[In the following essay, Kerr compares the representation of Asian characters in M. Butterfly and Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly. Kerr argues that the opera aligns the audience's sympathy with the pathos of the central Asian character, while Hwang's play aligns the audience with the plight of the central Western character.]

One of the best-known of all Asian voices sings in Italian. I dare say that Madame Butterfly is the most recognisable image in all of Western opera, and one that comes freighted with meaning even for those who have never seen or heard the opera, and have the vaguest idea of the story. One such was the American playwright David Henry Hwang, who, one afternoon in 1986 while driving down Santa Monica Boulevard, was visited by ‘the idea of doing a deconstructivist Madame Butterfly’, even though at the time he did not even know the plot of the opera.¹ This paper is interested in what led to that idea, and what resulted from it: that is, the production and development of the image of Madame Butterfly from its origins almost a century ago, to its latest and violent reaccentuation in David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly, given its first performance in 1988.

The composer Puccini was in England in the summer of 1900, in connection with the London production of his latest opera Tosca, when he attended a performance of an American play called Madame Butterfly. He was enthralled. He knew very little English, but he knew what he liked, and (says Mosco Carner) ‘came away profoundly moved by the play, in spite of or perhaps because of his inability to follow its dialogue’.² When Puccini first heard Butterfly's voice, it was speaking in a language he did not know, yet felt he understood.

The character of Madame Butterfly had made her debut in a novelette by John Luther Long which was published in the American Century Magazine in 1898. This in turn owes something to Pierre Loti's novel Madame Chrysanthème (1887), an orientalist whimsy that tells the story of a European sailor's temporary marriage to a Japanese geisha. (Loti specialised in this sort of thing: E. M. Forster described him as ‘a sentimentalist who has voyaged hat in hand over the picturesque world’, adding ‘Les mariages de Loti se font partout’.³) But Butterfly seems to have had her chief origin too in a piece of gossip which Long (who had never been to Japan) had heard from his sister, the wife of an American missionary at Nagasaki.⁴ The dramatic or melodramatic potential of the tale, when he read it in the Century Magazine, caught the attention of David Belasco, then at the height of his fame as a playwright and theatrical producer. The collaboration between Belasco and Long—Arthur Hobson Quinn describes it rather sadly as ‘the most artistic period’ of Belasco's career⁵—brought forth the one-act play Madame Butterfly, first produced in New York in 1900, which was to be followed by five other exotic romances, including The Girl of the Golden West (1905). Puccini first saw and heard Butterfly, then, in the London production of Belasco's dramatisation of Long's story.

The play retains a great deal of the dialogue of the original story, but Belasco's dramatic instinct led him to a concentration of the action into a single act—more accurately, an act of two scenes, separated by the overnight vigil of Butterfly, a feature which Puccini was to retain. Belasco's other major change was to the plot. In Long's story, Butterfly's attempt at suicide is unsuccessful: she decides to live after all, and (it is implied) she returns in the end to her former profession of geisha. Belasco could see that this would not do.

The action of the play starts some three years after Lt Pinkerton has sailed away from Nagasaki, leaving behind Cho-Cho-San the geisha (known as Butterfly) with whom he has gone through a form of marriage, and promising to return when the robins nest again. Even her servant Suzuki can see the cynicism of this promise: but Cho-Cho-San believes Pinkerton will keep faith. She turns down an offer of marriage from the wealthy Yamadori, even though Sharpless, the American consul, tries to make her understand that it is useless to pin her hopes on Pinkerton. A ship's gun is heard: Pinkerton's ship has arrived in the harbour; Butterfly, her child by Pinkerton, and the servant Suzuki sit up all night waiting to welcome him home. In the second scene Pinkerton appears, though he has not the courage to face a meeting with Butterfly. He has married an American girl, Kate, and now they have come to take the child (whom Butterfly has named Trouble) back to America with them. When Butterfly understands this, she agrees to give up the child to Kate Pinkerton. But in losing her husband and her child, she has lost everything. Rather than go on living without honour, she commits suicide, using the blade with which her father too had killed himself. Her death ends the play.

Madame Butterfly offered its audience large helpings of the exotic, spiced with pathos and humour.

