Madame Butterfly

Essay # 4385

Asian Studies > East Asian Cultures
Drama and Theater
Drama and Theater > World

Madame Butterfly

Sight and blindness, reality and constructions in Hwang's "M. Butterfly".

2,255 words () | 1 source | 2001 United States

Paper Summary:

The paper discusses figures of sight and blindness used in the play "M Butterfly" examining Gallimard and Song's relationship in the greatest detail. A look at the Western depiction of Eastern women.

From the paper:

"David Henry Hwang uses figures of seeing and not-seeing to depict the relationship between the East and the West in his play M. Butterfly, an inversion of Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly. Gallimard can turn a blind eye to the fact that Song is a man in disguise because of his deeply-ingrained, stereotypically Western fantasy of Eastern women as submissive, fragile "Madame Butterflies." Gallimard is so enamored of the Madame Butterfly fantasy that he cannot see past it, and he is blinded to the obvious fact that his "Butterfly" is a far cry from the original."