M. Butterfly: With an Afterword by the Playwright
by David Henry Hwang

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Book Reviews of M. Butterfly: With an Afterword by the Playwright

Book Review: Deliciously irreverent & subversive
Summary: 5 Stars

Hwang's M. BUTTERFLY skewers these concepts, attacking traditional Western views of Asian women, whom, perhaps even more than their sisters elsewhere, have the "weaker vessel", the delicate "lotus blossom" tattooed on their backsides. The character Gallimard is pulled into M. Butterfly's trap because he is enthralled with the modern western education and values she has, which he considers to be in conflict with her "Oriental" soul. It's exactly this piquant combination of an innocence and sexual prowess, which he considers culturally entrenched, that has him so in love with her. Asian girls in these types of stories are always slight, shy and beautiful, but no matter, they will eventually give in to the White Alpha Male, no matter WHAT he looks like. They are also loyal until the death, serving the White Alpha Male until their code of honor calls for suicide or some such nonsense, freeing White Alpha Male to marry a white woman, as the story wants us to believe he ought to have done in the first place. This thought is so entrenched in society, that we don't think twice when Puccini's Butterfly falls for some pencil pushing bureaucrat, renouncing offers from rich, handsome young men of her own country, and her demise at the end is celebrated. But Hwang WANTS us to start thinking, start realizing what our preconceptions about others say about US.

Does anyone think that the real life Butterfly that this play is based on was as beautiful as her enamored bureaucrat thought? Or did he simply see what he wanted to see? MADAME BUTTERFLY IS A MAN! Gallimard has, and perhaps not consciously, mentally objectified Asian women so much that he is able to project his fantasies and delusions of what an Asian woman should be ON A MAN! Butterfly even STRIPS in front of him, and he sees nothing amiss. The reason the ruse works is, as Butterfly says "only a man knows how woman is supposed to act". Butterfly keys into Gallimard's own preconceptions of Asian female behavior, and uses them against him.

Generally, smirking retellings of old stories where a dubious gilding of modern sociological mores is splashed over everything give me a pain. But this time it works, and HOW it works. Pick up M. BUTTERFLY today.

Summary of M. Butterfly: With an Afterword by the Playwright

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