Unsuspecting Souls

by Barry Sanders

  He begged to have an audience with her after the performance, and she most willingly agreed. He confessed: “My head is reeling.”13 As a token of her sincerity, she presented Freud with an autographed picture of herself, which he displayed on his office desk—one of the first things, if not the first thing, that his clients encountered on entering the doctor’s own little theater of wonders and marvels. He of course expected his patients to “believe at once everything [he] said.” Perhaps the photograph helped.

  Sigmund Freud did not stand alone in his admiration of Sarah Bernhardt’s seductive personality. As a young man, another expert on the subject of love, D. H. Lawrence, saw Sarah Bernhardt perform the lead in Alexandre Dumas’s La Dame aux Camélias at the Theatre Royal in Nottingham, England. As Camille, she loved the consumptive fits; critics wrote about her knack at dying. After seeing that play, Lawrence recounted his experience with that language of lust-driven primitive sexuality that became so familiar to readers of Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

  If Sarah Bernhardt were not white, if she were not a commanding actor, if her dramatic performance were drained of all of its high culture, we might easily believe that Lawrence had the other Sarah, Baartman, in mind: “There she is, the incarnation of wild emotion which we share with all live things, but which is gathered in us in all complexity and inscrutable fury. She represents the primeval passions of woman, and she is fascinating to an extraordinary degree. I could love such a woman myself, love her to madness; all for the pure passion of it.”

  Unlike the more fortunate Sigmund Freud, Lawrence never actually met Bernhardt. While Bernhardt’s fleshy and very real being prompted Lawrence’s description, he makes her sound so much like a cliché, offering his readers a glimpse at the ur-passionate woman as nothing more than mere image. “A gazelle,” he said, “with a beautiful panther’s fascination and fury.”

  Then, in what seems like an uncharacteristic move, Lawrence issued a warning. Bernhardt’s beauty had hit him in a physical and quite fundamental—dare one say savage—way: “Take care about going to see Bernhardt. Unless you are very sound, do not go. When I think of her now I can still feel the weight hanging in my chest as it hung there for days after I saw her. Her winsome, sweet playful ways; her sad, plaintive little murmurs; her terrible panther cries; and then the awful, inarticulate sounds, the little sobs that fairly sear one, and the despair and death; it is too much in one evening.”14

  That’s fairly heady company, Sigmund Freud and D. H. Lawrence, but they did not especially capture her attention. It took someone who lived a life at the edges of socially acceptable behavior, as Bernhardt lived hers, to fully appreciate her true nature and what she was capable of accomplishing. The most notorious playwright of the period, Oscar Wilde, demanded more than mere contemplation of Sarah Bernhardt’s beauty. He wanted to exploit it, to secure it for his own—if at all possible to possess it for himself. Like Freud, he too had been bowled over by her wonderful outspokenness, her life of slips and surprises, her eagerness to toss aside the expected and the conventional. Bernhardt promoted herself as a figure of mystery, at selected moments revealing only the smallest bits of herself. The critic Jules Lemaître wrote of Sarah Bernhardt as if she were unfettered consciousness itself, a continual unveiling of selves: “She could enter a convent, discover the North Pole, kill an emperor or marry a Negro king and it would not surprise me. She is not an individual but a complex of individuals.”15

  The great nineteenth-century photographer Nadar (Gaspard-Félix Tournachon) took languorous photographs of her reclining on a fainting couch just when she turned twenty—the diva on the divan. The famous artist Alphonse Mucha, the man who defined the Art Nouveau style, designed her theater posters. She played Cleopatra and Joan of Arc; she sculpted statues. In 1890, Le Figaro newspaper noted that visitors came to Paris to see two profiles: that of the Eiffel Tower and that of Sarah Bernhardt. Sixty years later, in another century, when the equally famous and notorious Marilyn Monroe chose to talk about her own fame, she said, apropos of a toothpaste that Madison Avenue had asked her to publicize: “People don’t realize that every time I show my teeth on television I’m appearing before more people than Sarah Bernhardt appeared before in her whole career.”16 So Marilyn Monroe, the ultimate star of the twentieth century, calibrated her own fame by the standard of Sarah Bernhardt. (Like Marilyn Monroe, Bernhardt signed a fairly lucrative contract to endorse a brand of toothpaste, that one called Sozodont, “the only dentifrice of international reputation.” One wonders about the connection between raving beauties and teeth. Perhaps only Sigmund Freud could reveal the mystery; I am certain that, had he been asked, he would have propounded some theory that would hold our interest.)

