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.