SOURCE: Martin, Robert K. “Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and David Henry Hwang's Chinese Woman.” Canadian Review of American Studies 23, no. 1 (fall 1992): 95-106.

[In the following essay, Martin compares the discourses of gender, nationality, and colonialism within Hwang's M. Butterfly with the novel and film adaptation Reflections in a Golden Eye, by Carson McCullers.]

Almost twenty years after its first production, Michel Tremblay's two-person play about a drag queen and her motorcyclist lover, Hosanna, was staged again in Montreal, this time by a woman director, Lorraine Pintal. In the interval, the play had become a classic of Québec nationalism, with the sexual disguises read as failure of political self-affirmation. The new production was significantly different from the 1973 production, which many people in the audience remembered. Most striking of the changes was an alteration in the ending when the drag queen Claude, or Hosanna, no longer undresses to reveal her “true self.” As Renate Usmiani rather sententiously described the ending in her account of the early version, “both characters realize that the time for hiding places and disguises is past and they must assume real life and real identities” (96). Even if it originates in Tremblay's own accounts of the play, the notion of “real identities,” would seem hard to sustain in 1991, especially when it is accompanied, as it is in Hosanna, by a claim to masculinity; Hosanna's five-time repeated final words of the play, as she “becomes” Claude again, “Chus t'un homme [“I'm a man.”—author's translation]” (75), words that echo and make explicit the end of the first act, when Hosanna declares to her lover Cuirette, “Moé aussi j'arais envie de t'enculer! [“Me too, I want to fuck you.”—author's translation]” (48).

However much it may be necessary for Québécois (and perhaps particularly Québécoises) to rewrite that final scene in a more modern, and less triumphant, version, English speakers seem to have been almost invariably incapable of understanding the play's political content. Again, Usmiani may represent the critical response to the play. Denying Tremblay's definition of the play as “an allegory about Québec,” she claims that “Hosanna will doubtless survive its political uses because its psychological and philosophical themes have universal implications” (96). It is not that Usmiani wants to stress the play's situation in a rhetoric of gay liberation: on the contrary she stresses that “the fact that both [lovers] happen to be male becomes irrelevant” (89). Despite such transcendental readings, Tremblay's play remains a crucial work for an understanding of a discourse of sexuality and nationalism. The shifts made necessary in the recent production indicate ways in which the affiliations between nationalism and masculinity have been redrawn since the early 1970s.

If we bear in mind Patricia Smart's comment that revolutionary nationalism is a project of the son raised against the mother, “a 'virility' to be assumed against and at the expense of woman” (240), it is easier to see Hosanna as a nationalist project and to understand why it is the “woman” Hosanna, the drag queen, who must be humiliated and then reborn. While Tremblay clearly does not participate in the ritual violence that Smart shows is central to the nationalist novel, he is caught up in an equation that links masculinity with nationhood. The male character, Cuirette, is pathetic, but he is not subject to the ritual destruction that Hosanna endures. Hosanna's situation for Tremblay is that of a person lacking identity, “ce coiffeur de la plaza St-Hubert qui a toujours rêvé d'être une actrice anglaise (Elizabeth Taylor) naturalisée américaine qui joue un mythe égyptien (Cléopâtre) dans un film américain tourné en Espagne [“This hairdresser from Plaza St. Hubert who has always dreamed of being an English actress, naturalized American, playing an Egyptian myth in an American film shot in Spain.”—author's translation]” (4). Hosanna's femininity and his “Orientalism” are signs of his lack of identity, that is to say, masculinity.

Wishing to show Québec's failure to develop its own identity, Tremblay turns not simply to a drag queen, but to a drag queen who wants to play the part of the Oriental queen.¹ This doubling of difference acts in some ways to counteract the gesture of subordination, but it substitutes a fantasy of performance for a reality, and a fantasy that has been multiplied by the screen into the world of mass culture. In the revenge that Hosanna's rivals take on her, as in the multiplied realities of the screen, all the drag queens are Cleopatra.

Tremblay's text marks an important moment in postcolonial and nationalist writing; though, in some ways it may be seen to promise more than it delivers. The defense of Hosanna, the drag queen who represents the colonialized fantasies of a subservient Québec, rests upon Tremblay's revelation, starkly dramatized in the early version's final scene when Hosanna disrobed to reveal that under the mask of the colonial woman there was a real man. Nationalist discourse seeks freedom from the loss of national identity through the assertion of masculinity, since obedience to the colonial regime is imagined as feminine or effeminate.