America's gaze was being drawn to the Orient. The year of Long's story was the year of the ‘splendid little war’ which gave Guam and the Philippines to America: Asia was becoming collectible. Japanese design was fashionable in the West, and Madame Butterfly itself is a collection or thesaurus of japonaiserie, containing most of what most people in the audience might be expected to recognise as typically Japanese—fans, screens, marriage-broking, paper houses, tea, suicide, cosmetics, ancestor-worship, politeness, cherry blossom. And at the centre of the collection the little geisha herself, acquired by Pinkerton in a buyer's market and referred to as Butterfly. Belasco's opening stage direction describes Butterfly's ‘little house’: ‘Everything in the room is Japanese save the American locks and bolts on the doors and windows and an American flag fastened to a tobacco jar.’

Pinkerton, who has acquired the place on a 999-year lease, has also possessed Cho-Cho-San, who in his absence insists on referring to the house as an American house and to herself as an American girl. She is locked into the marriage with Pinkerton that only she believes in. As Mrs Pinkerton, she can neither earn a living as a geisha, nor even consider a marriage proposal from the obliging and fabulously wealthy Yamadori. She has renounced her religion, and her family have renounced her. She is entirely and disastrously dependent on Pinkerton. But what is perhaps most interesting is what has happened to Butterfly's voice.

For obvious reasons, the play's dialogue is in English. The consul, and later the Pinkertons, provide the norm of speech: the cosmopolitan Yamadori also speaks a standard (even slightly Jamesian) American English. Against this must be measured Butterfly's idiom—as, for example, when she greets Mr Sharpless the American consul.

O, your honorable excellency, goon night,—no, not night yaet: aexcuse me, I'm liddle raddle',—I mean goon mornin', goon evenin'. Welcome to 'Merican house, mos' welcome to 'Merican girl! (Pointing to herself. They both bow.) Be seat.

And this is not an idiom reserved for her dealings with foreigners. She speaks to Yamadori and the marriage-broker in the same way, and at the beginning of the play she has already reminded the servant Suzuki that ‘no one shall speak anythin' but those Unite' State' languages in these Lef-ten-ant Pik-ker-ton's house’. She recognises and insists on this as the linguistic sign of Pinkerton's ownership—her voice is locked in his language just as her house is secured by those American locks and bolts. And so keen is she to refashion herself as her husband's creature that, when she winks behind her fan, Sharpless exclaims ‘Heavens! Pinkerton's very wink.’ This self-westernising of Cho-Cho-San is an assertion of her relationship with Pinkerton but also, of course, a measure of the grotesque inequality of that relationship. She refuses Japanese: in the English she has acquired from three months with Pinkerton, she is not only disadvantaged but often ridiculous.

Butterfly's comical English belongs to a strong theatrical tradition. There are moments when she sounds like a stage negro from a minstrel show. Alan S. Downer usefully points out that she speaks the English of a once popular comic figure, Hashimura Togo the ‘Japanese Schoolboy’.⁶ American drama and vaudeville were in any case full of characters and turns based on the immigrants flooding into the States—an accelerating flood, almost nine million in the twenty years before Madame Butterfly, almost nine million in the ten years after,⁷ and most of them no doubt protesting their Americanness loudly. (As one California Chinese says to another in Hwang's Family Devotions, ‘What do you know about American ways? You were born here!’) The theatres registered and applied the pressure of assimilation: American audiences were used to the idea that foreigners were condemned to be funny until they could become properly American. And so while Butterfly's setting made her part of an exotic spectacle, and her situation made her recognisable as the melodrama type of the deserted mistress, a figure of pathos, her voice made her recognisably a clown, a figure of fun. It is a potent and more or less unbearable mixture, reaching a dramatic climax when Pinkerton bursts in to find the dying Butterfly with the child he has never seen.

PINKERTON (Discerning what she has done):
Oh! Cho-Cho-San! (He draws her to him with the baby pressed to her heart. She waves the child's hand which holds the [American] flag—saying faintly.)
MADAME Butterfly:
Too bad those robins did n' nes' again. (She dies.)

