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Mohammad M. Jalil

Professor Batty

English 102

7 November 2018

Ideas of Gender, Sexuality, and Race in The Left Hand of Darkness and M. Butterfly

The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin and M Butterfly by David Henry Hwang,

are both works of literature that impose their own ideas of gender, race, and sexuality to the

readers. The Left Hand of Darkness revolves around Genly Ai, an envoy from a different world

that has landed on the planet of Gethen which is inhabited by a people who have no explicit

gender. M Butterfly revolves around the story of two “lovers”, one a male French Diplomat and

the other a man disguised as a female Chinese actress. Through the usage of these characters and

their development in the various narratives, a commentary on gender, sexuality, and race can be

found throughout the literature.

Race has a substantial presence in both the books. In The Left Hand of Darkness, its

plausible to conclude that Le Guin tries to push the reader to accept different races as stated by

Ellen Peel in her scholarly article titled “Black and White and Read All Over: The Semiotics of

Difference and Chiaroscuro in Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness”: “Readers are encouraged to

admire characters who celebrate difference, whether it be national difference between

citizens of Karhide and Orgoreyn, racial difference between light-skinned Gethenians and the

dark-skinned Earthman Genly…”. You see a lot of acceptance within the Gethenian people, as

seen when Ai lands in Orgoreyn: “‘They told me, keep the Envoy warm, he’s from a hot world,

an oven of a world, and can’t stand our cold. Treat him as if he were pregnant, put furs on his

bed and heaters in his room, heat his wash-water and keep his windows shut! Will it do? Will
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you be comfortable? Please tell me what else you’d like to have here’” (Le Guin, 125). Here, you

see acceptance and lack of discrimination. You don’t see the Orgoreyn people discriminating

against Ai, an outsider, but instead, they take care of him as one of their own. Mentions of Ai’s

darker skin are made but it barely has any effect as to how the Gethenians treat Ai. The

Gethenians focus more on the nature and character of other people and judge accordingly. Both

the people of Karhide and Orgoreyn accept Genly Ai with open arms and take care of him

without any question.

I think the same can be said about Hwang and the commentary he makes on stereotypes

through the usage of characters Rene Gallimard and Song Liling. Hwang intentionally introduces

Oriental stereotypes, to only diffuse them and reverse the stereotypes onto westerners and raise

awareness of the stereotypes. Throughout the play, the reader develops a strong understanding

that the Westerners stereotype the Oriental women as submissive to the stronger, more dominant

Western man. However, through the manipulation of Rene, Hwang rids of these stereotypes and

displays that Oriental women are just as cunning and dominant. To further his riddance, Hwang

has Rene, the Western diplomat, fill in the stereotypes instead. Instead of Song being submissive

and more “feminine”, Rene becomes more feminine and submissive to Song’s demands, and

Song becomes the dominant, manipulative masculine figure.

Moreover, as discussed by Michelle Balaev in her article titled “Performing gender and

fictions of the nation in David Hwang's M. Butterfly”, Hwang does a great job in displaying

Rene’s need for Song to fulfill the Oriental stereotypes to allow him to fulfill the gender

stereotypes of a man. In order for Rene to truly feel like a masculine, dominant male, he needs

Song to fulfill her roles of being a submissive female. This also ties in with the aforementioned

in that Hwang introduces these stereotypes to bring recognition to the reader so that more
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diversity within gender personalities becomes a norm. Hwang is bringing recognition so that we,

as a society, can become more accepting of those who share the same gender as us but differ

personality wise. Through these various expressions, I believe Hwang does a similar job to Le

Guin; both diminish the idea of having predisposed beliefs and attitudes of others and instead,

they both promote the values and nature that the people uphold.

Moving on, I think both Hwang and Le Guin push towards the acceptance of different

sexuality preferences in a modest and subtle way. This connection may be a stretch, but I think

its valid and the events are there to prove this. In Gethen, the androgynous people can be either

female or male during “kemmer”, a period where people can begin their reproductive process.

Essentially, the same person can be both a father and a mother to different children. This, in a

sort, demonstrates homosexuality because of how Ai describes the people. For most of the story,

Ai refers to the Gethenians as masculine figures, using the pronoun “he” and adds that the

Gethenian people are one sex but are still able to reproduce with each other. Because of this and

Ai’s acceptance of the uniqueness of the people, I think Le Guin is subtly pushing the reader to

accept the difference in sexuality amongst the Gethenians, just like Ai. She allows the reader to

interpret the people of Gethen and become accustomed to this difference. Le Guin displays that

the difference in sexuality doesn’t change who the people are and that ultimately, the people are

unchanged.

