SOURCE: Remen, Kathryn. “The Theatre of Punishment: David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.” Modern Drama 37, no. 3 (fall 1994): 391-400.

[In the following essay, Remen draws on Michel Foucault's theories of vision and power to examine the staging of the central characters and the discursive positioning of the audience in Hwang's play M. Butterfly.]

It's an enchanted space I occupy.¹

Mainstream American drama generally allows its audiences to slip into a passive role. With the exception of experimental theaters, such as the Living Theater, that rely directly on audience involvement and participation, dramatic productions tend to encourage their audiences to sit back and observe. Particularly on the Broadway stage, an audience comes with the expectation of entertainment without undue effort. The unsaid intention is to learn from the story, to watch and gather information about the characters, the plot, the themes, and to leave the theater with some distilled understanding, moral, or catharsis. If we apply Foucault's analysis of the prison system from his book Discipline and Punish, we begin to see that the theater and the prison operate in similar fashions with similar purposes: they are both “[architectures] … built … to render visible those who are inside … [architectures] that [operate] to transform individuals.”²

Both observational theater and punishment rely on a psychoanalytic privileging of knowledge. As members of the audience, we assume that we can gather enough information from the actions of the entrapped figure to come away with a better understanding of the internal workings of people.³ In this fashion, both the theater and the modern prison system attempt to “[function] … as an apparatus of knowledge” (Foucault, 126). Both institutions “[distribute] individuals in a space in which one might isolate them and map them” (144). The structure of the stage and the use of spot lighting isolate M. Butterfly's main character, René Gallimard, and allow the audience to “map” him without distractions. In such a situation, the only activity that the audience in the theater need perform is a close observation. They remain distant and removed, literally in the darkened house while the actors, the specimens of study, are under light.

M. Butterfly begins with this observational system. In many ways the play employs conservative theatrical elements that come from such mainstream modern dramatists as Tennessee Williams, Thornton Wilder, and Arthur Miller. Like Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie, M. Butterfly is a memory play with themes of illusion and reality, continual references to confinement, dramatic lighting and musical motifs for the characters; as in Thornton Wilder's Our Town, and Arthur Miller's After the Fall, our narrator steps in and out of the action of the play, commenting on scenes and playing different characters. Rather than inferring that these similar elements are merely following in a tradition established by Hwang's predecessors, we can see them as intentionally deceptive devices. As an audience, we are lulled into passivity by seeing a form that is familiar. We believe that this will be a drama in which we know our role: we are in the theater to watch. Even if the audience is not aware of the subject matter of the play, as soon as we open the program we find the following:

A former French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer have been sentenced to six years in jail for spying for China after a two-day trial that traced a story of clandestine love and mistaken sexual identity. … Mr. Bouriscot was accused of passing information to China after he fell in love with Mr. Shi, whom he believed for twenty years to be a woman.

NY Times, May 11, 1986.

This notice informs us of an atypical content (especially when compared to the earlier mentioned plays), but any residual anxiety about the form following the subject matter and straying from traditional boundaries disappears as the play begins. Tom in The Glass Menagerie announces to the audience, “I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.”⁴ He establishes the play as one that comes from his memories, in which he is the narrator who will introduce us to the other characters and point out significant passages. Similarly, René Gallimard tells us, “Alone in this cell, I sit night after night, watching our story play through my head …” (Hwang, 4). He secures us in our observational mode by announcing that he has been searching for us, the “ideal audience—who come to understand and even, perhaps just a little, to envy [him]” (4). This invitation to “understand” him allows us to sit back and watch him take us through the story step by step, while we gather information and try to fulfill the task that he has placed before us.

But by the end of the play, and crucially the final scene in which Rene Gallimard commits ritual suicide, this observational mode disappears and Hwang replaces it with a system of theater and of punishment that directly implicates and involves the audience. We realize that Hwang intentionally employed the familiar elements to lull us into an accustomed passivity. Gallimard has been lying to us by making us believe that we will remain passive; he transforms the audience from passive observers into the main characters of the play and we leave the play with the burden of responsibility and a greater understanding of our involvement, as active participants in punishment. In analyzing the process of implicating the audience by drawing parallels with Foucault's study of punishment, we come to see that rather than leaving the play with a greater understanding of our interiors, we have witnessed and participated in the operation of power and resistance on physical bodies in a Foucauldian system.

