Monstrous and Beautiful: Jungian Archetypes in Wilde’s Salomé
type: CreativeWork
description: The subject of my research is the 1891 play Salomé, by Oscar Wilde and my thesis addresses the modern psychological implications of the cultural truths revealed by Wilde's re-vision of the myth of that biblical femme fatale. I argue that in fashioning a tragic heroine out of a female monster figure of “Immortal Vice”, Oscar Wilde created a document that captures two contradictory narratives: one in which Salomé plays the heroine of a tragedy and another in which she performs the role and functions of a villain. By employing Carl Jung's psychology of the archetypes, I am enabled to read Wilde’s play as a cultural and psychological phenomenon that (self-consciously) constructs a religious and patriarchal narrative around its central female character, which captures her in a tragedy of socially imposed destruction. Ultimately, this paper poses a psychological assessment of Salomé, in which Jungian archetypes illustrate--at a psychic level--Oscar Wilde’s precocious and liberal-minded modernizations of a two thousand-year old myth.
abstract: The subject of my research is the 1891 play Salomé, by Oscar Wilde and my thesis addresses the modern psychological implications of the cultural truths revealed by Wilde's re-vision of the myth of that biblical femme fatale. I argue that in fashioning a tragic heroine out of a female monster figure of “Immortal Vice”, Oscar Wilde created a document that captures two contradictory narratives: one in which Salomé plays the heroine of a tragedy and another in which she performs the role and functions of a villain. By employing Carl Jung's psychology of the archetypes, I am enabled to read Wilde’s play as a cultural and psychological phenomenon that (self-consciously) constructs a religious and patriarchal narrative around its central female character, which captures her in a tragedy of socially imposed destruction. Ultimately, this paper poses a psychological assessment of Salomé, in which Jungian archetypes illustrate--at a psychic level--Oscar Wilde’s precocious and liberal-minded modernizations of a two thousand-year old myth.
author: Rajnish, Nayana
keywords: Jung, Wilde, Salome, Archetypes, Psychology, Literature in English, British Isles, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Psychological Phenomena and Processes
date published: 2021-01-01T08:00:00Z
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:38:09Z
provider: Chapman University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Chapman University