Oscar Wilde and the scarlet woman

In the late nineteenth century, England was embroiled in a political debate over the importation of Roman Catholic rituals into the Anglican Church, not to mention the re-establishment of the Roman Church itself in Great Britain. Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric draws upon the figure of the Whore of Babylon to depict the Roman Catholic Church as the Scarlet Woman, a femme fatale who perverts Christianity and seduces Englishmen with elaborate rituals and lascivious whisperings in the confessional. In writing Salomé, Oscar Wilde played ironically on the hysterical eroticism of the No Popery movement by mining the paradox of biblical sensuality. He invested his play with a biblical wealth of archaic metaphors and gestures that took their cues from The Song of Songs and The Book of Revelation. He became the ecclesiastical dandy that evangelicals feared most, a poet enamored of the Scarlet Woman, a would-be convert who exposed the scandal of Christianity as art.