Larry Hamberlin
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- January 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195338928
- eISBN:
- 9780199855865
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338928.003.0006
- Subject:
- Music, Opera, Popular
Of all operatic characters, the most influential on American popular culture was Cho-Cho-San, the title character of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. This chapter surveys the large repertoire of ...
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Of all operatic characters, the most influential on American popular culture was Cho-Cho-San, the title character of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. This chapter surveys the large repertoire of Butterfly songs, which, like the opera, allegorize the United States' flexing of imperialistic muscle in the Far East as a love story between a powerful American man and a powerless Japanese woman. Unlike the opera, these popular songs, of which “Poor Butterfly” emerges as the most important, explore a wide range of alternative readings of that allegory, from validating Pinkerton as hero, not villain, to empowering Cho-Cho-San.Less
Of all operatic characters, the most influential on American popular culture was Cho-Cho-San, the title character of Giacomo Puccini's Madama Butterfly. This chapter surveys the large repertoire of Butterfly songs, which, like the opera, allegorize the United States' flexing of imperialistic muscle in the Far East as a love story between a powerful American man and a powerless Japanese woman. Unlike the opera, these popular songs, of which “Poor Butterfly” emerges as the most important, explore a wide range of alternative readings of that allegory, from validating Pinkerton as hero, not villain, to empowering Cho-Cho-San.
Grace E. Lavery
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691183626
- eISBN:
- 9780691189963
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691183626.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in ...
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This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in swords by the publication in France of Pierre Loti's story Madame Chrysanthème, it was through Anglophone revisions of that story that the play of the sword, as an instrument of internal and external violence, has become most deeply entrenched. This chapter follows the Chrysanthème story's mutation into the Americanized story of Madame Butterfly, the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian auto-Orientalizing revision of the Butterfly stories in the work of Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Eaton, and then to cinema: a Japanese body-horror movie named Audition (1999) and a couple of American blockbusters made by Quentin Tarantino. The particular form of body horror that psychoanalysis refers to as “castration anxiety” inevitably permeates Western concern with the samurai sword. But the chapter shows how such an object as a sword is here understood as both feminine, and feminizing, rather than as a kind of phallic auxiliary.Less
This chapter argues that representations of the Japanese sword exhibit that distinctively feminized type of exquisite aesthetics. Feminized, because although Victorians were already interested in swords by the publication in France of Pierre Loti's story Madame Chrysanthème, it was through Anglophone revisions of that story that the play of the sword, as an instrument of internal and external violence, has become most deeply entrenched. This chapter follows the Chrysanthème story's mutation into the Americanized story of Madame Butterfly, the Anglo-Chinese-Canadian auto-Orientalizing revision of the Butterfly stories in the work of Onoto Watanna/Winnifred Eaton, and then to cinema: a Japanese body-horror movie named Audition (1999) and a couple of American blockbusters made by Quentin Tarantino. The particular form of body horror that psychoanalysis refers to as “castration anxiety” inevitably permeates Western concern with the samurai sword. But the chapter shows how such an object as a sword is here understood as both feminine, and feminizing, rather than as a kind of phallic auxiliary.
Grace E. Lavery
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780691183626
- eISBN:
- 9780691189963
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- DOI:
- 10.23943/princeton/9780691183626.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. ...
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From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. This book explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. The book provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. It argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. It features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. It also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats's prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. The book provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.Less
From the opening of trade with Britain in the 1850s, Japan occupied a unique and contradictory place in the Victorian imagination, regarded as both a rival empire and a cradle of exquisite beauty. This book explores the enduring impact of this dramatic encounter, showing how the rise of Japan led to a major transformation of Western aesthetics at the dawn of globalization. The book provides a radical new genealogy of aesthetic experience in modernity. It argues that the global popularity of Japanese art in the late nineteenth century reflected an imagined universal standard of taste that Kant described as the “subjective universal” condition of aesthetic judgment. It features illuminating cultural histories of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado, English derivations of the haiku, and retellings of the Madame Butterfly story, and sheds critical light on lesser-known figures such as Winnifred Eaton, an Anglo-Chinese novelist who wrote under the Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, and Mikimoto Ryuzo, a Japanese enthusiast of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. It also explains the importance and symbolic power of such material objects as W. B. Yeats's prized katana sword and the “Japanese vellum” luxury editions of Oscar Wilde. The book provides essential insights into the modern understanding of beauty as a vehicle for both intimacy and violence, and the lasting influence of Japanese forms today on writers and artists such as Quentin Tarantino.
