Hanson E
English Department, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.
J Homosex. 1997;33(3-4):121-37. doi: 10.1300/J082v33n03_06.
In the late nineteenth century, England was embroiled in a political debate over the importation of Roman Catholic rituals into the Anglican Church, not to mention the re-establishment of the Roman Church itself in Great Britain. Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric draws upon the figure of the Whore of Babylon to depict the Roman Catholic Church as the Scarlet Woman, a femme fatale who perverts Christianity and seduces Englishmen with elaborate rituals and lascivious whisperings in the confessional. In writing Salomé, Oscar Wilde played ironically on the hysterical eroticism of the No Popery movement by mining the paradox of biblical sensuality. He invested his play with a biblical wealth of archaic metaphors and gestures that took their cues from The Song of Songs and The Book of Revelation. He became the ecclesiastical dandy that evangelicals feared most, a poet enamored of the Scarlet Woman, a would-be convert who exposed the scandal of Christianity as art.
在19世纪后期，英国陷入了一场政治辩论，争论的焦点是罗马天主教仪式引入英国国教会一事，更不用说罗马教会在大不列颠的重新建立了。维多利亚时代反天主教的言辞借用了“巴比伦大淫妇”这一形象，将罗马天主教会描绘成“红衣女人”，一个致命的女人，她歪曲基督教，并用精心设计的仪式和忏悔室里淫秽的低语来引诱英国人。奥斯卡·王尔德在创作《莎乐美》时，通过挖掘圣经感官享受的悖论，对“反天主教”运动歇斯底里的色情意味进行了讽刺性的演绎。他在剧中融入了丰富的圣经古老隐喻和姿态，这些都源自《雅歌》和《启示录》。他成了福音派最惧怕的那种教会花花公子，一个迷恋“红衣女人”的诗人，一个将基督教的丑闻作为艺术展现出来的潜在皈依者。
