Racism
The play examines issues of racist stereotypes throughout the narrative. Gallimard falls in love with his ideal submissive partner, and he expresses a negative image of just about everything that is Chinese. Indeed, his perception of Song as "submissive" and easy to dominate has a great deal to do with her race—the fact that, as Song points out in his testimony against Gallimard, "The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated because a woman can't think for herself."
Throughout the play, there is a contradiction between the fact that Gallimard is in love with Song and puts her on a pedestal, but also disrespects her culture and race. Song understands this dynamics from the start and speaks about his racism overtly in their first meeting, claiming that Madame Butterfly, an opera Gallimard loves, is a white fantasy of oppression and tragedy.
Gender
The play is about gender on many different levels. For one, many characters feminize the East throughout the play, and use gender as a metaphor to explain the colonialist relationship between the East and West. In this metaphor, the East is the submissive "woman" while the West is the dominant "male." This logic extends to actual sexual dynamics as well, as we see Gallimard fall in love with Song because he perceives her as more "feminine" than the Western girls he has met. In his estimation, femininity has everything to do with submission.
Gender also comes into play in complicated ways when we learn that Song is not biologically a woman after all, but a man disguised as a woman. At the end of the play, after Song has shown Gallimard his male body, Gallimard laughs at the absurdity of the fact that he has fallen in love with an idea. As he tells Song, "I'm a man who loved a woman created by a man. Everything else—simply falls short." In this we see that Gallimard is unable to fully take on the role he wants as a heterosexual man until the woman he is falling in love with is an "idea," the performance of a man. In light of this information, Gallimard dresses himself up like a woman, before killing himself.
Colonialism and Imperialism
Gallimard is not only a man looking to find a Chinese woman to submit to his will and do his bidding, he is also part of a political campaign that is committed to dominance. As a French diplomat working in Beijing, Gallimard's work is an imperialistic venture, one in which Western powers might spread their influence in countries in the East. Gallimard's subjugation of Song coincides with his ascension as a government agent. He becomes influential during the Vietnam War, believing that Western force will eventually lead the Vietnamese to submit. When he is wrong about this, Gallimard is sent home. Thus, the play puts colonial and imperialistic campaigns in parallel with Gallimard's misogynistic and sexual ethic, his belief that the West can inevitably overpower the East.
Song elucidates this perspective in his testimony when he says, "The West has sort of an international rape mentality towards the East...Basically, 'Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes.' The West thinks of itself as masculine—big guns, big industry, big money—so the East is feminine—weak, delicate, poor...but good at art, and full of inscrutable wisdom—the feminine mystique. Her mouth says no, but her eyes say yes. The West believes the East, deep down, wants to be dominated because a woman can't think for herself."
Deception
The pivotal revelation of the play is the fact that Song is not a gentle, submissive Chinese woman, but a male actor posing as a woman in order to extract information from Gallimard for the Chinese Communist Party. The deception is heartbreaking to Gallimard to such an extent that he can hardly handle reviewing his memories of the events that led to the revelation. He insists on denying his knowledge of Song's identity, resisting any hints that Song might be deceiving him, as a way of preserving his own blissful ignorance. The discovery of Song's deception is too much for Gallimard to handle, and while he laughs hysterically at first at the sight of Song's naked body, it is not long before he kills himself, so undone is he by Song's deception and about its implications for his own sexuality.
Love
While deception, betrayal, and domination underscore the love story in M. Butterfly, it is still a love story. It is unclear just how deeply felt the love between Gallimard and Song is, especially given the fact that it is based on a lie, but the affair extends for over 20 years, and within it, the two men experience a deep connection with one another, a strange compatibility. We never quite learn how Song truly feels about it, but the couple speak in heightened, romantic terms throughout the play.
At the end, love is not a joyful emotion, but one that undoes everything that Gallimard has built. He says, "Yes—love. Why not admit it all? That was my undoing, wasn't it? 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."
Performance
Song's deception is all built around his expert performance as a woman. At one point he brags to Chin that his role as Song is his greatest role as an actor, and when he is ultimately rejected by Gallimard, he laments, "...you never really loved me? Only when I was playing a part?" Performance is the delicate thread on which Song's spying and Gallimard's love hangs.
Additionally, performance is a theme in the play because Song's profession, apart from being a spy is performing in the Chinese opera, an abstracted and highly theatrical storytelling medium. The play itself utilizes many aesthetics and strategies employed by Chinese opera, with dancers accompanying certain moments, and Song adopting gestures that are indicative of his profession. David Henry Hwang masterfully folds in conventions of the theater as a way of layering on different parts of the narrative. The theatrical space is one in which events are never simply events, but more elusive and mysterious, like memories or impressions.
Misogyny
Closely entwined with the theme of imperialism and colonialism is the theme of misogyny. Gallimard, even though he is positioned as the vulnerable protagonist of the play, is a deeply misogynistic character, and his attitude towards women reflects his attitude towards the East. He believes that both women and Eastern countries ought to be weak and easy to manipulate through force. Song says, in his testimony, "You expect Oriental countries to submit to your guns, and you expect Oriental women to be submissive to your men. That's why you say they make the best wives." This ethic is intrinsic to Gallimard's logic and, in Song's estimation, to the logic of the West.