Much of the criticism on M. Butterfly has focused merely on the plot and indeed the content of the story is such that it ought to incite interest. Most mainstream plays do not have a collection of “tabloid” topics such as cross-dressing, international intrigues, mistaken identity, and illicit homosexual affairs. However, critics who look only at the plot are allowing the sensational aspects of the plot to distract them from the theoretically radical structural effects of the play. Robert K. Martin and Robert Skloot only seem concerned with interpreting the play on the most basic level. Both have difficulty making sense of the ending of the play. In his interpretation, Martin goes so far as to reduce the final scene to the statement that “Gallimard, at the end is after all simply the dying queen.”⁵ Skloot at least seems to see the play as more than a case of cross-dressing, but his analysis remains firmly in a psychoanalytic understanding of Gallimard that leaves him confused with the ending: “Gallimard's transformation into Butterfly has several possible interpretations. … Is his suicide confessional transcendence or humiliating defeat? Has he accepted or rejected the woman in himself? Is one culture superior to another or merely different?”⁶ Skloot does not arrive at any conclusion and attempts to justify the ambiguities by saying that the unanswered questions make us think about our own interiors. Dorrine K. Kondo has a perspective that goes beyond Skoot's binary concerns. Her argument focuses on “the multiplicity of Asia and of women,” and her article is useful in understanding Hwang's condemnation of binary assumptions about “aesthetics and politics, the personal and the political, woman and man, East and West.”⁷ She shows how the webs and matrices of power relations operate on the specific characters' perceptions of self. Hwang's play tells a story that is both fabulous and based on a true incident, but his purpose for telling the story is not merely to serve as a news service and inform us of a bizarre case. Instead he appropriates Mr. Bouriscot's story for his own purpose: to discuss power and fantasies of dominance between different cultures. Kondo addresses how his Foucauldian understanding of power forms “identities”; I will discuss how these powers transform our theater from one of a traditional, observational arrangement into a spectacular theater of punishment that both involves and implicates the audience.

Foucault says that “power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production” (194). This power has the authority to punish. As a French diplomat in China, Gallimard's initial mistaken understanding of power follows the liberal interpretation: he thinks that, because he adopts the Western, white male position, he has the power. He doesn't understand that the power is not fixed, that the resistance is mobile, and that the rules can and do change. He is so caught up in his fantasy of being a powerful exploiter, which depends on this basic and inadequate view of power, that he does not acknowledge any information that may challenge these beliefs.

Gallimard comes to the understanding of the Foucauldian definition of power by the end; this is how we explain his resistance to it. Gallimard, the narrator, has this understanding of power at the beginning but he plays along with the audience; he encourages us to believe that he has submitted to our gaze, that he has given in to the proscribed observational punishment. Only at the end does the audience realize that he has been showing us his mistaken view of power and that his current understanding not only exhibits a clear knowledge of Foucauldian power but also allows him to employ the best mode of resistance. If the force of law produces the possibility of resistance, then Gallimard is resisting and rebelling in the final scene. Here we realize that he has changed the game and the rules of the game, without the audience being ready for this or even aware that he can do this until his actions occur.

Song Liling has a clear knowledge of Foucauldian power from the moment she begins her deception.⁸ She understands that lying is the best form of resistance to a power intent on fact-collecting; by supplying that power with false facts, with lies that the observer would prefer to believe, Song changes the rules of the game. Song justifies her lies by explaining that Western eyes will never accept her oriental male body as a body with any power: “being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man” (Hwang, 83). By assuming another identity, she undermines the powers more effectively with lies than she could with truth. Song creates the character and information that Gallimard wants to read into his fantasy of dominance. She creates a body that is a lie and Gallimard falls in love with this body, not with the physical body underneath the lies.

Gallimard's ignorance helps to make Song's lies more effective. Though Gallimard is imprisoned for treason, a part of his “crime” is his misunderstanding of the body—of his own body and Song's body. Not only does Gallimard lack a biological understanding, he also ignores the historical, political, and geographical specificity of Song's body. Gallimard would have known that Song was a man if he had known some details about Chinese culture. In a particularly effective scene between Song and Comrade Chin, Song asks and answers her own question about “Why, in the Peking Opera, are all women's roles played by men? … only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act” (63). Song recognizes what Gallimard wants to see and, as an experienced actor, carries out the lie. Song's lies are so powerful as to make physical information virtually insignificant. While on trial, Song explains her sexual relationship with Gallimard: “he never saw me completely naked. … I did all the work. … I suppose he might have wondered why I was always on my stomach. … it was my job to make him think I was a woman” (81-82). Only at the end of the play does Gallimard recognize Song's “job” and realize that he has loved and been manipulated by an impersonation, a collection of carefully coordinated lies. Gallimard's fantasy of how power operates, his adoption of a liberal definition of power, prevents him from recognizing his lover's physical body and from seeing his own body as a homosexual body.

