Madama Butterfly: Who Gets to Keep Their American Dream?

The plot of Puccini's Madama Butterfly is simple: American naval officer buys house in Japan and marries Japanese geisha, who in turn casts away her religion and culture and converts to Christianity to be his "American wife." She is swiftly abandoned by her beloved husband, and after three years, learns that he has remarried an American woman. Despite bearing his child, she is still not seen as his legitimate wife, so she decides the child will have a better life being raised in America. She kills herself rather than live without her husband and child.

Boy meets girl. Girl bears his child. Boy cheats. Girl kills herself.

At a glance, this is a story of heartbreak and tragedy. However, when contextualized, it becomes clear that it is actually the tale of a woman whose identity damns her. Cio-cio-san, or Madama Butterfly, pigeonholed into a profession that values her only for her submission and beauty, excels and finds the richest American who has come to her village. Even better, he loves her! Everything she has been taught is coming true: be beautiful, patient, and submissive, and you will have a rich husband and a happy marriage. In most cultures as we know, the woman casts off her surname to take the man's; in this way she joins his family. Cio-cio goes one step further (over-achiever that she is) and converts to Christianity for her husband. She is willing to do anything for this man.

How is she repaid for this? As though she were a souvenir left in a theme park tram. Her devotion continues; she will not take another husband, she will not re-convert, she will stay faithful to her American husband. As her friends and family watch her life dissolve into decrepitude, she refuses their help, determined that he will return to her. She refuses the proposal of a prince, the advice of her closest friend: nothing can get through to her.

She has bought the American Dream. The dream that tells us if you work hard and think big, anything is possible. The dream that tells us love is forever and that patience is a virtue. The dream that spins the wheel of capitalism and that bigger is better and keep hanging in there.

Cio-cio is love-blind; in love with her American husband, her American life, and her American dream. The only thing she loves more is her son, the living part of her husband who she hasn't seen in three long years. So when she sees his ship sailing in to the harbor, she's filled with the joy and rapture of a woman who knows she was right and you were wrong- her husband, she thinks, faithful all this time, has returned to her.

There is a special kind of hurt when you are betrayed beyond your wildest imagination.

Though he has in fact returned, her husband brings his American wife. Who then asks Cio-cio whether she might take Cio-cio's son with her back to America.

It is no wonder Cio-cio kills herself; she has abided by every law she has ever known. She was beautiful. She was submissive. She was patient. And it all still fell apart. Why? Because she wasn't born in the right place, the right color, in the right socio-economic class. Of course he could never have taken their marriage seriously; she was sold to him like an exotic fruit you try because When in Rome, do as the Romans do. No matter what she could have done, he was always going to leave her for a true American wife. Ultimately, her suffering means nothing to this American naval officer; he'll never understand her years of gazing at the sea waiting for his ship to enter the harbor. He'll never know how her family ostracized her for converting, or the havoc he wreaked upon their village. He'll never know how she heard robins sing every spring and thought of him.

This is the message of Madama Butterfly, the real tragedy: what was a little vacation fun for a rich white man was the beginning and end of a less fortunate woman of color.

Audience reactions have varied so much, but the anger towards Cio-cio is always unparalleled. Why didn't she get out? Audiences want to know. Why didn't she remarry when she had a chance, do anything besides wait for someone who clearly didn't care for her? It is their way of trying to cope and make sense of a situation seen far too often, in history and today: a woman of color taken advantage of by a man, simply because he could. A woman of color who sacrifices everything, and gets nothing in return. A woman of color who watches her American Dream float away.

It is not the suicide or the love story that connects the Legend of the Singing River to Madama Butterfly, but the prevailing theme of the sacrifices disadvantaged peoples have made to chase their bliss. It is an especially pertinent moment in our nation's history to produce this, in a time where tiki torches are lit and white hoods are donned in "protest," without fear, and indigenous peoples are tear gassed for protecting their sacred lands from being defiled by oil pipelines. We must tell the story of the largest undammed river in America, a natural phenomenon on par with the Everglades and Grand Canyon, and how it has survived the logging and oil industry that has taken Pascagoula by the throat. We must tell the story of a woman of color who knows only her life in her house by the river, and how a grinning white man with deep pockets comes to town and takes it all away.

We must tell this story because it is not the far fetched tragedy audiences see in traditional tellings of Madama Butterfly, it is the reality that countless indigenous peoples and people of color have faced in America, and continue to have the seeds and dried petals of their own American dreams rooted out.

We must tell this story to hear the melody sang by the Pascagoula natives and know it as a familiar refrain, not a rudimentary chant indiscernible to modern ears.

We must tell this story.