<i>The Shanghai Gesture</i>: Melodrama and Modern Women in the East/West Romance

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. US anti-Asian sentiments came out of labor competition between immigrant Asian workers and white workers and resulted in US passing a series of racially discriminatory laws of exclusion and anti-naturalization to prevent Asians from becoming assimilated as Americans unlike many other European migrants. 2. David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly is a critical revision of Madame Butterfly that explicitly foregrounds the gendered power dynamics in the cultural and political relationship between Asia and the West. Hwang dismantles the Western stereotype of Asiatic femininity on multiple levels by replacing Cio-Cio San with Song Liling, an Asian man masquerading as a woman. Colleen Lye's reassessment of gender politics in Hwang's M. Butterfly points to Madame Butterfly as a culturally assumed racist stereotype of the submissive Asian woman. So ingrained is this stereotype within U.S. popular culture that Hwang himself invokes the stereotype without knowing its history; he did not even know what the play Madame Butterfly was about but only knew that the phrase “pulling a Butterfly” referenced the stereotype of the docile and submissive Asian woman. Lye additionally argues that Madame Butterfly does contain a political critique of the relationship between Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San. Colleen Lye, “M. Butterfly and the Rhetoric of Antiessentialism,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo-Liu, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1995: 260-289. 3. Albert Auster, Actresses and Suffragists: Women in the American Theatre 1890-1920. New York: Praeger, 1987: 41. 4. E. Ann Kaplan, Mothering and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. New York: Routledge, 1992: 76-106. For further discussion on how the female melodrama both controls and ignites female desire, see Christine Gledhill, ed. Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and Women's Film. London: British Film Institute, 1987. 5. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Minnelli and Melodrama.” Christine Gledhill, ed. Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and Women's Film. London: British Film Institute, 1987: 39. 6. Chester M. Franklin's Toll of the Sea (1922), starring Anna May Wong, a feature length film production shot in two-strip Technicolor, used a similar story line to that of Madame Butterfly, in which Lotus Flower (Wong), a young woman, falls in love with a sailor Allen Carver (Kenneth Harlan) who ultimately abandons her. 7. “Cio-Cio San the Geisha,” A Vision of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly. Toronto: U of Toronto P. 2006: 36-58. 8. Amy Kaplan argues that early U.S. imperialist territorializations of non-contiguous countries such as the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawai’i in addition to the influx of immigrants from Europe and Asia, challenged the Anglocentric vision of the U.S. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. 9. In many ways, Madame Butterfly's appearance a decade or so after Loti's Madame Chrysanthéme is effectively read as a criticism masculinity in the East/West liaison. The story of Madame Butterfly is thus a dramatization of a specific problem of white male colonial behavior in Asia, mainly the entitlement of white males to take native women as temporary companions. Not only does the resulting taint of interracial sexual contact lead to domestic problems, but it also leads to a general crisis of masculinity. The play, in showing Pinkerton and his friend Sharpless as “Ugly Americans” shirking responsibility and behaving dishonestly in both their domestic and colonial affairs, expresses a sentimentalized and nostalgic desire for a lost chivalric masculinity. Despite the double standard that allows Pinkerton and Sharpless to cross-racial boundaries, albeit temporarily, Cio-Cio San is the sole heroic character. Consequently, Cio-Cio San's victimization criticizes a white masculinity within a specific colonial setting of western encroachment of the east. 10. Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism. New York: Oxford UP, 2003: 78. 11. Yoshihara argues that these Orientalist roles were not necessarily viewed as authentic. For example, one critic in reviewing Madame Butterfly and other melodramas centered on Japan and Japanese women derided the lofty and ostentatious translation of Japanese into English. In addition, Yoshihara argues that white actresses were fully aware of performing these Japanese female roles inauthentically in order to accentuate the polarity between white and Asiatic femininity. 12. John Colton, The Shanghai Gesture: A Play (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926): 189. All further references are to this edition. 13. Ibid., 56-57. 14. Ibid., 165. 15. Ibid., 204. 