# Madame Butterfly (short story)
**Madame Butterfly** is a short story by the American writer John Luther Long, first published in the January 1898 issue of *Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine*, about a young Japanese woman, Cho-Cho-San, who marries a callous American naval officer and is abandoned by him[1](https://www.sfopera.com/contentassets/d1d2d8d100854ea98c6a991840037165/butterflysource.pdf) • [2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). It is best known as the direct source of David Belasco's 1900 one-act play and, through the play, of [Giacomo Puccini](https://www.edgepedia.org/giacomo-puccini)'s opera *Madama Butterfly* (1904)[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). The story runs about 18 pages, a length Puccini's correspondence misleadingly called a "novel"[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html).
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Author | John Luther Long, a Philadelphia lawyer[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html) |
| First publication | January 1898 issue of *Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine*[1](https://www.sfopera.com/contentassets/d1d2d8d100854ea98c6a991840037165/butterflysource.pdf) |
| Sources | Incidents related by Long's sister, a missionary's wife in Nagasaki, and the structural model of Pierre Loti's novel *Madame Chrysanthème* (1887)[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html) |
| Ending | Butterfly attempts suicide with her sword but survives, bandaged, in the final scene[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html) |
| Stage adaptation | One-act play by David Belasco, premiered in New York in 1900, then seen by Puccini in London in the summer of that year[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html) |
| Operatic descendant | Puccini's *Madama Butterfly*, libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, premiered at La Scala on February 17, 1904[3](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/madama-butterflymadamu-batafurai/madama-butterfly-a-conflicted-genesis/1E6A9ADBA45806ECF7FE51D8BA4C76D1) |
## Origins
Long said that the events in his story came from accounts given to him by his sister, whose husband worked as a missionary in Nagasaki.[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html) The woman at the center of that account was a neighbor called "Chô-San" whose tragic tale Jennie Long Correll recounted to her brother, who then fictionalized it[4](https://www.bloomsbury.com/media/enajksyw/madama-butterfly-program.pdf). Decades later, in an interview in the *Jiji Shimpo* of 24 December 1935, the soprano Tamaki Miura reported that Long had told her the original Chô-Chô-San survived the suicide attempt, an assertion consistent with the ending of his story[5](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-opera-journal/article/abs/madame-butterfly-the-story/6A5C101733A5FFAA605E189AB7489FA4).
The story also has a French literary ancestor. [Pierre Loti](https://www.edgepedia.org/pierre-loti)'s *Madame Chrysanthème* (1887), a loosely autobiographical first-person account of a young naval officer's temporary marriage to a geisha in Nagasaki, supplied the structural model: much of the plot is contained in the French novel, with some notable exceptions[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). In Loti's version the officer Pierre is the central character and the geisha Chrysanthème is practical, unemotional, and secondary; the couple part amicably, and the final scenes show her testing the silver dollars paid under the marriage contract[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). Long kept the French novel's skeleton but shifted the narrative attention firmly to the geisha herself[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). The Met Opera's educational timeline dates Long's publication to 1897 in *Century Magazine*, while the San Francisco Opera study guide and Columbia University's materials give the January 1898 issue; the Met guide also describes the story as adapted from Loti's novel[6](https://www.metopera.org/globalassets/discover/education/access-opera/educator-guides/butterfly-aoguide.pdf) • [1](https://www.sfopera.com/contentassets/d1d2d8d100854ea98c6a991840037165/butterflysource.pdf).
## Plot of the story
Lieutenant Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton of the [United States Navy](https://www.edgepedia.org/united-states-navy), a name the Columbia account describes as an ironic accentuation of his role as the American intruder, marries the young Cho-Cho-San, nicknamed "Madam Butterfly," and forces her to relinquish all ties to her friends and family[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). Unlike her counterpart in *Madame Chrysanthème*, the naïve [Butterfly](https://www.edgepedia.org/butterfly) believes the marriage is real and allows herself to fall in love; Pinkerton departs with his ship, promising to return[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html).
During his absence Butterfly gives birth to his child, whom she names Trouble, planning to change the name to Joy when she reunites with her husband[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). When Pinkerton's ship finally returns, Butterfly learns that he has married an American woman who wishes to take her child back to the United States[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). Butterfly attempts suicide but survives, and the story closes with her bandaged in what the Columbia account calls an amateurish but moving final scene[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). The San Francisco Opera study guide adds that in that ending Butterfly, her faithful friend, and the child disappear before Pinkerton and his American wife can claim the boy[1](https://www.sfopera.com/contentassets/d1d2d8d100854ea98c6a991840037165/butterflysource.pdf).