The audience is gone which could enjoy this tableau, and this curtain line, in any straightforward way.⁸ Yet that audience did exist, and it made the play a sensational success in its time. The ending is constructed out of widely shared ideas or feelings about what it meant to be Asian and what it meant to be Western, and about the relation between the two.

The transformation of the Long-Belasco play took four years, and is not a simple matter. I do not propose to try to disentangle the contributions of Puccini, his two librettists Giacosa and Illica, or the different stages of revision. I must treat the opera as a single, finished thing, and pay attention to the transformation of the voice of Butterfly from Long's heroine to Puccini's.

First, in the opera Butterfly loses the linguistic disadvantage that made her sometimes ridiculous in the story and the play. She is as fluent as Pinkerton and the others in the language of the opera, Italian. Difference of idiom is a device more suited to the more realistic forms. Puccini does give his Butterfly elements of native Japanese and pseudo-Japanese music,⁹ but it would be difficult for the singing voice to suggest a Japanese imperfectly imitating an American idiom: besides, these language nuances probably were of no interest to the Italians who worked on the opera (and they certainly would not have been noticeable to Puccini when he saw the play). Gone is any sense that as a foreigner Butterfly is linguistically inferior: that sense perhaps depended on an experience of empire, or of immigration. The result of the equalising (so to speak) of Butterfly's language is that she is now no longer at all comic. The comedy, such as it is, recedes into the background to be distributed among the locally-colourful relatives who attend her wedding; the heroine herself is perhaps even more picturesque and exotic than she was in the original version but her Japaneseness is attractive and charming and not laughable. Unlike her prototype, Puccini's Cio-Cio-San is neither vulgar nor silly. Her powerlessness in relation to Pinkerton is registered not in an inadequate command of his language, but in the much greater emphasis the opera gives to her youth (she is fifteen when she meets Pinkerton).

The major structural difference between the opera and the play is the introduction of a long first act centred on the wedding, or ‘wedding’, of Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San. The erotic climaxing of this first act in the union of Pinkerton and Butterfly will be followed, and parodied, at the end of Act 1 of M. Butterfly. In an obvious sense, the act is a necessary prelude to the obligatory and dazzling love duet, but it serves other purposes too, purposes that open up differences from the original play. Butterfly's bridal happiness supplies what the play had lacked, a sense of the high point from which the heroine's fortunes decline, an arc of tragedy. It also lends a certain credibility to her devotion to Pinkerton—he is after all a Puccini tenor, which is something, and an improvement on the timid and brutal oaf of the play. The opera brings a very much stronger light to bear on the erotic. And yet that rhapsodic duet under starlight on the wedding-night is already ironic, pathetic. Earlier in the act and before Butterfly's first entrance, Pinkerton has given notice, in the aria ‘Dovunque al mondo’, that he intends to take pleasure and profit wherever he can find them, and that he is taking his wife on just the same contractual terms as he took the house—999 years, with the option to quit at any time he likes. So the unbridled lyricism of the wedding-night duet has some emotional subtlety, deriving from Butterfly's unawareness of what is being done to her. Her bliss is dependent upon her ignorance that for Pinkerton she is another score added to his total, another wife in another port for the ‘Yankee vagabondo’. She is not to know that, immediately before her arrival, the groom was drinking a toast to the day he would marry ‘con vere nozze / a una vera sposa americana’—a real marriage, to a real American bride.

