Madame Butterfly

Both Butterfly and Pinkerton, the female and male leads of the play, engage in acts of Infidelity in Love and Faith. In Act 1, Pinkerton plans his future infidelity and clearly does not marry Butterfly in good faith. Before the wedding ceremony, he talks with Sharpless about his “real wedding day” (74), when he will marry an American. Pinkerton does not consider his marriage to Butterfly “real,” or worthy of fidelity and devotion. He is, however, consistent in doing what he tells Sharpless he intends to do. Pinkerton is honest with another man from his country, but not with his wives, which illustrates not only Pinkerton’s discriminatory nationalism, but also his sexism.  

On the other hand, Butterfly abandons her faith and family in order to commit fully to her marriage. She is honest with Pinkerton about this, saying, “[I]n order to please you / I shall try to forget my race and kindred” (84). She takes his name, calling herself, and insisting others call her, Mrs. Pinkerton after the wedding. She throws out her religious statues, or “Ottoke [...] souls of my forefathers” (84), which symbolizes her fidelity to Pinkerton as both an act of faith and an expression in cultural material. At first, her family is unaware of her conversion. While Butterfly is forthcoming about her new identity with her fiancé, she hides it from her relatives. However, when her uncle, the Bonze, arrives at the wedding, he tells their family: “She’s renounced, let me tell you, / Her true religion” (89). In return, the family renounces her, all saying together, “we renounce you” (90). By the end of Act 1, Butterfly only has her husband, his servants, and his friends. She sacrifices her past connections to be with him in the name of love. 

Another theme of Madam Butterfly is The Power of Love and Fate. Both Butterfly and Pinkerton believe that love and fate have power over them. Her first, offstage, lines include, “I’ve obeyed the summons, / The sweet summons of love” (74). Butterfly is introduced as a servant of love. Similarly, Pinkerton believes that he is also subject to a larger power. He says, “True love or fancy, / I cannot tell you. All I know is, / She, with her innocent charm, has entranced me” (73). While he doubts that it is love that enthralls him, Pinkerton does claim to be under a spell. The contrast between Butterfly’s and Pinkerton’s approaches to marriage illustrates their conflicting opinions about love. Butterfly, at this point, seems to enjoy being subservient to love. She is willing to undergo religious conversion for Pinkerton, placing not only his god but also love itself above the religion of her ancestors. Meanwhile, Pinkerton still questions if it is even love he serves, or if it is simply lust.

Near the end of Act 1, Pinkerton and Butterfly discuss these differing conceptions of love, which foreshadows Butterfly’s death. Pinkerton asks her to tell him she loves him, and she replies that she “perhaps will not tell you / For fear she may die of her love” (92). Love, to Butterfly, is powerful enough to cause her death. However, Pinkerton argues that “love does not mean dying, / No, it’s living, and it smiles / Like a joy born in Heaven” (94). This statement turns out to be ironic when Butterfly dies by suicide because Pinkerton betrays her, arguably by living out his idea of love as “smiles,” or, in other words, collecting wives all over the globe. His abundance of “love” leads to her death from love.

The differing relationships that the characters have with fate also underlie the immanent tragedy of the narrative. Pinkerton aims to be more powerful than fate. In his mind, “Fate cannot crush” (72) the ideal “Yankee” (72). Like love, Butterfly believes she must serve fate. When telling Pinkerton that she is converting to his religion, she says, “My fate I have to follow” (84). Sharpless, too, believes in the omnipotence of fate as he describes the meeting of Pinkerton and Butterfly as destiny. Sharpless says, “Fate has let you gather / A flower hardly opened” (80). In other words, Sharpless believes that Pinkerton is lucky, rather than more powerful than fate, to have found such a young bride. Who controls and who is controlled by fate is ultimately related to the context of colonization and Orientalism of the play.

A third theme that is developed over the course of the play is Cultural Conflict and Exotification. As part of his goal to be more powerful than fate, Pinkerton wants to have a wife in every port he travels to while in the Navy. He says, “the Yankee travels [...] life is not worth living if he can’t win the fairest / Pearl of every country” (72). Pinkerton compares women to an expensive commodity—pearls. This act of exotification characterizes non-Western women as “unusual treasures” to be collected rather than individuals who deserve fidelity. Exotification is a specific trope of Orientalism, or the imitation of South/East Asian world in Western narratives—fiction and nonfiction alike. The reduction of national and cultural identity to a trope is not limited to Pinkerton’s American opinion of non-Westerners but can also be seen in Butterfly’s family’s reaction to Pinkerton. They call Pinkerton a “stranger from America! / A foreigner! A barbarian” (94), terms that are typically associated with Western characterizations of non-Westerners during the era of colonization. This shift in who calls who a “foreigner” or a “barbarian” is an important detail that would have not been missed by the Western audiences of the play’s early productions.

The Japanese screens in the Nagasaki house are an important symbol introduced in Act 1. Pinkerton is fascinated with this architectural feature, and says, “This house is so fragile / That it stands up by magic” (72), suggesting that the delicacy of the screens cannot provide a proper shelter without extraordinary assistance. In this way, the screens symbolize a cultural distinction between the “strong” West and the “mystical” East. The screens also symbolize Butterfly, not only her delicate nature, but also the way Pinkerton objectifies her. He says she “seems to have stepped down straight from a screen [...] from her background of varnish and lacquer” (73). To him, she is a beautiful “thing” to be purchased, like the house with screens. In this way, the symbol of screens also serves as a motif that develops the theme of Cultural Conflict and Exotification.

The symbol of the flower is also introduced in Act 1. Suzuki initially compares smiles to flowers: “A smile is like a flower” (70). More frequently, women—specifically Butterfly—are compared to flowers. When Sharpless asks about Butterfly’s beauty, Goro replies that she is “Fair as a garland / Of fragrant flowers” (73). Flowers symbolize beauty and beautiful women. Both flowers and screens are delicate, and Butterfly is delicate—that is, able to be broken by her love for an unfaithful man.  

Throughout the play, Puccini uses many comparisons, especially similes which further the connection made between women and flowers to women and nature more generally. For instance, the movements of women are compared to parts of nature (flora and fauna), and Goro says Butterfly and her female friends hustling to the house are “Like the wind in branches rustling” (74). Later, Pinkerton compares Butterfly’s actions to the actions of a small, cute animal. He says, “all her pretty movements / Are like a little squirrel’s” (92). The literary device of the simile—a direct comparison—points to the means by which women are not understood on their own, but only in relation to something else.