SOURCE: Pao, Angela. “M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang.” In A Resource Guide to Asian American Literature, edited by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida, pp. 200-08. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001.

[In the following essay, Pao provides an introductory overview of M. Butterfly, including information about its critical reception, its historical context, and its major themes.]

PUBLICATION AND PRODUCTION INFORMATION

M. Butterfly premiered in Washington, DC, at the National Theatre on 10 February 1988 and opened in New York on Broadway at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on 20 March 1988. The play was originally published by Dramatists Play Service in 1988. New American Library-Plume has published a paperback edition of the text since 1989.

OVERVIEW

M. Butterfly is a play in three acts and twenty-seven scenes that unfold in nonlinear sequence. The action begins in the Paris prison cell of René Gallimard, a French diplomat who has been convicted of spying for the People's Republic of China. Gallimard serves as narrator for the subsequent scenes as he recalls how his infatuation with a Chinese opera singer, Song Liling, led to his downfall. In flashback scenes, Gallimard recalls his social ineptitude as a younger man and his growing acquaintance with Song Liling, who flattered his masculinity. The episodes from Gallimard's past are interspersed with reenacted moments from Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly.

By act 2, Gallimard and Song have become lovers. Their relationship appears idyllic to Gallimard, in contrast to his marriage with the outspoken Helga. Song, however, has been passing on information about United States troop movements in Vietnam gleaned from Gallimard to Comrade Chin, an agent of the Communist government. To ensure Gallimard's devotion and to counter his discontentment with the fact that Song will make love only in the dark, Chin agrees to supply a baby who Gallimard will be told is his and Song's child. Throughout the second act, in the course of exchanges between various characters, the politics of East-West relations are debated.

During the intermission between acts 2 and 3, the actor playing Song removes makeup, wig, and kimono to become a man in a fashionable suit. This transformation takes place onstage, in full view of the audience.

As act 3 begins, Song takes over the narrative as he tells a French judge how he followed Gallimard to Paris with “their” son and continued to engage in espionage. Song explains that he was able to manipulate Gallimard so easily because the latter was predisposed through various prejudices concerning both women and Asia to believe that he had indeed met his “fantasy woman.” Song also suggests that the common Western perception of the West as dominant and masculine and the East as feminine and submissive would similarly lead to the defeat of Western imperialist and military enterprises in Asia. In a climactic confrontation between Song and Gallimard, Song strips completely, forcing Gallimard to confront the truth of his self-delusions. In a final act of acceptance and resistance, Gallimard dons the cast-off wig and kimono, applies women's makeup to his face, and then reenacts Madama Butterfly's ritual suicide to the “Love Duet” from Puccini's opera.

RECEPTION

The first play by an Asian American playwright to reach a broad mainstream audience, M. Butterfly initially met with a mixed critical response. Many audience members and critics were confused about the protocols of interpretation to be applied to a play that did not fit into preconceived notions of a play with “oriental” subject matter. Other critics, however, recognized the originality and innovative aspects of Hwang's work and were receptive to his interrelated critiques of the stereotyping of Asians, social constructions of gender and sexuality, and the imperialist history of European and American foreign policy in Asia (Skloot). Some gay critics recognized the work as an exploration of the nature of masculinity and love. For others, the play's submersion of the issue of sexual preference raised the question of whether M. Butterfly was homophobic.

Opinion regarding the play's ultimate effect on how Asians are perceived has diverged widely. While many Asian Americans of all ethnicities celebrated the first international recognition accorded an American dramatist of Asian descent and the publicizing of views that had previously received little attention outside the Asian American community, others felt that Hwang ended up perpetuating the very stereotypes he intended to subvert (Moy, M. Butterfly and Sights; Wong). It has been argued, for instance, that M. Butterfly continues to promote an exoticized view of East Asia as well as the perception that Asians are devious, manipulative, and cunning. Reactions broke down to a large extent along gender lines. Women were inclined to appreciate the play for its overturning of long-standing stereotypes of the submissive “lotus blossom” (Kondo, About Face and M. Butterfly; Loo), while men were more likely to protest the continued effeminization of the Asian male (Moy, M. Butterfly and Sights). From an international perspective, the play has also been criticized for its superficial treatment of the Asian political situation, notably its cartoonish portrayal of Chinese communism, and for failing to remark that its account of East-West relations proceeds from a dominant Western positioning (Lye).

M. Butterfly received several major awards, including the 1988 Tony Award for the best play, the Outer Critics Circle Award for the best Broadway play, and the Drama Desk Award for the best new play. The play had a successful run in London, was taken on tour in the United States and translated for performance in about two dozen other countries in Asia and Europe, and continues to be regularly produced by regional theater companies.

AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

David Henry Hwang, a second-generation Chinese American, was born in 1957. His father, who was from Shanghai, emigrated from China in 1948, moving first to Taiwan and then to the United States, where he went into banking. His mother, a pianist and music teacher, was from a Chinese family living in the Philippines. They met in the United States and raised their children, David and a younger sister, in San Gabriel, California. The community was predominantly Euro-American, and Hwang's main contacts with other Chinese came through the family's membership in a Chinese church. He received his BA from Stanford University in 1979, writing his first play, FOB, during his senior year. After graduation he attended the Yale School of Drama. His work attracted the attention of Joseph Papp, who mounted FOB for the Public Theatre in New York in 1980. The play, which portrays tensions between native-born Americans of Chinese descent and recent immigrants in a nonrealistic mode, won an Obie Award for best play of the 1980-81 season. Hwang's second drama, The Dance and the Railroad, inspired by the experiences of the Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroad in 1867, was written and produced the following year. Family Devotions, an almost surrealistic farce that examined the unique chaos produced by Christian fundamentalism in a suburban Californian Chinese-American family, was also produced by the Public Theatre in 1981. The last two plays were nominated for Drama Desk Awards, and in 1982 Hwang was also honored with a Chinese American Cultural Council Award for his “Chinese-American trilogy.”

In addition to works that deal directly with aspects of Chinese American experience, Hwang has written a pair of plays based on Japanese sources, The House of Sleeping Beauties (1983) and The Sound of a Voice (1983), both of which deal with relations between the sexes. A one-act play, As the Crow Flies (1986), explores the relationship of two older women, the one Chinese American and the other African American. Following the success of M. Butterfly, Hwang undertook a variety of creative projects, notably the book for One Thousand Airplanes on the Roof (1988); the libretto for Philip Glass's 1992 opera, The Voyage; and several screenplays, including Golden Gate. With Bondage (1992), Hwang returned to an examination of the power politics of race and sex in interracial relationships. A farce, Face Values (1993), attempted to use the issues arising from the Miss Saigon casting controversy to make audiences think about whether the notion of race is “real” or simply a form of mass delusion. Hwang's 1997 play Golden Child, set in China, examines the effect of early East-West encounters on Chinese social structures as a man decides to have his family, including his three wives, convert to Christianity.

Since 1980, Hwang has moved between New York and Los Angeles.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR THE NARRATIVES IN M. BUTTERFLY

M. Butterfly is based on an actual affair that came to light in 1986. Bernard Boursicot was an accountant assigned to the French embassy in Beijing after France recognized the People's Republic of China in 1964. Within a few months of his arrival, he met Shi Pei-pu, a Chinese opera singer, at an embassy party. The two became lovers. They maintained sporadic contact over the next nineteen years, primarily because of the existence of a child, who Boursicot believed was his son by Shi. In 1983, French intelligence officials began investigating the relationship between Boursicot and Shi, who were now living in Paris. Boursicot admitted that to protect Shi from persecution during the Cultural Revolution, he had passed on confidential embassy documents to a Chinese contact. In the course of Boursicot's trial for espionage, it was revealed that Shi was a man—not a woman as Boursicot had believed. Boursicot maintained that he never realized that his lover was a man because he never saw Shi naked. He said he accepted her modesty as a “Chinese custom.”

Whereas the most common public reaction was to see Boursicot's claim of ignorance regarding the true gender of his lover as a denial of his homosexuality, Hwang (as he explains in the afterword that accompanies the published play) concluded that the Frenchman was deceived because “he had fallen in love not with a person, but with a fantasy stereotype” of Asian women as “bowing, blushing flowers” (94). Hwang interpreted the situation as a reversal of the Madame Butterfly paradigm in which a naive Asian woman is deceived by a worldly Western man. Here, a clever Shi Pei-pu had apparently been able to turn the tables on a gullible Boursicot. In Hwang's estimation, the Frenchman must have fantasized that he was Pinkerton and that his “oriental” lover was Butterfly. By the end of the play, however, the Frenchman realizes that, as the dupe of love, he has been playing the part of Butterfly all along, while the Chinese spy who exploits that love has been the real Pinkerton.

The stereotype of the Asian female to which Hwang is referring can be traced to the late nineteenth century after the forced “opening” of Japan to trade with America and Europe. By the turn of the century, the figure of the Japanese geisha had entered Western popular culture. The narrative of Madame Butterfly, introduced in the United States in a novelette by John Luther Long (based on a French version by Pierre Loti), was first adapted for the stage as a one-act play by David Belasco (1900). It appeared in its most famous incarnation, Giacomo Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, in 1904. The narrative of an attractive young Asian woman who rejects a suitor from her own culture (always portrayed as insensitive and tradition-bound) in favor of a European or Euro-American man, whom she continues to love even after he abandons her, would become one of the twentieth century's most common paradigms for representing Asian women (Marchetti; Pao, “Eyes”).

HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR THE WRITING OF M. BUTTERFLY

Hwang's deconstruction of the Madame Butterfly motif must be placed in the context of Asian American political and cultural awareness that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. One of the most significant aspects of this movement was the challenging of stereotypes of Asians that had been created and perpetuated by Western literature, theater, film, mass media, and popular culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hwang himself acknowledges that he avoided inquiring into the details of the case so that this information would not interfere with his own speculations—speculations that proceeded from his positioning as an Asian American. This positioning is reflected in his deliberate conflation of various Asian national experiences or traditions (e.g., Chinese opera, Japanese geishas, the Vietnam War) in M. Butterfly. This conflation parallels the blurring of ethnic differences in favor of a common Asian American experience that has prevailed until recently.