  Such a complicated, anarchic human being—a woman, at that—appealed to the devilish Oscar Wilde. He loved to exploit the idea of a gradually unfolding personality or, rather, personalities, in his own fiction, most dramatically in The Importance of Being Earnest and most mysteriously in his several stories about ghosts. His new play would provide for him the major opportunity to push the possibilities of the twin themes he loved so much—concealment and revelation.

  The coming together of Sarah Bernhardt and Oscar Wilde has to stand as one of the great artistic collaborations of the nineteenth century. Born to a socially prominent Anglo-Irish family in 1854, Wilde was well-known in London society as a dandy, a sharp wit, and an enormously talented writer—but also as an underground figure, the dubious star of the demimonde and, as we saw earlier, of the aesthetic movement known as the decadents. While he would achieve great success in the theater, he would also suffer condemnation, as a homosexual, from no less a personage than the Marquess of Queensbury. Most of Wilde’s biographers interpret that scorn as a way for the Marquess to put an end to the romance between his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Wilde. Seemingly unflappable, Wilde turned the disapproval to his own purposes, answering the Marquess in the form of a letter of bitter reproach entitled De Profundis (1905). He continually searched for the right subject into which he could pour his nontraditional ideas about power, attraction, revelation, and sexual freedom. He found what he wanted in the Bible’s second example of seduction, the young and beautiful Salomé.

  Salomé was a first-century Palestinian princess, daughter of Herod’s son Philip and Herodias, who was responsible for the death of John the Baptist. By the time Wilde took hold of the Salomé story, almost every writer in the last few decades of the nineteenth century—English, Swiss, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Lithuanian, American, German, Polish, Irish, but mostly French—had tried to capture her in print. Salomé had become by that time a symbol of decadence, a coming together of love and death in a single person. According to one literary historian, by 1912 close to three thousand French poets had written about her. Flaubert actually traveled to the Middle East in 1850 to research “the harem dance” for his own rendering of Salomé, who entranced every other character in his novel, Salammbô. The previous year, Gustave Moreau had shown his two paintings of Salomé, which created such a sensation in the local press and in Parisian society that over half a million people traveled great distances just to see the canvases for themselves.

  Wilde drew his immediate source for the story of Salomé from two passages in the Bible, the Gospels of Mark (6:17-29) and Matthew (14:3- 6). But the biblical version did not serve either his dramatic or his political purposes. The Bible gave readers an innocent, young Salomé bullied by her mother to make off with the head of John the Baptist. She agrees to the dance as an act of redemption to rid herself of the taint of her mother. Wilde, on the other hand, saw the story as a parable of woman’s outsized sexual power. He transformed Salomé into a young woman keenly powerful, independent, and in total control. In Wilde’s revolutionary version, the young Salomé takes great delight in dancing naked before the king; she revels in her newfound power; she delights in both confronting and controlling the gaze of the court. A brief outline of the play reveals Wilde’s intentions.


  King Herod has recently married his sister-in-law, Herodias, after imprisoning and then executing her husband, Herod Philip, who was also his half brother. In celebration of his birthday, Herod plays host to a grand banquet. In a situation that Wilde absolutely loved, Herod has married his own sister-in-law, and thus become stepfather to his own niece, Salomé, a strikingly beautiful young woman.

  The king has several times cast his eye on young Salomé, making Herodias more than a bit jealous. While that provides grist for the mill of jealousy, the drama does not get going, however, until Wilde introduces another conflict, John the Baptist, who has been traveling up and down the land announcing the coming of the Messiah. He has also condemned the marriage of Herod and Herodias. Herodias has insisted that her husband imprison him and has further demanded his execution. But Herod has balked at the idea, afraid that John might indeed be carrying the news directly from God.