The pathos of women was Puccini's speciality. He liked to speak of his heroines as his ‘little women’; and indeed the littleness of Butterfly is inscribed all over the opera. Pinkerton bombards her with diminutives. She is his ‘piccina mogliettina’, his tiny little wife. In one passage of the love duet he addresses her as his squirrel, his little toy, his child (a witch-like child, rather like the subject peoples of the Kipling poem, the ‘fluttered folk’ who are ‘half demon and half child’.¹⁰) She concurs, replying in kind: ‘Somiglio la Dea della luna, / la piccola Dea della luna’—she is the little goddess of the moon. She is even, as it were, racially miniature. ‘Noi siamo gente avvezza / alle piccole cose, / umili e silenziose’, she comes from a people accustomed to small things, modest and quiet (a line quoted but interestingly misunderstood in M. Butterfly). Long before the transistor and the microchip, Japan was associated with miniature artefacts. Here the diminution of Butterfly speaks to a recurrent western imagination of the Orient as delicate, beautiful and fragile.¹¹ Linked to the libretto's insistence on the girl's extreme youth—and this is in turn related to a paternalistic tendency of the discourse of orientalism—and its characterisation of her as a grave child, courageous but out of her depth, these features add up to what was clearly for Puccini the truth of Butterfly's story, its overwhelming pathos. At one point in Act 2 Yamadori, the consul and the marriage-broker discuss her ‘blindness’ while she is in the room; people plot around her, she is the last to know. She is small, virtually alone, innocent and helpless, she has no power and no knowledge, nothing but dignity. Nothing, that is, except her voice. Whereas John Luther Long gave Butterfly a voice that made it impossible to take her seriously, Puccini's Butterfly has a voice of power, and she has all the best tunes. She does not resist her sufferings, but she sings. Her pathos is the opera.

Poor Butterfly. Long's narrative had her deserted: Belasco for the play required her death: Puccini's treatment of her story prolongs and deepens her pathos, while making it more impressive. You do not need to be particularly sensitive to consider that the myth of Butterfly, and its production, is a story of exploitation. The geisha herself is a resource exploited by the freebooting Pinkerton, and then abandoned. He adds her to his collection of erotic bibelots—she is like blown glass, he sings, or a figure painted on a lacquer screen. She is an attractive prize for him because she is Japanese; yet in getting his hands on her, he alienates her from her Japanese family, religion, language and future. To collect her is to kill her. And Pinkerton can take advantage of her by exploiting the powerlessness of virtually every card in her hand—her youth, her sex, her poverty, her race. But perhaps the buck should not stop at Pinkerton. Mosco Carner claims that it is ‘precisely because of their degraded position that [Puccini] was able to fall in love with his heroines’; but that, having created them to fall in love with them, he proceeds to punish them with ‘a manifestly sado-masochistic enjoyment’.¹² But it was not only Puccini who enjoyed the spectacle of Butterfly's suffering. It filled the opera houses; it was something people wanted. ‘Voglion prendermi tutto!’ Butterfly realises, far too late: they want to take everything from me. But she utters not a single word of protest or anger. She is the queen of submission.

When David Henry Hwang perused the libretto of Madame Butterfly, he says he found in it ‘a wealth of sexist and racist clichés’, and concluded that the figure of Butterfly could be understood as a ‘fantasy stereotype’. There is no doubt that this is true. Butterfly is clearly a wish-projection of what a Western male imagination supposed an Oriental woman might be like—beautiful, exotic, loving, yielding and not binding, giving all and demanding nothing. She is an aspect of a stereotype, fashioned in an age of colonial adventure (though by no means extinct), a Western myth of the Oriental female (and of the Orient as female) about which a post-colonial criticism has found a lot to say, much of it along the lines of Rana Kabbani's claim (in Europe's Myths of Orient) that To perceive the East as a sexual domain, and to perceive the East as a domain to be colonised, were complementary aspirations.’¹³ It is appropriate that this myth should be reappraised at the hands of an Asian American writer. It will be remembered that Butterfly had a child who would grow up in the States, a child both Asian and American, and that his name was Trouble.

So Hwang's project is, really, the revenge of Butterfly, a revolutionary retelling in which the means of production of the story, as it were, are in Asian hands—or, if you like, Madame Butterfly with an Asian voice. Hwang uses (and in the process inverts) the myth of Butterfly as a way of telling and of understanding the story spun from an anecdote he heard in a casual conversation, an anecdote about a French diplomat in Beijing who had fallen in love with a Chinese actress, who subsequently turned out to be not only a spy, but a man. The play is set in Beijing and Paris and most of its action takes place in the 1960s. But Hwang has said that it is also a personal play for him, coloured by his own experience of the stereotyping social attitudes and expectations that confront an Asian American.

In M. Butterfly what I was trying to ask was: Is it reasonable to assume that those attitudes I felt from society at large influence the policy makers as they consider the world?¹⁴

How does the play manage its dialogue with the opera, story and myth of Madame Butterfly?

