Major Themes

M. Butterfly explores Western stereotypes concerning Asians and the preconceptions affecting national, racial, and East-West tensions and issues of gender and sexual identity. Hwang has described his play as a “deconstructivist” revision of Madama Butterfly, and critics have asserted that Hwang's dismantling of dominant Western notions of race and gender exposes these ideas to scathing critique. Hwang utilizes such postmodern theatrical techniques as nonlinear narrative, direct address to the audience, and unique staging to dramatize the intersecting discourses of race, gender, nation, and sexuality that infuse his play. On one level, the work functions as an examination of the phenomenon of “Orientalism, ” which encompasses a broad spectrum of Western attitudes, prejudices, and stereotypes regarding Asian people, cultures, and nations. In the play, Gallimard's willingness to accept Song as a woman is a natural extension of his perceptions of Asian men as feminized creatures. Further, Gallimard's stereotyping of Asian women as passive, subservient, and modest makes it possible for Song to live as his wife without being discovered as a man, despite the couple's intimate relationship. Gallimard's Western “colonial” attitudes concerning Asian culture are at the heart of his relationship with Song. many commentators, and Hwang himself, have maintained that the play seeks to cut through layers of sexual and cultural misperception on both sides, and attempts to foster respectful relationships that are for the common good. In a different vein, M. Butterfly critiques traditional notions of gender by featuring a central character, Liling, who is biologically a man, but who succeeds in living as a woman for over twenty years. In the conclusion of the play, Gallimard dresses himself as a woman and commits suicide in a manner stereotypically associated with women—by stabbing his heart with a dagger. The ending has been interpreted by some critics as an assertion that gender is not necessarily an innate biological phenomenon, but a “socially constructed” identity which may be assumed by members of either sex.

30. T.Morrison Recitatif. The use of stereotypes.

Toni Morrison (Chloe Ardelia Wofford) finally made African Americans get rid from the “Uncle Tom complex” and proved in her writing that black skin is her real dignity. She wrote mostly novels, “Recitatif” is her only published short story. And this essay is dedicated to the main ideas conflicts of the book. In this short story the lives of two female friends, Twyla and Roberta, from their childhood in St. Bonaventure to the adulthood are described. Morrison gives us a hint that they are of different races, but she never says “who is who”, the reader may only guess about that through a number of characteristic features like class, physical traits, and social rituals such as food preferences. “Recitatif” is a unique story, because all the racial markers and codes are removed from the narrative. That`s why, it is not a surprise that the readers are confused and interested in the question: “Which girl is white and which is black? ”

The title alludes to a style of musical declamation that hovers between song and ordinary speech; it is used for dialogic and narrative interludes during operas and oratories. The term " recitatif" also once included the now-obsolete meaning, " the tone or rhythm peculiar to any language." Both of these definitions suggest the story's episodic nature, how each of the story's five sections happens in a register that is different from the respective ordinary lives of its two central characters, Roberta and Twyla. The story's vignettes bring together the rhythms of two lives for five, short moments, all of them narrated in Twyla's voice. The story is, then, in several ways, Twyla's " recitatif."

Morrison gives many examples of stereotypes in her short story " Recitatif." The narrator, Twyla, describes her roommate of " a whole other race, " Roberta, as being of a race that " never washed their hair" and " smelled funny." But her initial reaction, which plays on readers' ideas about other races (stereotypes), is supplemented by many other details of both Roberta's and her life.

Twyla later thinks, " Everything is so easy for them. They think they own the world." The " them" in this quote is in reference to the " other" race, meaning either blacks or whites, whichever race Twyla is not.

Morrison plays on readers' ideas of common racial stereotypes: which race (white or black) is rich or poor, which race eats certain kinds of food (like chicken, or gourmet food), which race is more likely to be Christian, which race is more likely to be mentally ill, to be a dancer, to be a bad mother, to be institutionalized, to wear certain types of clothing, to work certain types of jobs (like waitress), to protest school integration via busing, to have a chauffeur, to marry into a good family, to marry a divorced man with four children, to have a certain figure (big as a man or with a pronounced rear end), to like certain kinds of music (Jimi Hendrix), to have certain kinds of hair (like Roberta's, which Twyla comments on more than once), or even to wear a fur coat.

These are just a few of the many stereotypes the story discusses. And many of these stereotypes might fit both races or might not really mark race at all. Instead, they might be stereotypes about socioeconomic class.