M. Butterfly

In 1986, Chinese American playwright David Henry Hwang read a news story about a French diplomat who carried on a twenty-year-long affair with who he believed was a female Chinese opera singer. In a huge scandal, the diplomat’s lover was revealed to be both male and a spy, and the pair was each sentenced to six years in prison for espionage. This story, combined with inspiration from the classic opera Madame Butterfly (1904), inspired Hwang’s play M. Butterfly (1988).

M. Butterfly premiered on Broadway in 1988, winning the Tony Award for Best Play, and becoming a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It remains one of Hwang’s best-known works.

M. Butterfly: Characters

• Rene Gallimard is a sixty-five-year-old former French diplomat. While serving in Beijing, he fell in love with Song Liling, who he believed to be a woman. The two maintained a relationship for twenty years.

• Song Liling is a male Peking opera singer who performs female roles. He plays into Gallimard’s fantasy of a submissive Chinese woman and manipulates him into sharing classified documents with the Chinese Communist Party. Gallimard often refers to Song as Butterfly, referring to the opera Madame Butterfly.

• Marc is Gallimard’s friend from school. He is a womanizer who boasts of cheating on his wife with three hundred women over twelve years, and he encourages Gallimard to do the same.

• Comrade Chin is a member of the Chinese Communist Party. She is Song’s contact in the Party, the comrade to whom he passes classified documents.

• Manuel Toulon is the French ambassador to China and Gallimard’s boss.

• Helga is Gallimard’s wife. She is older than he is, and their marriage is one of convenience, not of passion.

• Renee is a young Danish student who comes to China to study Chinese and has a brief affair with Gallimard.

M. Butterfly: Summary

Below is a summary of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, a play in three acts.

Act One

Act One opens in 1988 with Rene Gallimard, a French civil servant, in prison for treason. Gallimard describes his cell to the audience and explains that he is treated well because he is “a celebrity.” To prove his point, Gallimard directs the audience towards another part of the stage where a group of people at a party are mocking him.

Gallimard then begins to tell his own story, starting in Beijing in 1960.

Gallimard recaps Madame Butterfly for the audience, and the opera’s end coincides with his introduction to Song Liling. When he first meets Song, she is singing the final act of Madame Butterfly during a performance at the German ambassador’s home. The opera is Gallimard’s favorite, and Song immediately captivates him. She scoffs at his praise of Madame Butterfly, arguing that it depicts a Western fantasy of the submissive Oriental woman. She invites Gallimard to see her perform with the Peking Opera, and they part ways.

Song Liling is a performer in the Peking opera.

Four weeks later, Gallimard finally gathers his courage and goes to see Song perform. After the show, they walk the streets of Beijing together and talk. Gallimard, often awkward and uncomfortable with women, is surprised to find Song flirting with him.

Although they only speak for a few minutes each time, he continues to see Song perform until she invites him back to her apartment one day. Once there, she becomes more shy and vulnerable than Gallimard has come to expect from her, and she reveals that she has never invited a man to her home before.

After this meeting, Gallimard decides that he should conduct an experiment to see if Song is truly infatuated with him. He stops going to the opera and cuts off all contact with her, feeling as if he is exercising his masculine power.

Six weeks later, he begins to receive heartbroken letters from Song. Although he has achieved what he wanted, seeing Song’s distress makes Gallimard feel incredibly guilty. However, he is then promoted to vice-consul, which restores his self-confidence. He finally visits Song, after an eight-week absence, calling her his Butterfly, and the two begin their affair.

Act Two

Although Gallimard continues to live with his wife, he rents a new apartment in Beijing which he often shares with Song. The Vietnam War is beginning, and Gallimard’s job is to advise the American military, some of the details of which he shares with Song, who in turn passes the information onto Comrade Chin, a member of the Communist Party.

Song’s methods of gathering information perturb Chin. She tells Song that homosexuality does not exist in China and that he should avoid “gathering information in any way that violates Communist Party principles.”

Gallimard and Song continue their affair over the years. Then, in 1963 he meets a young Danish woman, Renee, who is a student studying Chinese. The two begin an affair, and Gallimard is surprised by Renee’s forwardness and lack of shame, which contrasts sharply with Song’s modesty.

Song and Gallimard live together in Beijing for many years.

For several months, Gallimard sleeps with Renee and sees little of Song. When he does go to see her, he commands her to undress, but Song avoids the demand by telling him that she is pregnant.

Song tells Comrade Chin that she needs a baby. She goes away for several months, and returns with a baby boy, who she insists will never live in the West.