The facts of the play's story are these. René Gallimard, a junior French diplomat in Beijing in 1960, meets the opera singer Song Liling at a diplomatic reception where she fascinates him by singing Puccini; she invites him to see her perform in Chinese opera, a hesitant courtship ensues in which first Song and then Gallimard himself plays hard to get; this culminates in their becoming lovers at the end of Act 1. In Act 2, Gallimard has set up his mistress in an apartment, and she has begun to extract diplomatic intelligence from him (it is the early days of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam), Gallimard having been promoted on the strength of his envied ability to ‘get along with the Chinese’. Gallimard starts another affair, with a European girl, but her sexual frankness repels him; he returns to Song, who announces she is pregnant and (after going away for some months to the country) presents him with a child. But things start to go wrong: Gallimard is posted back to France, demoted and demoralised, Song suffers in the Cultural Revolution, and four years later is sent by his political masters penniless to France, to live off Gallimard and carry on spying. Act 3, fifteen years later, deals with Gallimard's discovery (or admission) of the truth about Song; the trial; and Gallimard alone in prison, with his memories and fantasies. It ought to be added that the audience is aware from the start that Song Liling is a man.

The play itself is presented (like Yeats' Purgatory) as an obsessive re-play, ‘always searching for a new ending’. (1.3) Gallimard, alone in gaol, introduces and stage-manages (or tries to) a series of tableaux from his memory, interwoven with verbal and musical allusions to the opera—necessary, he says, ‘in order for you to understand what I did and why’. (1.3) It is largely through this intertextuality that the play explores the issues of love and betrayal between cultures, the story of Gallimard being a parody and a reversal (up to a point) of the story of Pinkerton.

Through the first act, Gallimard gives a sort of caricature or cartoon version of the story of Madame Butterfly, his favourite opera, with himself in the role of Pinkerton. Here is Gallimard/Pinkerton telling the consul about his bride.

PINKERTON:
Cio-Cio-San. Her friends call her Butterfly. Sharpless, she eats out of my hand!
SHARPLESS:
She's probably very hungry.
PINKERTON:
Not like American girls. It's true what they say about Oriental girls. They want to be treated bad!
SHARPLESS:
Oh, please!
PINKERTON:
It's true!
SHARPLESS:
Are you serious about this girl?
PINKERTON:
I'm marrying her, aren't I?
SHARPLESS:
Yes—with generous trade-in terms.
PINKERTON:
When I leave, she'll know what it's like to have loved a real man. And I'll even buy her a few nylons.
SHARPLESS:
You aren't planning to take her with you?
PINKERTON:
Huh? Where?
SHARPLESS:
Home!
PINKERTON:
You mean, America? Are you crazy? Can you see her trying to buy rice in St. Louis?

(1.3)

This is hardly the language of the 1890s in which the action of the opera is supposed to take place. In fact the jokes about hunger and nylons point rather to the era of Macarthur, but the idiom is a slick contemporary colloquial. It also has a certain brutal self-confidence, apt for the speech of a latter-day Pinkerton, but actually ill-suited to Gallimard himself.

For though he may have his dreams of sexual conquest and power, Gallimard is a timid man, gauche and mild-mannered, and he is at first at a loss when his fantasies become actual in the alluring shape of the ‘Chinese diva’ singing the role of Butterfly—his dream made flesh. Though not one of nature's Pinkertons, Gallimard is enthralled by the myth, and drawn into it; he creates himself as Pinkerton, just as he creates Song Liling as Butterfly. And his old schoolfriend Marc collaborates in the construction of these roles, with his man-of-the-world advice about how the Chinese girl is ‘bound to surrender’ to her western suitor, she cannot help herself. It is, says Marc (quite accurately) ‘an old story’ (1.9), and so, evidently, not just Gallimard's singular fantasy but a communal, cultural and historical one. A Butterfly requires a Pinkerton; and in his pursuit of Song, Gallimard becomes calculating and commanding, aggressive and confident. He acquires authority, in both senses, of knowledge and power. He is promoted, and consulted by his ambassador as an expert on the East, a man with ‘inside knowledge’ whose advice (‘Orientals will always submit to a greater force’, and so on) is passed on to the Americans. Pinkerton possessed his Butterfly: ‘A lui devo obbedir!’, she said; I must obey him in everything. But Gallimard's authority and possession are a delusion. In M. Butterfly the tables are turned: he has been had.

