Deception in Importance of Being Earnest and M.Butterfly Essay Example

wo face quality Another point: The play’s title can be deceptive. Rather than a form of the name Ernest, the title implies earnestness as a quality one should seek to acquire, as in being honest, sincere, sober, and serious. •M. Butterfly > Song deceived Gallimard for the entirety of the play- He pretends to be an Asian woman and manipulates Gallimard to fall in love with her. This leads to Song’s ability to spy for the Chinese government. She keeps up this deception for over 20 years until eventually she gets caught by the french government.

The diplomat apparently became aware of the deception only in 1986, when he was charged by the French government with treason—it transpired that his companion had been an agent for the Chinese government, and had passed on sensitive political information that he had acquired from the diplomat. The singer spies on Gallimard for the Chinese government, using Gallimard's own fantasies of submissive oriental femininity to deceive and manipulate him. But Gallimard, now free of twenty years of illusion, tells Song to leave.

Scene 3 returns to Gallimard’s cell, in the present. To the audience, he reasserts the vision of love that he had, of the perfect Oriental woman. But he realizes that it was he, not his beloved, who sacrificed everything and was be trayed. He puts on make-up, a wig, and a kimono, and rechristens himself Madame Butterfly. Then he plunges a knife into his body, committing suicide just as Butterfly does in the opera. Gallimard commits suicide and Song loses the adoration she has received her whole life. David Henry Hwang is commenting on Orientalism in this play.

He faults

the western way of clumping the orient all together and viewing the orient as inferior to the west. In addition, he comments on the powerplay and the way the east accepts this view and exemplifies the orientalism attributes. this way of thinking ends in tragedy for both sides. Weaving into the play many parallels with, and ultimately ironic reversals of, Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly, Hwang explores the stereotypes that underlie and distort relations between Eastern and Western culture, and between men and women.