Biblical turns of phrase, repetition and circularity in Oscar!Wilde's 'Salome'

Written in French and translated into English by Lord Alfred Douglas with the help of the author himself at a time when novelists, poets and playwrights celebrated artifice and started revolutionising the forms of their art, Oscar Wilde's Salome (1893) created a new language and located radical representational possibilities. If the play was considered outrageous in Victorian Britain it was obviously because of the author's use, appropriation and transformation of Biblical sources. Indeed, in Salome, the extremely short accounts of the beheading of John the Baptist that can be found in the Gospels turn into a sexual tragedy in which lust, perversity and frustration are the main motivating forces behind the characters' actions. But Wilde's impertinent originality does not only lie in his departure from the factual biblical accounts of the events and the presence of a sexual subtext. It also rests upon his linguistic use of the Authorized Version of the Bible the style, rhythm and cadence of which are resorted to in the play. Among the main linguistic and stylisticfeatures that are reminiscent of biblical language, obsessive repetitions produce a narcissistic text in which words neither reproduce nor refer to anything but themselves. Oscar Wilde's tragedy of repetition reflects the cultural change that is associated with the transition from Victorianism to Modernism, the text pointing up the incapacity of language to transcend itself.