Song him/herself is first seen in the panoply of Oriental mystique, costumed for Peking opera, and is last seen demystified, as a naked man. For unlike the guileless Butterfly, Song is an actor. ‘Only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act’, (2.7) and Song has captivated Gallimard by telling him just what he wants to hear.

SONG:
Please. Hard as I try to be modern, to speak like a man, to hold a western woman's strong face up to my own … in the end, I fail. A small, frightened heart beats too quickly and gives me away.

(1.10)

This is consummate: it is recognisably the voice of Butterfly—diminutive, meek, feminine, culturally quaint but backward, pathetically anxious to be Western. But of course the helplessness that doomed Puccini's Butterfly is a gambit for Song. Song's submissiveness makes a conquest of Gallimard: it is an instrument of power.

For Gallimard believes—and goes on believing (like Butterfly in the opera)—because he wants to believe. The Chinese singer has assumed the form of his desire, as romance embodied, beside whom Western women seem either commonplace or alarming. And so the demystification of Song, when it comes, is stark and brutal. In the courtroom scene in Act 3, Song responds with a cruel lack of modesty, to the judge's (the audience's?) prurient curiosity.

SONG:
… I did all the work. He just laid back. Of course we did enjoy more … complete union, and I suppose he might have wondered why I was always on my stomach, but … But what you're thinking is: ‘Of course a wrist must've brushed … a hand hit … over twenty years!’ Yeah. Well, Your Honor, it was my job to make him think I was a woman. And chew on this: it wasn't all that hard. See, my mother was a prostitute along the Bund before the Revolution. And, uh, I think it's fair to say she learned a few things about Western men. So I borrowed her knowledge. In service to my country.

(3.1)

Song in the witness-box stands revealed as cynical, arrogant and unfeeling, proud of his powers as actor, lover and spy. This is what the voice of Butterfly has come to: it speaks now in a register, and manner, that recalls the boastful and racist vulgarities of Pinkerton in Act 1. And Gallimard—humiliated, betrayed and helpless—is forced to listen.

It is a dramatic discovery and reversal that turns the Butterfly story inside out. Gallimard understands at last that he has been telling the wrong story, or rather telling the right story but from the wrong point of view. The fantasy of Butterfly has been turned against the fantasist: Gallimard's dream of power was the weakness that enabled Song to use him. It is Gallimard who has been tricked into submission, exploited, deluded and lied to—he who is the last to know, ruined, and now abandoned. He has been brought, a low-mimetic Antony, to the heart of loss; and all for love.

GALLIMARD:
… Yes—love. Why not admit it all? That was my undoing, wasn't it? Love warped my judgment, blinded my eyes, rearranged the very lines on my face … until I could look in the mirror and see nothing but … a woman.

(3.3)

He is Butterfly; and in the last moments of the play he enacts Butterfly's death, which Song is brought onstage (like Belasco's and Puccini's Pinkerton) in time to witness.

The project of Hwang's ‘deconstructivist Madame Butterfly’, as he explains in the Afterword, was to expose the falsities and dangers of the kind of ‘sexist and racist clichés’ that were to be found in ‘the archetypal East-West romance that started it all’. The play that gives Butterfly her revenge is as much of its place and time as were the earlier versions of the story that watched her suffer. Terms like ‘American’ and ‘Asian’, ‘Oriental’ and ‘Western’, are growing new meanings in multi-ethnic California, after Vietnam. But though its premises are quite different, M. Butterfly has much in common with Belasco's play, and not least in its theatricalism, its spectacle and melodrama. And if it stumbles at times over its own ambitions, it is none the less compelling. I want to conclude by raising two points, one political and one dramatic, about this latest but probably not last of the metamorphoses of Butterfly.

