Word: gallimard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Hwang attacks cultural and social prejudices such as these in his account of the demise of Rene Gallimard, a French consul living in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution of the '60s. The plot is based on a true story of an affair between a French diplomat and a Chinese actress that became public in 1986 with expected notoriety. The Chinese actress, who supposedly bore the diplomat's child, was, in fact, both...
Inversions of sexual stereotypes have been used as an artistic device before. The most notable example occurs in the movie, The Crying Game, where the leading character is an IRA terrorist. Here, in M. Butterfly, Gallimard falls in love with a man that embodies his vision of what an ideal woman should...
Somebody like Genet, I feel, is basically irrecuperable; you can't co-opt, you can't normalize, recuperate him. There's this biography and he exists in Gallimard's Ouvre Complete, all that stuff, but the truth is that people in the provinces still don't buy Genet, he'll never be taught in schools. Bourgeois women, who are most readers, can't read him or don't want to. I think it's really always going to remain like that. There's no way he's going to ever really fit in. I don't think my works...
...bitter penultimate scene, which involves a confrontation between Song and Gallimard--both wearing suits--is also particularly fine, hinting at the power the stage version must have...
...fooled, though. The force of this exchange only lasts a few minutes until we're asked to witness a ludicrous closing episode at the French prison where Gallimard has been incarcerated for betraying state secrets. In this scene, Gallimard displays his final transformation from a sexist imperialist into a transvestite performance artist. The inmates seem charmed. But then they--unlike you--don't really have anywhere else...