Madame Butterfly (Allegory)
The story of Puccini's opera, Madama Butterfly, is a motif in the play and runs parallel to the story of Gallimard and Song. To each of them, the plot has a different meaning. As Song explains in her first interaction with Gallimard, to her, the opera represents a Western white fantasy: a fantasy in which the submissive Asian woman sacrifices everything, including her life, for the white man she loves. To Song, the story represents the oppression of Asian culture by the West, the scourge of colonialism. In contrast, Gallimard sees the story as beautiful, the representation of perfect love, in which a woman gives herself completely to a man. While both see the opera as representative of sacrifice and submission, they have different ideas about its political implications.
"Butterfly...Butterfly..." (Motif)
This is a line in the play that recurs throughout and recalls the parallels between the story of Gallimard and Song and the plot of the Puccini opera. They are the first lines of the play, as we see Gallimard in his prison cell calling out to the woman he loved. It is also the final line of the play, this time uttered by Song to Gallimard, as he watches the French diplomat get into the Butterfly costume and commit suicide. In both contexts, the line is an expression of longing and desire, a calling out to the elusive character of "Butterfly."
Gallimard's Suicide (Symbol)
At the end of the play, Gallimard commits suicide. He dresses up as Madame Butterfly himself and commits seppuku, a ritual suicide. The scene is symbolic of his deep shame, his realization that he has been betrayed by the woman he loves. As he says, rather cryptically, "love warped my judgment, blinded my eyes, rearranged the very lines on my face ... until I could look in the mirror and see nothing but...a woman." The scene symbolizes his deep psychic unrest and his sense that he is permanently damaged and dishonored. It is also a symbol of his only chance for redemption, as he tells the audience, "Death with honor is better than life, life with dishonor."
Chinese opera (Motif)
A recurring motif in the play is the physical and visual vocabulary of the Chinese opera. Song is an actor from the Chinese opera, and we see performance styles from this very traditional form interpolated into the action of the play, as well as contrasted with the Western musical excerpts from Madama Butterfly. The use of Chinese opera tropes throughout reminds the audience of the longstanding traditions of China, the fact that it has a performance history that precedes Western incursion.
Vietnam War & Sexual Submission (Symbol)
Throughout the play, the submission of Asian women (and Asian people) is put in parallel to the submission of Asian countries under the colonial rulership of Western countries. Sexual submission and military submission are put in parallel. Thus, the Vietnam War, and Gallimard's tactical instincts about it, are symbolic of Western attitudes towards the East more broadly. He tells Toulon, "If the Americans demonstrate the will to win, the Vietnamese will welcome them into a mutually beneficial union." In this, we see that the war in Vietnam is symbolic of the sexual dynamic that Gallimard has with his ideal submissive mistress, Song, and that their relationship is, in turn, symbolic of the tensions between East and West.
