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Oscar Wilde's one-act play Salomé occupies a puzzling place in the late nineteenth-century discourse of Orientalism. One sign of Orientalism, according to Edward Said, is "the distillation of essential ideas about the Orient-its sensuality, its tendency to despotism, its aberrant mentality, its habits of inaccuracy, its backwardness-into a separate and unchallenged coherence,"1 all of which seem to characterize Wilde's drama of excess. In Salomé, we have familiar binary oppositions: sensuality/ spirituality, the Jew/the Christian, Salomé/Jokanaan, the Orient/ the Occident. The Jewish royal family embodies Oriental sensuality and irrationality; the outrageousness of Salomé's desire and cruelty upstages the lascivious tyrant and his promiscuous wife. Religious disputes among Jews are belittled as meaningless babble. Herod's kingdom of Judaea is like a treasure island full of perfume and incense, jewels and exotica. The "Oriental clichés" Said speaks of in Gustave Flaubert's novels-"harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on"-hold equally true for Wilde's play.2 Salomé seems to be every inch an Orientalist work.
Given all its Orientalist characteristics, it is odd that Wilde's Salomé has seldom been regarded as such. Largely dismissed in earlier criticism as a mere pastiche of previous Salomé materials from the Bible to French symbolist works,3 the play has gained "its rightful degree of prominence in the Wildean canon" only in recent decades.4 The re-evaluation of the play has mainly to do with the ascendancy of feminism and queer studies since the 1970s, and with the rehabilitation of Wilde as sexual martyr for "the love that dare not speak its name." Critical opinions vary as to the nature of Salomé's sexuality and Wilde's attitude toward it. Undeniably, the play reveals a great deal about late Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality, in comparison to which, Orientalism seems to be a minor issue. Furthermore, it may sound out of place to speak of Orientalism for such an iconoclastic work, hailed by some critics as an audacious expression of female or gay sexuality. Wilde's marginal status as sexual dissident and Irish in imperial London further complicates the matter, as discourses of gender and race share the logic of an inferiority/superiority binarism. If Salomé were charged with Orientalism, which has not happened so far to my knowledge, then the ready defense...