  At that moment, Wilde shifts the action back to Herod, who, in his wine-soaked state, decrees that the young Salomé must dance for him to enliven his celebration. To everyone’s horror, Salomé refuses. Her mother, standing by her side, supports her brazen daughter. In fact, she openly chides her new husband for his lascivious eye. Herod then decides to offer Salomé whatever she chooses, including elevation to high priestess, if she will only dance for him. Again, he hears only staunch refusal. But he’s Herod, after all, a man not to be spurned. And so Herod raises the ante and offers half his kingdom as payment. Finally, Salomé agrees but declines the offer of the kingdom. She has something else in mind, which she will only disclose, she teases, at the conclusion of her dance.

  Salomé leaves for a brief moment and reappears, to everyone’s surprise, wearing only seven diaphanous veils of seven different colors. Then she gracefully begins to dance, slowly removing each of the veils—first from her face and shoulders, then her waist, hips, legs, breasts, and finally, spinning slowly round and round, she pulls off the final veil and stands before the king absolutely naked.

  Salomé pleases Herod beyond his wildest expectations. He asks her what she now desires as a reward. Without hesitating, she asks, in a very straightforward manner, for the head of John the Baptist on a silver charger. Herod receives the news with shock. He pleads with her to ask for anything else—“He is a holy man. He is a man who has seen God.” But, with her mother by her side urging her on, she stands her ground before the mightiest of kings and repeats her solitary demand in the same emotionless way: Bring the head of John the Baptist before me on a silver charger.

  Salomé remains insistent, in part, because earlier in the evening she has seen John the Baptist in his cell and hopelessly and passionately fallen in love with him. When she declares her love to him, John the Baptist scolds her and turns her aside in a most rough and rude manner. She persists, confessing her love, she announces, for a trinity of reasons—for his body, for his magnificent hair, but most of all for his mouth. “Suffer me to kiss thy mouth,” she urges as she pushes herself on him. But he, as stubborn as she, will have none of it: “Never! . . . Daughter of Sodom! Never.” He rebukes her and he is done. The matter is closed.

  A bargain is a bargain and Herod reluctantly agrees to Salomé’s demand. And, when Herod has the head brought out to her, in a scene that startles all the birthday guests, Salomé walks calmly and deliberately over to it and, by slowly planting a kiss on the mouth of the severed head, finally succeeds in getting her earlier demand. A bitter taste lingers on her lips, she tells the startled assembly, but adds that, in the end, bitterness may be the true and only taste of love. Revolted by her behavior, Herod scolds Herodias. “She is monstrous, thy daughter. . . . In truth, what she has done is a great crime. I am sure that it is. A crime against some unknown God.” In the last line of the play, the audience can hear Herod screaming, somewhere offstage, “Kill that woman!” Herod’s guards move swiftly, with swords raised, ready to slay the young Salomé.

  Wilde planned to stage Salomé at the Palace Theater. According to notes that he sent to his friends, Wilde had written the play with Sarah Bernhardt in mind. Why not? By the 1890s, Sarah Bernhardt was the richest, most flamboyant, and most publicized actress of her time. Only Houdini, and at times the strongman Eugen Sandow, performed before larger audiences than the divine Sarah Bernhardt.

  Both Bernhardt and Houdini were masters of illusion—their stock in trade, utter and absolute power over appearance, which is to say power over disappearance. Both were shape-shifters: two Jews born in Europe who changed their names to take on more exotic and intriguing characters. Both of them worked hard at not fitting in, at defying all categories. They acted like vamps, in that late-nineteenth-century sense of sensually enticing vampires—creatures who changed identities (names), who lived on that thin line separating life from death, reality from irreality, and who threatened to suck the life out of respectable society. Death defying, convention defying, they wrapped themselves in mystery and intrigue. On the stage, however, in full view of the public, they wrapped themselves in very little, preferring to perform near naked, or even totally naked. Sandow, Bernhardt, Houdini: Audiences knew and respected all three, first and foremost, as strongly in possession of something that they themselves found missing: bodies.