Mark Glancy
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- October 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780190053130
- eISBN:
- 9780190053161
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190053130.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
In 1932, Cary Grant had his first major role in a high profile film, working with the famed star-director team Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932). Chapter 7 explores the ...
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In 1932, Cary Grant had his first major role in a high profile film, working with the famed star-director team Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932). Chapter 7 explores the making of this classic film, and Cary Grant’s discomfort working alongside these two very temperamental personalities. It considers the crucial element that von Sternberg brought to Cary Grant’s image: his razor sharp hair parting. It also offers accounts of the making of Hot Saturday (1932) and Madame Butterfly (1932), and, in the process, the slow but steady improvement in Grant’s acting and on-screen presence.Less
In 1932, Cary Grant had his first major role in a high profile film, working with the famed star-director team Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus (1932). Chapter 7 explores the making of this classic film, and Cary Grant’s discomfort working alongside these two very temperamental personalities. It considers the crucial element that von Sternberg brought to Cary Grant’s image: his razor sharp hair parting. It also offers accounts of the making of Hot Saturday (1932) and Madame Butterfly (1932), and, in the process, the slow but steady improvement in Grant’s acting and on-screen presence.
W. Anthony Sheppard
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- October 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190072704
- eISBN:
- 9780190072735
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190072704.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, American
Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination offers a detailed and wide-ranging documentation and investigation of the role of music in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, ...
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Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination offers a detailed and wide-ranging documentation and investigation of the role of music in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. This book covers over 150 years of American musical history, from the first American encounters with the Japanese in the mid nineteenth-century to today, as it reveals the central role of music in American japonisme. Nearly every musical genre, media, and form is discussed, as parallels between “high” and “low” art and connections between various art forms are explored. Particular emphasis is placed on popular song in both the Tin Pan Alley period and in more recent decades and on representations of the Japanese throughout the history of Hollywood film and Broadway musicals. Manifestations of the “Madame Butterfly” narrative are explored throughout a wide range of popular musical, cinematic, and theatrical genres. Musical representations of Japan were directly connected to efforts to reshape American perceptions of race and gender and for the purposes of political propaganda, particularly during World War II and the Cold War periods. The book also details the extensive influence of Japanese traditional music on modernist American composers and the pursuit of Japanese musical performance by numerous American musicians.Less
Extreme Exoticism: Japan in the American Musical Imagination offers a detailed and wide-ranging documentation and investigation of the role of music in shaping American perceptions of the Japanese, the influence of Japanese music on American composers, and the place of Japanese Americans in American musical life. This book covers over 150 years of American musical history, from the first American encounters with the Japanese in the mid nineteenth-century to today, as it reveals the central role of music in American japonisme. Nearly every musical genre, media, and form is discussed, as parallels between “high” and “low” art and connections between various art forms are explored. Particular emphasis is placed on popular song in both the Tin Pan Alley period and in more recent decades and on representations of the Japanese throughout the history of Hollywood film and Broadway musicals. Manifestations of the “Madame Butterfly” narrative are explored throughout a wide range of popular musical, cinematic, and theatrical genres. Musical representations of Japan were directly connected to efforts to reshape American perceptions of race and gender and for the purposes of political propaganda, particularly during World War II and the Cold War periods. The book also details the extensive influence of Japanese traditional music on modernist American composers and the pursuit of Japanese musical performance by numerous American musicians.
