SOURCE: Garber, Marjorie. “The Occidental Tourist: M. Butterfly and the Scandal of Transvestism.” In Nationalisms and Sexualities, edited by Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, pp. 121-46. New York: Routledge, 1992.

[In the following essay, Garber examines the role of cross-dressing in Hwang's M. Butterfly as a deconstruction of dominant categories of gender.]

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. … M. Boursicot 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.

—New York Times, May 11, 1986

This story, which scandalized and titillated Western journalists and readers, was—perhaps predictably—received slightly differently in different parts of the West. The British press treated it as another homosexual spy scandal, analogous to those involving gay men like John Vassall, Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt. Boursicot's explanation for his gender “mistake,” that the couple had always had sexual relations in the dark, was dismissed as a thin cover for something else. According to one British chronicler of spy activities, “the likeliest explanation” for this unlikely story was “that Boursicot knew the truth and was hopelessly entangled in a web of lies begun to hide his homosexuality, which he continued to deny.”¹ In other words, the “secret” here was homosexuality, the denial of which became so important for Boursicot that he was willing to be branded a fool and a traitor.

The French, not surprisingly, had a slightly different view as to where the shameful secret of this story really lay. A panel of French judges sentenced both Boursicot and his lover to six years in prison. Their treason in itself was not considered very serious—only minor documents were leaked. But at least one French judge seemed less appalled by the evidence of treachery than by the apparent fact that a Frenchman was unable to tell the difference between a man and a woman.²

As for the American press, its attitude may perhaps be exemplified by the spectacular coverage afforded the incident by People magazine. People arranged for interviews with the two principals in the scandal—a coup it trumpeted with understandable self-congratulation (“Until now” neither man had been willing to discuss their relationship; “finally last week they agreed to talk”; “theirs is a story of East meeting West, and of political upheaval, sexual ambiguity and betrayal”; “It is a conundrum, finally, that will never be solved”) and so on and on. But underneath this veneer of wide-eyed openness People, too, offered a social critique of sorts. And People's contempt, unlike that of the British or the French, was directed not at Boursicot, the now openly gay French man, but at Shi, the Asian “woman” in the story, now living, like Boursicot, in Paris. “A delicate man of 50 whose most striking features are his tiny hands,” writes People,

he leads his life like an exiled, impoverished princess, living in apartments provided by friends whom he calls “protectors,” carrying himself like a faded diva.

“My life has been très triste, très triste, don't you agree?” he asks, in the dramatic French he favors. “But one cannot fall into une vie de désespoir.” With a sigh, catching his middle-aged reflection in the mirror, he adds, “I used to fascinate both men and women. What I was and what they were didn't matter.”³

What does matter to People's readers, of course, is the question that underlies every account of this story: what did they do? And how could Boursicot possibly not have known? The British accounts imply that he did know, and was ashamed to admit it; the French judge exhibited consternation at an ignorance that seemed to reflect badly on a prized national trait, heterosexual connoisseurship. The American press, at least as represented by the voice of the People, applies a characteristic investigative technique: American know-how.

Shi says he kept himself covered with a blanket in a darkened room and never allowed Boursicot to touch his crotch. He hid his genitalia by squeezing them tightly between his thighs. Even today [Boursicot] still cannot explain why sex with Shi seemed “just like being with a woman.” He does not believe he had anal intercourse with Shi; he thinks his lover might have “put cream between his thighs,” and that he penetrated Shi's closed legs. In any case, Boursicot stresses, they had sex only rarely.

(96-97)

Thus to the British, the answer to the “conundrum” was that Boursicot was gay; to the French, the answer—shameful to admit—was that he was a nerd; to the Americans, he was merely a dupe, misled by the tactics of a “faded diva” with a tube of K-Y jelly.

What is particularly interesting to me in all of these readings is that none of these accounts is willing to recognize the role of the central figure in the story, the transvestite. Attention focuses on sexual object choice (gay or straight) and on erotic style (dominant, submissive) rather than on the cultural “fact” at the center of the fantasy: the fact of transvestism as both a personal and a political, as well as an aesthetic and theatrical, mode of self-construction. Once again, as so often, the transvestite is looked through or away from, appropriated to tell another kind of story, a story less disturbing and dangerous, because less problematic and undecidable.

That Boursicot could fall in love with a man, or be duped by a spy—these are tales for which we have cultural contexts and cultural stereotypes. But that Shi could be—professionally, as an actor and a spy—and personally, as Boursicot's lover—a transvestite, whose entire persona put in question the cultural representation of gender—this was a “truth” too disturbing not to be explained away. And the masterstroke of M. Butterfly, the play based upon this affair, is that it puts in doubt, in question, the identity of “the transvestite.” For by the end of the play it is the Western diplomat, and not the Chinese spy, who wears the wig, kimono, and face paint of the (deliberately ambiguous) “M.” Butterfly.⁴

Both the original casting and the playbill of M. Butterfly drew attention, in different ways, to gender undecidability. The part of the diplomat, René Gallimard, was played by John Lithgow, who had appeared in a celebrated performance as the transsexual Roberta Muldoon (formerly a pro football player called Robert) in the film version of The World According to Garp. As for the Oriental actor/spy, that part was taken by a newcomer, B. D. Wong, whose gender was concealed by a playbill bio that carefully avoided all gendered pronouns. Until B. D. removed his briefs onstage at the end of Act 2—the spy's final debriefing—it was not possible to know—unless one had read the play, or the news stories—what his gender “really” was. A. Mapa, the actor who succeeded Wong in the role, used the same device of onamastic occlusion, which had become by that time—if it was not originally—part of the mystification of gender and sexuality disclosed (and dis-clothed) on the stage.

When playwight David Henry Hwang heard about the Boursicot-Shi story, he was determined to write a play about it. He was equally determined not to find out any of the (disputed) details, since to him the events suggested a particular, and familiar, story about nationalism and sexuality—a story that he thought of as a “deconstructivist Madame Butterfly.” Over dinner one evening, he reports, a friend asked him if he had heard about “the French diplomat who'd fallen in love with a Chinese actress, who subsequently turned out to be not only a spy, but a man?” He then found a two-paragraph account in the New York Times that quoted the diplomat, Boursicot, as explaining that he had never seen his “girlfriend” naked because “I thought she was very modest. I thought it was a Chinese custom” (94).

Hwang, a Chinese American, was well aware that this was not a Chinese custom—that Asian women were no more shy with their lovers than are women of the West. He concluded that Boursicot had fallen in love with a stereotype, the image of the “Oriental woman as demure and submissive” (the word “Oriental” itself, he explains, is an imperialistic term imposed by Western discourse; “in general … we prefer the term ‘Asian’” [94]). Hwang had never seen or heard Puccini's opera, but he was familiar with the derogatory remark frequently made about Asian women who deliberately presented themselves to men as obedient and submissive: “She's pulling a Butterfly.” He was also familiar with the personal ads that run in magazines and on cable TV advertising “traditional Oriental women” as mail-order brides, and with the gay stereotype of the “Rice Queen,” a gay Caucasian man primarily attracted to Asians, who always plays the “man” in cultural and sexual terms, while the Asian partner plays the “woman.”

