M Butterfly Gender

As both a tragic tale and politically relevant masterpiece, David Henry Hwang’s Tony Award winning play, M. Butterfly, engages its audience’s emotion and intellect on multiple levels. Written largely as a critique of the opera, Madame Butterfly, the work tells the story of a French diplomat, Gallimard, who, while working in China, strikes up an affair with Song, a person he believes to be “the perfect woman”. The story goes through numerous twists and turns, offering reader’s plenty to think about along the way. One such topic of interest is the role gender plays in society’s power dynamics. Hwang’s multistep argument, in which he strips maleness of its position atop the hierarchy of gender, begins with the careful characterization of a male

While originally it was Song who was disguised as a woman, at the play’s end, it is Gallimard who takes on a female’s appearance. Having finally had his fantasy completely shattered by physical evidence that Song is in fact a man, Gallimard chooses to take on the female’s role himself in an ironic role reversal that tops all others. As he sits in his jail cell reminiscing his relationship with Song, Gallimard allows for makeup to be applied to his face, and dons both the wig and the robe that Song had used for his own disguise. In this instance, Gallimard has literally taken the female identity upon himself, a transformation he affirms when he declares, “My name is Rene Gallimard—also known as Madame Butterfly” (93). The name Madame Butterfly is a reference to the abandoned female lover in the opera Hwang is critiquing, who, out of despair and longing for her man, ends up killing herself. Throughout the play, Gallimard frequently referred to Song by the name of “Butterfly”, as he viewed “her” as his own version of the sacrificial lover. However, it is Gallimard, not Song, who completes the ironic progression by committing suicide for the lover he has lost. Hwang’s use of this full on role reversal in his ending is the ultimate destruction of Gallimard’s assumption of male superiority. As Gallimard’s world comes crashing down, and he chooses to die as a female, the belief in male supremacy is eradicated along with him. Hwang has shown once and for all that masculinity deserves none of the privilege society has granted it. As a result of Gallimard’s epic collapse, the reader is shown the severe ramifications faced by those who buy into the illusion that males are the higher ranking