The Real Butterfly Was Polyamorous
Ethically non-monogamists' rights are human rights
I have been revisiting some of the classic operas and noticing how much better they would be had the composers and librettists chosen to liberate their tragic heroines into empowering sex work. Like instead of Violetta sacrificing her relationship with Alfredo for the sake of his sister’s reputation, maybe Verdi could have made her add his dad to her list of clients, rendering her ending lucrative and fulfilling. And couldn’t Carmen’s relations with José and Escamillo have been strictly transactional—or Mimi’s story been more relevant if she’s had an STD instead of TB?
Speaking of Puccini, I love the Freudian reason he kills off his female leads (he was a sadist, over-attached to his mother), but his hugest disappointment is Madama Butterfly (1904). I naturally support banning this so-called heartbreaking masterpiece due to its historic complicity in yellowface. The fact that the treatment is fully sympathetic and the eponymous role is the composer’s most psychologically compelling matters little. It does however remind me of the time a student at my former college voiced her concern that the Jade Parlor in our Main Building might be a space of cultural appropriation. One must always assume colonialism without evidence. So even when they discovered that the furnishings and objets d’art in this room originated from the time Japanese women attended Vassar in the 1880s, I was greatly relieved when the college decided to remove them, beige the walls, and install an exhibition of student portraits on the little-explored theme of identity.
So japonisme is dangerous, but I do want, as ever, to read against the grain and thus subvert traditional interpretations and sentimental ethics. To any uneducateds who might be reading, the plot of Butterfly is this: in about 1898 an American naval officer marries a geisha outside Nagasaki before abandoning her; when he returns with an American wife three years later, Butterfly’s illusions are shattered and she’s expected to hand over her kid to them. Then someone does something with a dagger, when they could have become a proud sex worker and not just the kind of geisha who sings and dances. I won’t give away the ending but what did you think Puccini’s love-guilt was about—essays, vibes, symbolic archetypes?
Basically everything is framed as being really sad for Butterfly, but if you ask me the whole opera is a violent assault on the polyamorous community. Act I opens when the lieutenant is being shown a house he’ll share with his lover, the latest in a long trail of globally diverse sexual partners. In the 1974 film version, Placido Domingo shows the consul photographic evidence of his body count, and I love how this frames promiscuity as a kind of commerce within the economy of libidinal desire. He is living his best life, dropping his anchor in every port (metaphor!), thinking nothing of the risks, and thrilled that in Japan marriage contracts are null and void once the guy skips town. Non-Western societies have always been non-hierarchical and fluid like this, so I don’t know why the consul has to criticize him for having “an easy philosophy”. Whatever feels good, bitches!
The conflict begins when Butterfly floats in like a breath of spring claiming to have heeded the call of love. We’re supposed to find this entrance beautiful but beauty is racist so Puccini should have made more of an effort to hurry “Ancora un passo or via” along.[1] Anyone who bothered to watch that clip might have noticed how she addresses her fiancé as FB Pinkerton. For some, this “FB” instead of “BF” has to do with making certain foreign audiences more comfortable but I say it reflects the fact that she’s only 15, totally old enough to get married but too wrapped up in heteronormativity to clock the sailor’s actual initials—or see his true self.
And names don’t get more queer than Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. Assigned this forename myself I can confirm that Benjamin in the original Arabic of the Old Testament means “son of the right hand”, signifying self-pleasure. Enhued in pink, we have an undeniable nomenclature of onanistic omnisexuality that entwines one of the countless Founding Fathers who was a deist and 100% not Christian with the potentialities of BF (boyfriend, black female, brainfuck, and of course the synonym for a posterior intruder).
But here’s the clincher and a premise I anticipate my peer reviewers will ensure is cited endlessly in future gender studies research: the word for butterfly in Italian is farfalla, whose letters are all contained within Franklin, which is cocooned between Benjamin and Pinkerton. So it’s not Cio-Cio-San but Pinkerton who is the butterfly. It is in fact she, the white-adjacent conventionally gendered woman, who wants to crush her polyamorous lover’s wings, pin him to the board of monogamy, and forevermore display him as a pierced specimen of nuptial conquest.
