Race and gender in: "M. Butterfly" - Committing suicide "cross-dressed" and "cross-raced" to fulfill the fantasy of a perfect woman

  I wrote M Butterfly as an attempt to deal  with

  some aspects of orientalism I assumed  that

  many in the audience would be coming to  the

  theatre because they hoped to see something exotic  

  and mysterious but what exactly is behind  the

  desire to see the exotic East  "

  David Henry Hwang  1

1.  Introduction  2

2.  Three scenes  4

2.1.  The first meeting  4

2.  2 The second scene - living the fantasy  10

2.  3 The death scene a failing fantasy needs to be saved  14

3.  Conclusion  17

  Literature:  20

  Primary texts:  20

  Secondary texts:  20

  Internet Links:  21

Appendix: ........................................................................................................23   

1.  Introduction  

  The figure in the middle of the high room seems to be alone despite all  the

  people around him He (apparently a male person) kneels on a kind of a stage  

  wearing a kimono and a wig It must be a prison because all the people  

  around wear prison clothing Like spectators in an arena (or in a theatre)  the

  prisoners occupy the balconies above and the space in front of the stage  He

  starts to speak:  

1  DiGaetani John Louis M Butterfly An Interview with David Henry Hwang In TDR  The

  Drama Review Volume 33 No 3 1989 p  141.

  2  

"I have a vision. Of the Orient. That, deep within her 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." 2

This is a part of the last scene in David Cronenberg's film "M. Butterfly". The described figure is former French diplomat René Gallimard (played by Jeremy Irons), who is going to kill himself in the costume of an "Oriental" woman – a Geisha. And the question is: Why is this the only thing to do for him? Why is it the only consequence of a quite straight forward development? And, is it really the only thing to do? The film itself offers just this end (as well as the play), but how can one explain it theoretically? David L. Eng gives with his text Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America a "tool" to look on Gallimard's behavior through out the film, and to explain his actions and reactions, his bearing and some of his thoughts, as well as his conception of the world and his understanding of gender and race.

Eng also sees in Gallimard's suicide the only way "to protect the psychic integrity of his farce." 3 What farce? Eng merges in his text Freud's psychoanalytic tractate about fetishism, and also "the Ego" 4 with the factors race and Orientalism (a concept lent mainly from Edward Said 5 to explain the relation of the East and the West). The result is a concept that explains, why Gallimard enters into the relationship with the opera diva Song (played by John Lone) – a male Chinese spy, who pretends to be a woman – and how they could live together for almost 20 years without Gallimard knowing (or admitting) that Song is a man, i.e. "castrating" him in a way sexually and racially. In the end the secret – that Song is a man – is revealed through the espionage being laid open, and Gallimard's fantasy of a submissive Asian woman by his side is destroyed. His farce cannot be kept up, and Gallimard needs to react on these new conditions. Eng presents an explanation why

2 quotation from the film M. Butterfly.

3 Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2001. p. 138.

4 See Sigmund Freud, Fetishism, in "The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud", ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1955. And Freud, The Ego and the Id, in Freud, "Standard Edition".

5 See Said, Edward W.. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. 1978.

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Gallimard reverses gender as well as race, and becomes that Butterfly fantasy himself, viz. committing suicide to fulfil his ideal of the perfect woman. In my paper I want to show, how Eng's text can help to analyze three particular passages of David Cronenberg's movie to look behind Gallimard's psyche. I will take those three sequences which appear in chronological order in the film, and apply parts of Eng's theory on them. How does Gallimard manage the situations, and why "it is, after all, only through Gallimard's sustained identifications with and Song's sustained investments in conventional stereotypes and fantasies of the Oriental geisha that Hwang's drama can unfold to its pitiable end." 6 Doing this, I am also briefly going to look on certain cinematic techniques (especially the setting of light in the first scene

I have chosen) to find out, how David Cronenberg interprets Hwang's Drama

and how he creates Gallimard's psyche, Gallimard's feelings for Song, and how Cronenberg deals with the question of gender and race. And finally, I will raise the question, if Gallimard is homosexual. Does Eng's theory give a proper answer for that or can that question be solved, though Eng does eventually not give any answers.

