Deconstruction Of Madame Butterfly

David Henry Hwang, with profound influence, is one of the most preeminent Asian American dramatists in the US.He's famous for his various plays concerning Chinese American and Asian American's roles and experiences in modern US society. His best-known play M. Butterfly has earned him numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The play is loosely based on a news report of the relationship between a French diplomat and a male Chinese opera singer who purportedly convinced the diplomat that he was a woman throughout their twenty-year relationship. As a critical and provocative play contributing to ethnic plays in the US, M. Butterfly provides a brilliant and complex analysis of the politics of race, gender, class, and sexuality.This thesis investigates M. Butterfly as a deconstruction of Giacomo Puccini's opera Madame Butterfly in both content and form, based on a thorough textual analysis.In light of deconstructive theories and Bertolt Brecht's epic theatre, the two main sets of binary oppositions in the play:Male and Female; East and West are deconstructed to resolution; meanwhile, the form of the play alienates all and thus achieving David Henry Hwang's purpose of subversion. It reveals the long-term stereotypes the West has about the East, so as male about female. The play starts by introducing the image of "Butterfly"—submissive Oriental woman sacrificing herself for her Western lover, while in the end, Gallimard's committing suicide deconstructs the former stereotype, and rises as a Western "Butterfly" image—a Western man obsessed with the imaginary relationship between Oriental woman and Occidental man resulted from colonial mind-set. This kind of deconstruction leads us to ponder over its profound realistic meanings in our increasingly globalizing world..