NEW ESSAY: Power and Powerlessness in Madama Butterfly

Image credit: Butterfly and Pinkerton; screenshot from the film by Frédéric Mitterrand (1995)

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

My work in recent years has been concerned with exploring a simple but demanding claim: power and powerlessness are always intertwined in any person and in any action. They do not coexist evenly, symmetrically, or justly, and they do not cancel each other out. I am using these terms not as fixed identities—powerful or powerless—but as a way to describe how agency and constraint coexist in lived situations. Power is always exercised under constraint, and powerlessness rarely (if ever) means the total disappearance of agency.

This claim matters because common ways of talking about power simplify human relationships and human beings themselves. People are often sorted into categories—e.g., villains or victims—as if these were stable, internally coherent states. Such framings can be morally clarifying, but they are often analytically blunt. They obscure the uneven, relational dynamics through which agency and constraint take shape in lived situations, often in ways that become visible only in retrospect. And when we rely on such blunt categories, we also oversimplify our responses to conflict and harm, making it harder to understand what sustains suffering and what might actually interrupt it.

​As I searched for a case that could make this paradox visible, I found it easier to begin with someone conventionally understood as powerful. That is why I chose Louis XIV. In writing about him, I examined how even a ruler associated with absolute monarchy lived within dense webs of dependence, fear, limitation, and loss of control. That analysis relied on biography, archival detail, and historical distance.
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In this essay, I take a different route. I turn to a work of fiction—Puccini’s Italian opera Madama Butterfly—not to reverse the argument or to offer a symmetrical counterpart, but to explore a different problem: how power can still appear within lives that are overwhelmingly defined by powerlessness. This approach is based on the assumption that fiction can sometimes illuminate inner logic and constrained agency in ways that the historical record cannot. This essay discusses major plot developments in Madama Butterfly (spoilers) and includes reference to suicide.

Continue reading here.

[This essay will be included in Newsletter#21.]