ABSTRACT

This essay explores Wilde’s pervasive and long-lasting influence on European literature and art through a comparative reading of Salome (1893) and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s tragedy Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien (1911) based on their use of typical cross-cultural myths of the Decadent period. The fundamental assumption is that Salome constituted a hypo-text for D’Annunzio, whose tragedy enlarged upon such aesthetic, cultural, and social issues tackled in Wilde’s seminal drama as inter-art experimentation, the eroticization of religion, gender subversion, and spiritual questioning, all developed within a form of Symbolist theater that paves the way to Modernism. By doing so, D’Annunzio contributed to the spread of Wildean poetics not only in Italy and France, where he resided in the years 1910–15 and where Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien was first represented and published, but also across Europe. Wilde’s evocation of legendary ancient worlds and D’Annunzio’s peculiar reconstruction of them in his play set the canon for subsequent interpretations of the decadent myths of Saint Sebastian and Salomé in and outside literature and across the arts.