M Butterfly

M Butterfly is David Henry Hwangs retelling, and in a lot of ways, revising of the famous Italian opera, Madam Butterfly. In Hwang's version, the most powerful element is the reversed ending in which it is the white man who must kill himself for honor instead of the abandoned Asian wife. Hwang takes the "classic" story of the pompous westerner dominating the fragile orient and changes the stakes by adding one key detail: Butterfly is a man. By deceiving Gallimard, the uninteresting French diplomat, and making Song Liling the true mastermind behind a deeper and ingenious espionage scheme, the supposedly superior person is made a fool of and reaps the true consequences of believing the fable of western masculinity and dominance.