When Hwang consulted Puccini's libretto, therefore, he was gratified to find it a repository of sexist and racist cliches. From his point of view, he notes, the “‘impossible’ story of a Frenchman duped by a Chinese man masquerading as a woman always seemed perfectly explicable; given the degree of misunderstanding between men and women and also between East and West, it seemed inevitable that a mistake of this magnitude would one day take place” (98). Inevitable, that is, that racism and sexism should intersect with one another, and with imperialist and colonialist fantasies. The idea that good natives are feminized—submissive and grateful—and that the passive, exotic, and feminized East is eager to submit to the domination of the masculine West—this is a story so old that, in Hwang's play, it became new.

Now, what I want to argue here is that the figure of the cross-dressed “woman,” the transvestite figure borrowed from both the Chinese and Japanese stage traditions, the Peking opera and the Kabuki and Noh theaters, functions simultaneously as a mark of gender undecidability and as an indication of category crisis—in literary and cultural formations in general, but to a particularly high degree in M. Butterfly. By “category crisis” I mean a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another. The presence of the transvestite, in a text, in a culture, signals a category crisis elsewhere. The transvestite is a sign of overdetermination—a mechanism of displacement. There can be no culture without the transvestite, because the transvestite marks the existence of the Symbolic.

Man/woman, or male/female, is the most obvious and central of the border crossings in M. Butterfly, and the fact that the border is crossed twice, once when Song Liling becomes a “woman,” and the second time when René Gallimard does so, indicates the play's preoccupation with the transvestite as a figure not only for the conundrum of gender and erotic style, but also for other kinds of border crossing, like acting and spying, both of which are appropriations of alternative and socially constructed subject positions for cultural and political ends. “Actor” and “spy” both become, like “transvestite,” “third terms,” or, more accurately, terms from within the third space of possibility, the cultural Symbolic, the place of signification. And that space of “thirdness” is marked, tagged, signalled, by the presence (or, as explicitly in this play, the construction) of the transvestite.

In order to make this argument, I will briefly summarize the action of M. Butterfly, and then take up a number of key and related issues: specific category crises within Hwang's play—crises of nationalism and sexuality troped on the transvestite figure; the Peking opera and the European infatuation with Oriental transvestite theater; the concept of “saving face” and the overestimation of the phallus; and the formal and theoretical interrelationships among acting, spying, diplomacy, and transvestism.

For reasons both political and theoretical, I will be using the pronouns “she” and “her” to describe the Chinese actor when dressed as a woman, and the pronouns “he” and “him” when the actor is dressed as a man. This may at first seem confusing, but that is, of course, part of the point.

Hwang's play begins with the diplomat, René Gallimard, in his French prison cell, and proceeds by flashback to tell the story of his love affair with Song Liling, the Chinese opera star he calls “Butterfly.” His first encounter with “her,” at an ambassador's residence in Peking where “she” performed the death scene from Puccini's opera, had convinced him that “she” was a woman. She quickly perceives both his ignorance and his fascination, and invites him to attend performances of the Chinese opera. As their relationship develops, giving him a new sexual confidence in his own dominant manhood, he becomes more successful in his diplomatic career as well, and is promoted to Vice Consul. Always shy and inept in his relationships with Western women, and now fearing that his relationship with a Chinese will exposure him to ridicule, he finds himself instead—because he has a “native mistress”—the envy of the consular office. He discovers that he can treat Song Liling with cavalier neglect, and this further strengthens his sense of masculinity. Briefly he engages in another affair, this one with a young Danish woman student whose name is the feminine twin of his: Renée. (Denmark here is presumably chosen for its connotations of sexual freedom, and “Renée”—as with “Renée Richards”—in part because it means “reborn.”)

But Renée, who is eager to parade naked before him, and whose language is as frank as her sexual behavior, strikes him as paradoxically “too uninhibited, too willing, … almost too … masculine.” In other words, the play provides Gallimard with two narcissistic “female” doubles: the “masculine” Danish woman with the beautiful body, and the “feminine” Oriental who turns out to be a transvestic man.

When Song Liling writes him an imploring note, saying “I have already given you my shame,” René knows he is in command. “Are you my Butterfly?” he demands, requiring her to acknowledge the scenario of cultural domination and submission. When she assents (“I am your Butterfly”) he takes her to bed—in the dark, and clothed, for she protests that she is “a modest Chinese woman.” In this first section of the play, then, Gallimard becomes—as he tells the audience—the Pinkerton of Puccini's opera, exploiting and abandoning his Oriental mistress.

In the second half of the play, the roles will be reversed. René is sent back to France; none of his predictions about the war in Indochina have come true. The Cultural Revolution comes to China, and after being put to work in the fields and renouncing his “decadent profession” the actor Song Liling is sent by the Mao government to Paris, to resume his work as a spy, by resuming his women's clothes, and his relationship to Gallimard. At “Butterfly's” urging, René becomes a courier, photographing secret documents, which Song passes on to the Chinese embassy. Then comes the trial. In front of the audience the Chinese actor removes his kimono, wig, and makeup, and appears before René and the audience as a man in an Armani suit. The French judge asks the question the audience has wanted to ask all along: “Did Monsieur Gallimard know you were a man?” And Song Liling answers with two rules. “Rule One”: “Men always believe what they want to hear.” And “Rule Two”: “The West has sort of an international rape mentality towards the East.” And he defines “rape mentality” this way: “Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes.”

The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor … but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique.

Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated—because a woman can't think for herself. … You expect Oriental countries to submit to your guns, and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men. That's why you say they make the best wives.

(3.1)

But why, the judge asks, would that make it possible for Song Liling to fool Gallimard?

One, because when he finally met his fantasy woman he wanted more than anything to believe that she was, in fact, a woman. And second, I am an Oriental. And being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man.

Yet there is another power reversal to come. Before Act 3 is over, and before René can stop him, he has completely removed his clothes, and stands naked, revealed as—in René's words—“just a man—as real as hamburger” (3.2). And René chooses “fantasy” over “reality.” If his “Butterfly” is not the Perfect Woman he has thought her to be, he will become that perfect oriental woman himself. Song Liling—revealed at last to be a man—becomes the Pinkerton figure, and Gallimard literally transforms himself into “Madame Butterfly,” dressing himself in the kimono and wig Song has discarded, making up his face in the traditional Japanese fashion, and ultimately committing ritual suicide—seppuku—plunging a knife into his body as the music from the “Love Duet” blares over the speakers. The final stage picture is a reversal of the first: Song, dressed as a man, stares at a “woman” dressed in Oriental robes, and calls out “Butterfly? Butterfly?”

