Assignment 7 11/16

M Butterfly shows us the vast contrast between China and The Western world, but at the same time, it shows us that they are similar as well. In Act 1 scene 10 of the play, Song invites Gallimard to her apartment in France. As they talk, Song acts subservient and nervous around Gallimard. At one point she says, “France is a country living in the modern era….China is a nation whose soul is firmly rooted two thousand years in the past….I’m a Chinese girl…The forwardness of my actions makes my skin burn,”(pp. 29-31). She is explaining how China is still a country with strict rules about how men and women interact that run so deep, it is burnt into the culture. Song also talks about the strong and tough women of the west. If the two, the women of the west and the women of China, were compared, there would definitely be some differences, but there would also be similarities. The woman plays hostess, the woman cares for the home and also cares for the man, and the woman are supposed to be approached by the men. At the end of the play, as Song is standing before the judge, he says that the western world has a rape mentality and that a oriental man can’t really be a man because he’s oriental. In the scene where Song is revealing himself to Gallimard he uses the same line that he claims western men use on oriental women, “Your mouth says no, but your eyes say yes,” (p. 87). The stereotypes in this play are both upheld and broken. Gallimard only wants the subservient Chinese girl at his side, using her as he pleases, just as Song claimed to the judge, but in the end the roles have been reversed. Song is now the true man with the rape mentality and Gallimard has been converted into the will-less, helpless woman.

Assignment 6 11/4

The social commentary about a post 9/11 world and the climate leading up to it is a theme that is laced throughout the book Pattern Recognition. Before September eleventh occurred, the main character, Cayce, is staying in a friend’s house when someone breaks in and has appeared to use her computer and phone. After the break in, Cayce has the lock changed. When she returns from her outings from then on, she checks “…that her single dark Cayce Pollard hair is still there, spit-pasted across the gap between the door and frame…” and checks “…that the powder she’d brushed across the underside of the doorknob is still there, undisturbed” (71). From the start of the book, there is a slightly paranoid atmosphere diffused throughout the world Cayce lives in. This appears to be a long hung-over side effect from the cold war, when people were afraid that communists were infiltrating their neighborhoods and government.

            It is impossible to talk about the social climate of a post 9/11 world without talking about spies, espionage, and the stealing of information. Cayce, secures her home with simple devices and tools that are used by James Bond, England’s greatest spy. James Bond fought the soviets and other communist and fascist powers of the worlds. There were many movies made with the same themes as James Bond, a noble man from a democratic nation battling the fascist powers of the world. Even though the cold war ended way before 2000, the security issues and concern about sensitive, top secret information spreading around the globe still exist. The 9/11 incident exasperated this underlying fear. It didn’t create more fear, it made it larger and put that fear back into the forefront of our minds.

            Another aspect of the social climate after 9/11 is the general mistrust of our government entities. While Cayce is in Tokyo, she gets picked up by Boone Chu, her partner working with her to find the maker of the footage, and taken back to the apartment he’s staying at. He asks for her computer and runs a program on it to check for any hacking devices, claiming, “I want to make sure this isn’t sending your every keystroke to a third party” (165). He goes on to explain, “Things have been different in computer security since last September. If the FBI were doing what they admit they can do, to your laptop, I might be able to spot it” (165). There have been many conspiracies about the government tapping our phone lines and watching our every mouse click on the internet. Some even claim that the US government knew about the 9/11 plan, but allowed it to happen so we could invade the Middle East.