ABSTRACT
Starting from the observation that many playwrights begin to write more detailed stage directions regarding costumes and characters’ bodies during the late nineteenth century, this chapter explores the ways that a literary text can (or can’t) control an onstage image. I read the “textualizing” of costumes as a response to the problem of the performing body within modernism, which troubled Symbolist writers in particular. This chapter uses queer theory – especially the work of Judith Butler and Eve Sedgwick – to understand the slipperiness of the mimetic material body. I begin by considering Richard Wagner’s relationship to costume and corporeality onstage, reading the undressing/armoring scene central to Parsifal as a way of exposing masculinity as a performative construct. The chapter continues with Oscar Wilde, reading first his Symbolist play Salomé (with its own central undressing scene, pointing towards an unperformable identity) and then his turn towards visual art in the character descriptions for An Ideal Husband. Together, these writers’ “queer” costume stage directions illuminate some central tensions within modernism: the relationship between image and text, the obsession but also frustration with surfaces, and the paradox of onstage visibility.