Puccini then erases, excises, and exiles Pinkerton from Act II, attempting to extirpate him from our consciousness by forcing us to endure Butterfly’s oppressive process of awaiting his return. The personification of marriage disruption comes along in the form of the wealthy Asian Yamadori. He’s been divorced multiple times and offers to take on Cio-Cio-San, even though she’s betrayed her family and put a picture of Jesus (code for Hitler) over her shrine. But no. “Butterfly” holds out, determined to control the one who wants to be free. She keeps singing desperate songs of love and hope, but in all the performances I’ve seen no director has yet cast a drag queen to highlight their talents in lip synching. That would achieve more verismo than the inauthenticity of any cis woman’s trained voice.
A moment of relief arrives in Act III when Cio-Cio-San brushes some rouge on her son’s face to make him less white and to foreshadow the trans girlhood she will be allowed to have once she is released into polyamorous parentage. Note that under Cio-Cio-San the child is called Sorrow/Trouble, but once Pinkerton returns she will be reborn as Joy, the ultimate and exclusively queer modality.
The average viewer may think this closing act shows the heroine to progress to psychic maturity, but this feels like Orientalism because geishas are, along with all indigenous peoples, psychologically static and two-dimensional. The true transformation is Pinkerton’s. He finally shows up at the house with his new wife and then freaks out about how stressful it’s going to be to confront his possessive ex. So he asks the servant, the consul, and the new Mrs. Pinkerton to handle it—tell Butterfly he couldn’t deal, get the kid, whatever. He’ll see them back in Nagasaki. I would end the opera at the moment he runs away, liberating himself from the emotional labor of having to negotiate her expectations of matrimonial servitude to her. Move the Humming Song here and have the remaining cast slo-mo grind to it. Curtain.
In opera as in life, people should have identities not souls. We need to abolish lyricism and anything else that distracts us from political purpose. Take a leaf out of Scottish Ballet’s book and their recent offering, Mary, Queen of Scots, which is more like a series of beats with zero transition between sequences. The wonders of this production included a towering and betesticled dancer performing the role of Elizabeth I (achieving the rare and revolutionary feat of smashing the gender binary) and the honest juxtaposition of mean English versus lovely and kind Scottish characters. Mary dresses like a vamp from the musical Chicago, while her male lovers are actually in love with each other. I adored the fat suits for the corps, because anything to make ballet ugly! The problem was that the costumes stopped at bulging bellies, drawing attention to the unfortunate lack of real cankles.
Perhaps this segues to a further possibility for Butterfly. The Japanese are super into whaling, and I once discussed how an institutionally lauded trans artist claimed to find the blubber in Moby Dick sexy.[2] What would it be like, after the Pinkertons sail off into the horizon of Joy’s joy, for Cio-Cio-San to take her father’s dagger and start hacking away at some whale flesh? She and Suzuki could replace all the flower petals they’ve strewn throughout the house with lashings of blubber and then invite over the consul, the marriage broker, and all the people of color along the harbor for a finale of erotic frenzy. It’s the kind of production you could tour through schools to advance music and LGBTQ awareness.
Oh, and Cio-Cio-San and Suzuki would make bank from the aggressive entry and service fees at their sex-positive slime-fest. Easy philosophy, easy money.
[1] For a better-resolution version of the complete Jean-Pierre Ponnelle film, starring Mirella Freni and Placido Domingo, click here.
[2] Content warning: I wrote “Queer Antoinette, Part 2” before I transitioned to my present voice.
Madxm Butterflye starring Bad Bunny
OMG, *LOVE* !!!!
Absolutely hilarious!
Thank you so much for this. Going to restack it out the wazoo.
💖