At the end of the play, when Song strips before Gallimard and forces him to see the physical body, he responds by saying: “You showed me your true self. When all I loved was the lie” (89). Truth and knowledge create different bodies and in this realization Gallimard shows us the moment that he begins to understand a different system of power. He loves a different body from the one Song strips to show him because it is formed of truths that are different from those that he wants to believe.

As Song outwitted Gallimard, her observer, so Gallimard learns from this experience and employs similar deceptive techniques to outwit the audience, his observers. But before embarking on an explanation of how he lies to us, we must first clarify the audience's position in the punishment. The play begins with Gallimard in his cell in a prison on the outskirts of Paris; thus we instantly are introduced to a form of punishment and it is a punishment with which we are familiar. Punishment in our time is, as Foucault explains, a matter of observation. We do not expect any torture or inscription on the body of the condemned, only confinement and observation. Foucault fittingly describes the modern prison cell as “so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible” (Foucault, 200). In Hwang's play we see the cell as small theater, and the theater as a prison. Throughout the course of the play, Gallimard never leaves the stage.⁹ Thus, we are invited into his prison cell at the beginning of the play and we don't leave until he is dead. He is under continual scrutiny and all of his costume changes occur in direct lighting under the observer's eye. The breakdown of the action into short scenes parallels the observational form of punishment where “The ‘seriation’ of successive activities makes possible a whole investment of duration by power: the possibility of a detailed control and a regular intervention … in each moment of time” (160). Our “control” heightens the pressure and the punishment on Gallimard.

His only relief is to wander in his memories, but even here he is trapped. If discipline is a form of enclosure, then not only is he enclosed in his cell on the public space of the stage, he is also trapped by his memories and not fully able to control them. At the point when Song strips for him, Gallimard becomes an unwilling captive of his memories. He says, “once again, against my will, I am transported” (Hwang, 85). He tries to stop the reenactment of the scene and end the story when his love of “the Perfect Woman” is still intact. He says, “You're only in my mind! All this is in my mind! I order you! To stop!” (87), but Song does not stop.

Gallimard's mental mutiny tempts the audience to try to understand the workings of his mind. Foucault says that “The publicity of punishment must not have the physical effect of terror; it must open up a book to be read” (Foucault, III). The audience is trying to read Gallimard through the exposure that his punishment provides. In the early scene at the cocktail party, the audience sees the public fascination with his story. The people who gossip on the stage act as a mirror of our own fascination. Gallimard's sexual “crime” has elevated him to something of a minor celebrity so that “In the world's smartest parlors” the people “say [his] name, as if it were some new dance” (Hwang, 2-3). They all want to know the secret to his story; they want an explanation of how he could have had an affair for twenty years and not known the real sex of his lover. This is the story that we came to the theater to see, but it is not the only story. Significantly, we never get a real answer to this question. The other story that we are watching is an enactment of punishment methods and the execution of and resistance to power.

As we can see by the fascination of the men and women in the cocktail party scene and by our own draw to the “tabloid” subject matter, what is occurring is a judgment of the soul of the condemned rather than the actual crime he committed (Foucault, 19). As Foucault says, this “introduction of the ‘biographical’ is important. … [b]ecause it establishes the ‘criminal’ as existing before the crime and even outside it” (252). By attempting to see to the depths of Gallimard's soul we are ordering a “punishment that acts in depth on the heart, the thoughts, the will, the inclinations” (16).

The role of the audience early in the play is to remain removed as “anonymous and temporary observers” and to judge Gallimard (202). Our judgment of him rests on our views of “normality.” As observers and a part of the “carceral network,” the audience “[supports] … the normalizing power” (304). We objectify Gallimard to both learn about “Knowable man” and to try to “normalize” the criminal (305). We also heighten the inmate's “anxious awareness of being observed” (202). Immediately after the scene at the cocktail party, Gallimard announces his search, night after night, for an “ideal audience,” one who will “envy” him (Hwang, 4). In the observational mode of punishment this goal seems impossible; after all, one of the pre-stated purposes is to make him like everyone else, to destroy any uniqueness that may be enviable and “normalize” him. Only when we interpret the final scene as a spectacular form of resistance is this “envy” possible.

In the final scene of the play, Gallimard costumes himself as Butterfly and commits the Japanese ritual suicide, seppuku, which involves disemboweling oneself with a hara-kiri knife. Before he plunges the knife into his body he makes this announcement to his observers:

I have found her at last. In a prison on the outskirts of Paris. My name is René Gallimard—also known as Madame Butterfly.

