Decadent Femme Fatale. Counter-narratives of the Biblical Salome’s Myth in Fin de Siècle France, England & Poland

elective courses

(in Polish) Znajomość j. angielskiego min. na poz. B2.

Fin de siècle tensions are inextricably linked with its "salomania": the decadent obsession with femme fatale, of whom Salome is one of the most powerful incarnations. The main question to be answered during the course will be the following: Why is the Salomé myth so powerful in the European fin de siècle era?

The course offers a comparative analysis of the representations of Salomé in a number of literary and artistic adaptations of the myth, focusing on close-reading of three of them: a short story Hérodias by Gustave Flaubert (1877), a tragedy Salomé by Oscar Wilde (1893) and a poetical drama Uczta Herodiady by Jan Kasprowicz (1905). They are inextricably interconnected and represent the evolution of the Salome narrative as a vertical movement, showing a woman that rebels against the parameters written for her in the context of the old Europe in decline (with its “mission civilisatrice”), scandals surrounding female sexuality and hypermasculinised male honour.

Students will be working with different hypotheses based on various methodological approaches, among others René’s Girard theory of scapegoating, gender theory, feminist literary & visual theories, as well as comparative literary & historical approaches current in more traditional scholarship. They will examine the forces standing behind the extreme power of fin de siècle Salome in France, England and Poland, and analyse the subsequent literary & artistic reinterpretations of the biblical Salome as focalisers of the era’s political, historical and social tensions.

This course seeks to provide research training by exploring a range of literary and cultural theories through which texts of all sorts may be conceptualised, criticised and analysed. We will study a broad chronological and national range of seminal writers & artists.

I. Primary Sources:

Flaubert, Gustave, 'Hérodias', in Trois contes, ed. by Pierre-Marc de Biasi (Paris: GF Flammarion, 2009), pp. 109-159. English translation: 'Hérodias', in Three Tales (New York: Dover Publications: 2012). Polish translation: Herodiada, w: Trzy baśnie, przeł. R. Lis I J.M. Rymkiewicz, Warszawa, Sic!, 2009.

_, Voyage en Égypte, ed. by Pierre-Marc de Biasi (Paris: Grasset, 1991). In English: Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour (1972).

Holy Bible. New Revised Standard Version, (New York, Shanghai: Oxford University Press, 1995).

Kasprowicz, Jan, 'Uczta Herodiady', in Pisma zebrane, vol. 4, ed. by Roman Loth (Kraków- Wrocław: Wyd. Literackie, 1984), pp. 245-403.

Wilde, Oscar, 'Salomé', in The complete works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 5, ed. by Joseph Donohue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 325-780. In Polish: Salome: tragedia Oskara Wilde'a, przeł. W. Fromowicz, Bydgoszcz, Arcanum, 1992.

_, The Letters of Oscar Wilde, ed. by Rupert Hart-Davis (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1962).

II. Secondary sources:

Beckson, Karl, London in the 1890s: A Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1992).

Bentley, Toni, 'Salome: The Daughter of Iniquity', Sisters of Salome (New Haven; London:Yale University Press, 2002).

Cassou‐Yager, Hélène, 'The Myth of Salome in the Decadent Movement: Flaubert, Moreau, Huysmans', The European Legacy, 2.1 (Routledge 1997), pp. 185-190.

Conklin, Alice L., A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa 1895-1930 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

Décaudin, Michel, 'Un Mythe Fin de Siècle: Salomé', Comparative Literature Studies 4, 1.2 (1967).

Dijkstra, Bram, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Dottin-Orsini, Mireille, Cette femme qu'ils disent fatale. Textes et images de la misogynie fin-de- siècle (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1993).

Gagnier, Regenia A., Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986).

Hanson, Ellis, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

Marchal, Bertrand, Salomé : entre vers et prose : Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Flaubert, Huysmans (Paris: J. Corti, 2005).

Marshall, Gail (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Menon, Elizabeth Kolbinger, Evil by Design: the Creation and Marketing of the Femme Fatale (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Neginsky, Rosina, Salome: The Image of a Woman Who Never Was; Salome: Nymph, Seducer, Destroyer (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

van Os, Henk, ed., Femmes Fatales, 1860-1910 (Wommelgem: BAI, 2002).

Weir, David, Decadence and the Making of Modernism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995).

Zagona, Helen Grace, The Legend of Salome and the Principle of Art for Art's Sake (Paris: Droz, Minard, 1960).

III. Approaches:

a) scapegoating theory:

Girard, René, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972). English translation: Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). Polish translation: Sacrum i przemoc (Poznań: Brama-Książnica Włóczęgów i Uczonych, 1993).

_, Le Bouc émissaire (Paris: Grasset, 1982). English translation: The Scapegoat, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). Polish translation: Kozioł ofiarny (Łódź 1987, 1991).

_, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996).

Dumouchel, Paul (ed.), Violence and Truth: on the Work of René Girard (London: Athlone, 1988).

b) feminist literary & visual theories:

Alsop, Rachel et al., Theorizing Gender (Polity: 2002).

Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: on the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Cixous, Hélène, “The Laugh of the Medusa”, Signs 1: 4 (Summer 1976), p. 875-93.

Doane, Mary Ann, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator”, Screen (1982) 23: 3-4, pp. 74-88. doi: 10.1093/screen/23.3-4.74.

Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet (eds), Language and Gender, Second edition (Cambridge: CUP, 2013), Chapter 1, “An Introduction to Gender”, p. 1-36.

Wittig, Monique, The Straight Mind and Other Essays by Monique Wittig (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992).

Critical essay (50%), attendance and activity in class (50%).