Gender and Orientalism in Hwang's M. Butterfly

Introduction: Preconceptions and the Drama's Design

David Henry Hwang's Pulitzer Prize-winning drama M. Butterfly is almost single-minded in its examination of the role played by preconceptions in the establishment of cultural expectations and stereotypes. Based on a true story, the drama lays out in clear, precise terms the ways in which Western prejudices toward China can lead to results that would seem wildly implausible in a brief factual summary, yet are nonetheless the foreordained results of taking such Western prejudices to their logical conclusion. It is crucial to note, however, that Hwang's ideas are couched largely in terms of gender: this is a play in which the difference between men and women is engaged intellectually — for the reader or viewer — as a way of complicating or underscoring certain preconceptions about the difference between East and West. It is worth conducting a deeper examination of the ways in which Hwang constructs his story, investigating the notions of gender used in that construction, and examining what he considers the underlying cultural conceptions to be and how they are formed.

It is worth noting at the outset that M. Butterfly is itself a text that rewrites an earlier text: Hwang's story, while based on a true event, is a retelling or re-vision of the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly. The idea of a gender difference is already advertised in the title: "Madame" is a French term of address for a married woman, while "M." is the abbreviation for the French "Monsieur," a term of address for an adult man. In other words, the title could very well be read as "Mr. Butterfly," except that the protagonist is a French diplomat named Gallimard. In some sense, then, we are notified simply by reading the title that what we might expect is a gender-reversed version of Puccini's Madame Butterfly.

Conveniently for an audience that might know the title of Puccini's opera without recollecting the details of its plot, Gallimard summarizes the original story at the beginning of M. Butterfly:

"Its heroine, Cio-Cio-San, also known as Butterfly, is a feminine ideal, beautiful and brave. And its hero, the man for whom she gives up everything, is — [he pulls out a naval officer's cap from under his crate, pops it on his head, and struts about] — not very good-looking, not too bright, and pretty much a wimp: Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of the U.S. Navy. As the curtain rises, he's just closed on two great bargains: one on a house, the other on a woman — call it a package deal. Pinkerton purchased the rights to Butterfly for one hundred yen — in modern currency, equivalent to about…sixty-six cents. So he's feeling pretty pleased with himself…" (Hwang, 5)

Rewriting Madame Butterfly: Gender Reversal in the Title and Plot

The rest of the plot, which Gallimard also summarizes, is fairly simple: Butterfly falls in love with Pinkerton, who abandons her. He returns to America, where he marries a white American woman; when news of this betrayal reaches Butterfly in Japan, she commits suicide. What is worth noting about Gallimard's summary, however, is its performative nature. As he tells the story of Pinkerton without romanticizing him — describing him as "pretty much a wimp" — he simultaneously takes on the part of Pinkerton by wearing the "naval officer's cap." We are therefore invited at the outset of the drama to see the white Westerner in M. Butterfly as self-consciously playacting the role of the white Westerner from the earlier Madame Butterfly.

To some extent the resolution of the drama will therefore come as an utter surprise, when it is revealed that Gallimard has in fact been playing the opposite role all along — that of the spurned woman. So even though there is a larger and more memorable surprise about the gender of the main characters — the central fact of the drama — the drama itself is structured around a broader gender reversal: Gallimard begins the play as the unheroic agent of Western imperialism, but ends it as the one who dies for love, the role played in Puccini's opera by the Asian character, who is also a woman. We are asked to entertain ideas about both racial or cultural reversal and gender reversal simultaneously.

Early in the drama, the two main characters — the French diplomat Gallimard and the Chinese spy Song, who is employed to gather information on him while pretending to be a woman — directly discuss the notion of a gender-reversed version of the Puccini opera:

SONG: It's one of your favorite fantasies, isn't it? The submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man.

GALLIMARD: Well, I didn't quite mean —

SONG: Consider it this way: what would you say if a blonde homecoming queen fell in love with a short Japanese businessman? He treats her cruelly, then goes home for three years, during which time she prays to his picture and turns down marriage from a young Kennedy. Then, when she learns he has remarried, she kills herself. Now, I believe you would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot, correct? But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner — ah! — you find it beautiful.

[Silence.]

Song's Challenge: Deconstructing the Submissive Oriental Woman

GALLIMARD: Yes…well…I see your point… (Hwang, 17)

This passage offers a vision of how shallow the plot of Puccini's Madame Butterfly might seem if an audience questions its unspoken assumptions. It is also important to note, however, that these characters are themselves acting out a different version of the Madame Butterfly plot, reversing expectations in yet another way. The interaction between these two riffs on the Puccini original is quite interesting when we consider how gender plays into Hwang's construction of cultural preconception.

In this passage, Song deconstructs the original plot by speaking — as a Chinese person — about the racial assumptions built into the story. It is the story of a "submissive Oriental woman," and the easiest way to prompt a Westerner to consider the extent to which this is a stereotype is to reverse the cultural backgrounds of the main characters. The notion of a submissive American woman who commits suicide for the love of a rather uninteresting Japanese man who spurns her is assumed to be readily explicable to Gallimard — and to the implied white Western audience of a Broadway play — as the behavior of a "deranged idiot." Because Hwang is writing a tightly constructed play rather than a more discursive novel, he does not explore the fact that this race-reversed fantasy of Madame Butterfly has indeed been attempted by others: one might consider a work like L'Amant by Marguerite Duras, or even Frank Capra's 1933 Hollywood film The Bitter Tea of General Yen, both of which imagine the scenario of an Asian man with a younger Western woman. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine either Duras or Capra in too much detail, but it is enough to note that in neither case is the Western woman presented by the Western artist as a "deranged idiot."

It is worth noting that the version of the "submissive Oriental woman" discussed in M. Butterfly is more or less explicitly presented for a white Western audience and is therefore challenging that audience's stereotypical preconceptions. It would complicate matters too much, perhaps, to suggest that Chinese or Japanese authors have examined gender in ways that call into question their own cultural constructions of gender for Asian audiences — without the assumption of a Westerner looking in on the drama.

The protagonist of Kawabata's Snow Country, with his seemingly cavalier treatment of the geisha Komako, might be seen as a native Japanese version of Pinkerton from Madame Butterfly — it is possible that Kawabata even intends this, since his protagonist is explicitly described as having a profound interest in Western arts, particularly ballet. Kawabata may therefore dramatize cultural difference as well, but it is a cultural difference within Japanese culture — not about the conflict of East and West per se, but about an urban cosmopolitan (with exposure to Western ideas) and a rural geisha. Similarly, Feng Jicai approaches the subject of foot-binding in historical Chinese culture in the novel The Three-Inch Golden Lotus. This issue might well be taken as a source of Western stereotypes about the "submissive Oriental woman," precisely because so many Chinese women were forced to submit to the practice. Yet in The Three-Inch Golden Lotus, the girl Fragrant Lotus is an object of fetishistic desire without any exposure to Westerners — it is a traditional Chinese man who is obsessed with her perfectly bound feet.

These examples are important to recall because the critique offered in M. Butterfly — by a Chinese-American writer writing for a majority white American audience — could itself be reconstructed by Asian authors for Asian audiences, conceiving of the gender issues in a way that is no less powerful, but does not involve those gender issues in a critique of Western views of Asia as Hwang's does.