Fantasy Dependence in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly M. Butterfly, as its title suggests, is the reworking of Puccini’s opera, Madama Butterfly. In Puccini’s opera, Lieutenant Pinkerton, a United Sates Navy officer, purchases the conjugal rights to Cio-Cio-San, a fifteen-yrear-old Japanese Geisha girl, for one hundred yen, and marries her with the convenient provision that each contract can be annulled on a monthly notice. Meanwhile, Pinkerton leaves Cio-Cio-San for the United States to marry an American girl, Kate. During his absence, Cio-Cio-San has born him a son, and has been waiting for his return, unaware of his marriage in America. After three years have passed since Pinkerton left her, Cio-Cio-San is visited by Pinkerton’s wife, who attempts to claim his son and take him to the United Sates. Realizing that Pinkerton has abandoned her, Cio-Cio-San commits hara-kiri, saying: “Death with honor is better than life/life with dishonor.” At the end of the opera, Pinkerton arrives only to find Cio-Cio-San dead on the tatami floor. In the Western world, Butterfly represents a stereotype of the Oriental woman. The stereotype of an obedient, submissive, and domestic Asian woman appeals to Westerners through other media beside the opera; for example, the “mail-order bride trade” catalogues and TV spots. The story of the white devil Pinkerton and a sub-missive Asian girl Cio-Cio-San has become a cultural myth in Western world. In M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang parodies and deconstructs this myth. In his play, a French diplomat Rene Gallimard fantasizes that he is Pinkerton and his Chinese lover Song is his Butterfly. However, as Hwang says in the “Afterword” of the play, Gallimard “realizes that it is he who has been But... ... middle of paper ... ...tends as the final impression of the play” (61). Works Cited DiGaetani, John Louis. “M. Butterfly: An Interview with David Henry Hwang.” TDR 33(3): 141-53. Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: A Plume Book, 1988. ---. “Afterword.” M. Butterfly. 94-100. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics. New York: Routledge, 1985. Moy, James S. “David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Philip Kan Gotanda’s Yankee Dawg You Die: Repositioning Chinese American Marginality On the American Stage.” Theatre Journal 42: 48-56. Shimakawa, Karen. “ ‘Who’s to Say?’ Or, Making Space for Gender and Ethnicity in M. Butterfly.” Theatre Journal 45: 349-62. Shin, Andrew. “Projected Bodies in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Golden Gate.” Melus 27(1): 177-97. Skloot, Robert. “Breaking the Butterfly: The Politics of David Henry Hwang.” Modern Drama 33(1): 59-66.
Athletics in American schools have always been controversial for many reasons. Some of these reasons include health concerns, safety precautions, and academic significance. Daniel H. Bowen and Colin Hitt wrote an article titled, “High-School Sports Aren’t Killing Academics” to present the factors of positive correlation between success in athletics and academics. I believe that athletics in high schools not only benefit students socially, but also academically.
Financial aspects and profitability of college athletic programs is one of the most important arguments involved in this controversy. A group of people expresses that college athletic programs are over emphasized. The point they show on the first hand, is that athletic programs are too expensive for community colleges and small universities. Besides, statistics prove that financial aspects of college athletic programs are extremely questionable. It is true that maintenance, and facility costs for athletic programs are significantly high in comparison to academic programs. Therefore, Denhart, Villwock, and Vedder argue that athletic programs drag money away from important academics programs and degrade their quality. According to them, median expenditures per athlete in Football Bowl Subdivision were $65,800 in 2006. And it has shown a 15.6 percent median expenditure increase fro...
The social world in which all people co-exist is an unruly playing field. Separated by class, race, and gender, this world calls for all to assimilate in order to maintain the balance society imposes. Kenji Yoshino raises awareness to the discriminatory aspects of this world in his piece titled “Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights”.Yoshino’s argument of the unjust abuse of covering, hiding one’s natural identity to meet the standards that are required of the individual, circle the topics of racial and sexual discrimination. Similarly on a smaller scale, the same concept is depicted through gender inequality (particularly in America) through Michael Kimmel 's “Girls in Guyland: Eyes on the Guys”. Kimmel expresses that both males
Wood, J. T. (2011). Gendered lives: Communication, gender, and culture. (9th ed ed., pp. 1-227). Boston,MA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster’s Monkey: His Fake Story (1989) is a “book” about the “West …meeting West” (Kingston 308). She borrows heavily from Chinese myths and legends but at the same time she also alludes to Hollywood movies, western literary tradition and western authors, and strives for some sort of amalgamation of the two. The focus of the novel keeps on shifting from “synthesis to multiplicity” (Janette 145) and the definition of a new form of democracy which accords recognition to this multiculturalism without being exclusionist. Wittman’s play is the “stage” where all the minorities – Japanese, Chinese, Mexican, African American, etc – come together to confront the White America.
Lee, Brian. "Are college sports worth the cost?" PBS (2011): 2. online. 20 November 2013. .
Durkheim was a functionalist, and theorised that a holistic social narrative could be identified which would explain individual behaviour. He argued that, whilst society was made up of its members, it was greater than the sum of its parts, and was an external pressure that determined the behaviour of the individuals within it. At that time, suicide rates in Europe were rising, and so the causes of suicide were on the agenda. Since suicide is seen as an intrinsically personal and individual action, establishing it as having societal causes would be a strong defence for Durkheim’s functionalist perspective. Durkheim used the comparative method to study the official suicide rates of various European countries. While he was not the first to notice the patterns and proportional changes of suicide rates between different groups in European societies, it was this fact that was the foundation of his theory – why did some groups consistently have much higher rates than others? This supports the idea that it was the external pressures placed on certain groups within society that induced higher rates of suicide, and is the basis of Durkheim’s work.
