Perverse Midrash: Oscar Wilde, André Gide,and Censorship of Biblical Drama

by Katherine Brown Downey

Overview

Oscar Wilde's Salome and Andre Gide's Saul have been considered critically in the traditional contexts of authorial oeuvre, biography, or "thought." These plays have been treated with embarrassed respect, dealt with only because of the importance of their authors. That Wilde and Gide made use of biblical material seems to discomfit their critics; that they had done so at a time when biblical drama was prohibited has rarely been addressed. Traditional critical treatments seek to smooth over the plays' aberrant qualities. This study takes them seriously as aberrations and investigates Wilde's and Gide's claims that these plays are works of faith, by considering them as participating in the history of biblical drama.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826416223
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	11/03/2004
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.41(d)

About the Author

Perverse Midrash is Katherine Brown Downey's, first book. She is working on a second about the Victorian-era Anglican cleric F.W. Farrar.

Table of Contents

	Acknowledgments	ix
	Prologue: "Half Biblical, Half Pornographic"	1
Act I	Cultural Dialogues
Scene 1	Nostos and Shavah: Recovering Spiritual Origins	15
	The Bible and the Theatre	15
	Biblical Criticism and Popularization	18
	Symboliste Theatre and Reform	38
Scene 2	Unveiling Fears: Literary History as Guardian of Culture	57
	Accounting for the Medieval Mysteries	57
	Defending Censorship of the Bible on Stage	64
	"Abuses" and Fears	81
Act II	Interpretive Monologues
Scene 1	Manifesting Fears: Oscar Wilde's Salome	95
	Sources of the Salome Legend	96
	Wilde's Salome	99
	Wilde's Desire and "Religious Drama"	110
Scene 2	Perverting the Text: Andre Gide's Saul	115
	The "Biblical" Account	116
	The Interpretive Problem	128
	Gide's Perversions	132
	Epilogue: "Perverse Midrashim"	145
	Overcoming Adversity	145
	A Subversive Genre	149
	Reverting to Wilde and Gide	154
	Works Cited	161
	Index	173

Editorial Reviews

"Here we have a deliciously unique and engaging cross-disciplinary study, centered around two notorious plays from the turn of the 20th century. But in Downey's capable hands the plays become examples of serious, insightfully perverse, readings of the ancient biblical texts from which the plays come, along the way demonstrating that those ancient texts themselves possess complexities too often hidden from the traditionally religious reader. Biblical scholars, theater historians, and cultural critics will learn much that is new from this extraordinarily fresh essay." - John C. Holbert, Lois Craddock Perkins Professor of Homiletics, Perkins School of Theology, Dallas, Texas--Sanford Lakoff

"Perverse Midrash is a fascinating study, of both scholarly and critical depth, raising the question of why drama with biblical themes was banned in England and France during the Reformation era and remained banned until virtually our own time. This is of course a large issue and it takes Katherine Downey through several centuries of archival material, but she focuses sharply and in great detail on two plays: Oscar Wilde's Salome and Andre Gide's Saul. Both her conclusion and, en route, her methodology are exceptionally coherent and cogent. She concludes that the fear responsible for the ban on biblical plays was not a fear that playwrights would pervert the Bible narratives, but rather that they would expose perversities already present in Scripture; and when, in our last fin-de-siecle, Wilde and Gide finally broke the ban, that situation is precisely, she demonstrates, what did emerge." -Jeffery M. Perl, editor of Common Knowledge--Sanford Lakoff

"Sometimes it takes one to know one. Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, writers thought scandalous and subversive in their day, responded with unique sympathy to scandal and subversion in the Bible. With elegant simplicity, Perverse Midrash writes a fascinating chapter in the linked histories of the Bible and Western literature and theater." -Jack Miles, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of God: A Biography--Sanford Lakoff

'I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in fin de siecle literature, the rise of early modernism as a movement, or a biblical drama.'--Alison Jack, Expository Times "Expository Times "

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