Salome, the Heroine of Decadence

Salome, one of the most famous representatives of the femme fatale image, has an unquestionably important place in our culture. From ancient times her image has had a rich afterlife not only in literature, but in popular culture, opera, dance and film. The transformation of her image started in late Victorian England, where the imaginative associations of femininity and female sexuality started to change, and the image of feminity split into two extreme images: that of the prostitute and that of the Angel of the House. In this doubtful time two major authors, Gustave Flaubert and Oscar Wilde elaborated Salome’s image in their works. Although the two authors treated the theme differently, in one aspect their works are similar: they both recreated Salome in terms of the general image of femme fatale. My aim in the following text is to compare the two Salome images, reveal their cultural differences, and describe the birth and death of the femme fatale through the works of these two authors.BSc/BAAnglisztikaB