M Butterfly Sparknotes Essay

René Gallimard is at the prison cell in 1980’s Paris, listening to the audiocassette musician. He remembers this skill with which his Asian Communist soul, Liling music, performed at traditional plays in the Beijing theatre, also as at Giacomo puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904; Madame Butterfly) —a thematically important juxtaposition of Eastern and Western cultures. Gallimard flashes back to his times at Peking, reliving these events that led to his punishment. At the 1960’s, Gallimard is the quite ordinary, low-level diplomat in the French Embassy in Peking, Taiwan, at one time when France and these people’s Republic of China are establishing diplomatic relations. He has gone to China harboring some stereotypes about “ Asian ” females. Gallimard’s stereotype of Asian women as lovely, meek, self-sacrificing, and hankering after white males was shaped through his influence to puccini’s lady Butterfly.
[...]
This move M. Butterfly is cheered by Rene Giacomo puccini’s theatre Madama Butterfly. It from the ridiculous but true story of Gallimard, a French diplomat who holds on the twenty-year affair with Song Liling, the lovely Chinese diva, Without realising that his soul is actually a male spy masquerading as a female. In this turn, Gallimard represents the masculine western imperialist, while music as a submissive Asian female figure.
[...]
David hwang’s play, M. Butterfly, this history covers the outstanding knowledge that Western white men take toward East Asian women which is demonstrated through Rene gallimard’s experiences. Throughout this history, Gallimard always takes up his favourite move, M. Butterfly, where the Asian woman, Butterfly, makes up and loses everything including her time for the white man she loves, Pinkerton, and despite butterfly’s efforts, Pinkerton turns out marrying another female getting Butterfly to commit killing.
[...]