Oscar Wilde’s Poetics of Exposure

Abstract This essay juxtaposes Oscar Wilde’s play Salome with his prison writing to consider the relationship between two types of transfer: of meaning between tenor and vehicle in metaphor and from one prison to another as experienced by Wilde during his incarceration. The semantic transfer, this reading of Salome suggests, is not simply a question of direct transformation but something live and able to be intruded on. Thus it shares with the prison transfer the violence of exposure: To the mob jeering as he is transferred to Reading Gaol, Wilde is not the tragic hero of his own figurations but a minor character in a farce. In reading Salome with the prison writing, this essay contends that their shared interest in exposure reveals a structural duality of metaphor: The space of figuration can be salvific in how it may establish distance between a subject and a reality that would violently misconstrue him or her, but this distance is also hopelessly open, a field of figuration ever subject to the marauding of the other.