BORDER CROSSINGS

M. Butterfly itself stands at the crossroads of nationalism and sexuality, since the axes along which it plots its dramatic movement are those of West/East and male/female. These two principal binarisms are brought immediately into both question and crisis, for one cultural fact of which René and his wife Helga—a diplomatic couple stationed in China—are blissfully ignorant, is that the Peking Opera is a transvestite theater: that all women's roles are played by men. After his first encounter with Song Liling, Gallimard reports that he met “the Chinese equivalent of a diva. She's a singer at the Chinese opera.” In other words, he is convinced that the performer he met was a woman. His wife is surprised to hear that the Chinese even have an opera. Informed by René that the Chinese hate Puccini's opera “because the white man gets the girl,” Helga is dismissive (“Politics again? Why can't they just hear it as a piece of beautiful music?”) and only mildly curious: “So, what's in their opera?” Gallimard: “I don't know. But whatever it is, I'm sure it must be old” (1.7).

Undoubtedly, much of the Broadway audience shares this cultural indifference, which will be René's downfall. (“I asked around,” he says. “No one knew anything about the Chinese opera.”) Only much later in the play does the play offer enlightenment, in a conversation between Song Liling and her female confidant-superior in the Chinese Communist Party:

SONG:
Miss Chin? Why, in the opera, are women's roles played by men?
CHIN:
I don't know. Maybe, a reactionary remnant of male—
SONG:
No. Because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act.

(2.7)

One category crisis leads to another, as Gallimard, voicing the indifference of the West to distinctions of national and cultural tradition in a region romanticized simply as “the Orient” or “the East,” conflates China and Japan. Captivated by Song Liling's performance as Cio-Cio San, the heroine of Madame Butterfly, he assumes that what he is seeing is “authentic,” and that an Oriental actress can bring Puccini's character to life in the way no Western diva could. After the performance, he seeks out Song Liling to tell her so:

GALLIMARD:
I usually don't like Butterfly.
SONG:
I can't blame you in the least.
GALLIMARD:
I mean, the story—
SONG:
Ridiculous.
GALLIMARD:
I like the story, but … I've always seen it played by huge women in so much bad makeup.
SONG:
Bad make-up is not unique to the West.
GALLIMARD:
But who can believe them?
SONG:
And you believe me?
GALLIMARD:
Absolutely. You were utterly convincing. […]
SONG:
Convincing? As a Japanese woman? The Japanese used hundreds of our people for medical experiments during the war, you know. But I gather such an irony is lost on you.
GALLIMARD:
No! I was about to say, this is the first time I've seen the beauty of the story.
SONG:
Really?
GALLIMARD:
Of her death. It's a … a pure sacrifice. He's unworthy, but what can she do? She loves him … so much. It's a very beautiful story.
SONG:
Well, yes, to a Westerner.
GALLIMARD:
Excuse me?
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)
GALLIMARD:
Yes … well … I see your point …
SONG:
I will never do Butterfly again, M. Gallimard. If you wish to see some real theatre, come to the Peking Opera sometime. Expand your mind.

(1.6)

We might notice that even though Gallimard knows nothing at all about the Peking Opera—clearly he has no idea that its women's parts are all played by men—he assumes that “the Orient” can be represented in a single, and conventional, way. He conflates China and Japan.

But if M. Butterfly deliberately challenges the conflation of China and Japan as some mystical element called “the Orient,” it also offers up another, less obvious conflation of national qualities between China and France. “What was waiting for me back in Paris?” Gallimard asks, rhetorically. “Well, better Chinese food than I'd eaten in China … And the indignity of students shouting the slogans of Chairman Mao at me—in French” (2.11). Like the exchange of roles between Song and Gallimard, between culturally constructed “woman” and culturally constructed “man,” this apparent paradox is presented as not really a paradox at all. In a global cultural economy all constructions are exportable and importable: recipes for food, slogans, and gender roles are all reproduced as intrinsically theatrical significations.

The crossover from China to France, as from “female” to “male,” is underscored theatrically by the presence onstage, during the scene of Song Liling's testimony and confession in the French court, of the actor who had played the French consul in China, and who now “enters as a judge, wearing the appropriate wig and robes” (3.1). Moments before in this same scene Song Liling had removed “her” wig and robes, the formal black headdress and embroidered kimono of Butterfly, and appeared for the first time onstage as a man, in a “well-cut Armani suit.” In the courtroom scene “wig and robes” take on a new set of vestimentary significations, now the accoutrements of Western (specifically French) maleness as power and authority, the traditional costume of the judge. In the scene that follows, to the blaring music of the “Death Scene” from Butterfly, Gallimard will enter, “crawling toward Song's wig and kimono,” while “Song remains a man, in the witness box, delivering a testimony we do not hear.”

These border crossings, then, present binarisms in order to deconstruct them. As the figure of the transvestite deconstructs the binary of male and female, so all national binaries and power relations are put in question.

THE ORIENT-ATION OF TRANSVESTITE THEATER

In fact the traditions of the Peking Opera and of Japanese Kabuki theater, though both are transvestite theaters, are otherwise quite different, as we should expect, despite the efforts of some European and North American observers to conflate them (rather like René Gallimard), producing an idealized image of pure “theater” or “theatricality” that is analogous—and not coincidentally—to the idealization of “woman” derived from certain transvestic representations and certain cultural fantasies.

The European infatuation with “Oriental” theater as the antitype of (and antidote to) the psychologized theater of the West was memorably expressed by Artaud in The Theater and Its Double, first published in 1938. Artaud, responding in part to a visit by a Balinese theater troupe, wrote rapturously about the death of the author: “It is a theater which eliminates the author in favor of what we would call, in our Occidental theatrical jargon, the director; but a director who has become a kind of manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies … the actors with their costumes constitute veritable living, moving hieroglyphs. And these three-dimensional hieroglyphs are in turn brocaded with a certain number of gestures—mysterious signs which correspond to some unknown, fabulous, and obscure reality which we here in the Occident have completely repressed.”⁵

Artaud's romanticized and mystified account of the difference of Oriental theater focused on clothes, on doubleness—and on the image of the butterfly.

Those who succeed in giving a mystic sense to the simple form of a robe and who, not content with placing a man's Double next to him, confer upon each man in his robes a double made of clothes—those who pierce these illusory or secondary clothes with a saber, giving them the look of huge butterflies pinned in the air, such men have an innate sense of the absolute and magical symbolism of nature much superior to ours.

