Hamlet and Decadent Reimagination

Abstract

The decadents and Aesthetes of the fin de siècle exhibit a distinct penchant for incorporating diverse artistic works into their idiosyncratic aesthetic universe, including those which may appear alien to the decadent ethos. This process facilitates transformative and provocative new understandings of the original texts. Two exemplary cases of this practice can be observed in the treatment of the classical poet Sappho and of the biblical princess Salomé as they are rendered in decadent literary works. Nicole Albert credits Charles Baudelaire with sparking the nineteenth century rediscovery of Sappho with his references to the poet in Les fleurs du mal (1857), further popularized in English thereafter by his disciple, Algernon Charles Swinburne. The decadent caricature of Sappho reduces her to a vessel of transgressive sexuality, effectively disregarding any notion of biographical fidelity to the poet or her extant literary legacy. Petra Dierkes-Thrun tracks the evolution of Salomé’s representation in the same period, and a pattern becomes discernible in the decadent treatment of canonical figures. The early works of decadents and Symbolists transform the New Testament narrative ‘into a lurid tale of dangerous female sexuality and cunning, physical passion, and pathological perversity’, setting the stage for the character’s metamorphosis in Oscar Wilde’s 1891 play. The obedient daughter of the biblical story becomes the apotheosis of the decadent femme fatale.