the Other as a direct reflection of the self, as opposed to a negative against which one defines oneself. That is, instead of seeing what one is not, one might just see and react against what one is in the perception of the Other. For Wilde and Beardsley, this mirroring opens possibilities of gender redefinition.
The performances of Beardsley’s and Wilde’s characters significantly disrupt the heterosexual normativity on which the patriarchy depends for its authority. According to Butler “all social systems are vulnerable at their margins, and…all margins are accordingly considered dangerous. If the body is synecdochal for the social system per se or a site in which open systems converge, then any kind of unregulated permeability constitutes a site of pollution and endangerment” (Trouble 168). In the text, and especially in the illustrations of Salomé, these ambiguously gendered and sexualized characters move from the margins and into the forefront of the tragedy. They “pollute” and “endanger” the established rules of the patriarchy by confusing the gender and sexual binaries. It is sometimes impossible to distinguish between a male and a female in these illustrations, and the lines between masculinity and femininity are blurred as well. This confusion is exacerbated by the hermaphroditic characters in The Title Page (figure 14) and The List of Pictures (figure 15). The demonic character on the title page possesses both “male” genitalia and the “female” breasts. However, this body is most creepy because of the eyes that look back at the viewer from its breasts and navel. It is framed on either side by a phallic candle, and is being worshipped by a small and youthful-looking creature with a semi-erect penis. The body of the creature in The List of Pictures can’t even really be classified as hermaphroditic, because although it has the sagging breasts of an older woman, its bottom half is that of a goat. Chris Snodgrass has noted that
Beardsley often presents his hermaphrodites as a combination of beauty and beast, of aesthetic refinement and bestial nature…In [The Title Page] Beardsley gives the attending acolyte insectlike wings and snakelike Medusan hair; and the term-mounted god has horns and cat’s eyes….[E]ach gender is grotesquely accentuated, set off in sharp paradoxical conflict within one body, thus emphasizing bestiality as well as confusing taxonomic distinctions and making impossible the repression of either gender, even exposing the fact that the viewer may be attracted to both….[T]he ambiguities Beardsley encodes into his sexually conspicuous figures also throw into question the presumably unequivocal moral principles Victorians prized and linked so closely to sexuality. (61-62, my italics)
These bodies further confuse the performance of traditional roles of femininity and masculinity, as well as sex because they aren’t classifiable as either male or female, or even human, although they appear thus. By operating at its margins, the writer and illustrator disrupt and dismantle the binaristic foundations on which the Victorian patriarchy is built.
Along with exploiting the “gaps and fissures” which occur in the rigid patriarchal law, Beardsley and Wilde subvert that tradition by disrupting what it means to “have” or to “be” the phallus. In conjunction with parody and performativity, Butler locates the feminine, or more precisely the lesbian, appropriation of the phallus as a site for radical change in the hegemonic and heterosexual social structures. Although the phallus is a site of patriarchal control, it is also an idealization, and “precisely because it is an idealization, one which no body can adequately approximate, the phallus is a transferable phantasm, and its naturalized link to masculine morphology can be called into question through an aggressive reterritorialization” (Bodies 86). This “reterritorialization” is the appropriation by a woman, specifically a lesbian, of the phallus. The “lesbian phallus” subverts the very foundation of patriarchal models of power. “If the phallus is an imaginary effect (which is reified as the privileged signifier of the symbolic order), then its structural place is no longer determined by the logical relation of mutual exclusion entailed by a heterosexist version of sexual difference in which men are said to ‘have’ and women to ‘be’ the phallus” (Bodies 88). This disruption of the heterosexist norms would allow anyone to “have” the phallus (the “privileged signifier,” the power to name and to control). Redistribution and recirculation of the phallus among women and homosexuals would mean that they would “have” the power denied to them by the heterosexist patriarchy. While it is attractive, Butler’s theory founders here because she refuses to identify the materiality of the lesbian phallus, and doesn’t propose any tangible method for its reappropriation. She insists that it is imaginary, but that the lesbian should “have” it anyway.
