饒舌な挿絵―オスカー・ワイルド1894年版『サロメ』に見るオーブリー・ビアズリーのシンボル・マーク―

Oscar Wilde’s Salome was first published in French in 1893 and the English translation was published in 1894 by Elkin Mathews & John Lane in London. The 1894 English version came with Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations, which were notorious for their sexually implicit expression and for being ‘irrelevant’ to the story itself. Some of the illustrations even include unidentifiable characters, and this seeming irrelevance has been much discussed by researchers. In order to examine the meaning of this irrelevance, this paper focuses on reading both Wilde’s text and Beardsley’s illustrations. When we read Salome, it is not only Beardsley’s illustrations that are irrelevant. Dialogues between its characters are quite irrelevant. Indeed, some researchers (e.g. Elliot L. Gilbert) have pointed out that ‘solipsism’ is Salome’s one coherent theme and that Beardsley succeeded in illuminating this characteristic of the text. In this paper, I would further suggest that characters such as Salome make ‘irrelevant responses’ to others to acquire what they want; at the same time, I would show that this irrelevance includes the potential of violence to vitiate other characters’ interpretation of the world and life. This paper then pays attention to Beardsley’s emblem, which appears as his signature in all the illustrations of Salome. Although many critics have examined the meaning of the caricatures of Wilde’s face in the illustrations, Beardsley’s emblem does not seem to have the same attention. This paper thus particularly focuses on it as the emblem appears sometimes quietly and at other times quite obviously – they seem parallel to characters’ repetitive and irrelevant responses to each other’s speech stating their own desire and neutralizing the desires of others. It is especially notable when his emblem appears in contrast to the caricatures of Wilde. In the analysis, I will point out that Beardsley’s illustrations are also a participant in the irrelevant dialogues of the text and that these illustrations may reveal the illustrator’s violent desire to prove himself to be a better artist than the writer Oscar Wilde.