| Popis: |
As in the late-Victorian pornographic novel Teleny, or The Reverse of the Medal: A Physiological Romance of To-Day (1893) the overlap between musical reality and sexual instinct allows the description of a motionless orgasm as recognition of unconventional sexuality, so in barefoot dancer, and former musician, Maud Allan’s Wilde-inspired The Vision of Salome (1904) sexuality is staged in all its destabilising danger through stillness as a condition of both desire and movement. As in Teleny again, the solitary and rigid eros of a kiss – a necrophilic one – in Salomé is revelation and perdition, perversion, and subversion of desire. Nevertheless, the scandal of Allan’s performance, with the serious judicial implications that followed, were nothing else than evidence of the destabilising danger that women’s active sexual knowledge represented for the heterosexual patriarchal social order. In short, in Teleny as in The Vision of Salome, musical experience is associated with the perversion of a non-conforming sexuality that manifests itself through stillness. |
