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Historically, both in mythology and religion,
women were frequently portrayed as having the potential to
ruin men. Female figures such as Lilith, Eve, and Pandora
were early femmes
fatales. In the Victorian era, custom required upper
and middle-class women to be asexual and appear as invalids.
In contrast to their entirely asexual and often sickly wives
and daughters, men saw working-class women as healthy and
beautiful sexual beings, something that made these women
irresistible.
Artists and intellectuals of the
nineteenth century became obsessed with the Biblical story
of the innocent Salome and the guilt of her mother, Herodias,
who incites her to dance for her stepfather, Herod. They
shifted the blame for John the Baptist’s decapitation
from her mother to Salome, making her the symbol of feminine
evil and bloodthirsty lust. Salome fulfills her passion
by kissing the dead lips of John the Baptist, who had previously
rejected her. This new and more familiar version of Salome
depicts her as a seductress of her stepfather and a murderer
of a saint, thereby becoming a symbol of the erotic and
dangerous woman – the femme
fatale – that the artists of the nineteenth century
so liked to portray.
The French Symbolist painter Gustave Moreau gave the story
of Salome its initial impetus in 1876. He had already
introduced into the artistic and intellectual milieu of the
time a large repertoire of perverse women. Oscar Wilde, influenced
by Moreau, presented his own vision of the decadent femme
fatale in his play Salome. Wilde's play became the source
and inspiration for Richard Strauss's one-act opera Salome, first
produced in Dresden in 1905. Its first production in Toledo
was in 1979 at the Toledo Masonic Auditorium.
Photo: Amy Johnson, Salome |
