Salome – Desire, Doom, and the Moonlit Dance

A moonlit tragedy where desire speaks louder than law, and one dance changes the fate of a prophet.

Of all Oscar Wilde’s works, Salome may be the strangest. Written in French, banned from the English stage, and wrapped in religious and sexual scandal, it looks at first like a simple Biblical retelling: the story of Herod’s step-daughter who demands the head of John the Baptist. But Wilde turns that story into something far more unsettling – a dream-like tragedy about obsession, the gaze, and the price of saying I want in a world built to silence you.

Where his society comedies sparkle with drawing-room wit, Salome glows with a different light: moonlight on marble, blood on silver, the glitter of jewels on skin. Lines circle back on themselves, images repeat like a chant, and the atmosphere is thick with perfume, prophecy, and doom.

1. The story in a single night

The play takes place in one enclosed, dangerous space: Herod’s palace terrace under a huge white moon. The prophet Jokanaan (John the Baptist) is imprisoned in a cistern below, his voice rising up like a warning the court refuses to hear. Above ground, the royal family circle each other in a tangle of desire and fear.

Salome, the young princess, is tired of Herod’s hungry gaze and the drunken talk of the court. She steps out onto the terrace and hears the prophet’s voice denouncing the sins of Herod and Herodias. The soldiers, fascinated but afraid, describe Jokanaan as a holy man. Salome is seized by curiosity and demands to see him.

When Jokanaan is brought up from the cistern, Salome’s fascination becomes possession. She praises his body – his hair, his skin, his mouth – with an intensity that makes the prophet recoil. Jokanaan rejects her utterly, calling her the daughter of adultery and prophecying doom. His rejection only sharpens her desire. She begs to kiss his mouth. He curses her and is taken back below.

Herod enters, terrified by ominous signs – the moon looks strange, the sound of wings is in the air – and obsessively fixated on Salome. He begs her to dance for him. She refuses, until she bargains: she will dance if he swears to give her whatever she asks. Herod agrees, swearing an oath in front of everyone.

Salome performs the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils” – an invention of Wilde, never mentioned in the Bible – and the court is intoxicated. When the dance ends, she claims her reward: the head of Jokanaan on a silver charger. Herod tries to buy her off with jewels, peacocks, the veil of the Temple, anything – but she is implacable. He has sworn, and she will have what she asked for.

Jokanaan is executed offstage. The head is brought to Salome. Alone with it, she delivers one of Wilde’s most disturbing speeches, finally kissing the dead prophet’s mouth. Herod, horrified, orders her to be crushed beneath the shields of his soldiers. The play ends with blood and moonlight.

2. Desire, the gaze, and who gets to look

One of the most powerful threads in Salome is the question of the gaze – who is looked at, who does the looking, and what that look does to power. At the start of the play, Salome seems to be the object of everyone’s gaze: Herod lusts after her, the Page of Herodias watches her anxiously, even the soldiers comment on her beauty.

Wilde’s twist is that Salome refuses to stay only an object. The moment she hears Jokanaan’s voice, she becomes the one who looks – and the one who demands. Her desire is not polite, romantic, or socially acceptable. It is hungry, repetitive, insistent:

“I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan… I will kiss thy mouth.”

In Victorian moral terms, this is shocking. Women in respectable literature were supposed to be desired, not desiring. Salome breaks that rule again and again. She names what she wants; she pursues it; she forces Herod to keep his oath even when it disgusts him.

At the same time, Wilde keeps the audience uneasy. Salome’s desire is understandable – a reaction against a world where she is treated as decoration – but it is also terrifying. By the end she is willing to accept a severed head in place of a living man, to kiss lips that can no longer consent. Wilde refuses to give us a comfortable heroine. Instead he shows desire escaping the polite boundaries society sets for it and becoming something dangerous, even murderous.