College is a time for young people to develop and grow not only in their education, but social aspects as well. One of the biggest social scenes found around college campuses are athletic events, but where would these college sports be without their dedicated athletes? Student athletes get a lot of praise for their achievements on the field, but tend to disregard the work they accomplish in the classroom. Living in a college environment as a student athlete has a great deal of advantages as well as disadvantages that affect education and anti-intellectualism.
For decades there has been a debate on student athletes and their drive to succeed in the classroom. From the very beginning of organized college level athletics, the goal to want to succeed in athletics has forced students to put academics to the back burner. In spite of the goal to want to succeed over a hundred years of attempts to check limits of intercollegiate athletic programs on colleges' academic standards still seems to struggle to this day. This brings to surface one of the most asked questions in sports, “What effect does college sports have on academics and economics?” Herbert D. Simons, Derek Van Rheenen, and Martin V. Covington, authors of “Academic Motivation and the Student Athlete” researched the topic on whether athletics and academics benefit each other. Bryan Flynn, the author of “College Sports vs. Academics” poses the question “Should institutions of higher learning continue to involve themselves in athletic programs that often turn out to be virtual arms races for recruiting talented players who bring big money and prestige, but put academics to the back burner?” Although both authors agree that sports have an impact on an athlete’s academics, the focus of their argument differs.
Durkheim (1951) explains, “suicide is applied to any death which is direct or indirect results of a positive or negative acts accomplished by the victim himself…” (42). Suicide is a solidarity act; the cause has a significant connection to various social factors. Durkheim was trying to find a relationship between social interactions amongst individuals and suicide rates in different countries around Europe. “Since suicide in an individual action affecting the individual only, it must seemingly depend exclusively on individual factors, thus belonging to psychology alone” (Durkheim:46). What Durkheim is saying that suicide doesn’t come from within the individual but rather the influence of other factors on the individual. He compares different social factors that would potentially per sway an individual to commit suicide, like religion, domestic factors in a country, and political hardship.
"Sula Theme of Gender." Shmoop.com. Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 06 Nov. 2015.
The issue of cultural stereotypes and misconceptions thematically runs throughout David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly. The play is inspired by a 1986 newspaper story about a former French diplomat and a Chinese opera singer, who turns out to be a spy and a man. Hwang used the newspaper story and deconstructed it into Madame Butterfly to help breakdown the stereotypes that are present between the East and the West. Hwang’s play overall breaks down the sexist and racist clichés that the East-West have against each other that reaffirm the Western male culture ideas. The stereotypes presented in the play revolve around the two main characters, Gallimard and Song. The play itself begins in the present with Gallimard, a French diplomat who has been incarcerated in a Beijing prison. He relives his fantasies for the past with his perfect woman and shares his experience with the readers throughout the remainder of the play. Upon Gallimard’s arrival in China, he attends the opera and meets Song, and Gallimard immediately describes Song as his “butterfly”. Gallimard falls in love with the “delicate Oriental woman” that Song portrays (22). He then buys into the Western male stereotype that Eastern women need protection by strong, masculine Western men. Gallimard ends up falling in love with Song and has an affair with her to fulfill the stereotypical idea of a dominant Western male controlling an Eastern woman. Throughout Gallimard’s relationship with Song, the readers discover that Song is in reality a male spy for the Chinese government. Song had manipulated his looks and actions to mirror those of the ideal Chinese woman in order to earn Gallimard’s affection. M. Butterfly’s main issue arises from the cultural stereotypes of the masculin...
More specifically, Durkheim concluded that each society has a specific inclination towards suicide that is made up of social currents which serve to influence individuals. It is important
In the Article, Ding Culture With Girls Like Me: Why Trying on Gender and Intersectionality Matters, by Susan Williams, Williams examines, outlines, and identifies how race, ethnicity, and class play a role in how girls try on gender, while also gathering information on the intersectional and experimental aspects of the process. She highlights diversity of girl’s experiences to strengthen the ability to asses ways in which societies participate in gender. Williams does this by identifying and highlighting the way girls do gender, examining intersectionality through her concept of trying-on gender, and by including cross-over literature to show how girls make a multi-constructed sense of self. Through this process Williams was able to find that
To lead off, people who disagree say colleges lose money through sports. Those not in favor state University of Michigan football won the Big Ten Conference in the 1998-1999 season and their ticket and apparel sales skyrocketed (College Athletics Programs). Despite their success, they still lost $3.8 million in their athletic department for the year. This is significant because they had a great winning season and a jump in sales but they still lost money that led to the school losing money. The opposition also points out that college athletics cause unneeded scandals for the college university. In 1998, the NCAA penalized Texas Tech for letting a star running back play even though he had a GPA of 0.0 (Sports in America: Recreation, Business, Education, and Controversy). This tells us that some programs do not care about the education side of college athletics. Opponents state that college athletics programs make regular students help fund the athletics programs. Around sixty percent of all Division I colleges have a fee for students to help fund the sports program (College Athletics Programs). This is important because it shows schools make students help pay for the sports programs, which is bad for the students that don’t want anything to do with sports programs, or that may be in