To Shock or Not to Shock?

Reading M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang would have been a completely different experience had Hwang kept Song’s true gender a secret. Letting the audience know that Song is really a man makes the audience very critical of Gallimard. Every time Song does a little something to keep Gallimard from finding out he is a man, the audience questions how Gallimard cannot see through the ruse. For example, when Song/Butterfly tells Gallimard that he/she is pregnant I wanted to know how Gallimard could have possibly believed that. In order for Butterfly to be pregnant with his baby they would have had to have sex. They clearly could not have had sex.

If the audience had not known Song was a man, there could have been a much bigger climax to the play. To reveal something like that to an audience that was not expecting it would be huge. Hwang’s choice in not doing this shows that he did not want to shock his audience, but instead make them analyze the relationship between Song and Gallimard. Instead of making the audience gasp in shock he makes the audience cringe at Gallimard’s blindness.

It is also interesting how the characters speak directly to the audience as well as to each other outside of the story. If the audience had not known about Song’s true gender, this way of storytelling would not have worked. Hwang would not have been able to use the flashback structure to the same effect had the audience not known right away that Song is a man. However, since the audience does already know what happens to Gallimard at the end, he is able to talk to them directly about it, as well as to Song about how to tell the story. It was interesting to read this interaction, but I would really like to see it performed on stage to get the full effect.