16. See Susan McClary, “Mounting Butterfly,” Visions of the Orient: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts of Madame Butterfly, 21-35. McClary rereads the play and opera as a performance of female victimization intended to make men responsible. In a close reading of the libretto, McClary describes Pinkerton's brimming desire for Cio-Cio San, a desire expressed as an urgency without empathy of love. McClary fuses images of rape and impaling, such as Pinkerton's comparison of Cio-Cio San to the mounted butterflies on his office walls at home (pinned and frozen between glass), his symbolic impaling of her through sex, and her suicide. 17. Colton, 135. 18. Interestingly, both Rain and The Shanghai Gesture did very well on stage during the 1920s at the veritable height of the Jazz Age; but in the 1930s, both Nine Pine Street and Saint Wench were box office failures. It may point to the specific moment in which Colton's earlier plays captured the essence of a particular New Woman and flapper sensibility during the 1920s that was impossible during the Depression Era. Colton's Rain, which was based on Somerset Maugham's short story “Rain” continued to adapt and transfer well from theatre to film. It played onstage throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s with top billed female stars such as Gloria Swanson, who also starred in Raoul Walsh's 1928 silent film version of Rain, entitled Sadie Thompson. Later came Lewis Milestone's sound film version of Rain, under the story's original title, with Joan Crawford as Sadie in 1932. 19. Ibid., 163. 20. Ibid., 204 21. Review of The Shanghai Gesture, New York Times, 1925, D 20. 22. J. Brooks Atkinson, Review of The Shanghai Gesture, New York Times, February 2, 1926, <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D0DE7DF163FEF33A25755C2A9649D946093D6CF&scp=3&sq=shanghai%20gesture&st=cse>. Accessed April 2, 2009. 23. Florence Reed was lauded for her role as Mother Goddam, and for producing one of the finest moments in 20th C. American theatre; see critic Ward Morehouse's comments at <http://www.answers.com/topic/florence-reed>;. Other actresses playing Mother Goddam included Leslie Carter who also appeared in John Colton's play Rain (1921). 24. Colton, 165–66. 25. Ibid., 214. 26. Colton, 34 27. Joseph Arthur de Count Gobineau theorized during the turn of the century that racial mixtures of white with yellow, red, or black could sometimes create extraordinary individuals with particular talents associated with those races. In general, while black, red, and yellow possess particular talents, whites excel in all areas, possessing the talents of all the other races and more. According to Gobineau, in the case of racial mixture, even with exemplary nonwhite races, the outcome usually exhibits the negative traits of both races. The more a population mixes racially, the greater the risk for increased racial degeneracy. Although many European and American racial theories concurred that nonwhite races are inferior, there was a hierarchy. Often this hierarchy was used as a justification for colonization, exclusionary immigration policies, and racism. In the United States, the different racial hierarchies rationalized slavery, exploitative labor and exclusion laws, and territorialization. There were also distinctions within Asian cultures, both immigrant and native. During the Qing dynasty, the Manchu were seen as royal racial stock and not common Chinese stock. Mother Goddam continually refers to herself as Manchu, establishing a parallel with Madame Butterfly's Japanese samurai ancestry. Joseph Arthur de Count Gobineau, “Recapitulation: The Respective Characteristics of the Three Great Races; the Superiority of the White Type, and, within this Type, of the Aryan Family,” in Mixed Race Studies: A Reader, ed. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe. New York: Routledge, 2004: 39–41. 28. Colton, 253. 29. Ibid., 234. 30. Ibid., 253. 31. Ibid., 253. 32. Ibid., 252–253. 33. Pressburger and von Sternberg's 1942 film The Shanghai Gesture was written without input or permission from Colton. Colton filed a lawsuit against Pressburger and von Sternberg shortly after the film was released and settled in court a few years later. Colton v. United Artists Corporation, Arnold Pressburger, et al., June 22, 1942. 34. Frank Miller, “The Shanghai Gesture,” Turner Classic Movies, n.d., <http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article.jsp?cid=25854&mainArticleId=136002>. 35. Bosley Crowther, review of The Shanghai Gesture. The New York Times December 26, 1941, <http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9D0DE7DF163FEF33A25755C2A9649D946093D6CF&scp=3&sq=shanghai%20gesture&st=cse>. Accessed April 2, 2009. 36. John Colton, Memo to Hays Office, January 7, 1941. 37. Production Code Administration, Letter to New York Governor Carl E. Milliken, January 22, 1942. The letter tells Milliken what has changed in the story from the stage to the screen. 38. Josef von Sternberg, The Shanghai Gesture, Universal Pictures, 1941. All further references are to this version. 39. John Colton to Hays Office, Revised script submission, March 8, 1932. 40. Hays Office, Letter to Mr. Harry D. Buckley of United Artists Corporation, January 29, 1942.

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