(Artaud, 62)

The influence of Artaud could still be felt in France when, in 1955, the Peking opera came to the Théatre des Nations, to be greeted by the press with hyperbolic praise. (In fact, had he wished to, the model for M. Butterfly's Gallimard, Bernard Boursicot, could have seen this cultural event during this visit, or on subsequent occasions when the troupe returned to Paris, in 1958 and 1964. As it happens, he did not.)

One of the Chinese opera's most important works is a traditional piece called The Butterfly Dream, or The Story of the Butterfly: a folktale about a beautiful girl who impersonates her lazy brother so that she can get an education. Like Shakespeare's Rosalind (or I. B. Singer's Yentl, whose story hers resembles), the girl in the opera falls in love with a young man who thinks she is a boy. It was this part, in fact, that made Shi Pei Pu a star in China. And at least according to one account it was looking at a scrapbook containing pictures of Shi in his cross-dressed Butterfly role that led the French diplomat Boursicot to believe he was really a woman, when the two men first met at a party at the French embassy. Although Shi was dressed in men's clothes at the time, the photographs of him in women's costume apparently persuaded Boursicot that he had detected his “real” gender.

(The two mens' stories differ slightly on this point. Boursicot says that Shi took him aside after they had become friends and confided that he was actually a woman, just like the character in The Story of the Butterfly—that his mother, having borne two daughters, was afraid to tell his father the third child was also a girl. Shi contends that he was showing Boursicot the scrapbook and that Boursicot—rather like d'Albert in Gautier's Mademoiselle de Maupin—leapt to the conclusion that he was really a woman, with expressions of relief and delight.)

Many observers during the opera's European visit commented on similarities between the Chinese and the Elizabethan theaters, including the paucity of scenery, the absence of stage lighting to indicate night, and the commotion of eating, drinking and talking that took place in the audience during the performance. But there are obvious dangers about conflating Chinese opera, Elizabethan acting companies, and Japanese Kabuki as “transvestite theater,” dangers that Hwang's play continually points up in the way it reverses even expectations of reversal. In Chinese opera, the tan, or female impersonator, wears a mask corresponding to the class of woman he is portraying: chingyin, the elegant lady, huatan, a woman of the lower classes, or taomatan, an Amazon or militant.⁶ There is, then, no one fixed and inevitable role for woman; in fact, this tripartite division, with the inclusion of the woman as militant or Amazon, suggests the same kind of splitting and refusal of binarism explored by Hwang's M. Butterfly.

Furthermore, the Chinese theater also includes a tradition of female transvestism. All-female troupes were popular during the Ming and Qing dynasties,⁷ and in the plays of that period the cross-dressed “man's” true gender is often detected by her tiny feet. This sign of “nature” was in fact a sign of culture, since the cultural aesthetic of foot-binding produced an ideal of beauty that was the effect of mutilation and deformity. The small size of the appendage is a mark of femininity, artificially and painfully wrought. Theatrically produced as a device of discovery, the female foot that trips up the masquerading “general” or “statesman” becomes a displacement downward that marks the site of anatomical gender. Thus, for example, in the play Ideal Love-Matches by dramatist Li Yu, a woman disguised as a man discloses her gender identity when she takes off her shoes. “With those black boots off, his feet are little ‘three-inch lotuses.’ It means he must be a girl!”⁸

Similarly, in a tale called “Miss Yan” or “Yanshi” by the seventeenth-century author Pu Songling, an intellectually gifted woman who has disguised herself as a man in order to substitute for her less studious husband at the candidate's examinations reveals her gender to an incredulous aunt by pulling off her boots and displaying her bound feet; the men's boots have been stuffed with cotton wool. Another tale by the same author, subsequently expanded by him into a long vernacular play, describes a young woman's quest for revenge on her father's murderers. Disguising herself as a young male entertainer, the heroine Shang Sanguan takes the fancy of the murderer, a village bully; they retire together for the night, and in the morning servants discover that the bully has been beheaded, and the young “boy” has hanged himself. When they attempt to move the “boy's” body the servants discover to their surprise that “his socks and shoes felt empty, as if there were no feet inside. They took them off and found a pair of white silk slippers as tiny as hooks, for this was in fact a girl.”⁹ As Judith Zeitlin notes, “bound feet, those manmade fetishes which had become the locus of the erotic imagination in late Imperial China, are transformed into a natural and immutable proof of true femininity.”¹⁰

In Japan, as in China, female transvestite theater has at times coexisted with the male Kabuki tradition. The Takarazuka Young Girls Opera Company, for example, presents all-female productions in which the male roles are played by women. Recent films like Shusuke Kaneko's Summer Vacation: 1999 (1990) starring four young actresses as schoolboys in a drama of uncanny homoerotic substitutions problematize gender roles and sexual fantasies.

But Kabuki remains the best-known, and the dominant, form of transvestite theater in Japan. The tradition of the onnagata, the male actor of female roles, is an honored position passed down, at least adoptively, in theatrical families. The present onnagata, Tomasaburo IV, has become a celebrity in the U.S. as well as in Europe and Japan. The onnagata is heir to an interpretative tradition centuries old, and so stylized that it demands a certain way of walking, of moving the head and hands, of managing the kimono. “Were a woman to attempt to play a Kabuki female role,” writes one scholar, “she would have to imitate the men who have so subtly and beautifully incarnated woman before her.” “But it is unlikely that a woman has the necessary strength to play a Kabuki female part; the Japanese claim that only a man possesses the steel-like power hidden by softness which is requisite to a successful onnagata creation. Besides, with many layers of heavy kimonos, and a wig weighing as much as thirty pounds, a woman would probably not have the physical stamina to hold up such a weight for ten or twelve hours a day.”¹¹

These comments by one of the most careful observers of modern “Theater East and West” exhibit the very essentialism that he describes Kabuki theater as putting in question. The idea that women would inevitably play cross-dressed women's parts less well than men, and would lack even the physical strength to wear the traditional woman's stage costume, suggests not a harmonious blending of male and female, as he later contends (“whether the spectator is aware of it or not, the onnagata stirs in his unconscious a dim memory of some perfection partaking of both feminine and masculine … the divine androgyn in whose bisexuality both dark and light are harmonized”¹²) but a reimposition of gender hierarchy. Only the onnagata is the real or true stage woman.¹³

