Reading Order
Hérodiade (Mallarmé)Hérodiade Reading Order
Hérodiade (1867-1898) by Stéphane Mallarmé is the great unfinished project of his career — a dramatic poem centered on the figure of Hérodiade (Salome) that Mallarmé worked on for over thirty years without completing to his satisfaction. The sections that were published and that Mallarmé recognized as completed are: the 'Scène' (dialogue between Hérodiade and her nurse), the 'Ouverture ancienne' (the nurse's opening monologue), and the late 'Cantique de saint Jean' (the severed head of John the Baptist singing). These form an extraordinary poetic structure in which Hérodiade — cold, hermetic, virginal, terrifying — defines herself entirely through negation: the refusal of the nurse's warmth, the refusal of the natural world, the pure self-enclosure of an existence that has no need of an other. Hérodiade is the antipode of L'Après-midi d'un faune: where the Faun is all sensory openness and erotic dissolution, Hérodiade is cold self-sufficiency and self-enclosure. The posthumous reconstruction from Mallarmé's notes, published in 1959, allows a more complete picture of the project he never finished.
Where to start
Begin with the 'Scène' (the central dialogue between Hérodiade and her Nurse) — this is the most complete and most finished section, and the exchange between the cold princess and the warm Nurse is the dramatic and thematic heart of the poem. Then read the 'Ouverture ancienne.' The late 'Cantique de saint Jean' is a separate fragment that can be read at any point.
Complete Hérodiade (Mallarmé) Book List
- 1Buy
Hérodiade (Scène, Ouverture, Cantique)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1898·Published in the Pléiade Œuvres complètes and in the standard editions; the 1959 reconstruction of the complete project from Mallarmé's papers by Gardner Davies is available in French scholarship but not in English translation. - 2Buy
L'Après-midi d'un faune (1876)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1876·The essential counterpart — where Hérodiade is cold, virginal, and self-enclosed, the Faun is sensory, warm, and open; reading them together defines the two poles of Mallarmé's imagination and the full range of his poetic world. - 3Buy
Poésies (1899)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1899·The complete verse poems in which Hérodiade appears alongside all the other major verse — the Poésies are the essential context for understanding Hérodiade's place in the body of work. - 4Buy
Salomé
Oscar Wilde·1891·The French-language play (1891) by Wilde — who was part of Mallarmé's Parisian circle — takes the same Salome/Hérodiade figure into a more directly theatrical and erotic register; reading it alongside Mallarmé's version shows the range of interpretations the fin-de-siècle attached to the figure. - 5Buy
Divagations (1897)
Stéphane Mallarmé·1897·Mallarmé's critical prose — including 'Crise de vers' and 'La Musique et les lettres' — provides the theoretical context for understanding what Hérodiade was attempting as a poetic project over thirty years.
Hérodiade (Mallarmé) — Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Mallarmé never finish Hérodiade?
Mallarmé worked on Hérodiade from 1864 until his death in 1898, but never completed the project to his satisfaction. He published individual sections (the 'Scène' in various versions, the 'Ouverture ancienne') but kept revising. The likely explanation is that the project was simply too ambitious for its own premises: Mallarmé was trying to write a poem about pure self-sufficient beauty — an art that would need no external reference, no connection to the world — and such a poem may be in principle uncompletable. He left extensive notes and drafts for the projected 'Noces d'Hérodiade' (the complete poem), which were posthumously reconstructed.
Who is Hérodiade and how does she relate to Salome?
In the New Testament, Salome (unnamed in the text) is the daughter of Herodias (Hérodiade) who dances for Herod and asks for the head of John the Baptist on a platter at her mother's instigation. By the nineteenth century, the story had conflated the mother and daughter into a single figure — 'Hérodiade' or 'Salome' — associated with cold erotic cruelty and the feminine power of destruction. Mallarmé's Hérodiade is largely stripped of the decapitation narrative: she is a figure of pure, cold self-enclosure, defining herself through refusal and negation rather than through any erotic or violent act.
What is the significance of the mirror in the poem?
The mirror in the 'Scène' dialogue is Hérodiade's primary interlocutor — she prefers looking at her own reflection to encountering the external world or other people. This is not simply vanity: the mirror is a figure for the self-sufficient artwork that reflects only itself, that needs no external reference. Mallarmé's Hérodiade is in part a figure for poetry itself — the pure poem that closes itself off from the world and exists in perfect self-enclosure. The mirror is the space of that ideal self-sufficiency.
How does the fin-de-siècle treat the Salome/Hérodiade figure?
The Salome/Hérodiade figure became one of the defining obsessions of fin-de-siècle art and literature — she appears in Flaubert ('Hérodias,' 1877), Gustave Moreau's famous paintings (1876), Huysmans's description of those paintings in À rebours (1884), Wilde's Salomé (1891), Strauss's opera Salome (1905), and many other works. She represents for this generation the femme fatale — the cold, beautiful, destructive feminine that threatens masculine culture — and also the pure aesthetic object that exists without reference or purpose. Mallarmé's version is the most abstract and least erotic of the major treatments.
What is the 'Cantique de saint Jean' section?
The 'Cantique de saint Jean' (Song of Saint John) is a late poem (1895-96, published posthumously) in the voice of the severed head of John the Baptist — the head sings as it falls from the executioner's blow, celebrating the separation of the head from the body as a figure for the separation of the spiritual from the material, the ideal from the physical. It is the most extreme expression of Mallarmé's Hegelian idealism — the idea that death is the moment of the ideal's liberation from matter — and one of the most uncompromising poems he wrote.
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