The Voice of Rapture: A Symbolist System of Ecstatic Speech in Oscar Wilde’s Salome

With Wilde’s Salome (1893) as an exemplary text, this book examines the conditions under which speech constructs ecstatic experience. The author considers Wilde’s text as a complex Symbolist system of relations between rhetorical devices and attitudes toward language. By identifying the components of the system, the book provides a theoretical model for understanding the power of language to construct specific emotional states. The dramatic nature of Wilde’s play further indicates that, contrary to popular perception, ecstasy is not beyond language but in it. Rapture possesses a voice, but this voice emanates from a communication system which is actually outside of the body which speaks it. Movement toward ecstasy is therefore not a release from system but a supreme manifestation of it.