The great eighteenth-century onnagata Yoshisawa Ayame declared that “if an actress were to appear on the stage she could not express ideal feminine beauty,” for she could only rely on the exploitation of her physical characteristics, and therefore not express the synthetic ideal. “The ideal woman,” wrote Ayame, “can only be expressed by an actor.”¹⁴ In the same years, in England, where the reopening of the theaters presented women onstage after decades of transvestite performance, the Restoration actor Edward Kynaston, who specialized in women's roles, was praised by his contemporaries as superior to any actress: “It has been disputable among the judicious whether any woman that succeeded him so sensibly touched the audience as he.”¹⁵ The question seems to be, as Ayame expressed it, one of “ideal” and transcendent womanhood, an abstraction politically inflected so that it can only be conceptualized and embodied by men. Goethe, applying similar criteria, produced a celebrated praise of the castrati of Italian opera: “a double pleasure,” he said, “is given in that these persons are not women but only represent women. The young men have studied the properties of the sex in its being and behaviour; they know them thoroughly and reproduce them like an artist; they represent, not themselves, but a nature entirely foreign to them.”¹⁶ Nor is this an attitude that can be safely consigned to the past. Not too long ago, for example, Kenneth Tynan remarked about Shakespearean theater that Lady Macbeth was “basically a man's role,” and that “it is probably a mistake to cast a woman [in the part] at all.”¹⁷ Meantime in modern Japan, where Shakespeare is much admired, we are told that audiences “enjoy seeing Lady Macbeth played by a famous [male] Kabuki star, precisely because it is more artificial, thus more skilful, in a word, more beautiful.”¹⁸

I should note that David Hwang himself is far from immune to this kind of sentiment. “What interested me most from the start,” he reflected in an interview, “was the idea of the perfect woman. A real woman can only be herself, but a man, because he is presenting an idealization, can aspire to the idea of the perfect woman. I never had the least doubt that a man could play a woman convincingly on the stage.” And he added, “I also knew it would not hurt in commercial or career terms to be able to create a great part for a white male.” As for “real” women, Hwang is less interested in their “perfection,” or, indeed, in their subjectivity: “Pleasure in giving pain to a woman is not that far removed, I think, from a lot of male experiences,” he says. “As an Asian, I identify with Song,” but “as a man, I identify with Gallimard.”¹⁹

There is, then, a certain amount of double-speak that goes on in the discussion of “transvestite theater,” even as an approach that verges on cultural anthropology valorizes these Eastern traditions, not only Peking opera and Kabuki but also the older and more stylized Noh drama, in which women never appear, and Balinese cross-gender ritual dances, to name only a few of the best known instances. The twentieth-century Western infatuation with Noh, and to a certain extent with Kabuki and the Chinese opera, reinstitutionalizes as “traditional” and “culturally authentic” a form of drama that writes out women and replaces them with men.

SAVING FACE

As we have noted, makeup, costume, gesture, symbols, and stylization are the key elements of the “Oriental theater” (whether Chinese, Japanese, or Balinese) that captivated Europe. Significantly, they are also the key elements of female impersonation as it is practiced in the West. What David Henry Hwang did, in writing his play about the seduction of a Western diplomat by a Peking opera star, was to demystify, and then remystify, the material basis of female impersonation. In so doing he recast the roles, allowing Gallimard to see that it was he, and not Song Liling, who was playing the woman in the piece, and thus revealing the mechanism of female impersonation as a political and cultural act.

One of the faults Gallimard found with Puccini's opera was that the part of Butterfly was always played by “huge women in bad makeup.” At the end of M. Butterfly, Gallimard seats himself at the same dressing table where Song Liling had unmasked himself, and smears his face with white face-paint. The whiteness of the makeup is traditional in Japanese theater as a sign of the ideal white complexion of the noble who can afford to keep out of the sun, and the pallor of the protected young woman (or trained geisha) even today.²⁰ Since Butterfly is the story of a Japanese woman, the makeup is appropriate, but Song also wears white makeup whenever s/he is dressed as a woman, and we might note that in Chinese opera face-painting participates in an entirely different sign system, in which white on an actor's face symbolizes treachery, as red does loyalty, yellow piety, and gold the supernatural.²¹ In this story of spies and treason the Chinese signification is over- or underlaid on the Japanese, and Song has already given Gallimard fair and explicit warning not to conflate the two.

For Gallimard himself, of course, the white makeup has yet another significance, since he is continually described as a “white man” throughout the play, even in France where “There're white men all around.” When he covers his face with dead white paint Gallimard demonstrates the inexactness of this cultural shorthand. His already pale face takes on a dramatic sharpness, as he continues his painting. A red slash of mouth, dark black lines for eyebrows—this is not the careful and seductive adornment of acculturated woman or trained actor, but something that verges on tragic parody. He lifts the wig—which has remained onstage on a wig stand since Song's unmasking—onto his head, and slips his arms into the kimono. And as he makes up his face, he talks to himself, and to the audience:

Love warped my judgement, blinded my eyes, rearranged the very lines in my face … until I could look in the mirror and see nothing but … a woman.

Dancers help him put on the Butterfly wig.

I have a vision. Of the Orient. That, deep within its almond eyes, there are still women. Women willing to sacrifice themselves for the love of a man. Even a man whose love is completely without worth.

Dancers assist Gallimard in donning the kimono. They hand him a knife.

Death with honor is better than life … life with dishonor.

(He sets himself center stage, in a seppuku position.)

The love of a Butterfly can withstand many things—unfaithfulness, loss, even abandonment. But how can it face the one sin that implies all others? The devastating knowledge that, underneath it all, the object of her love was nothing more, nothing less than … a man.

(He sets the tip of the knife against his body.)

It is 19—. And I have found her at last. In a prison on the outskirts of Paris. My name is René Gallimard—also known as Madame Butterfly.

(3.3)

“Death with honor is better than life with dishonor.” These lines from Puccini's opera have been quoted throughout the play. When juxtaposed to Gallimard's transformation, they underscore the fact that the dramatic use of face makeup in M. Butterfly is a remarkable literalized commentary on the concept of “saving face” in Chinese culture. It should come as no surprise to learn that this term, “saving face,” is an invention of the English community in China, and not, strictly speaking, a Chinese phrase at all—although, equally significantly, it is common enough in Chinese to speak of “losing face” or doing something “for the sake of one's face.” To “save face” in M. Butterfly it is necessary to “lose face.” Song Liling in the character of Butterfly signals this in her letter to Gallimard: “I have already given you my shame.” When Song Liling goes to a mirror at the end of Act 2 and starts to remove her makeup—and when Gallimard reverses this procedure in Act 3, sitting at the same mirror to make up his face—the figure of face is laid bare. And of course “figure” means “face.”

Let me again emphasize that it is the omnipresent question of transvestism that makes this translation possible. Nationalisms and sexualities here are in flux, indeed in crisis, but what precipitates the crisis is the conflicting intertextual relationship between a transvestite theater that traditionally presents “woman” as a cultural artifact of male stagecraft (in the Chinese opera; in Kabuki theater) and a Western tradition of female impersonation that defiantly inverts the criteria for assertive individual “masculinity.”

