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. Origin of the "veil" dance Bentley notes that the Mesopotamian goddess Inanna "performed the first documented striptease" when she descended into the Kur (underworld), ruled by her sister Ereshkigal, in search of her faithless lover Dumuzid. Inanna had to divest herself of the mysterious "seven mé " (conjecturally, her various jewels and robes) in her descent through seven successive gates leading ever deeper into the underworld until at last she stood naked in the 'land of no return.' Oscar Wilde assigned this symbolic descent to the underworld of the unconscious, a ceremony that equates stripping naked to being in a state of truth, the ultimate unveiling, to Salome." Writing from a Jungian perspective, Perera has demonstrated the same for the far older Sumerian myth of the descent of Inanna. Wilde's concept of "seven veils" is believed to be derived from the popularity of what were known as veil dances at the time. These were westernised versions of imagined Middle Eastern styles of dance. The dancer Loïe Fuller was especially associated with such dances. In 1886, Fuller appeared at New York's Standard Theater in a show called The Arabian Nights. According to Rhonda Garelick, this "featured fourteen different Oriental dance numbers, including the 'Veil of