A few years later, however, as American troops pulled out of Vietnam, Gallimard was sent back to France. Song admits the sexual nature of her relationship with Gallimard and is sent to work in the fields of Hunan Province as punishment.

Four years later, Song is also sent to France with the mission of resuming the affair and passing more information to the Communist Party.

Act Three

Act Three begins in a French courthouse in 1986. Song appears as a man for the first time, and the stage directions switch to using he/him pronouns to describe the character.

Song describes how he found Gallimard in France and lived with him for fifteen years. He testifies in court, saying that he encouraged Gallimard to get a new job that gave him access to sensitive documents. He would share these documents with Song, who passed them on to his contact in the Communist Party.

He insists that Gallimard never saw him naked and that he believed completely in the vision of the submissive Asian woman that Song created.

Song comes to visit Gallimard in his cell, dressed as a man. He taunts Gallimard, insisting he admits his attraction to him, that he is the same person that Gallimard loved for so many years.

In the final scene, Gallimard puts on makeup and Butterfly’s costume. He understands that he has been Butterfly in his relationship with Song, and he stabs himself while the music from the opera’s final scene plays.

M. Butterfly: Key Themes

Some key themes in M. Butterfly are femininity, imperialism, and theatre and deception.

Femininity

One important theme in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly is the depiction of femininity. Gallimard has a specific vision of the ideal woman: she is submissive, delicate, and modest, just like the female persona that Song creates to seduce him.

Gallimard is captivated by the feminine ideal of the delicate butterfly.

However, there are many other female characters in the play that illustrate the failings of this simplistic view of femininity. Comrade Chin is strong and commandeering, Renee is outspoken and shameless, and Helga, Gallimard’s wife, is rather dull and matronly.

Imperialism

Much of the play revolves around Western imperial stereotypes of Eastern culture. Gallimard and other Western characters in the play subscribe to various Orientalist ideas of the East as exotic, submissive, and naturally subordinate to the West.

Song takes advantage of these preconceptions to create Gallimard’s fantasy woman, someone beautiful, doting, and submissive. However, Gallimard never suspects he is being deceived because he believes so fully in Eastern inferiority that it never occurs to him that an Asian man could better him.

Theatre and Deception

There are many layers of deception in M. Butterfly, and the illusion of theatre is central to the play. The clearest example of deception, of course, is Song, who turns out to be both a man and a spy. However, theatre plays a key role in constructing this deception.

Gallimard is captivated by the opera Madame Butterfly and believes so fully in the cultural stereotypes it conveys that he easily falls for Song’s deceptions. He begins to call Song “Butterfly,” further blurring the lines between theatre and reality, and lines from the opera are dispersed throughout the play.

M. Butterfly: Key Symbols

Two key symbols in M. Butterfly are the butterfly and the kimono.

Butterfly

Throughout the play, the butterfly is a symbol of femininity and fragility. Gallimard believes that he has complete control over Song, a theory he tests by cutting her off for periods of time or by sleeping with other women. Like a butterfly, she is captive and under his control. Butterfly also refers to the opera Madame Butterfly and therefore symbolizes the illusion and falsity of Song and Gallimard’s relationship.

Kimono

Kimonos repeatedly appear throughout the play as another symbol of femininity and sexuality. It is what Song wears when she performs as Butterfly, and Gallimard frequently imagines her wearing a kimono when they are not together. When Song comes to Paris, she sleeps on the streets for three days while she searches for a kimono, unwilling to appear before Gallimard in anything else. Finally, at the play's end, Gallimard dons a kimono before he kills himself.

The kimono is a key symbol in M. Butterfly.

M. Butterfly: Key Quotes

The first time that Song and Gallimard meet, Song sings the final act of Madame Butterfly.

The two speak after the performance, and Gallimard tells Song that he finds the opera very beautiful. Song scoffs at him, saying that he only finds it beautiful because it perpetuates stereotypes of the submissive Asian woman.

When Gallimard begins an affair with the young Danish student, Renee, he is almost alarmed by her forwardness. These are characteristics that he associates with masculinity, and they make Renee seem less feminine to him.

During the trial, Song explains how he seduced Gallimard by playing into his Western imperialist mindset. Because Gallimard already believed the East to be weak and inferior to the West, Song was easily able to fit himself into these ideas.

This is the play’s last line. Gallimard realizes that he has played the role of Butterfly in his relationship with Song. He loved Song despite the deception. Butterfly, however, kills herself out of devotion even though her lover is not worthy of the sacrifice, and Gallimard does the same.