Gallimard's (Lack of) Power

The character of Gallimard in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, as I’m sure everyone noticed, is weak and cowardly, and yet, throughout the play, he yearns for power and convinces himself that he has it, though he never truly does.

We are immediately made aware of this in Act 1, Scene 1 when Gallimard describes his prison: “When I want to eat, I’m marched off to the dining room – hot, steaming slop appears on my plate. When I want to sleep, the light bulb turns itself off – the work of fairies. It’s an enchanted space I occupy. The French – we know how to run a prison” (2). Though we know he does not actually have any control over when he eats or when he sleeps, Gallimard convinces himself that he does – those things beyond his control (though jokingly attributed to fairies) happen when he wants them to. He also uses an association fallacy to put himself in a position of power despite being a prisoner: the French run the prison; Gallimard is French; therefore, Gallimard runs the prison.

Again, in Act 1, Scene 5, Gallimard fallaciously feels power – this time over women, though those women are actually photographs in a “girlie magazine” (10). He says, “…my body shook. Not with lust – no, with power. Here were women – a shelfful – who would do exactly as I wanted” (10). Those women can’t do anything, but Gallimard feels that he has the power to make them do what he wants, and so he enters into a fantasy where a woman from the magazine comes to life. She shows herself to him, but Gallimard – rather tellingly – is unable to react or to make the woman do anything to him. His power is actually powerless.

What I mean to point out with these two examples is how, right from the start, the audience is made to question Gallimard’s assertions of power. He uses faulty logic and proclaims power over agency-less objects, making the audience question Gallimard’s seeming power over Song later in the play. The scenes between Song and Comrade Chin reveal Song’s duplicity, but prior to that Gallimard believes he has power over Song (all her construction, of course), and the audience may very well fall prey to stereotypes and believe his power to be real. I, unfortunately, knew the play’s “surprise” before reading it for the first time (and Hwang kind of gives it away in the “Playwright’s Notes” section), but I’m curious as to the effect of Song’s reveal on an audience less familiar with the play – is it a surprise because it disrupts traditional stereotypes of Asian women? Or is it obvious from the beginning that Gallimard is being duped because his power could not be real? I guess I’m mostly curious about which takes precedence in a first time encounter with the play: the foreshadowing of Gallimard’s powerlessness by the playwright or the dominance of cultural and racial stereotypes. I hope we can discuss some aspects of this in class.