After reading M. Butterfly and Jodi Kim’s analysis of David Henry Hwang’s text in Ends of Empire, one question continues to trouble me: Does it matter that Rene Gallimard is French? Yes and no. Firstly, I will outline why it does matter, and why Kim’s analysis of M. Butterfly becomes problematic when reading the play in the context of French, rather than American, politics. As I will argue, France’s failed imperial relationship with Asia informs Gallimard’s struggles with his masculinity and calls into question his position as the bearer of both political knowledge and self-knowledge.
Hwang first legitimates Gallimard’s presence in China by making him a French diplomat. According to Ambassador Toulon, the United States did not have an embassy in Beijing in the 1960s. It is the French, with their long history of colonization in Asia, that must serve as the “eyes and ears” of the United States as the latter plans its attack in North Vietnam (Hwang 2.2). Toulon positions the French as givers of vital knowledge to the U.S. As Kim argues, Gallimard will eventually suffer from a “problem of knowledge” (Kim 91) that leads him to wrongly predict America’s success in Indochina. Yet it is precisely his French identity that places him in a privileged position of knowledge for the Americans—Gallimard becomes a sort of mouthpiece of the French nation that colonized Indochina for more than half a century—and that sets him up for failure. Gallimard becomes one among many failed imperialists: as a Frenchman, he is always already positioned in a history of French miscalculation because of France’s “loss” of Indochina by 1954. Toulon’s lament of this failure serves only to infantilize him and French diplomacy in general: “What a bunch of jerks. Vietnam was our colony. Not only didn’t the Americans help us fight to keep them, but now, seven years later, they’ve come back to grab the territory for themselves. It’s very irritating” (Hwang 2.3).
When the French embassy learns of America’s plan to assassinate Diem, Gallimard explains that he “considers this a vindication,” (Hwang 2.6), thus indicating a stance towards Vietnam that is imbued with French politics. Interestingly in this scene, Toulon credits Gallimard with advocating the assassination and notes that the success or failure of America’s plan will be a “test” of Gallimard’s diplomatic foresight (2.6). If America fails, according to Toulon, it will be Gallimard (and not the French government in general) that will be viewed as inept, but this is only because it is Gallimard’s name that is on the report. Toulon’s absurd diplomatic logic, as well as Gallimard’s miscalculations, present a poor image of French diplomacy grounded in a “problem of knowledge” (Kim 91). That problem is highlighted most obviously in Gallimard’s arguably willful and conscious misreading of Song’s gender and of his own sexuality. In fact, Gallimard links his presumed diplomatic prowess to his masculinity: When he is promoted to vice-consul, he recognizes that “At age thirty-nine, I was suddenly initiated into the way of the world” (Hwang 1.12). This world, according to Gallimard, is a misogynistic one in which “God is a man” and in which He “creates Eve to serve Adam, who blesses Solomon with his harem but ties Jezebel to a burning bed” (1.12). Thus, Hwang positions Gallimard as an always-already failed vessel of both diplomatic knowledge and self-knowledge because he is implicated in a history of failed French imperialism in Asia. His claims to masculinity are equally subverted (and perverted?) because such claims are linked to his position as the flawed bearer of knowledge.
There are several instances in M. Butterfly, however, in which Gallimard is complicit in subsuming his French identity under the heading “Westerner.” Hwang presents a subversive discussion of Orientalist perspectives through Gallimard, whose desire to place himself and Song into the stereotypical roles of the Butterfly genre ultimately adulterate his self-knowledge and foreground him as a failed negotiator of international relations.
Hwang critiques Cold War logics that define the East as homogenous. Yet, he is perhaps also critiquing a related logic that posits a monolithic West. In “The El Dorado of Commerce,” Kim argues that Hwang critiques Western tendencies to view the East as an “undifferentiated, homogenous mass, with one Asian national fungible with another” (Kim 87). Hwang achieves this critique through Gallimard, who compares his situation as a Frenchman in love with a Chinese “woman” to the story of the American Pinkerton and his relationship to the Japanese Cho-Cho-San and who thus makes little or no distinction between China and Japan. By the end of the play, it becomes evident, however, that Song Liling’s Chinese identity is crucial to the plot, since is working for Mao and the “Great Proletarian State”(Hwang 2.4). Song’s professed loyalties to Mao ground her identity in China and serve to highlight the absurdity of Gallimard’s alignment of Song with Cho-Cho-San and the Japanese-American relations of the Butterfly genre. While Song’s identity is always in gendered racial flux, her/his Chinese identity is crucial, even if Gallimard fails to recognize it as such. He is content to call her Butterfly and to discuss the universal characteristics of “Oriental women” (2.6). He willingly remains deaf to Song’s espionage even after he has been told that s/he is a spy.
Gallimard’s unwillingness to recognize Song’s nationalist identity in order to maintain the fantasy also causes him to view the West in a monolithic way, and to align himself (and be aligned) with an undifferentiated Western identity. After Song says that she will no longer play Madame Butterfly because it upholds stereotypes of the “Oriental woman and the cruel white man,” Gallimard laments, “So much for protecting her in my big Western arms” (Hwang 1.6). Like his desire to cling to a fantasy of the stereotypical Oriental woman, Gallimard is content to play the role of the stereotypical Westerner when he says “If the Americans demonstrate the will to win, the Vietnamese will welcome them into a mutually beneficial union…Orientals will always submit to a greater force” (2.3). In this instance, does it matter that Gallimard is French? By the end of the play, Gallimard becomes so steeped in Orientalist fantasy that he comes to recognize himself not only as Rene Gallimard and Madame Butterfly, but as “pure imagination” itself (3.2). Ultimately, however, Gallimard subverts his complicity in maintaining the Butterfly genre’s Manichean West/East, masculine/feminine logics by literally killing himself into the image of the Butterfly. Yet, what is interesting to me in his negotiation of the role of the Western male in the Butterfly tale is what it means for him to be a Frenchman in the political context of the Cold War.
Works Cited
Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 1988.
Kim, Jodi. “The El Dorado of Commerce: China’s Billion Bellies.” Ends of Empire:
Asian American Critique and the Cold War. Minneapolis & London: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010. 63-93.
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