Transvestite theater in England and the United States, both Shakespeare's theater of “boy actors” and more recent manifestations like the Hasty Pudding Show or the chorus of hula-skirted sailors in South Pacific (another East-West borderline marked by rampant cross-dressing), often turns on a stage rhetoric of phallic reassurance. And what I want to suggest here is that phallic reassurance, and its theatrically “comic” underside, the anxiety of phallic insufficiency, is the Western transvestite theater's equivalence of “saving—or losing—face.” By a familiar mechanism of displacement (upward or downward) which is in fact the logic behind Freud's reading of the Medusa, “face” and “penis” become symbolic alternatives for one another. And this, in turn, suggests a reason for the presence, throughout M. Butterfly, of an insistent and anxious language of phallic jokes—jokes about phallic inadequacy.

For example: René, remembering himself as a boy of twelve having discovered his uncle's cache of girlie magazines, imagines a pinup girl in a sexy negligee stripping in front of him: “My skin is hot, but my penis is soft. Why?” Girl: You can do whatever you want. Gallimard: I can't do a thing. Why?” (1.5). He reflects that when a woman calls a man “friend” she's calling him “a eunuch or a homosexual” (1.11), and his friend Marc jokes about having had to set up René's first sexual encounter. The play establishes him clearly as a man unsure of his own sexual attractiveness and adequacy. The one relationship that make him feel like “a man” is that with Song Liling, and the more he neglects her, the more male and potent he feels. We may recall that his affair with the Danish girl Renée was predicated on her difference from “Butterfly”: “It was exciting to be with someone who wasn't afraid to be seen completely naked. But is it possible for a woman to be too uninhibited, too willing, so as to seem almost too … masculine?”

The female Renée's “masculinity” extends itself not only to nakedness but also to unadorned language, as they discuss the difficult question of what to call his penis.

RENéE:
You have a nice weenie.
GALLIMARD:
What?
RENéE:
Penis. You have a nice penis.
GALLIMARD:
Oh. Well, thank you. That's very …
RENéE:
What—can't take a compliment?
GALLIMARD:
No, it's very … reassuring. […] what did you call it?
RENéE:
Oh. Most girls don't call it a “weenie,” huh?
GALLIMARD:
It sounds very—
RENéE:
Small, I know.
GALLIMARD:
I was going to say, “young” …
RENéE:
There's “cock,” but that sounds like a chicken. And “prick” is painful, and “dick” is like you're talking about someone who's not in the room.
GALLIMARD:
Yes. It's a … bigger problem than I imagined.

(2.6)

Furthermore, Renée has a sartorial theory about war that hinges on the unknowability of phallic supremacy:

I think the reason we fight wars is because we wear clothes. Because no one knows—between the men, I mean—who has the bigger … weenie. So, if I'm a guy with a small one, I'm going to build a really big building or take over a really big piece of land or write a really long book so the other men don't know, right? But, see, it never really works, that's the problem. I mean, you conquer the country, or whatever, but you're still wearing clothes, so there's no way to prove absolutely whose is bigger or smaller. And that's what we call a civilized society. The whole world run by a bunch of men with pricks the size of pins. (She exits)

Gallimard (to us): This was simply not acceptable.

(2.6)

Renée's exhibitionism is thus directly contrasted with Butterfly's modesty. When Gallimard, stung by humiliation at work (his political prophecies have not come true) decides to return to Butterfly and displace his humiliation onto her, he demands that she do the one thing she has consistently refused him: to strip. But before she can comply, he withdraws his request: “Did I not undress her because I knew, somewhere deep down, what I would find? Perhaps” (2.6). The phallus can play its role only when veiled.

Transvestism, in fact, theatrically literalizes Lacan's famous statement that the relations between the sexes “turn around a ‘to be’ and a ‘to have,’ which, by referring to a signifier, the phallus,” both “giv[e] reality to the subject in this signifier” and “derealiz[e] the relations to be signified.”²² In effect, transvestism becomes the middle term, the “to seem,” that Lacan suggests will intervene to protect both the fantasy of having and the fear of losing (or having lost) the phallus. Since in Lacanian terms “having” is always a fantasy, “seeming,” which speaks at once to the situation of theater (what Lacan calls “the comedy”) and of psychoanalysis, does represent an effective “intervention.” When the theater involved is transvestite theater, or when the intervention is that of the transvestite within the context of a (hypothetically) nontransvestite dramatic or cultural moment, the effect can be stunning.

Consider this example from Hwang's play, which may help to make the theoretical point more clearly. Song Liling, determined to keep Gallimard's affections from straying, tells him she is pregnant, and then produces a child she says is his son (following, as it happens, the scenario of the Boursicot-Shi relationship).²³ She announces that she will name the child “Peepee.” And to Gallimard's appalled remonstrance she offers the reproach of cultural difference:

GALLIMARD:
You can't be serious. Can you imagine the time this child will have in school?
SONG:
In the West, yes.
GALLIMARD:
It's worse than naming him Ping Pong or Long Dong or—
SONG:
But he's never going to live in the West, is he?

(2.9)

We may recall that the Chinese actor-spy on whom Song Liling's part was based was named Shi Pei Pu. The name Pei Pu may have suggested to the playwright the joke on “Peepee.” But in any case little “Peepee,” the detachable phallus (who may someday grow up to be Long Dong) is the “proof” of Gallimard's “masculinity.” In an earlier scene, his wife had urged him to see a doctor to find out why they were unable to have children. “You men of the West,” said Song Liling to him on that occasion, “you're obsessed by your odd desire for equality. Your wife can't give you a child, and you're going to the doctor?” “Promise me … you won't go to this doctor. Who is this Western quack to set himself as judge over the man I love? I know who is a man, and who is not” (2.6). There could be no better example of the translation of “saving face” into phallic terms. “Of course I didn't go,” Gallimard comments to the audience. “What man would?” (2.6).

TURNCOATS, OR WHAT PASSES FOR A WOMAN IN MODERN CHINA

Most transvestites are not spies. Indeed, recent statistics in Massachusetts suggest that most transvestites in that state, for example, are married heterosexual truck drivers or computer engineers.²⁴ But some of the most famous transvestites in history have been “actresses,” diplomats and spies. Why should this be?

In the seventeenth century, for example, the Abbé de Choisy, who cross-dressed in women's clothes from his earliest childhood, had a highly successful career on the stage (and off) as an actress in a Bordeaux theater. Indefatigably heterosexual, he dressed himself in a gown and his mistress as a boy and attended the opera with her, attracting more attention from the audience than the lesser spectacle on the stage. Sent to Rome to attend the election of the Pope, he dressed as a woman at the coronation ball—and for the next several years while he lived in Italy. When he visited Siam in the entourage of Louis XIV's ambassador, we are told, he “went gorgeously arrayed in a feminine evening gown, make-up and jewelry. The Siamese thought it was a European custom of some sort.”²⁵ This is the inverse of the East/West stereotype: instead of the West feminizing the East, the East feminizes the West, or, rather, naturalizes the “feminine” it sees.