(Hwang, 93)

In this action, Gallimard joins the Foucauldian world; in Discipline and Punish Foucault traces the evolution from spectacular to observational punishment. He uses specific and gory examples to show how punishment used to be unique, individual and specific to the crime that the criminal had committed. Modern observational punishment “automatizes and disindividualizes power” (Foucault, 202). Gallimard rebels by creating a punishment that suits the individual and the crime. His suicide follows the old form by making it into a punishment that is specific to his crime in ritual, costume, and penetration. The Japanese ritual disemboweling refers to his misunderstanding of the “Orient.” Though he was a diplomat in China, his fantasy involves a Japanese stereotype because he assumes that all Asians are the same. He dresses as Butterfly, his perfect “lotus blossom,” with the white Geisha make-up, a wig and kimono. Thus his surface presents the culture that he misunderstood while the Western, white man hides underneath. Just as he attempted to dominate Song, as Puccini's Pinkerton dominated Butterfly, the white man plunges the knife into the Oriental woman. Here, however, one character embodies both figures: the Western, white man dies along with the Oriental woman. This form of suicide involves penetration, and, in many countries, suicide, like sodomy, is illegal. Thus his “improper” penetration of his own body mimics his improper penetration of Song. Like Foucault's pre-eighteenth-century criminals, he tailors his punishment to his crime. In the public execution, “the body [produces] and [reproduces] the truth of the crime” (47). Gallimard can only reproduce this truth; earlier in the play we discover that he is most likely infertile. His wife, Helga, asks him to go to a doctor, and Gallimard, fearing this additional threat to his fragile manhood, refuses. One of the most brilliant elements of Song's deception occurs when she presents Gallimard with a child, thus enforcing his fantasy of being a powerful, fertile male. But at the end, Gallimard realizes that it is impossible for him to physically reproduce himself and he uses his body, the body that produced the crime, to reproduce the crime. He violates his bodily unity in a ritual fashion and with this ritual he tries to make his death more meaningful than his life has been.

The suicide, or execution, takes place in public, and in this way Gallimard also forces the audience back to an earlier form of punishment—from observation back to spectacle. As Foucault recounts, the public execution takes on “the intensity of [a festival]” with “sensual proximity” (216). Gallimard's death plays on the senses with music, costumes, special lighting and invocations of specific rituals. “The public execution formed part of the procedure that established the reality of what one punished”; it establishes truth and “[provides] the spectacle with … power” (56). He also enforces this past method of punishment by confessing before his death: “Through the confession, the accused himself took part in the ritual of producing penal truth” (38). Gallimard's final confession about fantasy and reality is his contribution to this “truth.” “Tonight” he says, “I've finally learned to tell fantasy from reality. And, knowing the difference, I choose fantasy” (Hwang, 90). In some ways, Gallimard's fantasy and his transformation into Puccini's Butterfly require the suicide. To follow through with the assumption of the stereotyped submissive Japanese woman he must kill himself for himself.

Gallimard's suicide is an effective form of resistance and is the climax of the play. If “Disciplinary punishment … [is] essentially corrective” (Foucault, 179), then Gallimard does not want to be corrected—he “chooses fantasy” over reality. Though officially he is being punished for treason and betraying the state, really he is being punished for the sexual “abnormality” and the mistake that allowed the treason to occur. He refuses to have his sexuality corrected. He would rather live and die in the world of fantasy where his sexuality, his dreams, and his desires can remain intact. He does not just fade away under observation; he transforms himself into a spectacle. Gallimard, by enacting a different form of punishment, creates a different type of body. The suicide is his reclamation of his body. Observation has tried to transform him into a docile, observable body and he is changing himself back. A key part of Gallimard's resistance is his refusal to be pliable raw material. He refuses the “training” of his body, the compartmentalization that the observers are attempting. He makes his body back into a fragile body, one that, he exhibits, is very capable of being broken.

Power never intended to bend Gallimard into a Butterfly, but the observation punishment was excessive. Every night he is on display for a new audience and he (unpredictably) rebels and refuses to be the ends and means of the functioning of power. Gallimard refuses to operate as “the lesson, the discourse, the decipherable sign, the representation of public morality” (Foucault, 110). He remains in-decipherable to the observers.

