Review: Marie Kawthar Daouda, L’Anti-Salomé: Représentations de la féminité bienveillante au temps de la Décadence (1850-1910) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2020)

Abstract

Salome is undoubtedly the most prominent femme fatale of the fin de siècle. In his 1967 study of Salome, Michel Décaudin even calls her a ‘fin de siècle myth’.[i] From Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetic fragment ‘Hérodiade’ and Gustave Flaubert’s tale Herodias (1877) to Jules Laforgue’s and Oscar Wilde’s versions of Salomé (1887; 1892), many writers used the young Jewish princess as a literary trope; she became, so to speak, ‘inevitable’.[ii] Indeed, Salome was the subject of poems, plays, stories, novels, operas, even posters and decorative objects, as well as paintings (J.-K. Huysmans famously dedicated many pages of À rebours (1884) to Gustave Moreau’s symbolist representations of Salome, which prompted Bram Dijkstra to write that Moreau’s Salomé (1876) ‘inaugurated the late nineteenth century’s feverish exploration of every possible visual detail expressive of this young lady’s hunger for St. John the Baptist’s head’).[iii] Salome was in fact so omnipresent in the literary field that in 1912 Maurice Krafft claimed to have recorded 2,789 French poets who had written about the dancer, before she slowly faded out of fashion later in the century.[iv]

[i] Michel Décaudin, ‘Un Mythe “fin de siècle”: Salomé’, Comparative Literature Studies, 4.1/2 (1967), 109-17 (p. 109).

[ii] Pierre Jaudon refers to ‘l’inévitable Salomé’ in L’Étouffement (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Plume, 1902), p. 86.

[iii] Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 384.

[iv] Quoted in Décaudin, ‘Un Mythe “fin de siècle”: Salomé’, p. 109.