  As with Oscar Wilde, fans simply could not get their fill of gossip about the private life of Sarah Bernhardt, her torrid love affairs, her more perverse sexual adventures, her penchant for posing nude for well-known artists, and her general extravagant style of life. For Wilde, the biblical Salomé merged with the mythical Sarah Bernhardt. She hired the modern equivalent of the premier public relations firm, Downey of London, to create an image for her and to spin it, like a giant coin, around the world. (Keep in mind this is the period when a new professional appears on the scene, the literary agent.) She commissioned the famous photographer Nadar to concoct the most daring poses of her—with various exotic animals, in the most whimsical and far-out locations, such as African backdrops, pyramids, and the deepest jungles. In some ways, Bernhardt needed no agent, for, like Salomé, with just her presence she mesmerized audiences all over the world. Again, like Salomé, she could also extract from theater owners whatever ransom she secretly or openly desired. She could, as the saying goes, name her own price. After all, she repeatedly sold out the largest theaters in Europe. Audiences lined up well in advance of her performance date to make sure they had tickets.

  In love her entire life with characters out of the Bible, Bernhardt went into rehearsal for the Wilde play with great enthusiasm. She adored Salomé, she confessed to reporters. In May 1892, she even transported her entire acting troupe from Paris to London for one express purpose, which we learn from a letter written by Oscar Wilde to the French poet Pierre Louÿs: “You’ve heard the news, haven’t you? Sarah is going to play Salomé!!! We rehearse today.” That turned out to be an historic moment in the history of theater.

  After all, Wilde was promising audiences that they would soon see the incomparable and elusive Sarah Bernhardt up close and dancing before King Herod. Every aspect of her being that audiences mooned over—her exotic movements, her sensuality, her desire to titillate and shock—they might behold in that one dance. Newspapers talked of it; theater lovers dreamed of it. What does Salomé’s dance look like? I do not know. No one does. Except for the veils, I can only imagine its shape. Wilde invited theatergoers and readers not just to imagine, but to imagine the far reaches, the outer limits, of something as commonplace as a dance.

  “Too much was just enough” could stand as Wilde’s motto. For this play, he insisted that the actors all dress in yellow, against a deep violet sky. He demanded a stage filled with huge braziers blazing with fire during the entire performance. Not content with just any fire, Wilde wanted the flames to fill the auditorium with a variety of exotic perfumes, wafting into the audience and intoxicating each person.

  Just before working on the play, Wilde had been reading Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, an anthology of graphic and aberr
ant sexual case histories based on medical testimonies. (Recall, this is a period that created the idea of deviance, the outsider, and the freak.) In particular,

  Wilde had been deeply fascinated by Case VII in Krafft-Ebing, an account of a woman who, from the age of thirteen, found herself addicted to lust and an all-consuming desire for sexual intercourse. He took detailed notes about her behavior, holding up for praise her refusal, even at such a young age, to recognize norms and boundaries. He found in this young woman the living example of Salomé. I will return to the dance in a moment, but to appreciate Wilde’s fractured conceptualization of something as familiar as a dance we must keep in mind the fact that Wilde derived enormous pleasure and power from his own penchant for breaking the rules of decorum.

  In that regard, Wilde shared a great deal with Nietzsche. More than anything else, both yearned for freedom from the constraints of normal or even so-called avant-garde behavior. Wilde’s behavior was of a piece, refusing, even in his writing, to respect the standards of recognizable, understandable prose. His obsessive patterns of repetition and the hallucinatory quality of his descriptions remind one of Edgar Allan Poe on some psychotropic drug. Consider, for example, his brief description, in Salomé, of the moon. The moon is no longer a planet but has become humanized. No more man in the moon—it is now an evocative and seductive woman:The moon has a strange look tonight. Has she not a strange look? She is like a mad woman, a mad woman who is seeking everywhere for lovers. She is naked, too. She is quite naked. The clouds are seeking to clothe her nakedness, but she will not let them. She shows herself naked in the sky. She reels through the clouds like a drunken woman . . . I am sure she is looking for lovers. Does she not reel like a drunken woman? She is like a mad woman, is she not?