A real American wife, a Japanese object: Critical Puppetry and the construction of the Orient in Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly

In Anthony Minghella and English National Opera’s (ENO) celebrated production of Madam Butterfly , three men manipulate the small, fragile bodies of Cio-Cio-San (also known as Madam Butterfly) and her child, Sorrow. Both characters are Japanese or part-Japanese, and both are portrayed, at least in part, by puppets, with white American characters all portrayed by human beings. These puppets were built and originally manipulated by the British company Blind Summit, who drew on the traditional Japanese form of ningyō jōruri (commonly and hereafter referred to as bunraku ). In this chapter, I argue that the use of bunraku-inspired puppetry, while lending Minghella’s production a notional sense of cultural authenticity, may also function to reinforce and reify the exoticizing and imperialist gaze present in the original source material. Conversely, I assert that even as the use of puppetry functions to further perpetuate Orientalist constructions of East-Asia, it simultaneously destabilizes and makes visible these constructions in fruitful and interesting ways.