Madame Butterfly

Reflection#8

In this reflection I will be summarizing Madame Butterfly. It’s a very confusing play about a man who is in a cell talking about his life and how he compares it to a play that he saw once named Madame Butterfly. Gallimard the main character is very innocent in many aspects and slow in catching things. He is married to Helga and they couldn’t have babies so she goes to the doctor even though they had decided to keep on trying. She finds out that there is nothing wrong with her so she asks her husband to go to the doctor to see if the defect is in him. He meets this Chinese actress named Song who does opera and falls in love with her because of her beauty etc… but it turns out that she is a man and he doesn’t know. From what the play says he is a homosexual but doesn’t want Gallimard to know. Since his wife couldn’t give him a baby and they had had relations before so she claims to be pregnant. He wants to marry her but she refuses. She looks for a baby in china that would have qualities that a Western man would have so that it would be more believable. Gallimard was named vice-consul by the French ambassador to china named Manuel Toulon so he was a very occupied man involved in revolution issues and treaties etc… He was a diplomat living in china but he was then transferred because even though he was chosen for that job because of his mind and intelligence all the things he had said that could be good for china were not working so he was transferred him to France. He then tells his wife Helga that he was unfaithful to her for 8 years with Song and that even though he couldn’t marry Song he wanted to get divorced. She returns they get married and live together for twenty years and then he finds out she’s a man and starts telling her about all the lies he had to put up with for all those years etc… I found this play to be really long and sometimes confusing because of the characters and many other parts that I couldn’t put together but it’s really impressing how someone could live with a person for twenty years and not know that it was a man by his side and not a woman…weird.