"Du Du That Voodoo": M. Venus and M. Butterfly

Abstract

"Du Du That Voodoo"1: M. Venus and M. Butterfly Melanie C. Hawthorne LATELY, I HAVE FOUND MYSELF referring to Rachilde's 1884 novel Monsieur Vénus as "M. Venus" in both writing and speech. In writing, of course, the abbreviation "M." is the accepted French abbreviation for "Monsieur," so in a way this alternative name is just a shortened form of the full title (an abbreviation already in use among Rachilde's contemporaries). But, whereas the abbreviation "M" is read aloud as "monsieur," in choosing to read the title as "Em Venus," I realize that I am invoking David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly.1 These two fin-de-siècle texts—Rachilde's first published in 1884, Hwang's first performed in 1988—have much in common, and the metaleptic echo effected through the assimilation of the title "M. Venus" to M. Butterfly serves to underscore the continued interest in texts that play on gender ambiguity. M. Butterfly is a late-twentieth-century play explicitly about orientalism , while Rachilde's late-nineteenth-century French novel is neither a play (though it was adapted for the stage at around the same time as M. Butterfly), nor as explicitly colonialist. In M. Butterfly, a diplomat falls in love with a Chinese opera singer while in China, has an extra-marital affair with "her," fathers a child with "her," and eventually divorces his wife and lives with "her." In M. Venus, an aristocrat takes a workingclass flower maker as a lover, then marries "her" before arranging for "her" to die. If the protagonist were a man, and the object of affection a woman in both cases, neither plot would have attracted the attention it did, but the Chinese opera singer is a man, while the French aristocrat is a woman. Both texts signal these plot twists through the gender ambiguity of their title. Although M. Butterfly is "American," it has a strong connection to French: it is based on a "true story," the story of a minor French bureaucrat of working-class origins (like Rachilde's Jacques Silvert), an accountant attached to the Foreign Service named Bernard Boursicot, who in 1986 was sentenced to prison in France for passing information to the Chinese. What made this spying incident attract special attention (for example, in the New York Times, May 11, 1986), what brought it to the 58 Winter 1997 Hawthorne attention of David Henry Hwang, was that Boursicot's Chinese lover to whom he had passed the information was really a man whom Boursicot had mistaken for a woman for twenty years. Much of the information about this story of an accountable accountant only became available after the initial performance and publication of M. Butterfly, when People magazine journalist Joyce Wadler published her full-length account of the story in 1993.3 Here she told the story of Boursicot, his Chinese lover Shi Pei Pu, and their putative son Shi Du Du,4 whose existence made possible the "voodoo," the charm that kept Boursicot coming back to Shi Pei Pu. Most of the events recounted in Wadler's book pre-dated M. Butterfly (by 1988, when the play was first performed, Boursicot was once again a free man—he had been pardoned after serving four years of the six-year sentence), but the "real story" was not widely known at the time M. Butterfly made its impact. The author, David Hwang, chose to resist knowing more about the case than the outline gleaned from the Times, and deliberately avoided trying to reduce the play to the "true story."5 The sources of "M. Venus" may be a little harder to trace, but in at least one version of its composition, Rachilde claimed that it too was based on a true story, her own. In a private letter dated 1896, she claimed that the plot of Monsieur Vénus was based on her own love affair with a secretary to a local politician. The young man was effeminate and, we are given to understand from the letter, homosexual, hence the gender role confusions that mark the novel. Questions about sex and gender role are the most obvious point of comparison between...