This joining of tropes, with masculine linked to national and anticolonial, may not be natural, but it is certainly pervasive. Because it is so thoroughly a part of an appeal to the revival of self, its sexist implications may pass unnoticed. What this suggests is the danger of resisting one form of oppression—political and national—by another, but in a manner that, because it is embodied in the tropes more than the explicit ideas, may seem “natural.”

As I see it, one aspect of director Pintal's refusal to retain the disrobing in the final scene (apart from the datedness of such theatrical nudity), is a questioning of the opposition of true self/disguised self, which implies a self somewhere outside of culture and history, as if any self were not always already constructed and disguised. Pintal also attempts to avoid the consequences (ultimately impossible in Tremblay's play) of the representation of the colonized body as the effeminate body, or the male body in drag. While Tremblay does suggest that the leather queen is as disguised as Hosanna is, the logic of the play's climactic moments works toward recuperating the masculine/nationalist connection.

I want to make use of the problems that Tremblay's play presents as a way into two rather different texts, a novel (and later a film) by Carson McCullers and a play by David Henry Hwang, in which issues of nationality, colonialism, and gender are raised. McCullers's focus on issues of gender will, in some eyes, make her less concerned with questions of race and nationality (although I think this is an incomplete view of her work), while Hwang's focus on the feminization of the Oriental male rests upon a set of assumptions about masculinity that must themselves be put under erasure. Edward Said's important study, Orientalism, has done much to demonstrate the artificiality and ultimate oppressiveness of the construction of the “Oriental” in the European imagination. However, a dismantling of the “Oriental” through its association with the “feminine” may replace one binarism with another; writing against empire by no means ensures rewriting gender.

Hosanna's heroine, Elizabeth Taylor, played the leading female role in the film of Carson McCullers's Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941, filmed 1967). Her particular appeal, as a woman with sexual desires and ambitions, to a gay male audience links her to the “diva” figures of exaggerated yet grandiose figures whose suffering can be taken as a sign of the inevitable defeat both of their gender and of the desire for love.

McCullers's text offers an interesting contrast to Tremblay's play, which, as we have seen, is implicated in a larger discourse of violence as self-affirmation. McCullers's project is at once feminist and antinationalist. Set at a military base, the plot focuses on the erotic relationships beneath the surface of Army discipline, and indeed of the ways in which the military draws upon and exploits sexuality. McCullers's list of characters is striking: “two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse” (2). The sequence can hardly be accidental: first the White men, by rank; then the women, unranked; then the “Oriental,” sex not indicated; then the horse. The men are situated by their military ranks, the women by their gender; the Filipino has neither rank nor gender. Anacleto, the Filipino houseboy, serves to destabilize the economies of power and desire even as he situates the lives of these men and women in the context of race and colonialism.

Amongst the White characters, we have two triangles of desire. Major Langdon is pursuing an affair with Leonora Penderton (Elizabeth Taylor), the captain's wife, under the captain's eyes, while the captain is, perhaps, more interested in the major than in his own wife. As McCullers puts it, “he had a sad penchant for becoming enamoured of his wife's lovers” (11). Meanwhile, the captain is engaged in an erotoscopic relation with Private Williams, who is himself obsessed with watching Leonora.

Langdon's wife, Alison, has excluded herself from these erotic games and entered into the world of the invalid, cared for by her doting servant, Anacleto. Anacleto's devotion to Alison separates him from the military world to which the other men, and Leonora, belong; it places him, as it were, in the harem. His identification as a Filipino in a novel written just before American entry into the war against Japan and the assertion of military control over the Pacific can hardly be innocuous. Throughout McCullers's work, she shows an interest in servants and their relations to their employers, but the interest here in an Asian rather than an African American servant (and a male rather than a female) allows her to explore the interrelations of gender and race.

Although D. H. Lawrence is frequently cited as the principal source for McCullers's novel, her work is, in some ways, more precisely a rewriting of Melville's Billy Budd, with Private Williams as Billy. In Melville's short novel, the hero is executed by a system manipulated by two men, the master-at-arms Claggart and Captain Vere, both of whom desire him in ways they cannot acknowledge. The crucial incident, which takes place before the action of McCullers's novel, in which the Private “spill[s] a cup of coffee on the Captain's trousers” (4; 120), is an obvious echo of Billy's spilling of the soup in front of Claggart. In both cases, the episode is both a form of insubordination and an act of sexual provocation. In both cases, there is a kind of phallic display, joined to a sense of transgression, that is heightened in Reflections by the image of the “stain.” McCullers draws on the Billy Budd story in order to inscribe her work in an American tradition of critique that wants to examine the connections between homosociality and homophobic violence. Claggart and the Captain both ultimately kill the younger man (or cause him to be killed, in Billy's case) as a way of outwardly projecting their own panicked response to homosexuality.² In both cases, the military enables the career of the captain as a closeted gay man, presenting him with a series of temptations that are expressly forbidden.

