WILDE,OSCAR AND THE SCARLET WOMAN

In the late nineteenth century, England was embroiled in a political d ebate over the importation of Roman Catholic rituals into the Anglican Church, not to mention the re-establishment of the Roman Church itsel f in Great Britain. Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric draws upon the fi gure of the Whore of Babylon to depict the Roman Catholic Church as th e Scarlet Woman, a femme fatale who perverts Christianity and seduces Englishmen with elaborate rituals and lascivious whisperings in the co nfessional, In writing Salome Oscar Wilde played ironically on the hys terical eroticism of the No Popery movement by mining the paradox of b iblical sensuality. He invested his play with a biblical wealth of arc haic metaphors and gestures that took their cues from The Song of Song s and The Book of Revelation. He became the ecclesiastical dandy that evangelicals feared most, a poet enamored of the Scarlet Woman, a woul d-be convert who exposed the scandal of Christianity as art.