Life as Art Pretending to be Life: The Role of Acting as Portrayed in M. Butterfly and Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Nicholas Lansen

Professor Steven Wexler

13 October 2008

Life as Art Pretending to be Life:
The Role of Acting as Portrayed in M. Butterfly and Breakfast at Tiffany’s

There is a measure of pretense we accept as part of our daily routine: we put on clothes that we hope will exude the image we desire, we engage in polite conversation as we edit out our personal details, we create chance encounters to ask favors of others. As a society, we understand there is some value in an amount of acting, though what can be made of a life of pretense? Both Song in M. Butterfly and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s shape themselves and are perceived by others based on the identities they create.

M. Butterfly’s Song is the paragon of womanhood, an actor in the Chinese opera who charms a French diplomat, Gallimard, into falling in love with her. She seems to do this not only with her delicate gestures or performing talents, but plays to Gallimard’s ego, making herself to appear to be very independent at first then implying that her weak heart desired to be submissive to a Western man. She also gives herself an air of mystique, as she keeps their meetings to only minutes at a time, leaving him always wanting more. Gallimard is only too happy to believe the elaborate ruse and eventually makes Song his wife for twenty years before finding out the truth: Song is not really a woman at all, but a male informant to the Chinese government.

In a similar way, Holly Golightly can be argued as having more feminine charm than physique. She is constantly the life of the party but is often described by her rather boyish figure with a “face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman” (Breakfast 12). Holly creates a mystery about herself much like Song does, never allowing most people to pin her down long enough to get to learn who she is. She leaves everyone to piece together her identity for themselves which attracts them even more while having the added effect of implying their own desires to her character. In this way, others create what they want to see.

In the two works, both character’s identities make them into the objects of those around them. Song makes an interesting claim when talking to a comrade asking “Why in Bejing opera are women’s roles traditionally played by men? …It’s because only a man knows how a woman is supposed to act” (M. Butterfly 49). Song claims an aspect of feminism to his character when he allows Gallimard to “define [a] woman not in herself but as relative to him” (Beauvoir). He showers the Frenchman with compliments for his high position as well as his great masculinity. Gallimard, in return, creates for himself the ideal woman, a delicate flower in need of protection. In this way, Song was able to retrieve sensitive government information and evade any suspicion saying that men will believe what they want to hear, no matter how preposterous.

The very measured actions made by Song help us to understand how Holly is also objectified. When Holly allows others to piece together her identity, she embarks on the first step of becoming an object of consumption. “In order to become an object of consumption, the object must become [a] sign” (Baudrillard 418). Others draw conclusions about her rather arbitrarily, separating her true self from the equation and creating a meaning based upon the assumptions (object-signs) made about her. She becomes everything to everyone but is not concretely anything to anyone.

We discussed this idea in relation to our conceptions of Michael Jordan. In the public eye, Jordan has been crafted into an icon of the perfect athlete, a player with not only great skill on the court but also can be associated with traits defining masculinity and Americanism. We create an abstraction out of a real person and end up consuming the things we may imagine about the person rather than anything related to who they really are. This same abstraction was discussed by Counting Crows lead man, Adam Duritz, when asked how he felt about making the cover of Rolling Stone in the 1990’s. He tried to explain that the fame was not something he could really comment on because he felt it was something being done to him rather than something he had done to deserve.

For many performers and particularly for Song and Holly, a person becomes so accustomed to acting that it becomes hard to distinguish an identity apart from it. Shunned in his country as a homosexual, Song finds that he cannot go back to Gallimard either, who has reserved himself to live in the past with the imaginary Butterfly he remembers. Initially thinking himself free from the confines of gender constructions, he finds it difficult to claim either masculinity or femininity for his identity. Holly also becomes plagued by the character she’s created when she is told that that character is incompatible with someone Jose Yberra-Jaegar would be able to marry (Breakfast 99). Defeated, she still fleas to Brazil to escape testifying in court. One could only hope that, with time, a new identity can be crafted so that life can be enjoyed for what it is and not for what is seems to be.

Works Cited

Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. New York: Random House, 1958.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998.

Beauvoir, Simone de. “Introduction: Woman as Other,” The Second Sex. 28 Jan 2006. Marxists.org. 13 Oct. 2008. <http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/de-beauvoir/2nd-sex/introduction.htm>

Baudrillard, Jean. “The System of Objects.” 408-418.