Salomé and Saint Sebastian: Modern Myths in Wilde and D’Annunzio

The essay discusses Oscar Wilde’s elaborations of such modern myths as Saint Sebastian and Salomé, both codified within the epistemological frame of medieval Christianity, and ponders on the writer’s mythmaking practices as reflected in Gabriele D’Annunzio. In particular, Wilde’s influence can be perceived in D’Annunzio’s representation of Saint Sebastian – a famously fin-de-siècle myth, especially charged with homoerotic significances, and a very important figure to Wilde himself – in the tragedy Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien, written in French and published in France in 1911. Despite Wilde’s influence in D’Annunzio’s adaptation of the legend of the soldier-saint, it was however his tragedy Salomé that constituted a fundamental hypotext for D’Annunzio’s play. Through D’Annunzio’s concurrent interpretations of the decadent myths of Salomé and Saint Sebastian, the essay argues that the Italian author widely contributed to the spread of Wilde’s poetics and ideas not only in Italy and France (the country where D’Annunzio resided from 1910 to 1915), but also across Europe. Various features of Wilde’s poetics in Salomé are analysed through comparative close readings with Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien to show the importance of the dialogue between the two authors and its centrality in shaping the reception of Wilde from a perspective of cosmopolitan studies and world literature.