The Flight of the Japanese Butterfly: Orientalism, Nationalism, and Performances of Japanese Womanhood

Abstract

written by American author John Luther Long in the year of the Spanish-American War, Madame Butterfly is one of the quintessential Orientalist narratives. Through the tragic relationship between Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton, an American naval officer stationed in Nagasaki, and Cio-Cio-San (Madame Butterfly), a self-sacrificing Japanese heroine who kills herself at the end, the narrative exemplified the gendered dynamics of EastWest relations founded upon unequal power relations. Following David Belasco's stage adaptation of the story, Italian composer Giacomo Puccini produced the now-famous opera Madama Butterfly in 1904, the year of the Russo-Japanese War. While Butterfly certainly echoed the numerous existing texts of European Orientalism, the specific narrative of Butterfly and the timing of its productions were also symbolic of Americas power in creating its own Orientalism at a time when the geopolitics of EastWest relations underwent a rapid change. On the one hand, the Spanish-American and Filipino-American wars followed by the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, along with the Open Door Policy vis-a-vis China, epitomized the United States' full-fledged entry into AsiaPacific as an imperial power and the coming of the "American century." On the other hand, Japan's victory in the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars and its growing military and economic expansion in Asia demonstrated the nation's entry among the Western powers as a modern imperial power. The cross-Pacific dynamics of nation and empire building manifested in these events were embodied in Butterfly 's narrative construction as well as its performances on stage. The multilayered nature of the operatic text expressed through its narrative, theatrical, and musical constructions further enhanced the dramatization of the highly racialized and gendered original story, inscribing onto popular memory not only the tragic narrative but also the visual and sonic images of Cio-Cio-San.1 Ironically, in most productions of Puccini's Butterfly 'in the United States in the early twentieth century, Cio-Cio-San's tragic Japanese womanhood was