From Madame To M.-M. Butterfly’s Panoptic Subversion Of The East-West Power Relation

David Henry Hwang is the first Chinese-American playwright to win the Tony Award.His playwright career began in1979and outstanding works have been continuallycomposed. As a Chinese-American, Hwang’s works are mainly about identity problems,contradiction and confusion among different cultures, M. Butterfly (1988) being the mostprominent and best example.This thesis consists of5parts. Chapter One contains introduction to Madame Butterflyand M. Butterfly, a literature review, and related literary theories which provide theoreticalbasis for the development of this thesis. Chapter Two takes a detailed look at the panopticstrategies Song Liling takes to discipline and surveril Gallimard and Gallimard’sinternalization of the surveillance. Chapter Three explores the process of the panopticsubversion by analyzing the Oriental binary oppositions and stereotypes in MadameButterfly story pattern, and the steps M. Butterfly takes to subvert them. Chapter Fourcenters on the changing power relation between the East and the West. The East has longbeen portrayed as feminized, as “madame” in the western culture, so as to construct theEast-West power relation. In this chapter, the author teases out the history of the “madame”image, the East-West power relation and the reversed East-West power relation based onthe analysis above. Chapter Five serves as a conclusion to the whole thesis, which contendsthat the distribution and conversion of the East-West power relation is explored todemonstrate that only by correcting the mistaken cultural conception and gender image anddiscarding the stereotype, can the equal communication between the East and the West beestablished and mutual cultural understanding reached.