Melodrama Is Women's Work

Yesterday, I saw Madame Butterfly at the LA Opera with Liping Zhang singing the title role ably despite being indisposed. She was a little difficult to hear when she sang upstage, but when she let it rip in the big numbers, her voice soared. Since she obviously had power and clarity of tone, I hesitate to attribute the softness of her singing simply to being farther away and ill. Instead, it may have been due to the little girl voice with which many sing the 15-year old, Cio-Cio San.

Cio-Cio San's story left me questioning my usual assumptions about tragedy. We generally think that tragedies are those narratives in which a superior human (not a super human) is subjected to divine or human law. In this process, the free life is limited, and the hero must leave behind some delusion or false consciousness (see Northrop Frye). Traditionalists do not regard Cio-Cio San's story as a tragedy. Critics and musicians alike will dismissively refer to it as a "melodrama." But why should this be the case? Cio-Cio San is subjected to human law, the custom that made it possible for male imperialists to exploit the women of non-Western lands. She does, in the end, throw off her false faith in Pinkerton's love. One might argue that she does not throw off her false view of herself as the faithful woman in love. One could say that because she does not, there is no significant revelation of the kind required by a tragic resolution.

If this is not the case, however, we must look further. Does Puccini treat her as a tragic figure? No, he does not. The music while often beautiful is sweet and lyrical. Puccini does not allow us to see the ugly emotions of false consciousness. So, at least, he probably didn't think he was writing a tragedy. The story, however, is or could have been just as tragic as Otello. Instead, it is put by Puccini and modern audiences in the same category as Dallas, One Life to Live, and celebrity gossip magazine copy. I think it is because we are loathe to universalize a woman's life and see it as a revelatory tragedy that may speak to every man. How many tragedies do we know that bring a female character low or use a typical woman's experience as the material of transcendence?