Butterfly by David Henry Hwang is a wonderful commentary on the occidental obsession of dominating the Orient. This obsession is smartly explained through two lenses. One is the odd situation of Rene Gallimard falling in love with the illusion of a “female” Song Lilang, of a butterfly. The other is the United States’ attempt to suppress the rise of communism in China. Both lenses convey a strategic attack on how the West views the East and how that relates to the way men view women. I find that this play is very deliberate about how it approaches this topic. The play establishes the presence of more noticeable problematic ideas about Western desire to dominate the East (which occurs through music in the opening scenes). Additionally, through the acting, it informs us less easily distinguished faults in our thinking that contribute to toxic ideas about dominating what is deemed “feminine.”
The music in the opening scene begins with traditional Chinese music. The traditional Chinese music and clothing present the western idea of China being an exotic and mysterious culture. Puccini’s music begins to play concurrently with the traditional Chinese music. It seems to represent a misguided attempt at reinventing that culture into something palatable, entertainment for westerners. The practice demonstrated her reveals a broad idea relating to how the West tends to feel entitled to taking bits and pieces of other cultures to amuse itself, thus not appreciating it for its deep cultural context. Instead, the focus is on it’s aesthetic and its appeal to their own culture. Finally, when the Puccini overwhelms the Chinese music, we are reminded of the conflict between Asia and the Western nations that sought to exploit and dominate it.
The acting helped to delineate our own faults when judging characters. Marc is a sexually confident, bold, and crude man who functions as Rene’s foil. The actor for Marc makes this clear in how his self-assured posture, assertive way of walking around a good portion of the stage, and confident tone provides contrast to Rene. In the scene where Marc is attempting to convince Rene to go out with him by describing scantily clad women and sexual adventure, we see how sometimes we can lenient to those who are not outwardly misogynists. Rene states that he is very nervous around women and asking them to sexually engage with him. Marc assures him that he does need to ask these women for permission. Marc is a very obvious representation of outright male negation of a woman’s autonomy. While Rene is condescending towards him and does not take him up on this offer, the fact that he does not point out Marc’s flaws and challenge him shows that he carries dangerous sexist beliefs as well or does not care enough to deal with Marc.
Nonetheless, Marc’s presence allows us to view Rene more fondly, which is something that can occur in our real lives with people we interact with on a daily basis. Our experience with particularly lewd men causes us to be more lenient with men not as blatantly chauvinistic thus underhandedly perpetuating unhealthy beliefs about women. This situation is eye-opening regarding how men can perpetuate fantasies about domination amongst each other.
I like the way you compared the suppression of China and the act of males “dominating” females. We discussed this parallelism in class, but I like the way you connected it to specific aspects of M. Butterfly. The opening scene where Rene talks about Puccini and Madame Butterfly was a good depiction of how Western culture wants to dominate the East. The fact that Rene still enjoyed the opera even after he grew up and understood its implications made him a symbol of Western domination. I also enjoyed how you showed Rene as a bystander to Marc, outing Rene as someone who also carries dangerous sexual beliefs.