Deconstructing the “Butterfly”: Teaching David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly in Cultural and Socio-political contexts

Asian American Literature: Discourses and Pedagogies 1 (2010) 16-26. Deconstructing the “Butterfly”: Teaching David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly in Cultural and Socio-political Contexts By Eileen Chia-Ching Fung David Henry Hwang’s play, M. Butterfly, is perhaps one of the most known and highly acclaimed Asian American plays in the late twentieth century. The significance of David Henry Hwang’s plays and the new visibility of Asian American theater reflect the escalating attention given to the political, cultural, and intellectual issues: race, gender, ethnicity, sexualities, and particularly their intersectionsi The critical strategies of understanding Hwang’s plays, especially M. Butterfly, rely on both the contexts of political histories between Europe, North America and China as well as on the cultural politics of Orientalism. Critical readings of this play range from debates over the representation(s) of ethnicity and sexualities, politics of Orientalism, theories of performance and the theatre, and the concept of the masquerade. This essay intends to explore critical angles and offer pedagogical suggestions for Hwang’s play. The first part of my discussion offers an exploration of the historical and cultural contextualization that has initiated and motivated the production of M. Butterfly, followed by a critical discussion on the play’s negotiations of race, gender, sexualities, and ethnicity that aims to offer pedagogical paradigms for teaching this play. Cultural and Historical background: Exploring the ideology of Orientalism that Hwang negotiates in his play, one must study the long history of colonial and imperial contexts between the East and the West. The image of the Orient as exotic, mysterious, and passive mirrors a wish-fulfilling fantasy that connects intimately to imperial and colonial sensibilities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Thus, the first part of my discussion focuses on the international fronts, starting with the date of the first appearance of a cultural icon, the Oriental “Butterfly,” in the late 19th century. Civil unrest and famine in numerous parts of Asia (i.e. China, the Philippines, Vietnam) beginning the late 19th and going through most of the 20th century not only weakened Asia’s political status but also allowed wider access for Western infiltration and dominance in Asia. Western presence in Asia and Southeast Asia during this time developed into both western imperialism and colonialism, constituting gendered political relationships which Hwang’s M. Butterfly would come to capture as forms of international intrigue and sexual mis-recognition. The following section traces the complex international politics that link the Eileen Chia-Ching Fung is an Associate Professor of English at the University of San Francisco. She has specialties in both Asian American and Medieval literature. Currently she is researching the representation of Asian American culture in food memoirs, cookbooks, and other food-related media. ISSN: 2154-2171 AALDP|Fung cultural histories between European, America and the “Far East”—which has become the new Orient in the 20th century discourse in the West--at the strategic moments of the initiation of “Madame Butterfly” as a recognized character in the late 1890’s and later in the first staging of Hwang’s M. Butterfly in the late 1980’s. One significant pedagogical approach to Hwang’s play situates in understanding the historical and political frameworks that address both the longstanding tradition of a “butterfly” story and Hwang’s authorial intent for subverting the “butterfly” persona. The character of “Madame Butterfly” was first created in a novelette by John Luther Long, which was published in the American Century Magazine in 1898. Long, who had never been to Japan, apparently was both inspired by gossip from his American missionary sister at Nagasaki and an Orientalist fantasy that tells a story of a European sailor’s temporary marriage to a Japanese geisha in Pierre Loti’s novel Madame Chrysantheme in 1887. Long and David Belasco, another playwright and theatrical producer, put on a one-act play titled “Madame Butterfly” in New York in 1900. This original play begins three years after the departure of Pinkerton, during Butterfly’s faithful vigil for his homecoming. Yet, Pinkerton returns with an American wife and a request to bring Butterfly’s child with Pinkerton back to America. The play ends with Butterfly relinquishing her child and then attempting to commit suicide.ii What popularized this story was the opera composed by Puccini after he had seen Long’s version in the summer of 1900. Hwang’s version of his play attempts to debunk this traditional construct of the “Butterfly” myth. The frame of the story is inspired by an anecdote Hwang heard in a casual conversation about a French diplomat’s love affair with a Chinese opera singer who subsequently turned out to be not only a spy, but a man, in Beijing and Paris during the 1960’s. Conspicuously, the time of the writing and production of Long’s story corresponded with the American-Spanish war in 1898, which ended with Guam and the Philippines being acquired by the United States in 1902. The ideology of American-white paternalism and benevolence had reached a new height as William McKinley convinced America to take on the duty of “educating” and “uplifting” the Filipinos. Yet, carrying the ‘white man’s burden,’ a term originally coined by Rudyard Kipling, has its limits. Even though the Filipinos were made “American Nationals,” they were denied numerous rights granted to U.S. citizens (i.e. voting), and were confronted with racial and class discrimination, like their Asian counterparts in America. Symbolically, the fate of the Filipino immigrants is analogous to “Butterfly”—she remains powerless, possessing no true “access” to the West or the ideology for which her lover stands. Thus, the ideology of American paternalism becomes another form of control, paralleling the American and European colonial relationship with Asia; the longstanding colonial and imperial history of British India, and later Britain’s opium trade from the Indies to China, and finally France’s involvement in IndoChina served as a few examples of colonial and imperial domination in Asia during the late 18th century. Such Western imperialist visions and ambitions in Asia further developed the fantastical construct of the Orient and the Oriental as something desirable, passive, and even dangerous. Most importantly, Asia as something “collectible” or claimable is metaphorically represented in heterosexual and interracial relationships in stories like Madame Butterfly. 17 AALDP|Fung While examining American colonial history in the Philippines serves as one form of historicist inquiry, the play’s construction of China and the West represents another interesting forum for discussing inter-cultural relationship(s). Therefore, a discussion of Asian American immigration history and (...truncated)