Self-Indulgences Idols of Perversity

By Otto Friedrich

As the priestess Salammbo danced to the seductive warbling of a flute, her long white dress slowly fell to the ground, and she stood naked before the sacred python. Taking the serpent in her arms, she "wound it round her waist, under her arms, between her knees . . . Salammbo gasped beneath this weight . . . her back bent, she felt she was dying; and with the tip of its tail it gently flicked her thigh."

Is this scene a) a typically clumsy 19th century attempt at pornography, b) a rather silly self-indulgence by Gustave Flaubert, c) a shocking specimen of male chauvinism, d) all of the above or e) none of the above? Skeptical common sense suggests that the best answer would be b or perhaps d. To Bram Dijkstra, an erudite and passionately indignant professor of comparative literature at the University of California at San Diego, the only answer is c. In case anyone thinks he is making too much of Salammbo's gyrations, Dijkstra wants us to know that a painting of the priestess by Charles Allen Winter was exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1898 and a sculpted version by Jean-Antoine-Marie Idrac won a place of honor at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It was, in other words, a scene that appealed all too strongly to the roving Victorian eye.

Dijkstra's thesis is a familiar feminist argument: that the 19th century man wanted women to remain passive, dependent, domestic and obedient, and that any female who ventured to differ was regarded as at best a shrew and at worst a witch or even a vampire. He buttresses this argument with evidence from both high culture and high camp. He decries Henry James' Verena Tarrant (in The Bostonians) and Tennyson's Lady of Shalott for their dim-witted self- sacrifice, and he manages to get angry about even such endearing targets as Dracula and Trilby.

The novelty in Dijkstra's approach is that he has illustrated his tour through fin-de-siecle fantasy not only with such masters as Degas or Klimt but with more than 300 of the new photographic reproductions that were spreading art's pernicious messages through popular magazines. Hypocrisy was the order of the day. Thus Albert von Keller's lubricious portrait of a naked woman crucified bears the pious title Martyr, and all those nude beauties frolicking around that white-bearded codger represent Lovis Corinth's Temptation of Saint Anthony. Exotic suggestions of bestiality (as with Salammbo) provided another popular theme. Arthur Wardle's Bacchante cavorts with a whole herd of amorous leopards, and Frederick Stuart Church's Enchantress strolls through the wilderness with two tigers "whose growling jaws suggested the vagina dentata which turn-of-the-century men feared they might find hidden beneath this . . . beauty's decorous gown."

How did misunderstanding and misogyny reach such deplorable heights? Dijkstra offers conflicting scapegoats. One is the rise of industrial capitalism, which made such physical and moral demands that men fled, exhausted, to the image of woman as "priestess of virtuous inanity." The other, which explains the failure of such canonization, is the spread of Darwinism and the quack argument that women remained at a more primitive stage of evolution. As Darwin himself put it, "Man has ultimately become superior to woman."

All of these fears and hostilities culminated in an obsession with the legend of Salome, who used her erotic powers to annihilate man's goodness. Flaubert wrote about her, and so did Mallarme, Huysmans and Wilde; and Richard Strauss set Wilde's version to music. Klimt painted her, as did Corinth, Max Slevogt and even a now-forgotten dauber of the time named Otto Friedrich. She was indeed a terrible woman, and the fin-de-siecle fascination with her was undoubtedly neurotic and perverse, like so many obsessions of the period. That this really led to the oppression of women, or that we should all be indignant about it, remains less than self-evident.