4 - Madama Butterfly between West and East

Summary

Approaches the opera from a postcolonial perspective, using scores published before the elimination of “offensive” passages in later editions. Emphasizing the relationship between the libretto and its musical setting, it suggests how a temporary “marriage” leaves Cio-Cio-san trapped between her Japanese ethnicity and her desired identity as Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton. The West–East hierarchy of act 1, with the hero’s “pseudo-wedding” dictating the action, followed by the heroine’s entrance and exchanges that ground her in a Japanese milieu, culminates in an extended seduction/love duet fraught with cultural difference. Act 2 foregrounds a dialogic construction of Cio-Cio-san’s dilemma: while Illica endowed her with infantilizing preconceptions of Japanese identity, Giacosa added the agency of a geisha and the interiority characteristic of an operatic heroine. As a result, the orientalizing “comedy” of Cio-Cio-san’s failed acculturation as “Madama B. F. Pinkerton” coexists with the intense emotion of arias performing her delusion and suicide, which is complicated by the unusual presence of a mixed-race child.