Salomé’s Kiss: Sensuality and Modernist Aesthetics in Republican Drama,” panel on “Rethinking Modernism in Republican China

Oscar Wilde’s 1891 tragedy Salomé had a long-lasting afterlife through different media across the globe. As an iconic sensual figure, Salome has become the embodiment of a transgressive, modernist aesthetic that challenges traditional metaphysical, moral, and cultural belief systems and expresses aesthetic visions that accentuate individual agency, rebellious attitude, and sensuous desire. The multifaceted messages exemplified by Salomé, her addiction to carnal pleasure, the intense yet impossible pursuit of beauty and sexuality----as well as the scenes of her riveting Dance of the Seven Veils and her last kiss to the lips of the blood-spattered head of John the Baptist--- captivated Republican readers and audiences. By analyzing the hitherto unexamined dramatic works of the playwrights Tian Han (1898-1968, who translated the English edition of Salomé into Chinese in 1921), Xiang Peiliang (1901-1959), Bai Wei (1894-1987) and their domestication of the figure of Salomé in the 1920s, this paper explores the critical nexus of the aesthetics of sensuality, hysteria, and decadence, focusing on the adoption and transformation of the dichotomy of romantic love between carnality vis-à-vis spirituality at a time when modern sexology, “free” marriage discourse, and fin-de-siècle culture were flooding into China. It will further investigate how intimate, expressive behaviors and tactile sensations sparked changes in language and the nascent genre of modern spoken drama, thus providing a fresh understanding of the relationship between embodied experience and Chinese aesthetic modernism.