PTC's "M. Butterfly'

All Westerners look alike?

DAN ROTTENBERG

The original Madame Butterfly— both the 1904 Puccini opera and the 1898 John Luther Long magazine story on which it was based— relied on a common Western male fantasy about the mysterious Orient. An American sailor in Japan finds and marries his ideal conception of a woman: young, beautiful, submissive, devoted, inexpensive and easily discarded. In David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, a French diplomat in China circa 1960, heavily influenced by Puccini’s opera, enters a similar relationship, only to discover that this particular Butterfly isn’t at all what this latter-day Pinkerton expected.

For one thing, she’s Chinese, not Japanese (a distinction often lost on Westerners). For another, she feigns submissiveness in order to manipulate. For a third, her maneuvers affect not only her diplomat lover Gallimard but also the East-West power struggle during the Vietnam War (i.e., payback time for the masculine colonial West’s rape of feminine Southeast Asia). For a fourth, she’s a he. And why not? Gallimard doesn’t really want an ideal woman; he wants the male illusion of an ideal woman— and who’s better qualified to fulfill that illusion than another man?

One scene worth the ticket price

Our willing self-deceptions about gender relations and East-West relations alike offer rich theatrical possibilities, and Hwang milks both topics perceptively. In this revival of Hwang’s 1988 play, director Joe Calarco makes ample use of the high-tech stage and lighting possibilities of Philadelphia Theatre Company’s new Suzanne Roberts Theatre. Telly Leung, as the would-be Butterfly, is appropriately attractive in both his male and female roles and displays a surprising soprano voice as well. The five-minute interlude in which Leung transforms himself from a kimono girl into an Armani-suited mod young man is worth the price of admission alone. It’s perhaps the most compelling visual scene I’ve watched since Micheline Presle sat down at a makeup table in King of Hearts and transformed herself from a frowzy old bag lady into a voluptuous hooker— and King of Hearts was a movie. Leung performs this fast change live, every night.

In many respects this production of M. Butterfly is a feast for eye, ear and mind alike. But maybe it’s a little too much of a feast. All those visual and aural goodies tend to conceal the shortage of intellectual protein at its center.

The Western rape mentality

“The West,” proclaims Song Liling, the latter-day Butterfly played by Leung, “has an international rape mentality toward the East”— presumably, the same mentality held by men toward women. Yet surely Western male attitudes toward women are more egalitarian, in general, than those of the East (where, say, a single woman can be beheaded for riding in a car with an unmarried man).

Even Western male fantasies, I would argue, are more egalitarian: Study American pornographic movies, as I was required to do during my 12 years as a film critic, and you will discover that the dominant theme is not subjugation of women but an egalitarian fantasy: The woman wants it as much as the man. In any case, female submissiveness to dominant males is a behavior trait found not only among most humans but also within the animal kingdom, East or West.

The French exception

More important, for all his sensitivity to the nuances of the East that we smug Westerners ignore, Hwang seems tone deaf to the nuances of the West— specifically, to the vast cultural gulf that exists between the French on the one hand and, say, the Americans, British and Germans on the other.

As colonial imperialists, the French and Anglo-Americans were spiritual opposites. The British established elaborate administrative codes in their colonies but isolated themselves from native populations, living instead in compounds where they replicated life back in dear old England.

The French, on the other hand, were sloppy administrators but lived among the natives and intermarried with them, with the result that French culture and language has survived in France’s former colonies while British culture has largely vanished from the old British Commonwealth. As the late Penn sociologist Digby Baltzell put it, “The French were unjust but humane; the British were just but inhumane.”

How the West was won: two scenarios

Similar patterns played out in the British and French settlement of America. Where the English aggressively occupied new lands from the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific, the French demonstrated little inclination to create new settlements or tame new stretches of wilderness. Where the English segregated themselves from the Indians (whom they considered an inferior race), the French lived among the Indians, often intermarried with them, and treated differences of race and color as accidents of minor importance.

(The popular American notion that people prefer to live among their own kind is lost on the French, who instinctively gravitate toward others: Philadelphia’s expatriate French population today approaches 50,000, yet you will find nothing resembling a “Frenchtown” or “French Quarter.”)

Where the individualistic English cherished huge spreads of land to separate themselves from their neighbors in America, the more social French created compact villages where land was owned communally and streets were deliberately laid out as narrowly as possible, the better to facilitate neighborly conversation from one cottage window to another. “Ambition failed to incite them to conquer the wilderness and push their settlements to unknown regions,” wrote one 19th-Century historian about the French, “and avarice was wanting to lead them to grasp after great possessions.”

Had America been settled primarily by the French instead of the British, no doubt our entire 40-year tragedy of the Indian Wars would have been avoided. On the other hand, the American West today might still be an undeveloped desert. There’s no such thing as an unmixed blessing.

All talk and no action

Gérard Gasarian, a French acquaintance of mine who teaches at Tufts University and is married to an American, has observed that the French are all talk and no action, whereas Americans are all action and no talk. American TV commercials and public policy alike, Gérard contends, can be boiled down to a single theme: “Don’t think— just do it!” Conversely, the French tradition of rigorous critical analysis is actually an excuse for inaction— a good thing in some instances (the French avoided our current Iraq trap) and a bad thing in others (the French failed to stand up aggressively to Hitler).

The French, says Gérard, derive greater pleasure from the anticipation of an event than from the event itself: As Clemenceau once put it, the high point of a love affair occurs on the first night, when one walks up the path to the front door.

The real-life French diplomat

To be sure, any cultural generalization has its exceptions (such as Bernard Boursicot, the actual French diplomat who took up with a male Chinese opera singer who performed as a woman, and who became the basis for M. Butterfly). And, to be sure, this is not to say that French culture is superior to that of Anglos and Americans— just that it’s very different. In M. Butterfly, Hwang’s diplomat protagonist Gallimard and his embassy colleagues are ostensibly French, but they talk, act and think like Americans. M. Butterfly is a dazzling appeal to Westerners (and males) to examine their opposite numbers in a more sensitive and intelligent manner. Is it too much to ask the author of such a work to do the same?



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