Monstrous and Beautiful

The subject of this research is the 1891 play Salomé by Oscar Wilde and this book addresses the modern psychological implications of the cultural truths revealed by Wilde''s re-vision of the myth of that biblical femme fatale. I argue that in fashioning a tragic heroine out of a female monster figure of “Immortal Vice” Oscar Wilde created a document that captures two contradictory narratives: one in which Salomé plays the heroine of a tragedy and another in which she performs the role and functions of a villain. By employing Carl Jung''s psychology of the archetypes I am enabled to read Wilde’s play as a cultural and psychological phenomenon that (self-consciously) constructs a religious and patriarchal narrative around its central female character which captures her in a tragedy of socially imposed destruction. Ultimately this paper poses a psychological assessment of Salomé in which Jungian archetypes illustrate--at a psychic level--Oscar Wilde’s precocious and liberal-minded modernizations of a two thousand-year old myth.