page_title: Dance of the Seven Veils
section_title: Oscar Wilde
hierarchical_section_title: Dance of the Seven Veils / Oscar Wilde
caption_attribution_description: The Stomach Dance
context_page_description: The Dance of the Seven Veils is Salome's dance performed before Herod II. It is an elaboration on the biblical story of the execution of John the Baptist, which refers to Salome dancing before the king, but does not give the dance a name.
  The name "Dance of the Seven Veils" originates with the 1893 English translation of Oscar Wilde's 1891 French play Salome in the stage direction "Salome dances the dance of the seven veils". The dance was also incorporated into Richard Strauss's 1905 opera Salome.
context_section_description: The idea that Salome's dance involves "seven veils" originates with Wilde's 1891 play Salomé. Wilde was influenced by earlier French writers who had transformed the image of Salome into an incarnation of female lust. Rachel Shteir writes that,
  To the French, Salome was not a woman at all, but a brute, insensible force: Huysmans refers to her as "the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust … the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible"; and Mallarmé describes her as being inscrutable: "the veil always remains." Huysmans' hero Des Esseintes characterizes her as a "weird and superhuman figure he had dreamed of. … [I]n her quivering breasts, … heaving belly, … tossing thighs … she was now revealed as the symbol incarnate of old world vice."
  Wilde was especially influenced by Gustave Flaubert's story "Herodias" in which Salome dances on her hands to please Antipas. The type of dance was common among "gypsy" acrobats in the 19th century. Wilde at first intended to follow Flaubert's version, but changed his mind. Shireen Malik says he may have been influenced by the 1870 poem "The Daughter of Herodias" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy which describes Salome dancing:
  She freed and floated on the air her arms
  
  Above dim veils that hid her bosom's charms...
  
  The veils fell round her like thin coiling mists
  
  Shot through by topaz suns and amethysts.
  The poem goes on to describe brief views of her "jewelled body" as the flowing veils swirl and part.
  Wilde transforms the dance from a public performance for his guests, as in the Bible, to a personal dance for the king himself. He gives no description of the dance beyond the name, but the idea of a series of veils has been connected to a process of unveiling. As Malik says, "although Wilde does not describe Salome's dance or suggest that she remove any veils, her dance is invariably assumed to be one of unveiling, thus revealing herself." Wilde's play has even been proposed as the origin of striptease. Toni Bentley writes "Wilde's bracketed brevity allowed for a world of interpretation. Can the invention of striptease be traced to a single innocuous stage direction in a censored play that could barely find a theater or audience? Can Oscar Wilde be considered the unlikely father of modern striptease?" 
  In one of Aubrey Beardsley's illustrations to the play, he depicts what he calls a "stomach dance" (i.e., a belly dance), in which Salome is depicted with exposed breasts and undulating belly, wearing transparent pantaloons. Wilde wrote a note in appreciation of Beardsley's design, saying: "For Aubrey: for the only artist who, besides myself, knows what the dance of the seven veils is, and can see that invisible dance." The concept of "belly dancing" had become widely known in 1893, the year before Beardsley created his designs, when it was featured at the World's Fair in Chicago that year.
caption: The Stomach Dance by Aubrey Beardsley, an interpretation of the Dance of the Seven Veils
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