within the statute of limitations.) Justice Anthony Kennedy’s Supreme Court opinion in Nguyen v. INS affirmed the constitutionality of the law, counterintuitively arguing that the three-part bar—despite the fact that it made it three times easier for fathers (often US servicemen) to escape responsibility for illegitimate children born overseas—forwarded a legitimate government interest in the “facilitation of a relationship between parent [father] and child.”1
In a 2009 New York Times interview, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who was among the dissenting Justices) described Nguyen (and a similar case, Miller v. Albright) in terms that directly associated it with the legacy of US imperialism in Asia. In a surprise move, she did so by suggesting that the majority’s ruling was written under the sign of a popular Orientalist opera: “They [the majority] were held back by a way of looking at the world in which a man who wasn’t married simply was not responsible. There must have been so many repetitions of Madame Butterfly in World War II. And for Justice [John Paul] Stevens [who voted in the majority in Nguyen and penned the Miller opinion] that was part of his experience.”2 Ginsburg’s interview implies that the impact of Madame Butterfly extends beyond the proscenium arch, insinuating itself into the high court’s interpretation of the law. At the same time, she evidences the ways in which Western audiences regularly mistake the fiction of Madame Butterfly for a reality. As if the opera were a template for actually occurring incidents, she muses, “there must have been so many repetitions of Madame Butterfly.” Somewhere in the middle of Nguyen and Madame Butterfly, the difference between a legal reality and an onstage theatrical spectacle collapses.
In 1907, Giacomo Puccini premiered Madama Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.3 It is a tragic story of a Japanese bride in nineteenth-century Japan who is married to and ultimately abandoned by her US American husband, ending in the young bride’s suicide. Since its debut, Madama Butterfly has become a centerpiece of most major opera companies’ repertories, and by some accounts it is one of the most produced operas in the world. Due to its iconic and canonical status, Madama Butterfly has contributed significantly to the shaping of cultural stereotypes of Asian difference and Asian femininity. As such, the Butterfly narrative is a central critical object for the field of Asian American studies.4 But how is it that Madame Butterfly has come to influence the writing of American law, and in what surprising ways does the narrative itself function as a vessel for the transmission of knowledge produced about Asian racial difference in US law?
This chapter argues that the legal management of Asian and Asian American difference is not simply the historical background against which the various versions of Madame Butterfly were written but that the Butterfly narratives themselves function as agents for the law’s codification and transmission. Madame Butterfly is a product, manifestation, and ultimately a representative of exclusion-era jurisprudence; it is part of the dominant culture’s juridical unconscious. This term is a legally focused amendment to Fredric Jameson’s description of literature as part of the “political unconscious,” whereby “master narratives have inscribed themselves in the texts as well as in our thinking about them; such allegorical narrative signifieds are a persistent dimension of literary and cultural texts precisely because they reflect a fundamental dimension of our collective thinking and our collective fantasies about history and reality.”5 As I will demonstrate, the Butterfly narrative neatly aligns with exclusion-era jurisprudence in areas of the law ranging from the immigration code to courtroom procedure and child custody. As a work of popular entertainment, it codified and represented these narratives, giving them the verisimilitude of flesh-and-blood presence onstage while confirming and embedding them within the national culture. Furthermore, as Ginsburg’s comment suggests, Madame Butterfly’s legal force is not contained in the twentieth century. Due to its continued popularity, it still functions as part of the nation’s juridical unconscious. It acts as a medium for the continued transmission of exclusion-era ideas about Asian racial difference, projecting these ideas onto the contemporary Asian American body.
Figure 1.1. Geraldine Farrar in the 1907 Metropolitan Opera premiere of Madama Butterfly. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera Archives.
Before continuing, I need to make one key point about my intervention into critical analyses of the Butterfly narrative. In the compendium of critical work published about the narrative, few scholars have critically interrogated the role of law in Madame Butterfly. But the law is everywhere in the heroine’s tale, including lengthy discussions of the marriage contract that binds Cho-Cho-San to her US American husband, legal counsel provided by her friends after she is abandoned, and a stunning scene in which the heroine imagines herself performing before a judge in a US court. Important Asian Americanist analyses of the narrative have often overlooked the legal theme in their studies of the Orientalist configurations of gender and the spectacle of US empire in the Butterfly narrative. While some of the studies have focused on the opera, many more have turned to works inspired by the opera, including two seminal works that premiered in 1989: David Henry Hwang’s Broadway play M. Butterfly and Claude Michel-Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s musical Miss Saigon.6 Much less attention has been paid to the two texts on which the opera is based, John Luther Long’s 1898 novella and Long and David Belasco’s successful Broadway adaptation of this work in 1900.7 The three original versions of Madame Butterfly were, like their descendants, popular and commercial successes, but few contemporary studies offer a comparative analysis of all three. If one looks at each version individually, the law seems simply to be an otherwise random incident of plot, which might account for the literature’s critical oversight of this factor. However, when the versions are read comparatively, it becomes clear that the law is a consistent concern that is central to and survives every early iteration of the story.
A focus on the problem of law in Madame Butterfly is necessary insofar as it supplements a missing piece of the Butterfly puzzle. My interest in the problem of law does not offer an alternative to critical investigations of race, gender, and empire in Madame Butterfly so much as it builds on this body of scholarship in order to offer a robust example of the ways in which these phenomena are produced at the intersection of law and performance in the narrative. It should be observed that one of the notable exceptions to the paucity of scholarship about law and Madame Butterfly is an article written by family law scholar Rebecca Bailey-Harris. Bailey-Harris’s 1991 article is a study of the “conflict of laws” posed by Madame Butterfly and analyzes the recently codified Meiji reforms of 1898 in Japan in relation to US jurisprudence of the same time.8 While the author provides a precise accounting for each and every legal question that Madame Butterfly raises regarding both US and Japanese law, her approach is avowedly guided by a mechanistic attention to the “issues of concern to a lawyer in the audience [that] arise from the plot.” Bailey-Harris goes so far as to ask whether the heroine would have been “better advised to refrain from so drastic a step [her suicide]” given the likelihood that both the United States and Japan would have recognized her marriage.9 Like Ginsburg, Bailey-Harris treats Madame Butterfly as if it were a possible historical reality, exhibiting little critical interest in the fact that the heroine is a fictional construct structured by bourgeois, racist, sexist, and imperialist aesthetic conventions. As an alternative, I offer a close reading of the problem of law in Madame Butterfly, one that attends to both the questions of law and aesthetics, in order to demonstrate the legal function of an aesthetic performance which works alongside the law to transmit and codify Orientalist notions about gendered, racial difference for Asians and Asian Americans.
This chapter is divided into three parts. After mapping out the cultural significance and the historical development of the three versions of Madame Butterfly, I trace the alignment between Long’s novella and Asian-exclusion legal discourse. Part 2 expands this analysis to focus on the legal theme within Madame Butterfly as it reflects Asian American jurisprudence in the late nineteenth century. Part 3 brings us into the present with a focus