2. Three scenes

2.1. The first meeting

a) The "Butterfly Fantasy" is born

The first meeting of Song and Gallimard takes place in the Swedish embassy. For Gallimard it is yet another of those boring, obligatory parties, and he is not very much interested. He expects a stereotypic order of events: "What are they planning to inflict on us tonight. Not these Chinese acrobats again, I hope." 7 We get to know Gallimard as a man of stereotypes and like Rocío G. Davis shows "it may be observed that stereotypes of racial minorities in the West are a record of prejudices; they often serve as part of an attempt to justify various

6 Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham and

London: Duke University Press. 2001. p. 4.

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attitudes and practices". 8 And Gallimard really is a man of prejudice. He merges individuals, and e.g. makes everyone in Peking "the locals", mistakes the Swedish for the Swiss embassy, and after one tells him, that an opera is going to be performed, he operates with another stereotype: "Is there some diva partying through town..." (Jeremy Irons's emphases) 9 expecting an "overweight lady with too much bad make-up" 10 . Gallimard is presented as a very superficial person. His negative mood changes, when Frau Baden 11 catches his interest for Song by telling him the story of Pucchini's Opera "Madame Butterfly" (1904). Song starts to perform on the stage. The romantic plot brings admiration into Gallimard's eyes. He gets involved with the story. And he falls in love with yet another stereotype: The submissive Oriental women who are willing to sacrifice themselves:

"...for the love of unworthy foreign devils. Who are born and raised to be the perfect women. Who take whatever punishment we [Westerners] give them, and bounce back, strengthened by love, unconditionally." (Hwang 1988:91)

And that is really the point of the story in the film, at which Gallimard sells himself and his life to this fantasy. The Madame Butterfly fantasy becomes his fetish.

The cinematic representation of Gallimard underlines this turning-point very much. He sits badly calm in the audience, and as his feelings for Song start to arise, the camera moves towards him, and the camera shot becomes a close-up. That is to get the viewer closer to Gallimard's eyes and therefore nearer to his feelings, as eyes are the mirror of the heart. Furthermore, the light changes and alienates him in a way. He seems to become just his eyes, looking fascinated to the stage. The spectator witnesses that something has happened inside of Gallimard. His look to the stage and on Song intensifies

7 Quoted from the movie.

8 Davis, Rocio G.. "Just a man" Subverting stereotypes in David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. In "HCM – A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism". Vol. 6, No. 2 Spring 2000. p. 61. 9 Quoted from the movie.

10 Quoted from the movie.

11 In the drama Frau Baden does not appear. But in the movie she works partly as a figure like Reneé (she is the one Gallimard has an affaire with and she is as permissive as Reneé), but Reneé does not appear in the movie.

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dramatically and as he leans forward – to get physically even closer to the stage – a band of light emphasizes and stresses just his eyes leaving the rest of the face in the shadow. He seems to see true love – like the main character Coi-Coi San feels (in the eyes of Gallimard) for the American soldier in the opera. It is notable that all this happens before any question about gender is raised by the movie. But how does Eng explain Gallimard's fancy for that fantasy?

Eng clarifies Gallimard's preference at first with the "Yellow fever"- model, in which Caucasian heterosexual men have a fetish for exotic Oriental women, because they are (in their eyes) more obedient, and domesticated. 12 The model exists in the shadow of the colonial order, where white men are said to be superior to the peoples they colonize, and this is "working to buttress white male heterosexuality, through the possession and exploitation of the native brown woman." 13 The same point makes Song, when confronting Gallimard the first time with race and gender questions by reversing the Puccini story quite ironically, asking him how he would like the story, if it had been a blond Cheerleader who had been seduced by a short Japanese business men. "You would consider this girl to be a deranged idiot" 14 . And she is right, because this would not be a story fitting into the stereotyping of Gallimard (or any other Westerner). "But because it's an Oriental who kills herself for a Westerner, you find it beautiful" 15 . Eng combines Gallimard's sexual and racial prejudice with Freud's Fetishism and shows how Gallimard manages to establish his position – of a superior, heterosexual, white man – in relation to the position he assigns to Song. Gallimard is really "inventing a character for Song" 16 . And David L. Eng is convinced that:

12 Cf. Eng, David L. Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2001. p.158/159.

13 Ibd. p. 159.

14 Quoted from the film.

15 Quoted from the film.

16 Kehde, Suzanne. Engendering the Imperial Subject: The (De)construction of (Western) Masculinity in David Henry Hwang's "M. Butterfly" and Graham Greene's "The Quiet American". In "Fictions of Masculinity – Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities. New York: New York University Press. 1994. p. 244.

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