Comparison of Hills Like White Elephants and M Butterfly

Hills Like White Elephants & M. Butterfly Comparison

M. Butterfly and "Hills Like White Elephants"

The man' and 'the girl.' Through these identifying monikers alone it should be obvious why the short story by Ernest Hemingway entitled "Hills like White Elephants" would be a favorite of Rene Gallimard, the hero of David Hwang's drama M. Butterfly. Gallimard is fascinated with the culture of China, or rather the Chinese culture as constructed by Westerners like Puccini, the 19th century author of the opera Madame Butterfly. Gallimard, rather insecure about his own masculinity, desires a female very different than his French wife -- he wants a woman who is passive and yielding. He thinks an Asian woman is ideal to 'fit the bill.' But what Gallimard really desire is a female impersonation rather than a real female, which is why his unintentional tryst with a male in a woman's attire is such a fitting fate for him.

However, the Hemingway short story reveals that not all men are similarly punished as Gallimard, even though they may treat women in an equally false fashion. The story "Hills Like White Elephants" is about a 'man' and a 'girl,' a vulnerable, young pregnant girl who is being pressured into getting an abortion by her evidently older, more dominant male lover. The 'girl' agrees with 'the man,' even though she is afraid and evidently does not want the abortion. She is going alone because her lover tells her that it is necessary for their relationship to continue. She begs him to say that if she does get an abortion than things will be all right between the two of them again. All she cares about, more than her own dignity, even her own pleasure or future, is her relationship with the man. This makes the girl the ideal woman in Gallimard's eyes, even though Hemingway the author seems to cast the relationship between the man and the girl in a slightly darker and more sadomasochistic fashion than would Gallimard, if Rene were authoring the story "Hills Like White Elephants." There are many negative allusions by Hemingway to how much alcohol girl and the man drink, for instance -- one of the things the girl weakly says that they can look forward to is trying new drinks, once she has the abortion.

But an even more profound similarity between the two stories is the confusion of the real with the false. A white elephant, after all, is a false version of something real -- an antique that is worthless is often called a white elephant. When the man and the girl are sitting, trying a new drink together, the girl says that the hills in the distance look like white elephants. However, her language seems to elide the real with the false: "I just meant the coloring of their skin through the trees," she says, of the hills, referring to the hills as if they were alive. Within the framework of the story, the confusion of the real with the false or with the metaphor could refer to her confusion as to whether she is pregnant with something that is 'alive' or whether the relationship is 'alive.' Similarly, Gallimard confuses the trappings of femininity with being female itself, and the trappings of another culture with the real essence of the culture -- because a Western construction of China sees Asia as a butterfly, Gallimard assumes that his feminine Butterfly is 'a real woman' even though he is not. While Gallimard's mistress seemingly produces a welcome child, this child is false -- as false and metaphorically if not literally stillborn as the child of the relationship in "Hills Like White Elephants" final textual resonance between the two stories is the love of the exotic evident in both tales. While there is no hint of China in the Hemingway story, the man's and also the author's less obvious implied love of Spain, with its references to the Spanish word for beer, for example, and various foreign drinks like absinthe create an aura of the exotic that seems to act as a barrier to creating a real relationship between the man and the girl. When one is a foreigner, either a perpetual traveler like the man, or a permanent foreign resident like Gallimard, one is always a trespasser, learning things through a translation, rather than truly apprehending the culture directly. As a traveler, one cannot even really understand a person from one's own culture, in the case of the man, in a stable, fixed, and permanent fashion, because of the inability to form a true commitment while constantly moving.