David Hwang’s Tony Award-winning M. Butterfly is one of the most celebrated and influential plays in recent American stage history. The play is based on the true story of a French diplomat and a Chinese spy. But Hwang weaves into it many parallels from Puccini’s 1904 opera to engage in what he termed as “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly.”
In 1986 a former French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer were sentenced to six years in jail for spying for China. The diplomat had fallen in love with the Chinese actress who subsequently turned out to be not only a government spy, but also a man. In Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Pinkerton, an American naval officer, marries a Japanese geisha girl Butterfly, who bears his child. He leaves for the States promising to return but instead sends his American wife to collect his child. The distraught Butterfly commits suicide realizing that Pinkerton will never return.
In M. Butterfly, Rene Gallimard, a French diplomat, falls in love with Song Liling, an opera singer whom he first sees performing an aria from Madame Butterfly. Gallimard would realize his partner was in fact a spy and a man masquerading as a woman only towards the end of the play. In between, David Hwang lays bare the racist and sexist stereotypes about the Orient as epitomised by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. Hwang's play renders a complex reading of the cultural tension between the East and the West as well as the politics of gender, race and sexuality.
Performative Gender
M. Butterfly appears to suggest that gender is a socially constructed, conveniently-changing ambiguous idea except for the little biological details or, as Song puts it, the “flap of flesh” and its counterpart. After all Song was as much a woman in her kimono as he was a man in his suit. In the third scene, Gallimard says “you see I have known, and been loved by the Perfect Woman.”
After he has put on a suit Song makes similar points trying to lure Gallimard back: “It’s the same skin you’ve worshipped for years. Touch it.” He goes on to say, “I’m your Butterfly. Under the robes, beneath everything, it was always me.” The perception of gender role and distinction gets even murkier when Song tells the judge: “I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.”
The Orient as Submissive and Effeminate
M. Butterfly is as much a play about cultural imperialism as it is about stereotypes of gender, race and sexual orientation. It is a critique of the attitude of the Imperialist West towards the Orient or, to use the less exotic term, Asia. For the west, the Far East is a ‘senile,’ effeminate society “begging to be taken.” Its major social and intellectual occupation centres around the buying and selling of rice. The Asian woman is submissive and a sex-toy at will for the Caucasian male.
Gallimard best describes this stereotype when he says in Act two, “It’s true what they say about Oriental girls. They want to be treated bad.” Helga is scandalized to learn the Chinese have an opera. Her husband concurs and adds that Song “must have been educated in the West before the revolution” as though the training of actors is something beyond China.
Gallimard repeatedly displays Western chauvinism when he tells Toulon that the “Orientals simply want to be associated with whoever shows the most strength and power,” adding that “Orientals will always submit to a greater force.” Song sums it up in his speech directed at the judge and the audience of course: “You expect Oriental countries to submit to your guns and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men. That’s why you say they make the best wives.”
Deconstructing the Western Gaze
Parallel to the building up of racial, cultural, and gender stereotypes runs the deconstruction of these social prejudices, the reversal of the imperial gaze. Gallimard, the Western protagonist from the outset is presented as a psychological weakling constantly bemoaning his fate. His assessment of the war situation is proven wrong. He falls in love with a Chinese secret agent and passes his country’s secret to the East.
He is sexually exploited by a man from the Orient as he was duped into believing that he was cohabiting with the perfect woman. And finally, in ironic reversals of Puccini’s opera where the Japanese heroine kills herself after realizing Pinkerton has deserted her, we have Gallimard committing suicide having come to the realization that all along he has been in fact the real Butterfly, the object of sexual exploitation.
Reference:
Hwang, David H. M. Butterfly with an afterword by the playwright. New York: Penguin, 1989.
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