-The Princess, the Prophet, and the Moon
THE PAGE OF HERODIAS:
Look at the moon! How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. You would fancy she was looking for dead things.THE YOUNG SYRIAN:
She has a strange look. She is like a little princess who wears a yellow veil, and whose feet are of silver. She is like a princess who has little white doves for feet. You would fancy she was dancing.THE PAGE OF HERODIAS:
She is like a woman who is dead. She moves very slowly.~~~
THE YOUNG SYRIAN: How
pale the Princess is! Never have I seen her so pale. She is like the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver.~~~
THE YOUNG SYRIAN: She is like a dove that has strayed .... She is like a narcissus trembling in the wind ... She is like a silver flower.
~~~
SALOMÉ: How good to see the moon.
She is like a little piece of money, you would think she was a little silver flower. The Moon is cold and chaste. I am sure she is a virgin, she has a virgin's beauty. Yes, she is a virgin. She has never defiled herself. She has never abandoned herself to men like the other goddesses.~~~
THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: Oh! How strange the moon looks.
You would think it was the hand of a dead woman who is seeking to cover herself with a shroud.THE YOUNG SYRIAN: She has a strange look!
She is like a little princess, whose eyes are eyes of amber. Through the clouds of muslin she is smiling like a little princess.~~~
SALOMÉ: How wasted he is! He is like a thin
ivory statue. He is like an image of silver. I am sure he is chaste as the moon is. He is like a moonbeam, like a shaft of silver. His flesh must be cool like ivory. I would look closer at him.~~~
THE PAGE OF HERODIAS: The young Syrian has slain himself! The young captain has slain himself! He has slain himself who was my friend! I gave him a little box of perfumes and ear-rings wrought in silver, and now he has killed himself! Ah, did he not foretell that some misfortune would happen? I, too, foretold it, and it has happened. Well, I knew that the moon was seeking a dead thing, but I knew not that it was he whom she sought. Ah! why did I not hide him from the moon? If I had hidden him in a cavern she would not have seen him.~~~
HEROD: The moon has a strange look to-night. 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?HERODIAS: No;
the moon is like the moon, that is all. Let us go within .... You have nothing to do here.
The
Princess, the Prophet, and the Moon
As almost all its critics have noted, Salomé weaves an extensive network of metaphors around the color white, which all link to the moon, Salomé, and the prophet. Key terms in this network include: an unearthly paleness, flowers, silver and doves (in the case of Salomé), sepulchers, ivory, and statues (in the case of Jokanaan). Significantly it elaborates this network in the cast's various acts of looking at the feminized trio, its members appearing as the play's consummate (and most consuming) objects of the look. Thus the play begins with two voyeurs: the Syrian, who marvels at the beautiful princess, and the Page, mesmerized by the moon. The Page's first line is an injunction to look: "Look at the moon!" Though both these voyeurs first appear lost in their own reveries, their respective monologues soon interweave around the pronoun "she." The moon becomes a metaphor for the princess: she is a dead woman rising from a tomb, slowly moving, dancing a dance of death. The link to the prophet, who will himself soon rise from the tomb-like cistern at the back of the stage, is also clear. Thus the image of the moon/princess/prophet heralds the viewers' death. As the Page repeatedly warns the Syrian, if he looks at "her" too much, undoubtedly something terrible will happen.
Importantly,
however, not only does the male look at the female: the female looks back and
also with fatal results. The play unfolds under the gaze of the moon, a gaze
that, as the page notes, searches for the dead. As the Syrian muses, the
princess herself has a "strange look" (the play is consistently unable to resist
the double entendre); the Page senses the significance of this female look more
clearly: "You would fancy she was looking for dead things." This phrase of
course parallels the Syrian's own fancy: "You would fancy she was dancing."
Again, Salomé's
dance is the dance of death. And, in dancing,
she looks for dead things.
Thus the feminine will bring death here as both look and spectacle.
As noted above, the moon appears here as a double of Salomé's and a symbol of woman. For the Page, the moon is the woman bearing death. Salomé triumphantly imagines the moon as virgin, as the goddess who never defiled herself as her sisters did. Tellingly, Herod sees no virgin in the moon but its opposite: a naked, drunken madwoman who seeks everywhere for lovers and will not let the clouds cover her nakedness. As Salomé notes earlier, the wish in Herod's gaze is all too clear. Again, Herodias resists the cast's propensity for symbolism. When Herod sees a madwoman in the moon, she can but scoff: "the moon is like the moon, that is all."