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Madame Butterfly and Men of Empire

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Madame Butterfly and Men of Empire MADAME BUTTERFLY AND MEN OF EMPIRE: STEREOTYPING AND TRAUMA IN 20TH CENTURY NOVELS Sandra Lyne Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Creative Writing The University of Adelaide April 2017 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………..v Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………..vi Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: Fin de Siècle Moral Anxiety, Conflicted Masculinity, and Asian Child-women ....................................................................................................... 45 Chapter Two: Perpetrator Trauma and the Scarred Asian Woman in Fifth Daughter and The Exposed ………………………………………………………….75 Chapter Three: Mysogyny, Anxiety and the Love of Men in Sayonara………………………………………………………………………………113 Chapter Four: Korean War Novels: Valhalla………………………………………153 Chapter FIve: The Emperor's General and The Sexual Occupation of Japan: Vietnam………………………………………………………………………………..191 Chapter Six:Turn of the Millennium Nostalgia for Empire and Writing Back in the New Fin de Siècle.............................................................................................. 237 Conclusion ......................................................................................................... 262 Endnotes………………………………………………………………………………273 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………...282 iii I certify that this work contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in my name, in any university or other tertiary institution and, to the best of my knowledge and belief, contains no material previously published or written by another person, except where due reference has been made in the text. In addition, I certify that no part of this work will, in the future, be used in a submission in my name, for any other degree or diploma in any university or other tertiary institution without the prior approval of the University of Adelaide and where applicable, any partner institution responsible for the joint-award of this degree. I give consent to this copy of my thesis, when deposited in the University Library, being made available for loan and photocopying, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I also give permission for the digital version of my thesis to be made available on the web, via the University’s digital research repository, the Library Search and also through web search engines, unless permission has been granted by the University to restrict access for a period of time. 13th July 2017 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my primary supervisor, Dr Dianne Schwerdt, for reading and dissecting, with such concentrated attention, many drafts of this thesis during a long research phase, and for keeping me on a straight course through a sea of endless possibilities. She attended to the human as well as technical aspects implicit in research projects, and was tough on nonsense and unclear expression. I am also grateful for Dr Rosemary Moore's inspiration and insight earlier in my candidature and while I was an undergraduate. It was a privilege to study with this woman of literature. I owe Dr Philip Butterss a similar debt of gratitude for giving me generous administrative and moral support while managing so many other academic duties. I also acknowledge that my family graciously endured my bookish absences and academic obsessions while I wrote this thesis, and that the occupants of Napier 602 at The University of Adelaide were wonderful companions. I must mention, also, the loving care with which anonymous owners of obscure bookshops throughout America wrapped out-of-print, crumbling paperback originals, some smelling of cigarette smoke from the post-WWII and Korean war periods, in layers of cardboard and newspaper so they arrived unscathed to be part of my research. Finally, I would like to express my thanks to the librarians whose meticulous skills make so many out-of-print resources available online, and have made this research project possible. v ABSTRACT While most research has rightfully focused on sexism and racism in 'Madame Butterfly' texts (Marchetti 1993; van Rij 2001; Morris 2002; Koshy 2004; Prasso 2005; Park 2010), this thesis argues that stereotypical protagonists and narrative themes from Puccini's fin de siècle opera, Madama Butterfly, reappeared after wars in Korea and Vietnam and in the first years of the new millennium as prototypes for two traumatic, sub-textual 'ghosts' suppressed in public discourses: an 'unmanly', psychologically- wounded Western subject-as-perpetrator, and a scarred Asian woman, the civilian victim of Western atomic and incendiary weapons, an almost un-representable figure. This thesis draws on a variety of fields, including literary trauma theory (Mandel 2006; Weaver 2010; Visser 2011; Balaev 2015), military masculinity studies and social psychology. It examines, in close readings within cultural, historical contexts, the synergies between trauma and moral (thèmis) conflict represented in a selection of twentieth century 'Madame Butterfly' narratives, primarily by ex-military writers, at three significant moments in history: firstly, 1880-1912; secondly, post-WWII from 1950-1980, including the Korean War (1950-1953) and the Vietnam Conflict; and, thirdly, from the 1990s to the early 2000s, the turn of the new millennium. 