“China Girl” and Butterfly: Stereotypes of Asian Women

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April 2005

China Girl ' and Butterfly : Stereotypes of Asian Women

As the author who wrote M . Butterfly , I think it 's fair to say that I believe our capacity for self-delusion to be fairly boundless (Hwang Worlds Apart ' 50 . only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act ( M Butterfly ' Act II Scene 7

Since the times of Rudyard Kipling who wrote the famous lines Oh , East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet ' eastern vs

br western otherness was the matter of discussion . In the multicultural world of the late 20th century the polemics escalated even more . Robert Cooperman in his New Theatrical Statements claimed that [ .] the most important play in terms of challenging the political /social /cultural identities of the West over the last decade is David Henry Hwang 's award-winning M . Butterfly (1988 (p . 201 . Jayne Blanchard in the pre-view about the revival of the widely spoken play at the Arena (Washington , D .C ) agreed that The shock value may have worn off some over 16 years , but Mr . Hwang 's deft deconstruction of racial and sexual stereotypes Westerners hold about Eastern culture remains powerful and wrenching . However The spectators ' shock at Hwang having ruined one of the most widely-known and deeply incorporated into the modern cultural paradigm stereotype of Madama Butterfly , thus the female Easterner sacrificing love and life for the male Westerner did exist . And the Cio-Cio San syndrome has been existing for almost a century - invented by a French writer Pierre Loti who described his own experience of having bought a wife during the stay in Nagasaki in the 1880s , supported and forced by an Italian composer Giacomo Puccini who created the opera Madama Butterfly ' on the base of the literary plot by an American David Belasco attacked by an American play writer David Hwang in his famous M . Butterfly ' a century later since the 1st mentioning of Butterfly at all

The play very plainly forces its Western audience to contend with Eastern stereotypes involving sexual orientation , gender , and culture especially those stereotypes promulgated by the myth of Orientalism discusses Cooperman (201 , and he is not lonely in underlining the methods which Hwang treated literary metaphors and cultural stereotypes on his script with . The author himself used to explain up to what extent "deconstructivist ' his Madame Butterfly is ( M . Butterfly Afterword ' 95

To the fact that the art matrix of China /Asian /Eastern Girl being destined to run to ashes speaks Hwang 's choosing of epigraphs . One of them addresses the reader to David Bowie 's China Girl ' - another significant product of the 1980s . Upon the whole music , as far as there are allusions to Puccini and Bowie (the musicians , belonging to absolutely different schools , countries and epochs ) contributes a lot for understanding the Hwang 's box-office success . David Hwang being so deeply rooted into the world of music (due to his mother ) and being raised in the...