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

First 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 East-West 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 America's power in creating its own Orientalism at a time when the geopolitics of East-West 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-à-vis China, epitomized the United States' full-fledged entry into Asia-Pacific 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 enacted by the white divas who played the role on stage. Trained in the most spectacular form of European high culture, performing the roles of the heroines on stage, and leading highly public lives off stage, these divas in fact embodied modern American womanhood much more than Japanese femininity. Most notably, Geraldine Farrar, who played the role of Cio-Cio-San for the Metropolitan Opera in the first two decades of the opera's production in the United States, was hailed by her young female fans as "the great Glamour Girl of [the] era," and became a forerunner in the history of diva worship in America. The production and reception of these white divas' performances of the Japanese heroine illustrated not only the gendered and sexualized nature of Butterfly but also the unequal racial and class relations between those who performed the role on stage and those who were presumably represented by those performances.²

Yet, Butterfly did not simply remain a white female performance of white male Orientalist fantasy. As Japan gained legitimacy as a modern, civilized nation, the Japanese themselves entered the stage and created their own Butterfly. The Japanese complicity in the production of Butterfly and their efforts to revise it to their own end illuminate the multiple forces involved in the shaping of Western cultural hegemony. In the Meiji (1868-1912) and Taishō (1912-1926) periods, Japan pursued modernity and sought recognition from its Western peers in part through the adoption of Western arts and culture. At the same time, the rapid social change also brought about a growing disenchantment with the West, and various forms of Japanese "tradition" were reconstructed and reinforced both by the state and the intellectuals.³ In this cultural climate, Butterfly became an important stage where Japan was presented to the Western world through the figure of Cio-Cio-San. The Japanese efforts to create...