'Moral conflict' in this thesis refers to Shay's definition of thèmis as 'just order' or 'what is right' (Achilles in Vietnam 5) and to the idea that a disjuncture between thémis and experience can cause psychological damage (Shay Odysseus in America 33). Examples of novels representing this disjuncture include Fifth Daughter by Hal Gurney (1957), Jere Peacock's Valhalla (1961), James Webb's The Emperor's General (1999), and Anthony Swofford's Exit A (2007). vi The examination of twentieth-century reconstructions of Madama Butterfly's gendered and racist stereotypes in these novels has found evidence supporting Gilman's notion (in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness) that stereotyping reveals much about the fears and anxieties of those producing the stereotypes, that 'pathology' in human cognition stems from 'disorder and loss of control, the giving over of the self to the forces that lie beyond the self' (Gilman 24), to trauma. This thesis examines the notion that Madame Butterfly stereotypes and themes allowed veterans 'to write about the war' for an uncomprehending public, as did Salinger in Catcher in the Rye. Along the way, the thesis also attempts to understand why Western men should have maintained such an emotional attachment to a quaint fin de siècle literary figure for an entire century. 1 INTRODUCTION In the decades after WWII, Western male writers such as James Webb, John Hollands, Hal Gurney and Jere Peacock constructed novels based on their own experiences in Japan, drawing on narrative structures and protagonist roles from Giacomo Puccini's opera, Madama Butterfly, the best-known version of the Madame Butterfly narrative in the Western world. Still in popular repertoire today, the opera was first performed in 1904 in Milan,1 then at Covent Garden in 1905, the US in 1906, and Australia in 1912 (The Metropolitan Opera 2016). Most twentieth-century novelists engaging with Madame Butterfly conventions and characters had spent time in Japan during the Occupation and wars in Korea and Vietnam, when it was a Rest and Recreation (R and R) base.2 The writers appear to have had in mind Madama Butterfly's personification of the Japanese 'geisha' or, more correctly, 'mousmé', a term that French writer, Fleet Officer and adventurer Pierre Loti, alias Julien Viaud, used in his novel/travelogue Madame Chrysanthème (1887) to describe an extremely young girl in the Japanese sex trade who was available for temporary 'marriage' to foreigners in treaty ports such as Nagasaki and Yokohama. Between 1880 and 1914, Viaud wrote novels based on his exploits overseas. He adopted the nom-de plume, 'Pierre Loti', and used it in real life, underlining the close connections between himself and the narrator of his texts, so that his novels may be regarded as not just fictional works, but travelogues embellished with exotic details. Puccini's and his librettists' operatic narrative was the culmination of a process of adaptation building on Loti/Viaud's novel, Madame Chrysanthème, a jaded account of Loti's temporary treaty port 'marriage' during his short sojourn in Nagasaki in the summer 2 of 1885. 3 Many critics, such as Groos, Liao, Marchetti, and Koshy, have traced the Butterfly narrative's evolution from Loti's travelogue into its operatic form during a twenty-year period straddling the turn of the twentieth century. In the second text of importance in this evolution, Madame Butterfly (1898), a short story, John Luther Long borrowed key elements from Loti's Madame Chrysanthème and wove them into an anecdote brought back from Japan by his sister. In this anecdote, a deserted and pregnant mousmé in Nagasaki attempts suicide when abandoned by a Western man. In Long's story, an American, Lieutenant B.F. (Benjamin Franklin) Pinkerton, grossly exploits and neglects the female protagonist, now called Madame Butterfly rather than 'Miss Chrysanthemum' (Kikou-san). Thus, Loti's male character becomes a perpetrator inflicting moral harm on his victim, who, in turn, becomes a devoted and loving feminine ideal in a morality tale, rather than
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