In M Butterfly, I think we can also conclude that Hwang treats the issue of sexuality in

the same way. In the beginning of the play, Rene says that everybody laughs at him and his story

and at the end of the play, he ultimately commits suicide to escape the humiliation he faced

because of his alleged homosexual activities. To recap the story, Rene was manipulated and fell

into a “trap” where the woman he loved ended up being a man. I think its valid to deduce
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Hwang’s motives, considering what Robert K. Martin concluded in his scholarly article titled

“Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and David Henry

Hwang's Chinese Woman”, that Rene may have known all along Song was a male, considering

he himself said that he may have known deep down and the fact that in their long relationship, he

never forced Song to undress after she denied him. Because of this and the humiliation that

followed, Rene committed suicide. This, I think, may have brought some awareness to how we

treat homosexuality as a society. If homosexuality wasn’t seen as a sort of taboo or as a stigma, I

don’t think Rene would’ve committed suicide and I think Hwang pushes this same ideology to

the reader. The horror and shame of what happened to him brought him so much pain that he

killed himself. Hwang brings awareness to this and transmits his feelings that maybe we

shouldn’t treat people who have a different sexuality different than us, because we affect them so

deeply, we bring them to a point where they commit suicide to avoid social shaming. Both the

authors also wrote their stories in a time where homosexuality wasn’t as big or accepted as it is

in society today, so presuming their motives makes sense.

Gender identities and their associations with the various characters also plays a large role

in both the works of literature. As stated by Christine Cornell in her interpretative article on The

Left Hand of Darkness, she states that all behaviors or qualities that are concerning or unwanted

are attributed as feminine and all behaviors or qualities that are considered impressive or

beneficial are attributed as masculine. Although many may think that this is how Le Guin feels,

I, on the contrary, feel as if Le Guin is using this as an example of how society views the two

gender identities and is trying to bring awareness to this issue. Le Guin is trying to get rid of

these predisposed notions that any associations with femininity is negative. Furthermore, I think

Le Guin is trying to get rid of the these preconditioned beliefs we have about gender identities
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and roles, and is trying to get her readers to accept that no gender should have specific traits

assigned to it and that it should be readily acceptable for different genders to have intermixed

traits.

I believe this same issue is handled in a similar way in M Butterfly. Song, physically a

male, has traits that one can associate with femininity as stated by Karen Shimakawa in her

article: “Those overdetermined identifies are nevertheless resisted, expanded and openly

contradicted throughout M. Butterfly, especially (though not exclusively) in the figure

of Song. She/he is never exclusively female or male…”. One example of this can be seen

where Song is wearing a dress and when questioned by commander Chin as to why he is wearing

a dress in his spare time, he quickly answers by saying that it helps to keep him in character and

practice his role as an actress. Just like Le Guin, I believe Hwang also tries to push the reader to

accept that gender identities shouldn’t exist and that we should be more accepting that both

genders can share certain personalities and traits.

To go more in depth, I believe Hwang and Le Guin, are overall, trying to fix societal

issues that we all face. I believe they are trying to push the readers towards the acceptance that

people are different by making obvious the differences the characters have from ourselves.

Furthermore, I believe the authors are also trying to rid our binary way of thinking, where

everything is either black or white, characters are either male or female, and are specifically

masculine or feminine. The authors do a great job by ridding us of these ideas by making the

characters a combination of these binaries. The authors allow us to see that even though you’re a

male, you can possess traits that would normally be associated with femininity and that would

pose no great issue in society, as we see with Song, and Estraven during his period in Kemmer.
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From the aforementioned, we can conclude that Le Guin in The Left Hand of Darkness

and Hwang in M Butterfly dispose their own commentary on issues that deal with gender,

sexuality, and race. We can conclude that through the usage of the various characters and their

development, the authors try to solve societal issues by providing alternative ideologies and ways

of seeing and thinking.

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Works Cited

Le Guin, Ursula K. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York, Penguin Group, 1969.

Hwang, David Henry. M. Butterfly. New York, Penguin Group, 1993.

Peel, Ellen. "Black and White and Read All Over: The Semiotics of Difference and Chiaroscuro

in Le Guin's Left Hand of Darkness.Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W.

Hunter, vol. 310, Gale, 2011. Literature Resource Center,

http://library.lavc.edu:2102/apps/doc/H1100105892/GLS?u=lavc_main&sid=GLS&xid=381badf

d. Accessed 5 Nov. 2018. Originally published in Semiotics Around the World: Synthesis in

Diversity; Proceedings of the Fifth Congress of the International Association for Semiotic

Studies, Berkeley 1994, edited by Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr, Mouton de Gruyter,

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Rashley, Lisa Hammond. "Revisioning gender: inventing women in Ursula K. Le Guin's

nonfiction." Biography, vol. 30, no. 1, 2007, p. 22+. Literature Resource Center,

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Pearson, Wendy Gay. "Postcolonialism/s, gender/s, sexuality/ies and the legacy of The Left

Hand of Darkness: Gwyneth Jones's Aleutians talk back." Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 37,

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Cornell, Christine. "The interpretative journey in Ursula K. Le Guin's the left hand of darkness."

Extrapolation, vol. 42, no. 4, 2001, p. 317+. Literature Resource Center,

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Fayad, Mona. "Aliens, androgynes, and anthropology: Le Guin's critique of representation in The

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Theatre Journal, vol. 45, no. 3, 1993, p. 349+. Literature Resource Center,

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Martin, Robert K. "Gender, Race, and the Colonial Body: Carson McCullers's Filipino Boy, and

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Balaev, Michelle. "Performing gender and fictions of the nation in David Hwang's M. Butterfly."

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