For the women of the army base, there are limited opportunities for resistance. The two wives, Leonora and Alison, represent the alternatives: a life devoted entirely to physical satisfaction or a life of frustration and self-hatred that, in fact, becomes self-mutilation. Alison's mutilation of her breasts not only renounces her role as mother after the death of her child but symbolically indicates her exclusion from the world of women. “Castrated,” as it were, she enters into a harem-like world with Anacleto as her only companion. Although McCullers's principal interest lies with the fate of Alison, the one-time Latin teacher who has become physically and psychologically incompetent, unable even to earn a living, as dependent as her servant whose very name means “dependent,” her introduction of the two servants, the African American and the Filipino, marked off by gender and race, permits her to extend her analysis.

Although McCullers is acutely aware of the situation of women, and their place in a society of what Adrienne Rich called compulsory heterosexuality and domesticity, she also recognizes that women form a part of a cultural construct of the “feminine” that is not limited to women. The Captain's repression of his feminine qualities leads him both to his masochistic self-torture and to his need to kill Private Williams, whose scopic possession of Leonora echoes the Captain's own inability to consummate his marriage. While it is obvious that the Captain's murder of the Private will be read as an act of defense of honour, it derives more from the fact that he was, as McCullers writes, “as jealous of his wife as he was of her lover” (33). In other words, the murder is a sexual act displaced onto violence, and justified by a code of “honour.”

The refusal of the “feminine” is also linked to the refusal of all that is “other,” including the foreign, represented by Anacleto. Anacleto enjoys embracing his role as queen to provoke the men around him, and deliberately (re)presenting the Western culture they might lay claim to. We see him dressed in an androgynous manner, “in sandals, soft gray trousers, and a blouse of aquamarine linen” (41). He has a passion for beautiful arrangements, for classical music, and for French. These are gestures that are, particularly in the context of an American military base in 1941, at once racial and sexual. They are also acts of gay provocation, in which the signs of the dominant culture are subject to replication and parody. Gay flouncing should be seen as the equivalent of “signifying,” as used in African-American criticism, a repetition with a difference.³ Just as Elizabeth Taylor plays the tragic queen in such a way that it is a parody, that she is herself already the drag queen who will imitate her, in a mirror of a mirror, so the gay adoration of high culture takes the symbols of the bourgeoisie and turns them around.

In effect, Anacleto knows the role he plays as the Filipino house-boy—the very term indicating his (homo)sexual role and the perpetual link between nationality and subjection in the colonial subject. He is the perpetual boy, never the full citizen/subject, in a term that is laden with racial meaning in southern America in the 1940s. Instead of fighting against the stereotype, he plays Sambo: dancing, listening to classical music, arranging the flowers, and speaking French, the American language of gayness that he barely masters, but that serves as a token of his difference and, paradoxically, superiority. While Anacleto can be seen as impenetrably “other” because of his racial difference, almost all the characters have a kind of secret life, represented, for example, by Leonora's photograph of her boarding school roommate, inscribed to her “with Oodles of Love from Bootsie” (56). Alison's other life may also be indicated by her cat Petronius whose name had to acquire “a feminine ending” when he “suddenly had kittens” (90). Anacleto serves as a means to the exploration of that other life, as an indication of the artificiality of the exclusive heterosexual regime as well as of American colonial domination.

McCullers's Anacleto is one of a number of her characters who represent a potential move toward a liberating androgyny in the context of a critique of Western patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality. The feminization of Anacleto indicates the construction of difference in the colonial/patriarchal economy. The issue for McCullers is expressed by Captain Penderton late in the novel, when the major argues that the army “might have made a man” of Anacleto. Against that, Penderton argues for a recognition of difference, the “unorthodox” in a world of normalcy (124-25), a normalcy that the text has already fully deconstructed as the cover for a drama of power and desire, and the suppression of the other. That the politics of this text has been so obscured is due in large part to the conceptualization of “Southern Gothic,” a category that has proved a useful vehicle for homophobia and misogyny. Leslie Fiedler's account is representative. Against the “masculine vigor” of the presumed origin, Faulkner, there is a “sensibility … quite frankly homosexual” that “appeals to certain wealthy women with cultural aspirations” (450). Indeed, if women do provide a special audience for “Southern Gothic” writers, it may be because these authors began the exploration of the consequences of a patriarchal order that was put into doubt by the brief interlude of the 1940s, that is, until the Cold War made masculinity respectable again.