The American experience in Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s provided the most immediate context for Hwang's observations regarding the relation between United States foreign policy in Asia and popular perceptions of Asia and Asians.

MAJOR THEMES

• stereotypes of Asian women and men
• the exoticizing of Asia in general and Asian women in particular
• the gendering of ethnicity
• the relation between foreign policy or international relations and popular cultural representations
• essentialist versus constructivist models of gender and race
• the politics of sexuality and sexual preference
• cross-dressing and gendered identities
• performance and identity
• gender as performance
• the relation of the real and the imaginary

CRITICAL ISSUES

The interest excited by M. Butterfly is due largely to its timely integration of themes involving the complex nature of gender and sexuality with the question of historical relations between East and West. The ambiguity of the title announces the destabilizing of gender distinctions that will take place during the course of the play. The action of the play is in effect an argument against essentialist notions of both gender and race and the concept of a unitary identity. Gender and race are shown to be as much the product of imaginary constructions and concrete social practices as they are the result of biological or genetic determinants (Butler; Garber; Kondo, About Face and M. Butterfly). Critics concerned with constructions of masculinity have found highly relevant material in M. Butterfly (Kehde; Q. Lee).

While the questions about constructions of gender hold relevance for all cultural groups, Hwang treats them from a specifically Asian American point of view. In M. Butterfly, issues of gendered identity are inseparable from the stereotyping of Asian women and men and the gendering of ethnicity that has taken place in American culture and society. While the play most overtly addresses the exoticizing of Asian women (Kim; Ling; Tajima), this phenomenon cannot be separated from the corresponding effeminization of Asian men (Chin and Chan; Kim; Moy, M. Butterfly and Sights). The play can be seen as a dramatization of Edward Said's arguments that the effeminization of the Orient and the Oriental through discursive and visual representations was integral to European and American colonialist and military activity in the Middle and Far East.

As Hwang notes in his afterword, the gendering of ethnicity figures in both heterosexual and homosexual relationships. M. Butterfly offers rich material for gay and lesbian studies in its revelation of the politics of sexual preference at work in Gallimard's denial or repression of the homosexual aspects of his attraction to Song (Eng; Q. Lee).

The eminently theatrical nature of M. Butterfly has drawn the attention of critics who note that Hwang's deconstructivist project cannot be discussed apart from the performance conventions and narrative structures used to present those arguments (Chang; Chen; Haedicke; Remen).

PEDAGOGICAL ISSUES AND SUGGESTIONS

M. Butterfly offers challenging and intriguing material for students at all levels. In an introductory-level course, the question of gender formation consistently generates the most lively discussions. The essentialist versus constructivist debate can be approached by having students recall incidents where what was considered gender-appropriate behavior was rewarded and departures from that behavior were censured by figures of authority or by peer pressure. To address the specifically Asian and Asian American aspects of the play, instructors may find it helpful to show the class examples of the stereotypes Hwang was working against. In terms of supplementary readings, the works by Frank Chin and Jeffery Chan, Chalsa Loo, James Moy (“Hwang's M. Butterfly”), Robert Skloot, Renee Tajima, and William Wong provide the most accessible discussions of the critical issues. Although the film version of M. Butterfly departs considerably in mood and focus from the stage version, excerpts are useful for allowing students to observe the gender impersonation. For more advanced students who have some background in contemporary critical theory, the play can be read in conjunction with excerpts from Edward Said and Judith Butler to introduce the students to the fundamental concepts of orientalism and gender constitution as performance. The works by Marjorie Garber, Dorinne Kondo (About Face and M. Butterfly) and James Moy (Marginal Sights) offer more theoretically informed treatments of the central issues of race, gender, sexuality, and representation in M. Butterfly.

INTERTEXTUAL LINKAGES

With Frank Chin's The Chickencoop Chinaman and Philip Kan Gotanda's Yankee Dawg You Die: the construction of Asian American masculinity in the face of media and popular stereotypes.

With Velina Hasu Houston's Tea: interracial marriages between Japanese women and American servicemen that show Asian women as complex individuals.

With Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine: the politics of gender, race, and sexuality; the acting out of essentialist, constructivist, and performative models of identity; the links between colonialism and sexism.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC RESOURCES

Although Hwang has distanced his work from the actual Boursicot-Shi incident, it may be of interest to students to examine the equally problematic questions of gender and sexuality in the real-life case as it has been documented by Joyce Wadler in Liaison. An extensive listing of critical reviews of M. Butterfly that appeared in American and British newspapers and magazines is included in an article by Angela Pao (“Critic”). Gina Marchetti provides one of the most complete filmographies to date of Hollywood movies representing Asians. Josephine Lee's book situates Hwang's work in the larger context of Asian American theater and drama.

OTHER RESOURCES

Slaying the Dragon is a sixty-minute film available on videocassette that reviews the principal stereotypes of Asian women that have dominated American films and media.

Bibliography

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