Through an interdisciplinary and comparative rhetorical and semiotic analysis of the Salomé theme in the wake of Oscar Wilde's 1891 French Symbolist play Salomé, my dissertation analyzes the nexus of aesthetics, sexuality, and morality in late-nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Transatlantic cultural modernity. Considering a variety of Salomé versions in literature, opera, dance, and film from the 1850s to the 1990s, I develop a critical historical genealogy of the epistemological functions of figurations of sexual and aesthetic excess, transgression, and “perversity” as carriers of a modernist transformative aesthetics of sexuality. I argue that against the background of the aesthetic-metaphysical denouement described paradigmatically by writers such as Mallarmé, Wilde, Nietzsche, Yeats, Adorno, Bataille, and Foucault, the Enlightenment project of metaphysical transformative aesthetics continued, albeit in conflicted and often contradictory forms, in images of the sexually ecstatic and transgressive body. In the Salomé theme, two such cultural figurations of sexual and aesthetic transgression converge: excessive female sexuality and male homosexuality (identified with Salomé and Wilde respectively). Showing how these representations have historically been associated with utopian modern individualism on the one hand, and apocalyptic cultural discourses of sexual, aesthetic, and moral “perversity” on the other, my thesis illuminates central intersections between aesthetics and sexuality in twentieth-century Western modernity, and suggests combined points of access for modernist studies, and lesbian and gay, as well as feminist, studies.; Chapters one and two investigate Wilde's fin-de-siècle thematic affiliations (Heine, Flaubert, Huysmans, Laforgue), and the Symbolist-Modernist dancer topos in Mallarmé, Symons, and Yeats. Chapter three offers a critical comparison of Wilde's Salomé with Richard Strauss's 1905 modernist operatic adaptation. Despite Wilde's and Strauss's relatively successful popular avant-gardism, the female artists who adapted the aesthetically and erotically charged theme in the 1910s and 20s, Maud Allan and Alla Nazimova, experienced severe personal and professional backlashes (chapter four). The continuation of the theme toward a superficially progressive political homosexual humanism in the recent films Salome's Last Dance and A Man of No Importance, as well as some literary criticism and related cultural representations of Wilde, illustrates the ongoing problematic impact of modernist structures of aesthetics and sexuality today.
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