바르트적 글쓰기로 『M. 버터플라이』 읽기: 신화의 재해석

The aim of this paper is to examine M. Butterfly by Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang focusing on the image of stereotyped Oriental woman as demure and submissive, on the basis of ‘myth’ of Roland Barthes who was a French literary theorist, critic, and semiotician. As a matter of fact, a lot of studies on imperialistic factors on M. Butterfly have been considered as the main themes of this major work of Hwang and as for me, I am not willing to deny the views of Edward Said’s critical-theory field of post-colonialism. As Hwang said, the main plot of this play was drawn from a notorious scandal involving a Chinese male spy and a French diplomat which indeed occurred during the Vietnamese War in the 1960s but came to the light in 1986. The author said that he wanted to break the back of the story and find some angles which compelled him to set make a new story twisting the Western fantasy about Eastern World as represented in Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly. But this new story which I think supposes empty space forcing the readers and audiences to read and create new kinds of fantasies may offer us not only a new story but also a text that should be filled with other myths. As Barthes insisted, the text is merely the form of language which is formed by the effect of a simple need of writing and it is the role of the readers to write another text. In M. Butterfly, Hwang tries to persuade the readers and audiences to break the established fantasies which the Orient means just a woman submissive, modest and shy. In this process, Hwang did try “writing Degree Zero” which helped the readers and audiences write another text breaking Western alibi about submissive Eastern aspects and I guess this shrewd trick has produced some appreciable results.