Salomé offers one possible solution to this problem. In this last section, I will argue that Salomé reappropriates the lesbian phallus, and that this is symbolized by her desire for and possession of Jokanaan’s head. Salomé’s fixation on Jokanaan’s head might be her desire for lesbian sex. The first thing that Salomé notices about Jokanaan’s body are his cave-like (or vagina-like) eyes: “They are like black caverns where dragons dwell. They are like the black caverns of Egypt in which the dragons make their lairs” (50-51). Almost immediately after, she tells him that she is desirous of his body (55). When she is rejected, she repudiates his body and fixates on his hair (57). Again she is rebuffed, and switches her infatuation to his mouth:
It is thy mouth that I desire, Jokanaan. Thy mouth is like a band of scarlet on a tower of ivory. It is like a pomegranate cut with a knife of ivory. The pomegranate-flowers that blossom in the gardens of Tyre, and are redder than roses, are not so red. The red blasts of trumpets that herald the approach of kings…are not so red….There is nothing in the world so red as thy mouth…Let me kiss thy mouth. (58)
After this list of Jokanaan’s mouth’s very genitalized qualities, Salomé demands his mouth eight more times, twice after he returns to his prison: “I will kiss thy mouth Jokanaan; I will kiss thy mouth” (63). Her obsession with his blood-, coral-, and wine-red mouth, again, might be conflated with a desire for the female sexual organs. Salomé isn’t desperate for his body, she is desperate for his mouth. According to Showalter, Freud posits that “the decapitated head of Medusa with its snaky locks is a ‘genitalized head,’ an upward displacement of the sexual organs, so that the mouth stands for the vagina dentata, and the snakes for pubic hair” (146). In Beardsley’s illustrations, hair is very frequently portrayed in snake-like locks. Jokanaan’s decapitated head is very Medusa-like (see figs. 17 and 18). While the male is typically afraid of this toothed female genitalia, Salomé, for one, is “amorous” of it. She wants Jokanaan’s head/mouth, and she dances for Herod to get it. She demands it eight times from Herod, who is forced (by law) to comply. Consideration of the vagina dentata sheds light on the strangely un-Beardsleyan Original Cover Design (figure 16). The peacock tails in this illustration take on a rather sinister appearance, as eight vagina dentatas threaten the reader.[4]
Figure
10, The Original Cover Design.
Salomé’s fixation on this “genitalized head” represents her desire for an appropriation of the phallus. Jokanaan’s head becomes the lesbian phallus, as Salomé gains power over the patriarch. She now “has” the phallus that she desires (Jokanaan’s head). She (at least for the moment) can no longer “be” the phallus, as she becomes repulsive to her once desirous step-father. “I will not look at things, I will not suffer things to look at me. Put out the torches! Hide the moon! Hide the stars!” (119). The patriarchy is subverted, as symbolized by the moment Salomé’s wish is granted. As she peers into the cistern in which Jokanaan is imprisoned and executed she cries: “Ah! Something has fallen upon the ground. I heard something fall. It is the sword of the headsman” (114). Although (happily for Salomé) it is not actually the sword, but rather the head of Jokanaan (presumably) that has fallen to the floor, the fallen sword is representative of the changing ownership of the phallus. The phallic sword has dropped, but the phallic vagina has been raised. Also symbolizing the loss of patriarchal power is the shriveled and blackened phallic arm of the black slave that raises Jokanaan’s head out of the cistern (figure 17, The Dancer’s Reward). Momentarily, Salomé “has” the lesbian phallus, the genitalized head of Jokanaan, bleeding as though it were menstruating. In The Climax (figure 18), Salomé’s own hair becomes erect, reflecting not only her appropriation of masculine power, but also the gender confusion that such reappropriation initiates. The erect locks also reflect the recurrent image of the peacock necks and heads which often accompany the Princess and her costumes.
Figures
17 & 18, The Dancer’s Reward and The Climax.
Unfortunately, at the end of Salomé, the patriarchy, and thus the repressive law of Victorian heterosexuality, regain power. Interestingly, however, Salomé is not killed by being penetrated by a sword, but rather she is crushed between the shields of the two soldiers. Although Beardsley did not make an illustration for this scene of heterosexual and patriarchal violence, one can imagine the phallic Salomé being crushed between two chargers as a symbol of either the danger of lesbian homosexuality or the power of male-dominated heterosexuality. Although temporarily confused and undermined, the patriarchy, in the end, destroyed the homosexually eroticized Salomé. It is notable that she appears most “feminine” in her death, as she is laid to rest in her cosmetic box. In the end, this play is a “tragedy” because the patriarchy remains firmly in control of sexual law.
Cul de
lampe.
Works
Cited:
Bucknell, Brad. “On ‘Seeing’ Salomé.” ELH, 60.2 (1993): 503-526.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993.
---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Gilbert, Elliot L. “ ‘Tumult of Images’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salomé.” Victorian Studies, 26.2 (1983): 133-159.
Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siecle. New York: Viking, 1990.
Snodgrass, Chris. Aubrey Beardsley, Dandy of the Grotesque. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.
Wilde, Oscar and Aubrey Beardsley (illustrator). Salomé. New York: Three Sirens Press, 1900.