Butterfly, the Bride: Essays on Law, Narrative, and the Family

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See James Hall, Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art, rev. ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1979),54. 2. Primo Levi, Other People's Trades, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Summit, 1989), 18. Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman in Sleeper conceived the transformation in the other direction, when the poet of the future, Luna, sees the butterfly turning into a caterpillar by and by. 3. Juan Eduardo Cirlot, A Dictionary ofSymbols, 2d ed. (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1995), 35. 4. J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 27. 5. The association of law and violence in current discussion-law's violence against both individuals and competing normative orders-results in part from Robert Cover's work. See "Nomos and Narrative," Harvard Law Review 97 (1983): 4. See also Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns, eds., Law's Violence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993). 6. Cicero, De Republica, trans. Clinton Walker Keyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928),317 (1.18). 7. Alexander Pope, Imitations ofHorace, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. Herbert Davis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966),336. 8. Dickens's Mr. Skimpole speaks "gaily, innocently, and confidingly": "Here you see me utterly incapable of helping myself, and entirely in your hands! I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies!" Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 90. On butterflies among the Japanese (and the naming of dancing girls for butterflies), ("Cho" in Japanese), see Lafcadio Hearn, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies ofStrange Things (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904). 9. Such as James Fitzjames Stephen's terrible image of an eyelash being pulled out with tongs, conveying the harm done when laws or public opinion try to regulate, for example, the internal affairs of the family or relations of love or friendship. See Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 162. 10. The emphasis is on the libretto. See Paul Robinson, "A Deconstructive 169 NOTES TO PAGES 3-4 Postscript: Reading Libretti and Misreading Opera," in Reading Opera, ed. Arthur Groos and Roger Parker (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 328, noting that"an opera cannot be read from its libretto." Since the "meaning of opera is at bottom musical" and opera's "essential argument is posed in musical language," an interpretation "derived exclusively, or even primarily, from the libretto is likely to result in a misreading." There is of course no attempt here to discuss the music of Puccini or anyone else. 11. John Luther Long, "Madame Butterfly," Century Magazine, January 1898,374-92. 12. Belasco's Madame Butterfly is described as "founded on John Luther Long's Story." David Belasco, Six Plays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1928). There is no suggestion of coauthorship in that text. The 1907 edition of Puccini's Madame Butterfly (Dover rpt., 1990) says that it has a "Libretto by Luigi Illice and Giuseppe Giacosa based on the story by John Luther Long and the play by David Belasco." This is the Library of Congress cataloging data. There is also a reference to a libretto based on the story by Long and "the play by Long and David Belasco" on the page containing the list of characters. This attribution seems not to have been generally accepted. It is not used here. Puccini was also aware of The Mikado (George Marek, Puccini: A Biography [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951],213). 13. David Hwang, M. Butterfly (New York: Penguin, 1989). On issues of representation, see Martha Minow, "From Class Actions to 'Miss Saigon,': The Concept of Representative Law," in Representing Women: Law, Literature, and Feminism, ed. Susan Sage Heinzelman and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994),8. 14. Pierre Loti, Madame Chrysanthemum, trans. Laura Ensor (London: KPI,l985). 15. Carl Dawson sees the Long story and its heirs as a challenge to and "tacit criticism" of the Loti version. See Lafcadio Hearn and the Vision of Japan (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1992), 40. Henry James's introduction makes plain that Loti's own impressions may not be accurate in the ordinary sense. "I have been assured," James writes, "that Madame Chrysanthemum is as preposterous, as benighted a picture of Japan as if a stranger, disembarking at Liverpool, had confined his acquaintance with England to a few weeks spent in disreputable female society in a vulgar suburb of that city." Pierre...