Deconstructing the Deconstruction

Not terribly long ago, I wrote what I thought was a brilliant piece on David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly. The play is exquisitely written, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in history, culture, gender, politics, and/or sexuality.
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Deconstructing the Deconstruction: An Examination of David Henry Hwang’s Failure to Adequately Deconstruct Cultural and Gender Stereotypes in M. Butterfly

David Henry Hwang refers to his play M. Butterfly as “a deconstructivist Madama Butterfly” (Hwang 86) but he is too close to his own writing to see he goes so far in his attempt to deconstruct the original story that he ultimately reinforces the very stereotypes he wishes to combat. Hwang’s inversion of roles in his story leaves the Oriental woman in a position of weakness and elevates the image of the original Butterfly’s Pinkerton to power. Despite failing to break down the predominate stereotypes he finds so infuriating Hwang does demonstrate to the reader that identities are not an essential component of a person but rather are a socially constructed performance. Hwang’s decision to present the reader with characters who choose to perform identities based in cultural and gender stereotypes, however, leads him to offer up a play that falls on its own sword rather than cutting down its enemies.

Early in Act One, Rene Gallimard establishes for the reader how the segment of his life discussed in this play is centered around Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. A synopsis of the original story is offered and a portion of it is acted out with Gallimard as Pinkerton. It quickly becomes clear that gender and cultural stereotypes intersect to create what is referred to as the West’s “international rape mentality towards the East” (Hwang 62). In short, the story is of a Western white man, Pinkerton, who seduces a beautiful Asian woman, marries her, and then abandons her when he becomes bored with her. The woman, Butterfly, is so desperate for the return of her husband and so ruined by her need to be with White culture that when she understands he will not return to her, she kills herself. Pinkerton, we are told, purchased his wife for the equivalent of sixty-six cents and knew before he married her that his plan was to use her and then leave her. He feels “[i]t’s true what they say about Oriental girls. They want to be treated badly” (Hwang 11).

Gallimard’s Western mentality shows when he first sees Song perform a piece from Madame Butterfly. Song acknowledges in a very forward, assertive manner that it is typical for a Western man to find beauty in such a story. After all, it is the story of “the submissive Oriental woman and the cruel white man” (Hwang 18). That one moment of seeing Song perform as the stereotype of a powerless, helpless creature is enough to entice Gallimard to pursue this woman. What he fails to notice is that despite the outward display of Song as a shy, fragile creature, it is really she who holds the power between them. Gallimard himself says “she keeps our meetings so short – perhaps fifteen, twenty minutes at most. So I am left each week with a thirst which is intensified” (Hwang 25). By showing Gallimard only what he wants to see and keeping herself shrouded in mystery, Song becomes the seducer in the relationship. These displays feed the existing stereotypes of Asian men and women as well as the way they are perceived by Western men. “If the Asian male is viewed as asexual, the Asian female is seen as all sexual, a perfect companion for the Western male who, perhaps subconsciously at least, desires a prefeminist ideal of womanhood, someone less independent and less assertive” (Dickey 274).

As the relationship between Song and Gallimard continues, Song uses her understanding of Western male thought to allow Gallimard to feel power over her, yet she is always in control. When he orders Song to strip in Act Two, Scene Six, Gallimard not only gives in to Song’s protests of modesty but ends the scene disgusted with himself and on the floor “crawling toward her like a worm” and apologizing (Hwang 47). By this time, the reader has already been let in on the secret that Song is really a man and thus every moment of their lives together is an act and is a chance for Song to further exploit the man she has wrapped around her finger. It is all too easy for this fantasy to continue because “in love with his own image of the Perfect Woman and therefore with himself as the Perfect Man, Gallimard reads signs of dissimulation… as proof of her essential ‘Oriental’ womanhood. In so doing, he guards his inner space of ‘real, masculine’ identity” (Kondo 17).

By now, the tale from Puccini’s story has obviously been turned upside down, and it is Song who disappears for months leaving Gallimard longing for her pathetically. To add insult to injury and to prove to Gallimard that he has been bested by what he assumed was a powerless woman, he is forced to watch Song transform into a man. Her traditional Asian wardrobe is replaced with a more Western suit and we see the new Song continuing to taunt Gallimard with the possibility of desire. Were the play to end here, Hwang would have succeeded in his deconstruction. It has been argued that “his work is an honest and heartfelt plea for all people to recognize the destructive nature of prevalent gender and cultural stereotypes” (Dickey 276). At the beginning of Act Three, Hwang has done this by showing the trouble the West is having in Vietnam thanks to Gallimard’s faulty assumptions, Gallimard himself in prison, and Song having been reprimanded for acting out the stereotypical Western fantasy a little too well. It is here that Hwang turns the tables again and recreates the very stereotypes he has spent two thirds of his work tearing down.

