against each other, suggesting their incompatibility. Then, as she sings, “non gia del mio paese [is not the law of my country],” the anthem meets her melody, and they join together for a brief moment as she sings this lyric in place of the phrase “by the dawn’s early light.”66 The anthem abandons her immediately after Gobo asks, “Which one?” She responds, “The United States,” and the strings cascade into a lower register that broaches an ominous minor-key tonality, setting up Sharpless’s hushed utterance, “Poor little creature!” This statement, rendered as an aside, emphasizes the fact that this is the tragedy of Cio-Cio-San’s situation (from the opera’s point of view): because she is incapable of grasping the concept of territorial jurisdiction, and her exclusion from the United States, she is incapable of properly situating herself as a Japanese legal subject/object.
Cio-Cio-San’s problem is that she has attached herself to an improper and impossible love object (Pinkerton and, by extension, the United States). The Asian-immigrant and Asian American subject’s desire for a place in the United States is thus figured as an inappropriate amorous attachment. This narrative trope was a convenient way of affirming the myth of US exceptionalism (as a place that all people purportedly desire to be a part of), while maintaining firm boundaries regulated by the practice of exclusion. In the New York Times’s coverage of Chae Chan Ping’s deportation, his relationship to the United States is similarly described as an illicit, forbidden, and ultimately one-sided love affair: “Ping’s love of country is confined to this country.”67 Like Cio-Cio-San, his relationship to the state is discursively staged as a failed marriage: “He was . . . wedded to the fascinations of Chinatown, and remained there until the indignant howl of an ever vigilant press awakened the authorities to a realization of the fact that Ping had brought his knitting and intended to stay.”68 Pitiable as Chae Chan Ping or Cio-Cio-San’s romantic national convictions may be, the final solution is unmistakable: negation through exclusion (or death). Locked in a one-way romance, both appealed to the majesty of US justice in the hopes that the state would ultimately recognize their marriage to the United States. Unsurprisingly, both lose their case.
Cio-Cio-San invokes rights that she imagines she has gained through marriage. In all three versions of Madame Butterfly, an exchange occurs in which she paints a detailed portrait of the scene of justice. She describes the ritual of going before a US judge in order to appeal for relief from the injustice of Pinkerton’s abandonment. In each case, she assumes that the judge will perceive her as a subject of US law and protect her accordingly. In the opera, this sequence directly follows the previously discussed scene. After Cio-Cio-San declares herself subject to the laws of the United States, the strings slide into a playful lilt. This is accompanied by tremolos in the wind section that give the scene an air of childlike playfulness. Like the dialect in Long’s and Belasco’s versions of the story, Puccini’s orchestration frames Cio-Cio-San as naïve, foolish, and infantile.69 This is particularly acute when she flutters around the stage with an enthusiastic euphoria as she earnestly lectures Gobo on the nature of US law and her assumed place within it. She complains about the tenuous nature of Japanese marriage, calling on Sharpless to authenticate her critique: “But in America, that cannot be done. (to Sharpless) Say so!”70 Sharpless attempts to interject, “(embarrassed) Yes, yes—but-yet,” and we can assume that he would continue to explain that Cio-Cio-San cannot claim the protections of US law. She will not permit him to continue, however, and sings with august sincerity:
Madame Butterfly: There, a true, honest
And unbiased judge
Says to the husband:
“You wish to free yourself?
“Let us hear why?—
“I am sick and tired
“Of conjugal fetters!”
Then the good judge says:
“Ah, wicked scoundrel,
“Clap him in prison!”71
On the one hand, because Butterfly is clearly wrong, we can interpret the scene as a critique of the bias of the judicial system in the United States. The aria explicitly acknowledges the gendered injustice of a system that would deny the basic claims for justice that a petitioner like Cio-Cio-San might put before a judge. At the same time, Cio-Cio-San’s embodiment reduces her to a stereotype of racialized, gendered subjectivity that is incapable of understanding the complicated vicissitudes and implications of engagement with a justice system that, ultimately, does not recognize her as a proper juridical subject.
As Cio-Cio-San delivers this aria, she bounds around the stage. When she embodies the judge, she stands behind Sharpless’s chair and issues the orders into his ear. As the beseeching husband, she bends on one knee in front of him and begs for release from his “conjugal fetters.” She stands and once again moves behind the chair, delivering the judge’s order with masculine authority, before melting into the opera’s rote physical manifestation of Japanese female sincerity: eyes batting and feet shuffling. (Over a century after the first production of Belasco’s play, it seems directors and performers still turn to Bergere’s “short, quick steps of the Japanese” to signify Japaneseness.) In every way, the scene stages not only the sexist trope of the incapacity of Cio-Cio-San to understand the gravity of her confused legal status but also the ridiculousness of her assumption that she would be perceived by a US judge as a fully recognized subject of US law.
As Cio-Cio-San performs for her imaginary judge, the audience in the theater is given the opportunity to take on another role: that of a jury weighing the merits of her case. In this sense, the scene draws on the classical Athenian roots of Western theater. As J. Peter Euben notes, for the Athenians of antiquity, “drama was as much a political institution as the law courts, assembly, or boule.”72 Indeed, the theater could be a unique place for working through the political debates of the day because it lacked what Carl Schmitt described as the juristic decision that is the determining moment in the law’s realization.73 As Euben observes, “Freed from the urgency of decision which marked other political institutions, drama encouraged inclusive and reflective thinking about contemporary issues.”74 Thus, we locate one of the unique political and legal functions of aesthetic performances in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which carry a trace of their historical ancestors in the Theater of Dionysus.
As reflective of the juridical unconscious of its time, Madame Butterfly encourages the audience-as-jury to weigh the different exigencies behind the case. Unquestionably, the audience is meant to feel sympathy for the heroine. But this sympathy is not necessarily driven by the revelation of an unjust system that excludes her from the sphere of national belonging or the protection of US law. Instead, this sympathy—expressed in Sharpless’s “Poor little creature!”—is colored by condescension. The tragic irony that attaches itself to Cio-Cio-San is born from the fact that Puccini’s Western audience, like Sharpless, knows that she has no place in the United States. It is thus Cio-Cio-San’s infantile inability to grasp this fact (infantile because she is a woman and Japanese) that causes the tragedy. Weighing the evidence, the audience-as-jury is encouraged to reject Cio-Cio-San’s deposition. They are given every reason to rule that the heroine is tragically beyond the jurisdiction of US law. Having been given the opportunity to sympathize with her, however, the liberal sensibilities of the audience can remain intact while the juridical exclusion of Cio-Cio-San proceeds apace.
If we can imagine the evidence leading the audience, however sympathetic, to reject Cio-Cio-San’s plea, we know that the courts of the period most certainly would have. Turning to a set of cases dealing with the question of Asian testimony in US courts shows just how closely the Butterfly narrative functions as a representative of this jurisprudence. It is important to understand how the problem for a subject like Cio-Cio-San was not simply the lack of a
