White Idolatry in Oscar Wilde’s Salome and the North Dakota Oil Patch
Rev. Douglas Olds (all rights reserved)
17 December 2018
In the finale to Richard Strauss’s 1905 opera Salome, the librettist Oscar Wilde has the title character caress the severed head of John the Baptist that has been presented to her on a silver platter by her step-father Herod Antipas. The composer Strauss then has her voice a lavish aria: Ah! Du wolltest mich nicht deinen Mund küssen lassen, Jochanaan! In this final scene, one of the greatest works of expressivit art of the 20th Century, she sings the short melody with symbolic meaning—a leitmotif-- that we’ve heard associated with her character earlier in the opera. Salome sings the leitmotif, “Nothing in the world was so white as thy body!”[1] She follows that line with, “nothing in the world was so black as thine hair. In the whole world, there was nothing so red as thy mouth.” Later in the scene, she plants a mad and passionate kiss on John’s disembodied lips.
We the operagoers are meant to be repulsed by Salome’s exultation at the murder and sexual violation of the remains of the Baptist, yet the music is so achingly lyric and beautiful that for a moment we are confused by Strauss’s intention for the dramatic scene. Then, in a climactic coda, Strauss recapitulates the aria’s instrumental line, continuing in large orchestral force its rhapsodic power until it reaches the previous vocal leitmotif, “Nothing in the world is so white as thy body.” On the extended note where “white” was earlier sung, Strauss adds a blast of dissonance,[2] so that the orchestra almost squawks. By this dissonance, Strauss is musically commenting on Salome’s moral nihilism and erotic insanity—her mistaking love of physical whiteness of skin to the neglect and denial of the Baptist’s moral goodness: his advocacy for God’s justice and his resolute character. Salome has monstrously demonstrated instead her admiring erotic obsession with John the Baptist’s mutilated body's whiteness made stark by contrast with its hair’s blackness.
Richard Strauss gets it: the fatal flaw of the civilization he is commenting on in his opera. He is commenting musically not so much on the court of Herod during the time of Jesus, but on his Viennese contemporaries bound up in a squalid exhibition of social Darwinist values that proposed an Aryan, white, master race. What Nietzsche two decades earlier had called the “Blond Beast.” It is that same idolatry that has led generations of Christians to depict both Jesus—and more scandalously, God—as white-skinned.
This cultural preoccupation with and valorization of whiteness of skin has led generations of Europeans and North American colonists to pursue a destiny of manifest injustice based on a flawed ideology of racial hierarchy and gross exploitation of nature.
Fracking is the staggering epitome of this exploitive economy preoccupied with the gushing forth of the Kingdom of Oil. Fracking pulverizes landforms containing petroleum and natural gas, often bound in shale, injecting large amounts of water at high pressure to separate the methane and oil from the fractured rubble, then sequestering the now-poisonous water runoff underground or in surface ditches. Hilda Koster links the impetus for this violence against nature to the epidemic of sex trafficking and rape that is engaged by the fracking field workers of North Dakota.[3] A deformed human agency intended by God for loving relationships pervertedly carries off Native American young women into sexual servitude. Correspondingly, the human soul’s agency intended by God for trusteeship of nature is deformed by the mania of ruinous extraction and destruction of natural landforms, leaving behind a desert of poisoned aquifers, sooty air, methane emissions, and compacted and nutrient-depleted soils. In the North Dakota oil patch as elsewhere in the White Man’s extractive economy, these deformations of moral agency violate the image of God in vulnerable, non-white women and the image of the non-Euro God in nature’s life-sustaining features. These linked violations of sexual and ecological integrity are human sinfulness run amok, a geography of racist violence, a domination feedback loop that raises social temper and global temperature.[4] The fossil fuel industry’s environmental and social pathologies exemplify the systemic evil of white idolatry.
Fracking is a brutal mashup in Satan’s opera of "de-creation." As is racism and sex trafficking. Shall we continue to look on with passive fascination, allowing our lifestyles to tacitly proclaim, "Bravo!"?
[2] At 15’14 of ibid.
--[Earlier] "when Salome finally kisses Jokanann's mouth, we hear superimposed chords of c-sharp (representing her desire) and f-sharp (eroticism), yielding a bitter dissonance that underlines the plot's consequence of this fulfillment. Goodall cites it as 'the most dissonant chord that had ever been heard' and contends that it is 'hard to find a more aggressively uncomfortable combination of notes.'"
--[Earlier] "when Salome finally kisses Jokanann's mouth, we hear superimposed chords of c-sharp (representing her desire) and f-sharp (eroticism), yielding a bitter dissonance that underlines the plot's consequence of this fulfillment. Goodall cites it as 'the most dissonant chord that had ever been heard' and contends that it is 'hard to find a more aggressively uncomfortable combination of notes.'"
[3] Koster, Hilda P. “Trafficked Lands: Sexual Violence, Oil, and Structural Evil in the Dakotas.” In Planetary Solidarity: Global Women’s Voices on Christian Doctrine and Climate Justice, edited by Kim, Grace Ji-Sun and Koster, Hilda P., 155–178. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2017.
[4] A Global temperature rise of just 2 degrees Celsius could increase intergroup conflicts (such as civil wars) by over 50 percent. See https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/01/climate-change-and-violence_n_3692023.html?
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