It was the Broadway producer Stuart Ostrow who thought the story had theatrical potential and commissioned Hwang to write it. You can see why. It’s not just Cold War espionage. To the Communists, the Shi trap was the perfect subversion of one of the most enduring imperialist narratives of East and West. You don’t have to be a Marxist deconstructionist to see Madam Butterfly in its multiple incarnations as a tale of not merely sexual but cultural exploitation. Pinkerton has the affair, Butterfly has the baby. And so it goes, through every telling, from short story to play to opera to pop song:
The moon and I know that he be faithful
I know he’ll come to me by and by
But if he won’t come back
I’ll never sigh or cry
I just must die
Poor Butterfly . . .
The template was established in Butterfly’s predecessor, Pierre Loti’s autobiographical novel Madame Chrysanthemum. “Pierre,” a French naval officer stationed at Nagasaki in 1885, relieves the burden of his posting by entering into a temporary “marriage.” Nine days after Puccini’s opera of Madam Butterfly opened at La Scala, the Russo-Japanese war began. “I believe,” wrote William Schwartz in The Imaginative Interpretation Of The Far East In Modern French Literature, “that the contempt for the Japanese expressed in Loti’s books in some measure influenced the Russians to refuse Japan’s requests and led to the war of 1904.” Six decades later, the Chinese figured there was enough potency in the Butterfly myth to make it work for the Cold War. This time it’s the westerner who’s suckered, with the baby as bait. As the Frenchman discovered 16 years later, the boy was not Boursicot’s, nor Shi’s, but a Chinese Uighur Muslim sold by her mom to provide a service to the People’s Republic.
In John Luther Long’s original short story (published in Century Magazine in 1898), Cio-Cio-San reaches her decision, picks up her father’s sword, and reads the inscription:
To die with Honour,
When one can no longer
live with Honour.
And then “she placed the point of the weapon at that nearly nerveless spot in the neck known to every Japanese, and began to press it slowly inward. She could not help a little gasp at the first incision. But presently she could feel the blood finding its way down her neck. It divided on her shoulder, the larger stream going down her bosom. In a moment she could see it making its way daintily between her breasts. It began to congeal there . . .”
A laughingstock throughout France, Bernard Boursicot also decided he could no longer live with Honour. He took the knife French prisoners are issued for meals—too short and blunt for purposes of suicide, but good enough to peel away the plastic from his disposable razor. And then, having liberated the blade, he drew it across his throat until it fell from his fingers. The ultimate plot inversion: his Butterfly will live, and he will die.
But it’s harder in prison than on an opera stage. They found him, they saved him, and today he lives in a French nursing home. Despite his best efforts, his Butterfly, like all the others, predeceased the leading man. “The plate is clean now,” he said on being informed of Shi’s death. “I am free.”
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