M. Butterfly and The Cheat

Emily mentioned in class yesterday that it can be hard to talk about M. Butterfly because Hwang picks up on so many important issues that reach into so many different areas, and executes them so well. I agree. It’s easy to feel M. Butterfly working on us, and to see Hwang’s various branches of intricacy reaching off into things we’ve read or seen, that it can become difficult to coherently extract and build on what is already so ingrained in our experience of the play. For this reason, everything I feel like I want to say about the play seems at once minimizing and too big to contain—somehow obvious, and yet hidden until it suddenly becomes glaringly apparent as a core theme of the whole piece. (Incidentally, that is also sort of the narrative around which the play’s plot is built, so go figure. Hwang is just that good.) What I want to point out, in this post, gives me that uncomfortable feeling, but I’m going to move boldly onward.

In all the thought I’ve given to Hwang’s ability to critique American culture, literature, and foreign and economic policy by laying it bare in Gallimard’s and the audience’s relationship with Song, who consciously exploits the silly and dangerous assumptions upon which that relationship is based, I didn’t give much thought to how, in creating such a setup, Hwang’s depiction of Song fits into the continuum of insidious, uncategorizable, terrifyingly hybrid Asian characters that runs through Western literature. Just as M. Butterfly turns the “butterfly genre” on its head, deconstructing it, as it were, from the inside out, it also epitomizes, in some sense, the genre of which The Cheat might be an example, in which a dangerously hybrid Asian character destroys a white Westerner from within his/her own life. It’s hard to see the play this way, I think, because it works so well to subvert genre, but the more I consider M. Butterfly in terms of texts like The Cheat, the more I am fascinated by the connection. Obviously, this dangerous, hybrid, deviant, sexually mysterious Asian character is mostly a male stereotype, so it’s quite easy to see this as Hwang inverting another thread of Asian depiction in Western literature, at a more removed level. Indeed, in this analogy, Gallimard is cast as an Edith figure, which works extremely well with his more explicit feminization and ultimate destruction of the bounds of gender.

Looking back at The Cheat, and thinking ahead to M. Butterfly, common themes crop up almost instantly. The desperate and repressed Edith/Gallimard gains a sense of power when she/he enters into what turns out to be a rigged or suspect “deal” with Tori/Song. In beginning this relationship, Tori/Song eventually comes to claim a sense of “ownership” over Edith/Gallimard, which leads to Edith’s/Gallimard’s public performance and revelation of a shameful sexual interaction with Tori/Song, with implications of ultimate sacrifice. This revelation also cracks open the troubling nature of Tori/Song’s hybridity and establishes that character’s ultimate responsibility in breaking the law. Obviously, there are major deviations to be found if we think about Edith’s husband, but the storylines are strikingly similar. Whether this was conscious on Hwang’s part or not is essentially irrelevant, I think, since The Cheat is just one example of many in this genre which, like the “butterfly genre” is one in which our culture is so steeped, that, as Hwang says, he knew how to deconstruct it “despite the fact that I didn’t even know the plot” (95).