Ep 03: Butterfly is a spy, and a man?
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Thank you so much for tuning in. Now the first two episodes we talked about some strange, exciting and at times scary stories from ancient past (Qing dynasty is more than a hundred years ago). If my first two episodes have not bored you, you will certainly like what we are going to talk about today. It’s quite a story!!! The fictional play M Butterfly takes its premise from news of the real life imprisonment of male French diplomat Bernard Boursicot for treason for passing along confidential documents to his lover, after it was revealed that he was unaware that the Chinese woman he had a decades-long affair with was in fact a man, a Chinese spy, also renowned Peking Opera performer named Shi Pei Pu.
Yes, today we are going to discuss Henry David Hwang’s M. Butterfly. I went to see the show three years ago in New York, and immediately fell in love with, so I thought, this is something interesting we can cover. The 2017 version I saw, starring Clive Owen and directed by Julie Taymor, at the Cort Theatre, is a revived version of the Broadway play in 1988, which won the 1988 Tony Award for Best Play. Note, this is not Madame Butterfly, the opera by Giacomo Puccini, but as we go on to discuss more, the two plays do have connections on a different level.
M Butterfly since its debut has drawn significant popular and critical interest as a play that critiques contemporaneous “western” stereotypes regarding race, gender, and nationality. In his original 1988 afterword explaining how he wrote the play, Hwang writes that he “concluded that the diplomat must have fallen in love, not with a person, but with a fantasy stereotype. I also inferred that, to the extent the Chinese spy encouraged these misperceptions, he must have played up to and exploited this image of the Oriental woman as demure and submissive” (Hwang 107). Hwang chose to use as his model Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which he found rife with “sexist and racist cliches” and conceived of Gallimard as “the Frenchman who fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his lover is Butterfly” but by the end, he discovers it “is he who has been Butterfly” (Hwang 107-108).
For his original play, Hwang noted that he specifically “refrained from further research, for I was not interested in writing docudrama” (Hwang 107). But recently, in 2017, Hwang produced a rewritten version of M. Butterfly in a new Broadway production. To explain the rationale behind “choosing to rework arguably [his] most renowned play” Hwang wrote that he was prompted by how “the way we think about gender fluidity has also changed considerably during the play’s premiere” and the additional details that emerged about the people he based the play’s two central characters on, Gallimard and Song (Hwang v). This prompted Hwang to rewrite it with “a more complicated understanding of gender identity and fluidity” and “intersectionality: the notion that race, gender, and sexual identity are linked” (Hwang v). I wish to argue, however, that many of the play’s core binary oppositions and critiques, a dramatization of Western stereotypes of the East (and vice versa), the constructed performance of masculinity and femininity, and the power dynamic of one individual and group viewed as superior and the other individual and group viewed as inferior, all remains largely intact. The play’s dramatization of the struggles and complexities of gender and sexuality, race and nationality may not be “fluid” or as blurred as Hwang may have intended, but they continue to complicate and show the lasting influence of these monolithic binary constructions and their hold on notions of selfhood, identity, and authenticity.