Portrayal of In-Betweenness of Femininity and Masculinity in Hwang’s M. Butterfly
The gain of self-knowledge in Hwang’s M. Butterfly are projected through direct story telling and disposal of disguises. From D. Cronenberg’s performance of M. Butterfly, it can be seen that the play consists of multiple performances, from Rene Gallimard’s process of self-knowledge. From how the story was told, it can be said that there are two performances shown in the play. It can be seen that the main character Rene Gallimard started off by introducing himself and why he was in the prison. In order to explain the latter, the character brought back his story from the past by a bit of tell tale of it and then continue to be straight acted out, performed along with him being in a prison. These performances were mainly played by the main character Rene Gallimard by telling his story on why he was prisoned.
However, the story included the character telling another story that relates to his situation in the past, which was a play titled Madame Butterfly by Giacomo Puccini, so he portrayed Puccini’s play and somewhat personally ‘engrave’ the characterization to his affair with the spy man in disguise Song. In sense of deceiveing, I think Gallimard was totally depicted of being played by the society’s view of masculinity and the idea of how ‘the perfect woman’ should be for this play basically projected the general stereotype between the West and the East and how both tend to ‘femininized’ and/or ‘masculinized’ in accordance with the respective races. This was marked by how Gallimard was projected of being deceived for 20 long years into believing that Song was “his perfect woman” all along. How he dressed, how he moved and her ‘submissiveness’ towards Gallimard.
Judith Butler in Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory said that if gender identity is grounded by “stylized repetition of acts through time”, transformation of gender can be found in “the arbitrary relation between such acts” with possibly different kind of repetition “in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style” (520). Relating to Gallimard’s belief of ‘the ideal woman’, it could mean that he was projected as a man who viewed gender identity as what he has mostly seen through all his life without considering the possibility of “the breaking or subversive repetition,” if Song supposedly ‘repeating’ Gallimard’s criteria of a perfect woman on him and supposedly concluded as ‘the woman.’
Regarding the many performance included and how the characterization of each character are depicted as ambiguous, Hwang’s play totally downplay the idea of “true identity” in a way that it shows contradiction of the generic identity of men and women throug the character Song which is physically a man yet the attribute himself to the image of the generic ideal woman. Therefore it can also be said that the play stated that there are no fixed or essential attribution of how men or women should act, dress or speak.
References
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519–531. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3207893.
Hwang, David H. M. Butterfly. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 2008. Print.
M. Butterfly (D.Cronenberg) “..There is a vision of the Orient that I have..” — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FxL2PtDy0w
