The Daughter of Hérodias: Salomé’s transcendent eroticism and her anticipatory dance of desire

The theme of the Princess of Judea intensely permeated French literature during the second half of the nineteenth century and profoundly influenced fin de siècle writers and artists. Derived from biblical sources, the character of Salomé dances for the Tetrarch, Herod Antipas. In reward for her lascivious dance, she may ask whatever her heart desires. She demands the head of John the Baptist, the prophet imprisoned for having denounced the incestuous relationship of King Herod with his sister-inlaw Hérodias, queen and mother of Salomé. To elucidate Salomé’s infamous dance, this article first examines the dance as a richly protracted and spiritually vivid narrative as it appears in Gustave Flaubert’s Hérodias (1877) before analysing the symbolic signification and cryptic meaning of Oscar Wilde’s Dance of the Seven Veils from his 1891 radical tragedy Salomé, an iconic naming that is synonymous with the biblical myth today.