Orientalism, Desire and the Politics of Looking in Oscar Wilde's Salomé

This paper examines Oscar Wilde’s Salomé as a site for the construction of the ‘Oriental woman’ through the intersecting frameworks of Orientalism, gender, and the male gaze, examining how Wilde’s titular Salomé becomes the site upon which Western fantasies of eroticism, conquest, and violence are projected. By analysing Wilde’s representation of Salomé within the broader context of 19th-century Orientalist discourse, this paper argues that her characterisation perpetuates a deeply gendered and racialised fantasy that positions the ‘Oriental woman’ as both a seductive threat and a necessary victim. The play situates Salomé as a visual and symbolic spectacle: a woman simultaneously virginal and hypersexual, sacred and profane, with Salomé emerging as the ultimate fetishised figure of the colonial imagination and whose body becomes a space for the fulfilment of repressed Western desires. Salomé, in the end, is not merely a literary figure, but a projection of Western anxieties about race, sexuality, and empire.