Post WWII: David Henry Hwang - M. Butterfly Notes (Not to be confused with Madame Butterfly)

• David Henry Hwang
• 1988
• Characters
• Gallimard
• Song
• Themes
• Gender roles
• Homosexuality
• Orientalism
• Occidentalism
• Society Expectation
• Role Reversal
• Setting
• Japan
• Paris Prison

Play reflects Madama Butterfly by Puccini in which an American marries a Japanese woman he names Butterfly. After marriage he leaves, but returns with an American wife three years later. He discovers that he should have stayed with Butterfly because she is perfect, but Butterfly kills herself from his rejection.

Alternatively, Gallimard, is a French civil servant for the French Chinese Embassy. He marries Song and lives with her for twenty years. He is imprisoned for leaking state secrets to Song and discovers Song is actually a man. His belief that Song's modesty was a feminine ideal and his view of Song as the perfect woman results in his own suicide. This "hidden gender" is reflected in Hwang's title, as the "M." creates the expectation of Madama rather than Monsieur or Mister. The play addresses the Occidental expectation that the Orient is feminine, because of the quietness and artsy of the culture. Despite Gallimard's thought that Song's behavior is due to femininity, it is Song that adopts these behaviors to take advantage of Gallimard's expectations. Gallimard is ultimately emasculated because of his twenty year homosexuality relationship in which he identified a man as the perfect woman.

Objectives

• Learn some context for Hwang's M. Butterfly
• Introduce Said's concept of "Orientalism" & discuss the history of "Asiaphilia" as a colonial practice
• Discuss characterization & sexuality in M. Butterfly
• Contrast themes in Hwang with depictions of sexualityism other words from the core exam
• Questions about 20th C. American list in general

19th Century 

• Madame Chrysanthéme (novel, 1887)
• "Madam Butterfly" (short story, 1898)

Early 20th Century

• Madama Butterfly (Opera, 1904)
• The Toll of the Sea (Film, 1922)
• Madame Butterfly (Film, 1932) (Cary Grant)

Late 20th Century

• M. Butterfly (Play, 1988) --> Racist stuff -->response to that
• Miss Siagon (musical, 1989)
• Pinkerton (album, 1996

M. --> French for Monsieur or Madam

Postmodern

• Formally similar
• Polyphonic devices
• Stream of Consciousness
• Non-linear
• Break in structure

*extradiegesis - older (Gallimard) rotting in prison

                              --> Retrospective (Inside-out)

*Intradiegesis - younger free (Gallimard) dealing with current relationship

                              --> Réne - outside-in character

Orientalism & the Fetishization of Asian sexuality

(Western fantasies of Eastern)

Orientalism is "a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient's special place in the European Western Experience. Orient is not only adjacent to Europe; it is also a place of Europe's greatest & richest & oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations & languages, its cultural constant, & one of its deepest and most recurring images of the other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the west) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience. Yet none of this Orient is merely imaginative. The Orient is an integral part of European material civilization & culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally & even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocab, scholarship, imagery, doctrines even Colonial bureaucracies & colonial styles"

*2 influences - Puccini's Opera and Ben Johnson's Epicoene

*Does Hwang successfully subvest the "favorite fantasy of Westerners" featuring "the submissive Oriental female" and her lover, "The cruel white man?"

*Allegory for the geopolitics scene

*Does Hwang's framing of Gallimard's (least masculine because of military rank) desire for Song represent homosexuality as a source of derision

A Comparative Discussion 

• Consider how sexuality is thematized in the following works from the core list
• Nathaniel Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter
• Kate Chopin - The Awakening
• William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
• Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God
• Toni Morrison - Beloved
• Tennessee Williams - A Streetcar Named Desire
• Relationship between the lover and the lover object the writers reveal through characterizations of protagonist? Explore consequences of immoderate desire in his/her work?
• How do literary representations of sexual sin or sexual identity change from the Romantic period to the Postmodernism era?