The most famous transvestite in Western history, the personage after whom Havelock Ellis wished to name the transvestic syndrome eonism, was the Chevalier d'Eon de Beaumont, a French diplomat who early in his career went to Russia as a cross-dressed spy, then was sent to England, where bets were laid about which sex he was. Based on anatomical observation, an English court ruled that d'Eon was a woman. Recalled to France by an increasingly restive King, d'Eon was required as part of his repatriation to dress and live like a lady of the court, which he did for years. Tiring of this restrictive life, the Chevalière, as she was then styled, began a theatrical career as a female fencer, which enabled her to use the military skills she had acquired in her earlier years. Tended by a faithful female companion for years, she died a woman—and was then revealed, to the astonishment of her companion, to have been a man.²⁶

Perhaps the most celebrated brief description of treason is the terse little epigram ascribed to Elizabeth I's godson, Sir John Harington:

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

—Harington, Epigrams

What is being described here is a hermeneutic of passing or crossover. If treason works, it gets mainstreamed or translated into another, nonoppositional category, a new political orthodoxy. This will come as no surprise to any reader of George Orwell—or of history. But the mechanism that is here being described is also the mechanism of gender impersonation, transvestic passing. If we were to take Harington's epigram about treason and replace “treason” with some metrically equivalent word—like “passing”—we would be characterizing a social and sartorial inscription that encodes (as treason does) its own erasure. Successful treason is not treason, but governance, or diplomacy. Is successful cross-dressing, when undertaken as a constant rather than an episodic activity, and when undetected, still cross-dressing? In other words, was Bernard Boursicot wrong, to believe that Shi Pei Pu was a woman? If we are serious about describing gender as constructed rather than essential or innate, the lifelong transvestite puts this binarism (constructed/essential)—like so many others—to the test.

The most direct revelation of Song Liling's activities as a spy in M. Butterfly comes, significantly, in a conversation that also addresses the question of cross-dressing and the essence—or construction—of womanhood. The scene is the flat shared by the lovers in Beijing, 1961. Gallimard has left for the evening, and Comrade Chin, Song Liling's female government contact, is interviewing Song about American plans for increased troop strength in Vietnam—all information passed through the French embassy. Chin, writing as fast as she can, can hardly keep up with the numbers of soldiers, militia, and advisors. “How do you remember so much?” she asks. “I'm an actor.” “Is that how come you dress like that?” “Like what … ?” “You're wearing a dress. And every time I come here, you're wearing a dress. Is that because you're an actor? Or what?” “It helps me in my assignment,” says Song.

“Remember,” cautions Comrade Chin, “when working for the Great Proletarian State, you represent our Chairman Mao in every position you take.” “I'll try to imagine the Chairman taking my positions,” replies Song, with an irony entirely lost on her interlocutor. “Don't forget,” says Chin as she is leaving, “there is no homosexuality in China.” And Song answers, “Yes, I've heard.” And then to the audience, after the departing Miss Chin in her Mao suit, he comments, “What passes for a woman in modern China.” What passes for a woman—this is the real question. And, in René's horrified recognition that “the man I loved was a cad, a bounder,” what passes for a man.

Song's ironic and disparaging aside, “What passes for a woman in modern China,” marks a crucial dissymmetry in the playtext. Focusing on male pathos and male self-pity, M. Butterfly is intermittently antifeminist and homophobic, ridiculing the female cross-dresser, Miss Chin, while it elevates Gallimard's plight to the plane of high drama. The other women in the play, like Renée and Helga, are likewise presented in caricature rather than in sympathetic depth. This is a critique frequently made of contemporary male transvestite theater, that it occludes or erases women, implying that a man may be (or rather, make) a more successful “woman” than a woman can. In Hwang's play cross-dressed men are emblematic of cultural crisis (or even of the “human condition”), but the cross-dressed woman is a risible sign of failed “femininity.”

Here too, though, it is worth recalling that the “women,” like the “men” in Hwang's play, are gendered in representation rather than in “reality.” Making Miss Chin the butt of broad jokes about uniforms, bureaucratic dress-for-success and the totalitarian erasure of difference offers a sharp contrast between the impossibility of androgyny by sartorial fiat and the subversive power of transvestism both to undermine and to exemplify cultural constructions. Nonetheless, the easy laugh elicited by Song's put-down on “passing for a woman” is too anti-butch not to let the fear of women, and women's difference, come through. What is really at stake here, it seems to me, is a subconscious recognition that “woman” in patriarchal society is conceived of as an artifact—and that the logical next step is the recognition that “man” is likewise not fact but artifact, himself constructed, made of detachable parts. This is the anxiety that lies beneath the laughter; and it is on this anxiety of artifactuality that the aesthetic claims of transvestite theater are, paradoxically, based.

That acting, espionage, and, indeed, diplomacy should be formally or structurally cognate with transvestism is not really surprising. Using the language of vestimentary codes, actors, spies, and transvestites could be characterized as potential or actual turncoats. Another suggestive sartorial term popularly in use to describe espionage activities is cloak and dagger—again, pointing to the element of disguise, but also of theatricality virtually for its own sake, and of displacement onto clothing—away from the body. Remember that Artaud's praise of Oriental theater was literally a praise of cloak and dagger—of “those who succeed in giving a mystic sense to the simple form of a robe and … pierce these illusory or secondary clothes with a saber, giving them the look of huge butterflies pinned in the air.” What these activities have in common, however, is more than metaphorical or literal change of costume. It is an ideology of construction.

“The woman of Fashion,” says Roland Barthes in The Fashion System,

is a collection of tiny, separate essences rather analogous to the character parts played by actors in classical theater; the analogy is not arbitrary, since Fashion presents the woman as a representation, in such a way that a simple attribute of the person, spoken in the form of an adjective, actually absorbs this person's entire being. … The paradox consists then of maintaining the generality of the characteristics (which alone is compatible with the institution of Fashion) in a strictly analytical state: it is a generality of accumulation, not of synthesis: in Fashion, the person is thus simultaneously impossible and yet entirely known.²⁷

We might compare this to what Diderot says about the paradox of acting: that the actor, the great actor, must not feel.

