A terrible beauty is born: M. Butterfly as a Romantic Tragedy

[[abstract]]This article presents a dialectical interpretation of David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly as a romantic tragedy. It is dialectical in the sense that the protagonist Gallimard, in his quest for/conquest of an ideal Butterfly, ultimately finds that he himself is his own object and opposite. It is romantic in the sense that, in his final unity with his opposite, Gallimard plays out the Hegelian negation of the negative and thus assures the purity of his spiritual subjectivity. In structure, accordingly, the main body of this paper consists of two parts. On one hand, Song Liling is taken as a pathetic figure, an unreflective puppet and instrument of nationalist ideology; he enacts the role of a perfect woman in Gallimard’s imagination but finally presents himself as everything negative to the latter’s fantasy. On the other hand, Gallimard is interpreted as a romantic hero in terms of the Hegelian definition of the romantic, with emphasis on the very process of Gallimard’s anagnorisis (recognition), especially his arrival at his inner reconciliation through suicide, through the negation of the negative. That is, with his decisive rejection of reality, as embodied in the disrobed Song Liling and his final reconceptualization of fantasy as an absolute affirmation of his spiritual subjectivity, Gallimard becomes a precise incarnation of what Hegel calls “the romantic.” Thus from Gallimard’s reconstruction of his expe-riences arises a combination of the romantic and the tragic in the whole play