When she meets Jokanaan, she pursues him. At the beginning of the play, she is able to manipulate Narraboth into bringing out Jokanaan because he desires her. What I found most interesting about Salomé is how Salomé’s choices have complete control over the direction of the play, and how this control directly comes from her attractiveness. Posted on ApApAuthor mlusebri Categories Uncategorized Tags An Ideal Husband, de profundis, pedestol 2 Comments on Pedestals and Celebrity Salomé and Choices And once he did, he received the fame an notoriety he desired, but cursed himself to always be stuck on the pedestal. He created a persona for himself, spending hours privately studying and perfecting his appearance. And what makes it all the more tragic is that for the most part, it is Wilde himself that puts Wilde on a pedestal. There is justification for his relationship with Bosie, his feelings about his estrangement from his wife later in life, his Catholic sympathies, and his deep insecurities about his place in the world. I see so much of Wilde in this selection of the text.

But what strikes me now is the repetition of the image of the pedestal, and how much it seems to reveal about Wilde, especially because An Ideal Husband was written before the date Wilde gives for his fight with Bosie. I remembered this line because it struck me as ironic in the modern world, where it is more common for women to be placed on pedestals and given unreasonable expectations (purity culture, diet culture, division of labor, etc.). It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. Not only is this a really cruel thing to say to someone, let alone someone you are in a deep personal relationship with, but it also reminded me of a line spoken by Robert Chiltern in An Ideal Husband: Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. In De Profundis, one of the moments that struck me the most is when Wilde described how Bosie told him that “when you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting” (994).

An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde