Madama Butterfly. The woman, Song Liling—
played by B. D. Wong on Broadway—tempts
Gallimard into an affair. She acts coyly and sub-
missively, reaffirming the Frenchman’s lost sense
of machismo and vitality—a vitality that has been
missing from his dreary, childless marriage to
his uninspiring, older wife, Helga, a daughter of
a French ambassador. Gallimard believes that he
has become another Pinkerton, the American lieu-
tenant character in Puccini’s opera who betrays a
loyal, meek Japanese geisha, causing her to commit
suicide. Flattered and energized, Gallimard falls for
Song’s act, reveling in his role as the domineering
Westerner. The first act ends with Gallimard en-
joying an unexpected promotion and enjoying sex
with his seemingly submissive Chinese mistress, a
“Butterfly” of his own.
In Act 2, it becomes apparent that Song is actu-
ally a man using his relationship with Gallimard
for the purpose of gathering information about
French and American intentions, particularly in
Vietnam, where a catastrophic war is imminent.
Song is under pressure from Chin, a functionary
in the Communist Party, who has contempt for
the nature of Song’s relationship with the naïve
Frenchman. But driven by ideology and submis-
sion to the state, Chin insists that Song continue
to deceive and flatter the Frenchman who incon-
tinently reveals sensitive information to Song and
consequently to China’s Communist regime. Chin
even provides Song with a baby that Gallimard be-
lieves to be his. Gallimard does not suspect these
layers of deception because he projects onto Song
an assumption that Chinese women are indeed
shy and submissive, and that it is usual for them to
keep their clothes on during love-making that in-
variably takes place in the dark. Gallimard’s blind-
ness with regard to Song’s sex is paralleled by his
blindness about Asian politics. Gallimard thinks
that militarily, politically, and sexually, “Orien-
tals will always submit to a greater force.” These
nonsensical, racist, and sexist attitudes cause
Gallimard’s spectacular downfall. Because of his
erroneous assumption that America will conquer
Vietnam easily and entirely, and other misjudg-
ments, he is recalled to Paris. In France, his wife
leaves him, but Song—after years of hard labor
under a Maoist correction scheme—finds him in
Paris. Soon, though, the pair are arrested for their
involvement in the passing of intelligence infor-
mation out to China. Song is scheduled to be ex-
pelled to China, but Gallimard suffers ferociously.
He is jailed and becomes a national laughingstock,
as he refuses to acknowledge Song’s maleness,
even after seeing the anatomical evidence that un-
derlines his folly.
Gallimard has loved a female Song, a female
invented in a collaboration between his own fan-
tasies about submissive Asian women and Song’s
masterly manipulation of Gallimard’s sexual
drives. Articulate in court, Song tells the judge
that Gallimard is a typical Westerner because
“The West has sort of an international rape men-
tality towards the East.” Western men want Asian
women to be like Madame Butterfly. In his after-
word to the published text of the play, Hwang
even provides anecdotal evidence of this alleged
Western fetish for obedient Eastern women. In the
play’s stirring climax, Gallimard kills himself, hav-
ing finally realized that the object of his love was
after all a child of his fantasy. Gallimard has been
made a fool because his combined misogyny and
racism has caused him to be destroyed by a cun-
ning Chinese actor.
David Cronenberg directed a film version of M.
Butterfly, which was released to commercial and
critical success in 1993. The film—the screenplay
of which was written by Hwang—should be stud-
ied in addition to the original play, because the
different genre of film necessitates many changes
from the stage version. For example, whereas the
narrative of the stage version progresses through
flashbacks commented on by the imprisoned
Gallimard, the film version moves chronologi-
cally. Cronenberg’s film retains the play’s thesis
that Westerners project wrong-headed notions
about racial and sexual submission onto Eastern
women in a manner damaging to both but rel-
egates this agit-prop to the background of a film
that depicts a naturalistic, traditionally Holly-
wood drama about personalities. There are many
minor changes to the plot as well: Gallimard has
his “extra-extramarital affair” with a middle-aged
Frenchwoman rather than with a young Danish18 6 M. Butterfly