Writing almost fifty years later, David Henry Hwang takes a very different approach. Provoked by press accounts of the French diplomat who had spied for his lover, a Chinese opera singer, for twenty years without apparently realizing that she was a man, Hwang sees this story as characteristic of the colonial feminization of the Oriental male.⁴ His great accomplishment [in M. Butterfly] is to have identified the operatic figure of Madama Butterfly as the paradigm for Western romanticizing of the subservient Oriental woman, and to have structured his play in part as a simultaneous performance and deconstruction of Puccini's 1904 opera, letting the Puccini “collide” with “a percussive Eastern score by Lucia Hwong.”⁵ The opera celebrates the love of Pinkerton, the American officer, for his mistress, the geisha Cio-Cio-San, called Butterfly, and his cruel betrayal of her. Butterfly accepts her fate and kills herself, allowing the opera to praise the impossibility of intercultural love and the domination of Japanese women by European men. At the same time, because of its use of the diva, the opera places emphasis on the triumphant act of sacrifice. While this can be read as oppressive, it is also a form of giving voice to what Lawrence Lipking has called the “abandoned women,” who may simultaneously stand for an aspect of the male self, a lyric counterweight to the dominant epic chord. Switching the gender (Madama becoming M. for Monsieur) permits Hwang to demonstrate the artificiality of all gender; the audience that is happy to consume the cultural stereotype of the demure Oriental woman sees this exposed as a fiction once the woman is a man.

In one of the play's many didactic moments, Hwang has the singer explain: “The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor … but good art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique” (83). The East becomes the measure by which one recognizes one's Westernness, just as the feminine becomes the means by which the man recognizes his masculinity. Hwang's analysis, while a powerful tool to explore the ways in which the East is constructed, is less insightful in matters of gender, largely because of its insistence on a fundamental dualism and its search for a truth of sexuality. Hwang might have done well to read Barthes or Foucault. After all, Song, the Chinese spy is not unlike Balzac's La Zambinella in Barthes's S/Z. Barthes draws upon his/her status to suggest the need for a uninflected middle term, a kind of human or linguistic neuter (absent in French, of course) that can destabilize a set of gender expectations based on absolute difference.

When Hwang has Song declare that: “being an Oriental, I could never be completely a man” (83), he illustrates the equation between the Western and the masculine, but he does so in a way that leaves the term “man” undeconstructed. Writing out of a postcolonial stance, and not one primarily interested in the politics of gender, Hwang seems to retain masculinity as a norm to which the Oriental must aspire if he is to gain equality with the West. Underneath his robes, the play suggests, there is still an Oriental cock, even if the West persists in erasing it. If Gallimard does not know that his lover is a man, it is because no Oriental can be a man in Western eyes. Unexplored is the possibility that Gallimard knows perfectly well the nature of Song's genitals and that he prefers them. Seeking to undo one erasure, Hwang runs the risk of another—the erasure of male/male desire and the transvestite history of the Chinese opera, with its possibilities for incorporating homosexuality and/or pederasty.⁶

The play's last scene highlights the problem. In Gallimard's prison cell, the diplomat speaks the words of colonial and sexist oppression, of “slender women in chong sams and kimonos” (91), before undertaking his final transformation into Butterfly. As he puts on the makeup, wig, and kimono, the audience is expected to participate in a ritual renunciation of masculine power, in the abject humiliation of man as woman, the powerful becoming the powerless. The scene works dramatically, but what does it suggest intellectually? What place does it leave for drag or for gender instability? In a play about the “feminine” as the colonised other, the ultimate humiliation is indeed to become feminine. Gallimard's assumption of the Butterfly costume confirms his own gender crossing, his own “feminine” (or “Oriental”) submission to the dominant figure of his master/mistress. Marjorie Garber sees this as “revealing the mechanism of female impersonation as a political and cultural act” (243), but she may overestimate the subversive power of the scene. Gallimard, at the end is after all simply the dying queen. Even more than in the opera, the play's conclusion focuses on the Western male and his suffering. In a striking put-down, Gallimard's Danish girlfriend (or alter ego) comments, “The whole world [is] run by a bunch of men with pricks the size of pins” (56). The remark is meant to suggest an aggressive and colonial politics as a sublimated phallicism, but its crude Freudian terms suggest the penis as the measure of authority. If the world were run by a bunch of men with pricks the size of baseball bats, would we be better off?

