Apocalyptic Images and Allusions in Oscar Wilde's Salome and Anton Chekhov's The Sea Gull

Abstract

This article examines the apocalyptic images, characters and allusions in two selected plays of fin de siècle theater: Salome (1893) by Oscar Wilde and The Sea Gull (1896) by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov. These two plays are selected to illustrate two different ways, direct and indirect, in adapting apocalyptic images, borrowed from the Book of Revelation. In Salome, Wilde employs apocalyptic images, sometimes literally and sometimes through allusions. The research claims that through this process, Wilde does not emphasize the dominant eschatological ideology of the end of time. On the contrary, he attempts to destroy the illusions and apocalyptic scenarios of the end of the world of his contemporary people. Doing so, Wilde uncovers the real apocalyptic reality that the people of the late nineteenth century lived. Similarly, the article also examines Treplyov's symbolic play within a play in Chekhov's The Sea Gull focusing on the great influence of the Apocalypse on Treplyov's mind whose eschatological imagination leads him to his final destruction and death. Because of the inability to cope with the accelerating changes and intolerable decadent reality, Treplyov becomes the prisoner and victim of his own apocalyptic imagination. The article concludes that like Wilde, Chekhov does not strengthen the apocalyptic and nihilistic views that echo the widespread fears of the end of time by the nineteenth century people, but rather warns against the dangerous consequences of the ideology of the end of the world through the play within a play technique, and the adaptation of apocalyptic images.