Beardsley’s depiction of gender and sexuality is striking, and his illustrations of the nude human body is always tethering on a perceived recognizability that simultaneously undermines his readers knowingness. This is the title page of Salome from the 1907 edition. There are figures with the assumed female features (breasts, insinuated lips and eye liner, wide hips), but that possess the masculine features as well, mostly being the penis and an abundance of pubic hair surrounding the groin. There are figures that "that blur the gender binary" by having traditionally feminine features (breasts, insinuated lips and eye liner), and the masculine features as well, mostly being the penis and an abundance of pubic hair surrounding the groin (King 186). Machen's uses characters to describe the destabilizing sense of unknowingness in a space you had though to have understood. In The Hill Of Dreams, Lucian comes to the conclusion that “he was an alien and a stranger amongst citizens” because of his seeking after art that “had in it something inhumane”, (Machen 215-216). Both artists enhance represent the weird by displaying the familiarity of human nature and natural worlds, and then alienating their audiences from their knowingness.
Works Cited:
Machen, Arthur. “The Hill of Dreams.” Aurthur Machen Decadent and Occult Works, edited by Dennis Denisoff, Modern Humanities Research Association, 2018, pp. 110-251.
Beardsley, Aubrey. Title Page of Salome. 1907. https://archive.org/details/salometragedyino00wildrich/page/n11/mode/2up. Accessed 6 December 2024.
King, Frederick. "4 Collaboration and Conflict: Queer Space in Salome". Queer Books of Late Victorian Print Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024, pp. 175-222. https://doi-org.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/10.1515/9781399525961-008