race class and gender

race class and gender

M. Butterfly David Henry Hwang

American playwright, screenwriter, and librettist.

The following entry provides criticism on Hwang's play M. Butterfly through 2003. For further information on Hwang's career, see CLC, Volume 55.
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INTRODUCTION

Hwang received the 1988 Antoinette Perry Award for M. Butterfly (1988), distinguishing him as the first Asian American to win a Tony. The play has been praised as a postmodern text that deconstructs preconceptions of race, gender, and sexuality in a postcolonial world. M. Butterfly focuses on the relationship between René Gallimard, a French diplomat, and Song Liling, who is actually a man employed to pose as a woman in order to extract state secrets from Gallimard. During the course of the play, Gallimard does not realize that his lover is actually a man. In a 1993 interview with Marty Moss-Coane, Hwang commented, “Writing for me tends to be closely bound up in the exploration of my identity as an Asian American,” concluding, “To me to write well is to battle stereotypes. To write well is to create three-dimensional characters that seem human.” M. Butterfly was adapted as a film in 1993, directed by David Cronenberg. Like many of Hwang's works, the play seeks to examine connections between different groups in society and to explore issues of shifting identity.
Plot and Major Characters

M. Butterfly was inspired by an article Hwang read about the real-life 1986 scandal involving a French diplomat, Bernard Bouriscot, who for twenty years maintained a relationship with an international spy and Chinese opera singer, Shi Pei Pu, whom he believed to be a woman. Hwang recognized in this story basic elements of enduring Western stereotypes defining Asian men as feminized and disempowered. In his play, Hwang interweaves details from the Bouriscot story with plotlines from the Italian opera Madama Butterfly (1904), by Giacomo Puccini, in which a Japanese woman falls in love with an Englishman who...