Death Of The "Butterfly"

M. Butterfly performed in Broadway not only wins David Henry Hwang the 1988 Tony Award for best play but also establishes him as the most prominent Asian-American playwright in contemporary America. The play contains so extensive implications regarding such terms as gender, sexuality, race, interculturality, Orientalism, imperialism and postcolonialism, that it immediately arouses heated discussion among a lot of scholars and critics from different disciplines.Existing studies of the play, based on varied theories such as feminist politics, queer theory, postcolonialism and deconstruction, could be generally classified into two groups. One group praises Hwang's deconstructive gender-bending text and his perception of the tensions between the East and the West. The other one argues that the play actually fails to achieve the aim of deconstruction despite its efforts to criticize Westerners' Orientalism and, worse, it in effect reinforces Western stereotypes of Asian men and women. However, not enough attention is paid to the protagonists' psychology in interpreting the complex play. For the death of Gallimard, most studies focus more on the social and cultural reasons such as the Western misconception of the East. This essay attempts to unravel Gallimard's death from a psychoanalytical perspective. According to Freud, human beings are driven by two kinds of basic instincts: the life instinct that helps humans to survive and the death instinct that urges humans to return to dead state. As the agent of life, the ego of Gallimard makes use of its defenses to satisfy the id's demands for love, passion, power and homosexual desire without confronting the Western patriarchal society and the superego's moral rules for heterosexuality. However, the life instinct is doomed to lose the war against the death instinct because of the ego's internal inadequacy and the harsh external reality. With the fantasy of Butterfly based on Orientalism proved to be false and Song's maleness true, the defenses of displacement and denial fail, and so the ego becomes split. Gallimard assumes himself to be the real Butterfly and then commits suicide. In fact, it is the death instinct in the form of the imbalance between id, ego and superego that drives Gallimard to his final suicide.