A Brief Exploration of Gender Roles in Hwang's "M. Butterfly"

To start off with, Song, Gallimard’s Butterfly, is a man. There is no way to avoid this spoiler and accomplish an analysis of the very interesting, and contradictory views of gender roles discussed within the play "M. Butterfly".

The play seems to love to play with reversing and re-reversing gender roles. To explain this, I will posit two terms: dominant and submissive, each a role within a relationship. These roles reflect relative power of one party over another.

Song brings up (definitively) his view on the assignments of power between the sexes and nations; strong, weak; West, East; and male, female (III, I, 83). These are conventional assignments, usually adding dominant and submissive to the list Ironically, Song defies these assignments.

Take the case of Gallimard’s first sexual encounter. Essentially, the woman he was with did all the work, and he just lied there (I, XI, 33-34). First off, we have a gender role flipped right there in this sexual act. So, in this encounter, the female was dominant, the male submissive.

But let’s also examine Gallimard’s role with Song. Song, a man, plays what is usually thought of as a submissive role (read woman), by sleeping with/being penetrated by Gallimard. In this way, it is revealed, as Song reveals to Gallimard that he used his sex appeal to will “the destiny of another” (III, II, 85), another being Gallimard. As an aside, seduction among adults is socially considered a feminine thing. But the question is “who was in control of whom?” Clearly, Song was in control of Gallimard. Thus Song, originally thought to be submissive, is clearly dominant. To use the vulgate, he topped from the bottom, unlike Gillard earlier.

Applying this to Song’s earlier logic, we now have either a. a breakdown of logic or b. a view expressing the feminine dominant to the masculine, the East dominant to the west (Song/ the storyline representing an infatuation of the East by the West, represented by Gallimard), and similar contradictions to prior assertions. This actually occurs a few times.

Agree with the conclusions that can be drawn from the play concerning gender roles or not, my previous claim seems to hold: the play likes to play with gender roles.

 

Elucidating Meaning

William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition has been held to be full of meaning. And in this case, the proof will be to attempt to show that for the novel, the devil is also in the details (as compared to the other glaring parts).

When Cayce, the protagonist, comes to be in Moscow in search of the mystery character, she stays in a very expensive hotel. The following is an innocuous scene noticing the details while waiting for an elevator.

“There is a large window between the two elevators draped ceiling to floor in nubby ocher fabric. Beside this is an upright glass cooler stocked with champagne, mineral water, what must be several exceptionally well-chilled bottles of burgundy, and much Pepsi” (p.276).

Here is the potential for comments on post-Soviet Russia in terms of globalization and the disparities of the wealthy and poor of that society. By making the curtains of ochre, combined with the burgundy, gives the place a somber, luxurious feel. Moreover, the juxtaposition of champagne, mineral water, and burgundy wine with Pepsi highlights the rise of globalization that Russia would have Pepsi next to fine wines. It could also highlight the nouveau riche of Russia, who, becoming rich within Russia, had acquired a taste for Pepsi and thus had brought it into competition for human consumption with fine wines (we’ll assume that price has diminished importance in a fancy Russian hotel).

However, there is a problem with that last argument. High-society Rusians, known for valuing the appearance of being cultured, would likely avoid Pepsi if it were to come into association with a nouveau riche class. Hence its presence could either point to strong foreign influence, given that the location is a hotel, where the clientele could be significantly foreign (and thus Pepsi-drinking), or an adoption of Pepsi by the Russians, both cases pointing still to further globalization.

Even the wine and water can be viewed as signs of globalization, although more tied to class divides than Pepsi. The reason the wine and water can be viewed as such is that, although they are historically more significant and less likely to raise eyebrows than Pepsi, they are both likely foreign to Russia. While the champagne may or may not be Russian (the Russians sometimes go against EU naming conventions), the burgundy is almost certainly just that: Burgundy from the Bourgogne region of France.  And the mineral water calls to mind regularly bottled water,  although it is probably in expensive glass bottles.

Another scene occurs when Cayce is in Japan, viewing advertisements, as is her wont. “Looking up now into the manically animated forest of signs she sees the Coca-Cola logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan ‘No Reason’” (p. 125).

 In this scene, the author is displaying globalization, again, with soda. Again. This time, the soda is Coca-Cola rather than Pepsi, but both are American, and often viewed interchangeably as just American sodas.

Perhaps more interesting is the purposefully jarring syntax of “No Reason.” The phrase, although English, is decidedly not English, because it was meant to illustrate the very frequent butcheries or lost-in-mulitple-translations very common to Japan (although the grain cuts both ways). Another view is that the marketing was sound and intelligible to the Japanese (coke is actually well known for its marketing), but was more or less gratuitous English to go along with the Japanese advertisement. Though, in both cases, it is interesting to note that not only has a product been exported and globalized, Coca-Cola, but so has a fraction of a language.