Expressionistic Features Of M.Butterfly

David Henry Hwang is considered as the most talented Chinese American playwright in the United States. In 1988, he was awarded the Tony Award for Best Play of the Year due to M. Butterfly and he is the first Chinese American who has won this award. Similar to most Chinese American writers, his works mainly concern the relationship between the West and the East.Madame Butterfly is an opera with oriental features written by Puccini in 1904 and it has been enjoying a worldwide fame for nearly one hundred years as one of the top ten operas in the world. The opera tells a story that a tame oriental girl falls in love with a white man and sacrifices everything to him, even her life. The stereotype of Eastern women is getting deeper and deeper in the minds of the Westerners as the opera is becoming more and more popular in the West.David Henry Hwang is an important playwright in the history of Chinese American literature. He is the first Chinese American playwright who is very popular and influential in the American society. M. Butterfly is the deconstruction of Madame Butterfly. The destinies of the characters in the opera are reversed and the stereotype of Eastern women is destroyed in the play, which proposes another path to understanding imperialism, orientalism and racialism. Expressionistic features are the speciality of artistic characteristics in the play.Expressionism is an art and literary movement, arising in Europe in the late nineteenth century and reaching its height between 1910 and 1925, and it gave significant influence to modern literature. The greatest achievement made by Expressionists is in the field of drama. Aiming to explore subjective feelings and emotions hidden in human's deep heart, Expressionistic playwrights always adopt absurd, dream-like and fantastic devices and mix illusions, dreams and fantasies together with reality. Sometimes they intentionally distort or exaggerate the shapes, colors and appearances of the objects in order to show the chaos caused by the mechanical world. The structure and language of Expressionistic plays are also distinct from their realist or romantic predecessors.This dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter makes a general introduction to Expressionism from the following two aspects: history of Expressionism and features of Expressionism.In the second chapter, the author analyses the Expressionistic features of M. Butterfly in characterization. Combination of characters is one of the artistic features in Expressionistic plays. In this play, Song Liling also plays the role of Madame Butterfly while Gallimard plays that of Pinkerton. The audience may naturally compare the characters in the play with those in the opera, and thus find out the reversion of the characters and the theme of M. Butterfly. Meanwhile the constant changes of characters'sexes and relationships make the plot more attractive and enhance the suspenses.In the production of a drama, stage managers typically provide practical and organizational support to the director, actors, designers, stage crew and technicians throughout the production process. Once the show opens, the director's work is essentially complete. Now it's the stage manager's job to make sure that every aspect of the production runs just as the director intends time after time, until the production closes. The stage manager is no longer a figure behind the scene, but a role to control the pace of the drama and to communicate with the audience, which becomes a classical Expressionistic feature. This technique is also employed in M. Butterfly, but the role of the stage manager is played alternatively by Gallimard and Song Liling.Monologue is the main method to externalize the inner world of the characters in Expressionistic plays. In M. Butterfly, Song Liling's monologue implies his plan and enforces the audience expectation of the plot development. Gallimard's inner struggle and misery are expressed by his monologue, through which the audience could understand how he sets up his fantasy of the East and how the fantasy is damaged.The Expressionistic features in dramatic structure of the play are analyzed in the third chapter. The main narrative structure frame of M. Butterfly features as realistic, starting from Gallimard's cell and ending in the same place with flashbacks about the past. Supenses, important elements in realistic dramas, are created, advanced and solved in the development of the story. The main structure of M. Butterfly is in a chronological order, but the narration of the story is often cut by the character's psychological activities. This is a typical Expressionistic technique, i.e. the externalization of the inner psyche. The images of reality presented on the stage are usually distorted with the twists and changes of the characters'emotions. The characters exist not only in theatrical reality but also in illusions. Besides, the Expressionistic segments which concern some extracts from Madame Butterfly, Gallimard's illusions and the different spaces in the reality of this drama, are inserted into the chronological order of the plot development, breaking through the chronological restriction, unfolding many layers of the story within limited time and space and thus producing visionary effects and projecting the theme of this drama. The outside events stimulate the inner activities of the character, which, in turn, make the character take actions in the real life of the story. The integration of Realistic structure and Expressionistic segments constructs the drama M. Butterfly.In the fourth chapter, the author analyses the Expressionistic features in M. Butterfly in the aspect of stage elements and how the playwright makes good use of these elements such as music, dance, costume, lighting and property to express the theme of the play.Chinese immigration literature is a new research field in our country, and there is little study in Chinese immigration plays. The thesis ends with the conclusion that as a representative of Chinese American literature, Hwang persists in looking for the identity and voice of Chinese Americans. M. Butterfly is his great achievement in resisting Orientalism as well as the stereotype of the Chinese and Asian Americans through his works. Expressionistic techniques are employed by Hwang in M. Butterfly to exposes the absurdity in the stereotype of the East and help the audience to understand the relationship between the East and the West.