ABSTRACT

This chapter describes the dimension of the sexual-pathological tendency raised by Kalbeck. Rather than making Salome's sexual perversity the thrust of the narrative, as Kalbeck and many others have done, the reading offered here foregrounds another form of feminist reading, one that shifts the focus from Salome onto the elements of ethnic and familial rot residing at the core of Herod's court. As Kalbeck rightly observed, unnatural desires and wanton degenerate behaviour are indeed the stuff of Salome; however, wantonness and degeneracy are not exclusively the domain of the title character. The dirt residing within Salome the opera runs deep. As Sander Gilman has noted, in setting Wilde's text, Strauss not only signalled his break with Wagnerism, he also identified the cultural avant-garde with Jewishness. The new technologies and devices employed by Egoyan in the Canadian Opera Company's (COC's) production of Salome open up hitherto unsuspected interpretive potentialities.