Hwang's play shares with Tremblay's a call for the achievement of the “true” self, in which the drag queen is revealed at the end to be a man. What Hwang adds is an extra fillip, in which the “man” is revealed to be a woman—as if Cuirette could have put on the Cléopâtre costume at the end of Hosanna.⁷ What this demonstrates is the impossibility, as women have known for a long time, of undoing the patriarchy by reversing its terms. For Hwang, androgyny is not the possibility of différance, as it is for McCullers, but a means of imperial possession of the Oriental body. Seeking to punish the presumptuous male, he can think of nothing worse than turning him into a woman, equivalent to the ritual acts of sodomy as humiliation one finds in Faulkner or Dickey. In an attempt to undo the construction of the Oriental as “feminine,” Hwang retains that femininity as the state of abjection. As recent work on nationalism and sexuality has shown,⁸ an anticolonialist discourse is capable of replicating fully the misogynist and homophobic discourse of patriarchy, as it seeks to validate itself. Bearing this in mind goes no little way to explaining the strange reluctance of Edward Said, in his key text Orientalism, to pursue the connection he identifies, in his discussion of Flaubert, between the Orient and “fecundity [,] … sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies”; although one “could speculate” on such matters, “it is not the province of my analysis here” (188). Without such speculation, I would argue, there is no way out of the double bind of the colonial feminized body.

Notes

1. The concept of the foreign queen as at once “Oriental” and “female,” as “darkness” personified goes back at least as far as the Roman representations of both Cleopatra and Dido, and their Renaissance reformulations. The popular images of Cleopatra carry a lot of baggage.

2. See further discussion in Robert K. Martin, in Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 1986), 111-16, and in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U California P, 1990), 91-130.

3. I have in mind the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford, 1988). One element of “signifying” that is particularly relevant to an analysis of gay style is what Gates terms “the ironic reversal of a received racist image,” where one might substitute “sexist” or “homophobic” for “racist”.

4. Although I have already indicated the need to suspend the category of “Oriental,” I will use the term in this section of my essay, since it is essential to Hwang's argument and to his elision of Japanese and Chinese.

5. See Frank Rich's review of M. Butterfly, New York Times, March 21, 1988, C13.

6. This erasure is particularly striking since Hwang's source for the play, an article in the New York Times, quoted as an epigraph, mentions that at the Peking Opera “female roles have, according to tradition, often been played by men” (May 11, 1986, p. K7). The play has Gallimard explain “no one knew anything about the Chinese opera” (20), but this appears to be ascribed to a lack of interest in Chinese culture, and not a failure to grasp a homosexual and transvestite tradition. Marjorie Garber gives a more precise picture of Japanese theatrical transvestism in her discussion of M. Butterfly, in Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 245. More detail is available in Tsuneo Watanabe and Jun'ichi Iwata in The Love of the Samurai: A Thousand Years of Japanese Homosexuality, tr. D. R. Roberts (London, GMP, 1989).

7. Although not at the end of the play, something of this reversal and “humiliation” does happen in Hosanna, when Hosanna reveals to Cuirette that as the breadwinner she is the “man:” “T'avais jamais pensé à ça que c'était toé, la femme, dans nous deux, Cuirette? Tu veux savoir que c'est que chus? Ben chus l'homme de la maison, Cuirette! L'homme de la maison!” (47). [“You never thought of that, that it was you who was the woman of the two of us. Cuirette. Well, I'm the man of the house, Cuirette. The man of the house!”]

8. In the Canadian context, see Robert Schwartzwald's very fine essay, “Fear of Federasty: Quebec's Inverted Fictions.” in Hortense J. Spillers, ed., Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text, (New York: Routledge, 1991), 175-195. See also my essay, “Sex and Politics in Wartime Canada: The Attack on Patrick Anderson,” Essays on Canadian Writing 44 (Fall 1991), 110-125. For Europe see the very important work of George Mosse (Nationalism and Sexuality [New York: Fertig, 1985]) and Sander Gilman (Difference and Pathology [Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1985]). The recent collection edited by Andrew Parker, Mary Russo, Doris Sommer, and Patricia Yaeger, Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992) contains a number of crucial essays.

Works Cited

Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. 1960. Rpt. Cleveland: World, 1962.

Hosanna. Michel Tremblay. Théâtre de Quat'sous. Montréal, 1991.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. NY: Penguin, 1989.

McCullers, Carson. Reflections in a Golden Eye. 1941. Rpt. NY: Bantam, 1967.

Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexualtiy and Lesbian Existence” Signs 5 (1980). 631-60.

Said, Edward. Orientalism. NY: Pantheon, 1975.

Smart, Patricia. Écrire dans la maison du père: L'émergence du féminin dans la tradition littéraire du Québec. Montréal: Québec/Amérique, 1988.

Tremblay, Michel. Hosanna suivi de La duchesse de Langeais. Montreal: Leméac, 1973.

Usmiani, Renate. Michel Tremblay. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, n.d.