Gallimard's suicide/execution/resistance shows the audience how we have been duped. We realize that the punishment we have been a part of inflicting is inappropriate, thus he resists and his resistance is unpredictable. We don't expect our narrator to exit the play, to leave us alone at the end. The narrators in other plays such as The Glass Menagerie and Our Town do not die and leave us without a main character. Foucault explains that “In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people” (57). We replace Gallimard in the story: the play is not about his “bodily crimes” but about our involvement in a process of punishment. Though we know that Madame Butterfly in Puccini's opera does commit suicide, we don't expect Gallimard to do this because, until the last scene, we think that the name “M. Butterfly” applies to Song Liling, not to René Gallimard. We think that we know something that Gallimard does not—that who he thinks is Madame is actually Monsieur Butterfly. But he shows us how little we really know by assuming this name.

The audience also expects “a reasonable aesthetic of punishment” because “the law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature” (106). The violent suicide displays the power of punishment. We are accustomed to carefully controlled and hidden forms of punishment that mask the violence against the body. Here the violence and the effects of power are not concealed, nor does his death seem “natural” because of the layers of disguise and impersonation that Gallimard has used to stage this spectacle. It is unnatural that the victim, the criminal and the executioner all are contained in one body.

Only at the end do we realize that the structure of the play has been a deception, that the ending will not follow the secure patterns that we are used to. Gallimard asked us to join in the observational mode and he has been lying to us. By unwittingly becoming “the main character,” we have to accept the burden of responsibility for what we have done, for the role we have been playing, for the objectification in which we are complicit. Earlier, Gallimard showed us how Song Liling fooled him and undermined his fantasy of power by a set of carefully constructed lies. So too has René Gallimard fooled us; he has employed the entire familiar structure of the observational theater to lull us into a complacent and falsely secure role and then, in his final destructive stroke of brilliance, he has transformed the system of punishment. As witnesses to the execution we are shocked and repulsed by the apparent “excessive” cruelty of the suicide/execution.

We think that our power relies on the technology of psychoanalytic observation and that it will yield some understanding or “enlightenment” for us. Instead Gallimard adopts a Kafkaesque form of punishment where the body of the criminal, by inscription, receives the enlightenment, not the observers. Our power doesn't work. It doesn't induce Gallimard to submit to it; he changes the punishment and denies the observers/punishers the observable subject. Because “the truth-power relation remains at the heart of all mechanisms of punishment” (55), in searching for the understanding that Gallimard invited us to seek at the beginning of the play, we have, almost unconsciously, aligned ourselves with the punishing powers. We want one “truth” or explanation from Gallimard, but we get another. We were fooled in thinking that observation would reveal a set of facts that would explain the affair and the “tabloid” topics. But Gallimard's self-imposed punishment offers another truth that does not answer the questions of the prior actions of his body and instead instructs us in the workings of mobile matrices of power.

Gallimard announced in the beginning that he was looking for an audience to envy him. He seems to know that he will never be able to accomplish this in a psychological method of punishment. Indeed we don't envy him for his fantasy, for loving the “Perfect Woman,” for becoming the “patron saint of the socially inept” (Hwang, 4). However, he has transformed us into the audience who envies or, at the very least, respects him for his resistance to power, for his ability to reclaim himself from our possessive gaze. Our theatre, which we believed was “a procedure … aimed at knowing, mastering and using” (Foucault, 143) has been proved ineffective, and we, the audience, also suffer from this inadequacy. Like the humbled and shamed Gallimard at the beginning of the play, we too have been tricked into seeing our own ignorance and incompetence.

Notes

1. David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York, 1989), 2. All subsequent references to this edition will appear (as “Hwang”) in parenthesis in the text.

2. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1979), 172. All subsequent references to this edition will appear in parenthesis in the text.

3. I will use the pronoun “we” throughout the paper to refer to the audience and the readers; I include myself among the intended audience.

4. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie, (New York, 1972), 29.

5. Robert K. Martin, “Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and David Henry Hwang's Chinese Woman,” Canadian Review of American Studies 23:1 (Fall 1992), 95-106: 104.

6. Robert Skloot, “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang,” Modern Drama 33:1 (March 1990), 64.

7. Dorrine K. Kando, “M. Butterfly: Orientalism, Gender, and a Critique of Essentialist Identity,” Cultural Critique 16 (Fall 1990), 5-29: 28-29.

8. Though it is difficult to select a pronoun to refer to Song, (perhaps “s/he” would be the most appropriate), for ease of reference in the scenes with both Song and Gallimard I have chosen the feminine “she.”

9. The only exceptions occur when Song talks with Comrade Chin in Act Two, Scenes Five, Nine, and Ten. But this is not a real escape for Gallimard: Hwang makes it obvious that Gallimard is afraid of Chin and is hiding only from her aggressive presence, not from the audience's gaze. After Chin's exit, Gallimard peeks out from the wings and asks “Is she gone?” (Hwang, 49).