3. Voice, silence, and the prophet in the cistern

Jokanaan hardly appears on stage, yet his presence dominates the play. At first we encounter him only as a voice out of the darkness, hurling thunderous phrases against sin and corruption. His words cut across the silky, stylised language of the court like a shard of glass.

Wilde loved paradox. In Salome the holy man is locked away, unheard by those in power; the corrupt king and queen sit above him on cushions, pretending to be secure. The cistern becomes a symbol of everything society wants to bury – truth, conscience, inconvenient judgement.

Salome is drawn to that buried voice precisely because it is forbidden. When she finally sees Jokanaan, she tries to turn the prophet into yet another beautiful object. He refuses, clinging to the purity of his message. It is a deadly clash:

• Salome wants the prophet’s body without his words.
• Jokanaan wants to speak his words without being reduced to a body.

Neither wins. His head is severed; her desire is frozen forever in that final kiss. As so often in Wilde, the attempt to separate body and spirit ends in disaster.

4. Beauty, death, and the Decadent mood

Salome is soaked in the atmosphere of the Decadent movement: peacock fans, perfumes, precious stones, slow repeated phrases, and the sense that the world is sliding toward ruin and loving every moment of it. Wilde gives the play an obsessive visual language:

• the white moon looking “like a little piece of money” or “a dead woman’s face”;
• blood on the silver charger;
• jewels that glitter as bribery for a guilty conscience.

The scandal around Salome was double. On the surface it was religious – Biblical characters on stage, blasphemous imagery, a prophet’s head as a kind of perverse relic. Underneath, it was about sexuality: a step-father’s gaze on his young step-daughter, necrophiliac desire, the spectacle of a woman demanding what she wants from a terrified man.

This is Wilde at his most uncompromising. There is no cosy reconciliation, no polite bow to respectability. The court does not learn a moral lesson; it lurches from drunken excitement to horror. The only thing that remains constant is the moon – cold, indifferent, watching.

a) Behind every image, a question

Wilde often insisted that art should not preach. Yet his images won’t sit still; they ask questions even when the play refuses to answer them:

• What happens when desire is never allowed to speak – does it come back twisted?
• What does a society do with prophets who tell the truth – lock them away, or cut off their heads?
• Can beauty and violence really be separated, or do we secretly enjoy watching them meet?

Salome doesn’t give tidy solutions. It simply holds the picture still and forces us to keep looking.

5. Why Salome still matters

For modern readers, Salome can feel remote at first – the language is stylised, the setting ancient, the characters speak in repetitions and symbols rather than naturalistic dialogue. But beneath the surface, its nerves are very close to ours.

We live in a culture obsessed with images, public scandals, and the fine line between fascination and exploitation. Wilde stages that tension with brutal clarity. A young woman performs for a male audience, her body turned into entertainment; but she uses that performance to claim terrifying power. A holy man is turned into a spectacle; his severed head becomes the most talked-about “object” in the palace.

The play also prefigures Wilde’s own fate. Written in 1891 and premiered in 1896 while he was in prison, Salome imagines a world where desire – especially queer or forbidden desire – is punished publicly, yet continues to exert a strange, haunting power. Herod’s court tries to go back to normal after the execution, but the moon and the blood say otherwise.

For students, Salome is a rich text to explore:

• a clash between Biblical story and Decadent aesthetics;
• a fierce study of female desire and male fear;
• a drama where language itself is like a dance – circling, repeating, slipping from praise into curse.

And for anyone reading Wilde as a whole, Salome is the dark twin of the comedies. The sparkling epigrams are gone; what remains is the same intelligence turned toward nightmare instead of drawing-room conversation. It is the play where Wilde lets the moonlit part of his imagination speak.

In the end, Salome is not just a story about a girl, a dance, and a prophet’s head. It is an x-ray of desire and power: who is allowed to want, who is punished for wanting, and what happens when the promise “you can have anything you ask” is taken at its word. Under the cold light of Wilde’s moon, nobody – not king, not prophet, not princess – escapes untouched.