Selective Interest

Narrative and cultural gaps, and butterflies from New York to Nagasaki

Earlier this year, Zachary Woolfe wrote a story for the New York Times on Orientalism and appropriation in Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and Turandot, ostensibly pegged to a new production at Opera Philadelphia of the former (an announcement that Woolfe said “seems to apologize for the production’s very existence”); one of several productions of Butterfly in recent years that had brought Asian and feminist perspectives to the stagings—or, in Woolfe’s words, “anxiously adjusted” to fit the discourse.

Woolfe was correct to point out that Puccini was hardly endorsing the imperialism of B.F. Pinkerton (who leases both a Japanese house and a Japanese wife on a generous month-to-month basis, treating both with about as much consideration as one would a toilet scrubber) as his male lead. Even still, as Woolfe also points out, “even sympathetic depictions of cultural ‘others’ can participate in stereotyping them.”