“It is not my mother’s voice that I heed,” Salome says to Herod when he disparages her as a pawn for the scheming Herodias. Then she asserts: “It is for mine own pleasure that I ask the head of Iokanaan in a silver charger” (Oscar Wilde, Salome [Mineola, NY, 1967], 58). Her pronouncement may well be Wilde’s most original contribution to the aesthetics of transgression, as Petra Dierkes-Thrun makes evident in Salome’s Modernity, her study of Wilde’s symbolist drama and its seemingly inexhaustible influence on modernist and postmodernist art to the present day. The line is chilling and exhilarating at once, and no effort at exegesis has yet resolved its paradoxes to define Salome once and for all as a rebel or just a monster. In demanding the head of the beloved saint who aroused her but spurned her, is she an angry feminist claiming the erotic and aesthetic agency that has been denied her, or is she merely a spoiled girl who has abused a dubious position of power to enforce her own delusional will? Both, it seems, and more besides. Dierkes-Thrun’s eagerness to celebrate the play’s transgressiveness and excess as it was elaborated in aesthetic theory and avant-garde performance for more than a century afterward is both an attraction and a limitation of this book.

The author does us the service of taking Wilde’s Salome seriously and guiding us through a selective tour of its innumerable stagings and redeployments, including most notably Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera, Maud Allan’s dance performances during and before the Great War, and various film adaptations from Alla Nazimova’s silent gem from 1922 to the audacious burlesque of Ken Russell’s Salome’s Last Dance (1989) and Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine (1998). She has also done some excellent archival work on the fascinating Salome craze in music halls and the silent cinema. Those who have dismissed Wilde’s play as camp, kitsch, or just boringly arty have failed to account for its persistent appeal and its eminently teachable aesthetic and moral challenges.

The discordant musical refrains of Wilde’s words and Strauss’s music can seduce and unnerve us with a peculiarly modernist sublime by which aesthetic and erotic ecstasy seem to upstage religious ecstasy by imitating it. This transcendent sensuality and excess can easily make the play (and the opera) seem at once modern and out of date since they appeal to revolutionary aspirations for high art that no longer much occupy the avant-garde. Certainly, few revisions of Wilde’s Salome in recent decades have cared much whether God is dead or a saint is martyred. Dierkes-Thrun revives these aspirations, which she deems quasi-religious, and situates them wisely within a European tradition of modernist theory typified by the erotic mysticism of Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, and Michel Foucault, to which I would add the ongoing tradition of Lacanian psychoanalysis that is oddly absent from her formulation. Jouissance remains the mot juste for this fatal ecstasy, which only a French philosopher could love. She would like to make an argument about Wilde as a secular modernist innovator in this tradition, but she has to downplay his conflicted Decadent spirituality, as well as the modernism and spirituality of French Symbolists since Baudelaire. Salome is more biblical than Dierkes-Thrun would admit, and her favorite transgressions are less modern; nevertheless, the author gives us compelling reasons why Wilde’s version of the story has mattered most.

She is at her best when she grounds a reading of transgressive thematics in more formalist terms, as in her discussion of musicological arguments about Strauss’s Salome as the first modernist musical drama (although I would say that Richard Wagner got there first) or the lighting effects for Nazimova’s Salome (although I would say that various German Expressionists did it better with Poe and other Gothic tales in the silent cinema). She delights us with an encyclopedic knowledge of Salome adaptations and references, but she eventually gives up on close reading in favor of some thesis-driven ideological critiques that make a fetish of transgression for its own sake. This movie is queer, while that one is just gay. This one is good feminism; that one is bad feminism. This one gets Wilde right, this one wrong—although Wilde would have probably regarded the whole lot of them as vulgar. All the texts she highlights would seem to me reliably offensive to prudes from one political party or another, including her own. What these often moving and hilarious productions deserve, however, is an aesthetic critique on their own terms and their own merits that does not hold them to an ideological standard that may not be their concern.

The enigmatic Symbolist music by which Wilde allegorizes his ambiguities and ironies seduces us more than any personal transgression of the author or his protagonist. Wilde’s ultimate transgression may be in his elegant and lyrical refusal of certainties, whether erotic, religious, or ethical. Like the characters in the play, we have gazed too long at forbidden things and know not what or why we desire. Perhaps, then, Salome’s most challenging line is not her assertion of her own desire, which requires only arrogance and little courage, but rather her puzzlement over the enigma of love itself. “Ah! ah! wherefore didst thou not look at me?” she asks of the decapitated head of Iokanaan. “If thou hadst looked at me thou hadst loved me. Well I know that thou wouldst have loved me, and the mystery of Love is greater than the mystery of Death” (Wilde, Salome, 65–66).