A Swarm of Butterflies: Their Flight from French Exoticism to the Stage, from the Opera to the American Multicultural Classroom

Abstract

This essay examines and compares the various renditions of the story of Madame Butterfly, ranging from the narrative found in Pierre Loti’s Mme. Chrysanthème, the John Luther Long short story (Mme. Butterfly), David Belasco’s play (Mme. Butterfly), Puccini’s opera (Madama Butterfly), and finally David Henry Hwang’s dramatic subversion of this story of ill-fated love and betrayal in M. Butterfly. In recent years, Hwang’s play has become a canonical work in the canon of multicultural literature in the US. The author investigates how Hwang’s treatment of race and gender supports this pedagogy and the identity politics currently fashionable in literature departments in American academe.