impossible. It is this incomprehensibility, her incompatibility with US culture and, ultimately, US law which results in Cho-Cho-San’s destruction.
The heroine’s tragic end is prefigured in each version of Madame Butterfly with a legal contract that is beyond her comprehension: the contract establishing Pinkerton’s rental of the home and his marriage to Cho-Cho-San for a period of 999 years. What the audience is told via Pinkerton in all versions and what Cho-Cho-San does not grasp, however, is that Japanese law (according to Long, Belasco, and Puccini) allows Pinkerton to simply walk away from both the house and the marriage without penalty. Looking back to Long’s 1898 novella, for example, we find a detailed discussion of the legal terms that structure the purchase of Pinkerton’s wife and the rental of his home:
With the aid of a marriage-broker, he found both a wife and a house in which to keep her. This he leased for nine hundred and ninety-nine years. Not, he explained to his wife later, that he could hope for the felicity of residing there with her so long, but because, being a mere “barbarian,” he could not make other legal terms. He did not mention that the lease was determinable, nevertheless, at the end of any month, by the mere neglect to pay the rent.60
The metonymic relationship between Cho-Cho-San and the house is established by way of the legal contract. (By the time we get to the opera, this distinction is dissolved, and both the bride and house are rented for 999 years.) Pinkerton, for his part, is protected by his mastery of the law. Understanding the legal limits placed on him by his status as a foreign “barbarian,” Pinkerton manipulates this status to set up a seemingly permanent arrangement that is entirely predicated on his ability to walk away from the house and wife at any point.
The play begins after Pinkerton’s abandonment, and in the first scene, we find Cho-Cho-San pacing the stage and hemorrhaging the limited funds left to her care by her husband on a rent that is beyond her means. She does so believing that (a) she is required to keep up the 999-year lease signed by her husband in his absence because (b) the lease is proof (to her) of his intention to return home. As she declares in the opening scene, while Suzuki counts the dwindling amount of money they are left, “If he’s not come back to his house, why he sign Japanese lease for nine hundred and ninety-nine year for me to live?”61 Belasco inaccurately stages Japan as a state of capricious lawlessness, suggesting that it is the fact that Japanese society exists without the benefit and securities of the US legal contract, and not Pinkerton’s abandonment of Cho-Cho-San, that is the root of the tragedy.62 The burden of blame is further shifted onto the heroine, as she is responsible for ultimately failing to grasp her proper position with regard to national and juridical categories of ideal subjecthood. Put clearly, she fails to comprehend the fact that she is hardly a subject at all but more nearly an object for exchange between nations and men.
All three versions of Madame Butterfly include a crucial scene in which the abandoned Cho-Cho-San is given harsh advice by Sharpless, Pinkerton’s friend who remains concerned with her well-being. In his endeavor, the marriage broker (Gobo) and a Japanese suitor (Yamadori) accompany Sharpless. Each man encourages her to move on and marry again. They assure her that remarriage would be legal given her circumstances. As they attempt to explain to her that her marriage is not binding under Japanese law, Cho-Cho-San rejects their counsel, curiously insisting that she is not subject to Japanese law. She claims, instead, that she is a subject of US legal jurisdiction.
In the dramatic adaptation, the scene unfolds thus:
Yamadori: According to the laws of Japan, when a woman is deserted, she is divorced. (Madame Butterfly stops fanning and listens.) Though I have traveled much abroad, I know the laws of my own country.
Madame Butterfly: An’ I know laws of my husban’s country.
Yamadori: (To Sharpless) She still fancies herself married to the young officer. If your Excellency would explain . . .
Madame Butterfly: (To Sharpless) Sa-ey, when some one gettin’ married in America, don’ he stay marry?
Sharpless: Usually—yes.
Madame Butterfly: Well, tha’s all right. I’m marry to Lef-ten-ant B.F. Pik-ker-ton.
Yamadori: Yes, but a Japanese marriage!
Sharpless: Matrimony is a serious thing in America, not a temporary affair as it often is here.63
This exchange demonstrates the proper orientation of a national subject, which is embodied by the two men. The thoroughly Japanese Yamadori knows “the laws of [his] own country,” and the unflinchingly US American Sharpless knows the laws of his. That proper subjectivity is tied to gender is amplified by the fact that unlike Cho-Cho-San, Yamadori speaks impeccable English. Furthermore, Belasco hierarchically organizes Japanese marital legal conventions as inferior, lacking the “serious” nature of marriage in the United States. We also encounter an implicit critique of US imperialism as Sharpless suggests that marriage is “a serious thing” in the United States (effectively condemning the behaviors of his colleague Pinkerton, who has behaved as if it were not). This is less a critique of US imperialism than of its execution by irresponsible agents like Pinkerton. Sharpless stands in as the ideal model of how US empire should function; he is a stable and responsible moral authority. What is without a doubt, however, is that Cho-Cho-San is confused with regard to both, applying what she understands of US law to herself. Adopting the laws of her “husban’s country,” Cho-Cho-San disavows the laws of Japan, while failing to recognize that she would be completely illegible in the theater of US law.
Scene 2. The Scene of Exception in Puccini’s Opera
The heroine’s crisis is that from a legal and a cultural perspective, she makes no sense. She is neither Japanese nor US American, and within the rigidly segregated logic of the turn of the century, this makes her altogether impossible. This impossibility is temporarily negotiated by the heroine as she shuttles between subjecthood and an objecthood that Long describes as an Oriental curio: “After all, she was quite an impossible little thing, outside of lacquer and paint.”64 Her disavowal of her legal status as a Japanese subject and insistence on her impossible status as a US subject is even more explicit in the same scene in Puccini’s 1907 opera.
In Minghella’s 2006 production of Madama Butterfly, the “serious” nature of US law is counterpoised against the childlike and silly nature of Japanese law. In this scene, the characters inhabit a primarily empty stage, save a wall of white shoji screens behind them. Cio-Cio-San is clad in a preposterous kimono of shocking pink and neon green, and the other Japanese characters wear equally ridiculous colors and towering hats and flap fans as if they were chicken wings. Sharpless grounds the scene with the sobriety of a staid diplomat, wearing a professional, earth-toned suit, sitting patiently on a Western-style chair, as the Japanese characters argue over Cio-Cio-San’s legal status:
Gobo: But the law says.
Butterfly: (interrupting him) I know it not.
Gobo: (continuing) For the wife, desertion
Gives the right of divorce.
Butterfly: (shaking her head) That may be Japanese law,
But not in my country.
Gobo: Which one?
Butterfly: (with emphasis) The United States.
Sharpless: (Poor little creature!)65
The heroine’s confused legal status is emphasized as the “Star Spangled Banner” makes an appearance, flowing