The play's overt political story is not one of its more impressive features. Its portrayal of Chinese communism is of the cartoon variety, and it is clumsy and contrived in its linking of Gallimard's adventures with Song to American activities in Vietnam. To be sure, the Americans took advice from the French over Indochina. But the play suggests there is a direct causal connection between the advice of a French vice-consul, whose orientalist qualifications are that he has a Chinese lover, and American decisions to escalate the war and later to have President Diem assassinated. (2.2, 2.6) The play is realist enough in its predication to suffer a good deal from its own improbabilities. And as a gloss on the history of East-West relations in its own time, it can't be assumed that M. Butterfly, for all its knowingness, is necessarily superior to the libretto of the Puccini opera.

Opera of course is not realist. Its words are in another language; they tend to be smothered in their music. The music, Brecht said, makes the reality vague and unreal: the point is repeated by the feminist Catherine Clément in her Opera, or The Undoing of Women, but, Clément adds, ‘The unconscious … does not hear with this deaf ear’.¹⁵ And her critique of the opera repertoire finds room to praise, of all people, Puccini.

None of these ‘women in Puccini's operas’ can be understood without history. Perhaps no one knew better than he and his librettists how to show a destiny and a politics that were intimately inseparable, right down to their final, crushing action.¹⁶

And indeed Puccini's Madame Butterfly is not a mere fantasy. It is an opera that opens with a man appraising a piece of real estate and ends with a woman making arrangements for the emigration of her son to the West. Butterfly's fate is of no historical moment, yet it has historical meaning. Her domestic tragedy is played out on a stage whose dimensions are political and economic, racial and cultural; and these awarenesses are created in the language, in the libretto—it may be a symptom but it is also an investigation of the discourse of orientalism. In Puccini the private drama lives in history in a way that makes M. Butterfly seem heavy-handed.

The dramatic point is related to this. Belasco and Puccini both identified the pathos of the betrayed victim as the dramatic centre of gravity of the Butterfly story. When David Henry Hwang undertook Butterfly's revenge and turned the story upside down, that centre of gravity remained fixed, though the victim was now not the Oriental woman but the Western man. Song triumphs over Gallimard; but Song's revenge (as we have seen) reveals him to be unfeeling and cruel. Gallimard's undoing leaves him a pathetic, even tragic loser. This could perhaps be related to the contemporary discovery by Hollywood that America was the real victim of the Vietnam war. And what is Gallimard, after all, but one who has loved not wisely but too well? You might say that, in drawing to a conclusion focused on the pathos of Gallimard, the story of Madame Butterfly exacts its own revenge on its would-be deconstructor. It remains a story of pathos. But its recomposition in M. Butterfly appropriates that pathos (Butterfly's last possession), taking it away from the Eastern and the female—for in the end, no Asians or females in the play are portrayed as deserving much sympathy—and investing it finally in a Western voice.

Notes

1. David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989), p. 95.

2. Mosco Carner, Puccini: A Critical Biography, 2nd edn. (London: Duckworth, 1974), p. 127.

3. E. M. Forster, Abinger Harvest (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p. 286.

4. Carner, pp. 125-26.

5. Arthur Hobson Quinn (ed.), Representative American Plays, 7th edn. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), p. 623. The text of Madame Butterfly is on pp. 627-36.

6. Alan S. Downer, Fifty Years of American Drama, Gateway edn. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1966), p. 6.

7. See Maldwyn A. Jones, The Limits of Liberty (London: O.U.P., 1983), p. 648 (Table 2).

8. It is perhaps worth speculating at what point this ending ceased to be playable.

9. Discussed in William Ashbrook, The Operas of Puccini (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 118-22.

10. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The White Man's Burden: 1899 (The United States and the Philippine Islands)’.

11. Turandot gives the obverse image.

12. Carner, pp. 275 & 276.

13. Rana Kabbani, Europe's Myths of Orient (London: Pandora Press, 1988), p. 59.

14. ‘Playing with stereotypes from both East and West’, interview with D. H. Hwang in The South China Morning Post, 25 January 1990.

15. Catherine Clément, Opera, or the Undoing of Women (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 9.

16. Clément, p. 20.