Butterfly David Henry Hwang\'s Play

Butterfly

David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly was based on a true story about a French diplomat who carried on a long-term relationship with a Chinese spy he believed was a women, but who was really a man. This basic story serves as the outline for Hwang's examination of the key questions asked by people when the story first broke: Did he really not know? How is this possible? In the play, Gallimard believes that Song is a woman because he has stereotypes about the Oriental, so he identifies with Pinkerton of the Puccini opera; as a result of revelation of Song's identity, he realizes that his blind acceptance of a false stereotype leads him to loss and to diminishment of his experience and character and so that he is actually the Butterfly in the story.

Gallimard, the diplomat, is presented as a man who has waited his whole life for a beautiful woman "who would lay down for you" (Hwang 505). Gallimard seems to elevate Asian women, but in fact he sees them as inferior, which is one reason he is attracted to Song, as he himself shows when he says,

Did you hear the way she talked about Western women? Much differently than the first night. She does -- she does feel inferior to them -- and to me. (Hwang 508)

He is also driven by guilt as he pursues and wins this inferior creature, as he sees it:

If there was a God, surely he would punish me now. I had finally gained power over a beautiful woman, only to abuse it cruelly. (Hwang 510)

When he is promoted to the position of vice-consul, he goes to Song and explicitly links his view of her with the opera when he asks if she is his Butterfly.

The relationship between these two satisfies Gallimard because he attributes her unwillingness to undress or to allow certain intimacies to her Asian background and culture. The stereotype he has of Asian women is that they are always demure, refined, restrained, and shy. This is one of the reasons he has been attracted to these women in the first place -- his vision of them gives him the power he never feels he has with a Caucasian woman. In his own culture, women are more assertive and individual, and so he seeks a woman who is very different, which is the stereotype he has of Asian women. He says to her that "we will go very, very slowly" (Hwang 512).

Hwang shows Gallimard as having the stereotype of Asians as bowing, blushing flowers, and he presents the man as falling in love with a fantasy stereotype and not a real person. This image is what Edward Said calls Orientalism. Said was concerned with the ways in with European and American observers created imaginative geographies of "the Orient" and used them in formulating policy. Said also saw such an analysis as shot through with metaphors of the theater and of drama, dividing issues into illusion and reality, present and future. Said states that the West accepts these stereotypes because "Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine willed over the Orient because the Orient was weaker than the West" (Said 240), and though Said speaks specifically about Islam in his analysis, it applies as well to other parts of Asia. Hwang himself states that he uses the term Oriental "specificlaly to denote an exotic or imperialistic view of the East" ("Afterword" para. 2).

Critics say of playwright Hwang, "Hwang's condemnation of Western masculinity emerges powerfully, identifying him as a critic, rather than a celebrant, of Western culture" (Shin para. 5). It is meaningful that he uses Western culture to criticize it.

Hwang uses the image of Puccini's Madame Butterfly to evoke a sense of the stereotype recognized by the West. In the opera, written in 1904, the central Western character is Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, stationed in Nagasaki at the turn of the century, who uses a marriage broker to receive a fifteen-year-old geisha girl, Cio-Cio San, or "Butterfly" in Japanese. He marries Cio-Cio San, and she bears him a child. He then leaves Japan for three years while vowing to return, but Cio-Cio San eventually learns that Pinkerton does not plan to return to her and that he is to take another bride. The news devastates Butterfly, who then kills herself with a knife. The submissive Oriental woman even submits in death -- she punishes herself for the perfidy of Pinkerton.

As a news release from Stanford University states, "Some of the issues Hwang raised in M. Butterfly, including perceived Asian submissiveness and the origin of racial stereotypes, are among the hot-button topics that he thinks have to be addressed by today's playwrights" ("Henry David Wang - Profile of a Playwright" para. 15). In Hwang's play, the Butterfly image is what his hero, Gallimard, keeps in his mind at all times and elevates to a high position. Gallimard tells the story to the audience, shifting time and place as needed to do so, and in the end Gallimard makes his own statement about his relationship with Song Liling, challenging the laughter of others as he denies in public that Song Liling is a man:

There is a vision of the Orient that I have. Of slender women in chong sams and kimonos who die for the love of unworthy foreign devils. Who are born and raised to be the perfect women. Who take whatever punishment we give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally. (Hwang 536)

This image derives directly from Madame Butterfly, including the reference to women who kill themselves for love. Anne Anlin Cheng says of Hwang's play that it is "his version of this tale of East-West intrigue" (Cheng 109), a tale told in different forms over the years and rooted in East-West relations as well. Critic Frank Rich says the true story was a starting point but that Hwang was not interested in the details of how the spy fooled the diplomat but instead seeks to "open a liaison to reveal a sweeping, universal meditation on two of the most heated conflicts - men vs. women, East vs. West - of this or any other time" (Rich para. 2).

The comparison is made explicit by the meeting between Gallimard and Son Liling, which takes place at an embassy function where she performs the aria from the death scene of Madame Butterfly. Gallimard approaches the singer after the performance and compliments her, showing his dedication to the story of Madame Butterfly and his belief in its beauty. A conflict between the two is evident from the first, for Song Liling agrees that this is a beautiful story to a Westerner:

It's one of your favorite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man. (Hwang 501)

The way Hwang develops Song Liling contributes to the deconstruction of Madame Butterfly, for while Song Liling criticizes the story of the opera, he makes use of it to seduce Gallimard and plays the part of Cio-Cio San in their relationship. For his part, Gallimard is a willing participant in the illusion and in the fantasy, for he can only believe himself to be a man if he has the image of the subservient woman against which to play.

What Gallimard wants and finds in Song is made apparent in much that he says, and what he finds is someone who flatters him, pleasures him, supports him, and listens to him: "Perhaps there is nothing more rare than to find a woman who passionately listens" (Hwang 516). Gallimard's affair with Renee offers a contrast with how he feels about Song, for Renee is assertive and bold, everything Song is not: