ABSTRACT
This chapter construes Wilde's play as self-consciously looking back on its multifarious interartistic sources on the one hand, and, on the other, as looking forward to its future artistic interpretations. It draws the interartistic transformations of Wilde's play in Aubrey Beardsley's drawings and in Richard Strauss's opera. Huysmans's A Rebours captures the bejewelled Salome of Gustave Moreau's paintings in luxurious, erotically charged ekphrases which fuse the visual and the verbal. The synaesthetic potential of the Salome myth fulfilled itself in Oscar Wilde's Salom, and the legend's interartistic strivings reached their pinnacle in the play's intermedial transpositions. Wilde's Salom is structured neatly around two pairs of oppositions: that of the idolatrous eye and the iconoclastic and iconophobic voice, and that of the material and spiritual worlds. The chapter demonstrates the workings of the decadent procedure of murdering and then reviving a dead language by engendering new extra-verbal, sensory life.