At the very moment when he touches your heart he is listening to his own voice; his talent depends not, as you think, upon feeling, but upon rendering so exactly the outward signs of feeling, that you fall into the trap. He has rehearsed to himself every note of his passion. … The broken voice, the half-uttered words, the stifled or prolonged notes of agony, the trembling limbs, the faintings, the bursts of fury—all this is pure mimickry, lessons carefully learned, the grimacing of sorrow, the magnificent aping which the actor remembers long after his first study of it, of which he was perfectly conscious when he first put it before the public, and which leaves him, luckily for the poet, the spectator, and himself, a full freedom of mind. … He puts off the sock or the buskin; his voice is gone; he is tired; he changes his dress, or he goes to bed; and he feels neither trouble, nor sorrow, nor depression, nor weariness of soul. All these emotions he has given to you.²⁸

This (de)construction or (de)composition of the fantasy of “character” is precisely what is at work and on display in M. Butterfly. Barthes' description of the fashion system suggests that “personality” in the discourse of clothing is an illusion, made up of an accumulation of signifying “essences”: “in Fashion, the person is thus simultaneously impossible and yet entirely known.” In David Henry Hwang's play the vestimentary codes of stage, gender, nation and race conspire together to make the person of the play's title, the dramatis persona, likewise, in Barthes' terms, both “impossible” and “entirely known.” As Song Liling changes costume, from the “traditional Chinese garb” of the opening tableau to the “Anna May Wong” black gown from the twenties and the chong sam in which “she” appears at home to Gallimard (1.10) to the Armani slacks and gold neck chain in which “he” reveals “his” true gender in the courtroom in France, s/he also changes “character,” becomes, as s/he has always been, unknowable, unknown.

“What passes for a woman.” And what passes for a man. Passing is what acting is, and what treason is. Recall that the French diplomat Boursicot was accused of passing information to his Chinese contacts. In espionage, in theater, in “modern China,” in contemporary culture, embedded in the very phrase “gender roles,” there is, this play suggests, only passing. Trespassing. Border crossing and border raids. Gender, here, exists only in representation—or performance.

This is the scandal of transvestism—that transvestism tells the truth about gender. Which is why—which is one reason why—like René Gallimard, we cannot look it in the face.

Notes

1. Chapman Pincher, Traitors (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 104-105.

2. The (London) Times, May 6, 1986; The Daily Mail, May 6 and 7, 1986; Pincher, Traitors, p. 105.

3. Joyce Wadler, “For the First Time, The Real-Life Models for Broadway's M. Butterfly Tell of Their Very Strange Romance,” People, 30, 6 (August 8, 1988), p. 91.

4. David Henry Hwang, M. Butterfly, with an Afterword by the Playwright (New York: New American Library, 1989). Citations from the play (by act and scene) and references to the afterword (by page number) will be incorporated directly in the text above. I am grateful to David Henry Hwang, to Andreas Teuber and to John Lithgow, who graciously allowed me to see the playscript before M. Butterfly appeared in published form.

5. Antonin Artaud, “On the Balinese Theater,” The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), pp. 60-61.

6. Peter Ackroyd, Dressing Up (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), p. 94.

7. See Colin P. Mackerras, The Rise of Peking Opera, 1770-1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 45-47.

8. Patrick Hanan, The Invention of Li Yu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 175.

9. Liaozhai's Records of the Strange, 3.374. I am indebted to Judith Zeitlin and her forthcoming book The Painted Wall: Pu Songling's Records of the Strange for this reference, and for much other fascinating information on cross-dressing and sexual transformation in Chinese literature and culture of this period. My thanks as well to Ellen Widmer, who first drew my attention to the bound foot in Chinese drama in a discussion after the Nationalisms and Sexualities Conference at the Harvard University Center for Literary and Cultural Studies in June 1989.

10. Zeitlin, The Painted Wall (unpub. MS), p. 167. As will be evident, Zeitlin's reading and mine agree on many points. As she notes, “It is almost irresistible to explore the allure of bound feet in Freudian terms as representations of the female genitals—as mutilated appendages with something missing” (p. 167).

11. Leonard Cabell Pronko, Theater West and East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 195.

12. Ibid., p. 196.

13. Yet even here things are not quite what they seem—or rather, what they seem always to have been. For the earliest form of Kabuki was in fact the so-called Women's Kabuki (onna-kabuki) of the late sixteenth century. But women were prohibited from the stage in 1629 because of allegations of immorality, political as well as sexual; many were prostitutes, and actors were by edict officially to be segregated from the general populace. After a brief interlude in which Kabuki actresses attempted to evade this regulation by reversing the theater's previous practice, and having men play men's roles, and women, women's roles, women disappeared from the stage altogether, and did not reappear as performers in Japan until after 1868.

    The women were succeeded on the stage by long-haired, handsome boys, in what was known as Young Men's Kabuki (wakashu-kabuki), but these boys proved, apparently, too attractive to some of the samurai in the audience, and in 1652 Young Men's Kabuki was also forbidden. The present form of all-male theater therefore derives from the “Male” Kabuki (yaro-kabuki) of the seventeenth century, in which boys and young men were required to cut off their forelocks and shave their foreheads in order to appear less seductive. See Earle Ernst, The Kabuki Theater (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1974), pp. 10-11.

14. Ibid., p. 195.

15. Ashley H. Thorndike, Shakespeare's Theater (New York: Macmillan, 1960), p. 420.

16. Quoted in Ackroyd, Dressing Up, p. 98.

17. Kenneth Tynan, Tynan on Theater (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1964), p. 108.

18. Ian Buruma, Behind the Mask (New York: New American Library, 1984), pp. 117-118.

19. Jeremy Gerard, “David Hwang: Riding on the Hyphen,” New York Times Magazine, March 13, 1988, p. 87.

20. Pronko, Theater West and East, p. 151.

21. Ibid., p. 44.

22. Jacques Lacan, “The Signification of the Phallus,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 289.

23. Wadler, “For the First Time …,” p. 96.

24. Sally Jacobs, “‘You Do What You Need to Do,’” The Boston Globe, August 2, 1988, p. 2.

25. Ackroyd, Dressing Up, p. 9. For more on Choisy, see The Transvestite Memoirs of the Abbé de Choisy and the Story of the Marquise-Marquis de Banneville, trans. R. H. F. Scott (London: Peter Owen, 1973), and also the extended treatment in my Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1991).

26. I discuss D'Eon, like Choisy, at much greater length in my Vested Interests. See also, among the many books and articles on this enigmatic figure, J. Buchan Telfer, The Strange Career of the Chevalier D'Eon de Beaumont (London: Longmans Green, 1885); Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, The True Story of the Chevalier D'Eon (London, 1895); Marjorie Coryn, The Chevalier d'Eon, 1728-1810 (London: T. Butterworth, 1932); Edna Nixon, Royal Spy: The Strange Case of the Chevalier D'Eon (New York: Reynal and Co., 1965); Cynthia Cox, The Enigma of the Age: The Strange Story of the Chevalier d'Eon (London: Longmans, 1966); Michel de Decker, Madame le Chevalier d'Eon (Paris: Perrin, 1987); and Gary Kates, “D'Eon Returns to France: Gender and Power in 1777,” in Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds., Body Guards: The Cultural Contexts of Gender Ambiguity (New York: Routledge, 1991).

27. Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 254-255.

28. Denis Diderot, The Paradox of Acting, trans. William Archer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 19.