As “James Moy, one of the play’s more acute critics, observes… Hwang’s deconstruction fails because, in inverting the cultural position of the characters, Rene Gallimard and Song Liling, the tragedy inadequately displaces the very Orientalist stereotypes it seeks to dismantle” (Shin 181). Act Three ends with Song finally stripping in front of Gallimard, revealing the undeniable truth that he (Song) has always been a man simply acting as a woman. This revelation shows that the power arguably found in Hwang’s Oriental woman cannot exist. “The feminine is empowered here only when it is undressed to reveal an essentially masculine core. In the end, the double disrobing of Song Liling/Mr. Shin merely proves that the ideal woman is a fiction, and that power resides in the male” (Morris 8). Though Song seems to have had power all along, it is not until revealing an utter lack of womanhood that he takes on the role of Puccini’s Pinkerton and Gallimard is clearly the less powerful of the two. It would be easy to read this as the Oriental winning over the West and therefore tearing asunder the cultural stereotypes scattered throughout Hwang’s play until the final scene serves to prevent the reader from doing so.

“In the penultimate scene, where Gallimard dresses himself in silk kimono and draws his sword to his own breast, he realizes that he has become Butterfly” (Morris 12). Though Gallimard rejects Song in the end, it is for a fantasy that still exists in his head. As Gallimard describes to the reader his idealized view of the Orient, he is assisted into the traditional kimono and makeup which represents the submissive Asian woman he so wished to dominate. As the death song from Madame Butterfly plays in the background Gallimard, in a traditional seppuku position, plunges a knife deep into his body and falls dead. Song can be seen on stage calling “Butterfly? Butterfly?” (Hwang 69). This double subversion returns the reader to a place where the more Westernized, cruel man is searching for his helpless Asian woman. Though underneath the kimono and paint, the person dead on stage may be the Western man, he was not able to die without being transformed into the image of the Oriental female. Even when turning from a general post-structuralist reading of the play to a more feminist centered critique, the play fails to show the power of the female Hwang seemed to be trying to write. “M. Butterfly turns upon the masquerade, generally aligned with feminist and lesbian discussions of cultural subversion, which, by generating a distance between the woman and her image, installs her within the semiotic system as subject rather than object. But in the tragedy’s gay context, playing the woman does not prove liberatory, and the masquerade’s capacity for contestation is paralyzed” (Shin 179).

Because Hwang clearly succeeds in showing the reader an alternative to essentialist identity, his final scene more powerfully destroys his alleged intent of deconstructing cultural and gender stereotypes. Since Song performs an identity as modest, humble female and Gallimard performs an identity as powerful, dominant male it is significant that they both choose to perform different identities throughout the play. When Song transforms on stage into a man, it is both literally and metaphorically obvious that even this identity (which is closer to what one would consider his essential identity) is a conscious performance. At this same time, Gallimard stops performing a powerful identity when he crumbles to the floor before Song. Instead, he begins performing the role of the longing Butterfly, yet still as a man. The performance at the end shows Song creating an identity that aligns with Puccini’s Pinkerton while Gallimard literally creates an identity as Puccini’s Butterfly. This choice by the characters (and by Hwang) is significant because in a world of proven constructed identity, these characters could have created themselves in any image they desired. The conscious decision to model their final identity after the very destructive stereotypes Hwang claims to be subverting only serves to bring more attention to those stereotypes holding true. After all, regardless of who is behind the mask, on the surface, it is the same Asian woman killing herself rather than face shame at the hands of a man and it is the same man seeking something powerless to control.

By choosing to end his play in this manner, Hwang defeated his own intentions. Rather than providing a solid literary argument of how cultural and gender stereotypes are damaging and asking the reader to rethink our own assumptions about the world around us, the play closes by showing the reader that no matter how twisted the road is that leads from point A to point B, it will inevitably still end in the same place with the Westernized masculine as dominant and the Oriental feminine as submissive, or worse, dead. By folding the world in upon itself so many times, Hwang actually folded his argument in on itself as well and ultimately deconstructed his own attempt at deconstruction.
 
Works Cited

Dickey, Jerry R. “Myths of the East, Myths of the West: Shattering Racial and Gender Stereotypes in the Plays of David Henry Hwang”. Drama Criticism 23 (2004): 272-280.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc, 1998.

Kondo, Dorinne K. “M. Butterfly: Orientalism, Gender, and a Critique of Essentialist Identity”. Cultural Critique 16 (1990): 5-29.

Morris, Rosalind. “M. Butterfly: Transvestism and Cultural Cross-Dressing in the Critique of Empire”. Gender and Culture in Literature and Film East and West: Issues of Perception and Interpretation. Ed. Nitaya Masavisut, Larry E. Smith, and George Simson. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. 40-59.

Shin, Andrew. “Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Golden Gate”. MELUS 27.1 (2002): 177-197.