## Belasco's play and Puccini's opera
The story was wildly popular with a public fascinated by the exotic, and many famed actresses approached Long for the dramatic rights; it was David Belasco, then at the peak of his fame as playwright and theatrical producer, who adapted it for the stage[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). Contrary to numerous reports, Belasco wrote the stage version without Long's assistance, though he borrowed liberally from the magazine story, so much of the dialogue is Long's[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html).
**The one-act play** was produced in 1900 as part of a double bill with Belasco's farce *Naughty Anthony*, and its London production was the one Puccini witnessed in the summer of 1900[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). Its entire action takes place two years after Pinkerton's departure, so the focus falls almost entirely on Butterfly and her maid; Pinkerton makes an ignominious entrance toward the conclusion, inspiring and witnessing Butterfly's suicide, which succeeds this time[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html). Belasco's tragic ending and his de-villainizing of Pinkerton are described as the most significant alterations to the narrative, shifting the blame for the story toward a tragic love triangle[7](https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/textmatters/article/download/15537/15323?inline=1). Another innovation that impressed Puccini was the 14-minute vigil in which Butterfly silently awaits Pinkerton's arrival, with the night's shadows depicted through creative lighting effects[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html).
Puccini attended the London production on 21 June 1900, during his visit for the British premiere of *Tosca*, and afterward asked his publisher Giulio Ricordi to obtain the rights to the play[8](https://www.puccinimuseum.org/en/giacomo-puccini/le-opere/madama-butterfly/) • [4](https://www.bloomsbury.com/media/enajksyw/madama-butterfly-program.pdf). He worked again with his *La bohème* and *Tosca* librettists, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa, whose libretto had to reconcile Long's story and Belasco's play[3](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/madama-butterflymadamu-batafurai/madama-butterfly-a-conflicted-genesis/1E6A9ADBA45806ECF7FE51D8BA4C76D1). The main difference between the opera and Long's story is the ending: before Long's Butterfly can inflict the fatal blow with her sword, she is stopped by her maid Suzuki, while Puccini restored the fatal outcome[9](https://www.eno.org/discover-opera/articles/an-introduction-to-madam-butterfly/). The opera's premiere at [La Scala](https://www.edgepedia.org/la-scala) on February 17, 1904, was a fiasco, and a revised version staged in Brescia a few months later succeeded[3](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/madama-butterflymadamu-batafurai/madama-butterfly-a-conflicted-genesis/1E6A9ADBA45806ECF7FE51D8BA4C76D1).
## Reception and legacy
The story sits within a late nineteenth-century wave of American and European writing on Japan, alongside works such as [William Elliot Griffis](https://www.edgepedia.org/william-elliot-griffis)'s *The Mikado's Empire* (1880) and Basil Hall Chamberlain's *Things Japanese* (1905)[10](https://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/opera/butterfly/orientalism.html). Scholars have read the Butterfly narrative, from Loti through Long to the opera, either as a pointed indictment of Western colonialism or as a grossly racist misrepresentation, and in both cases as central to a persistent racial type: the figure of submissive and suicidal Asian femininity in stories of interracial romance between Asian women and white European or American men[11](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/asian-american-literature-in-transition-18501930/decorative-orientalism/E921B82B95EAE95838BB9D760A15C858).
The story has been adapted repeatedly across literature, theater, and film, beginning with Belasco's play and continuing through David Henry Hwang's *M. Butterfly*, which subverts the dominant male West and submissive female East paradigm intrinsic to the tale[12](https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/jamit/article/view/6083) • [13](https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/27045/). The Columbia study guide judges Puccini's libretto one of the rare instances in operatic history where the text is an improvement over its sources[2](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html).
## References
1. [Butterfly Source Material, San Francisco Opera](https://www.sfopera.com/contentassets/d1d2d8d100854ea98c6a991840037165/butterflysource.pdf)
2. [The Original Story: John Luther Long and David Belasco, Columbia University (Chadwick Jenkins)](https://columbia.edu/itc/music/NYCO/butterfly/luther.html)
3. [Arthur Groos, Madama Butterfly: A Conflicted Genesis, in *Madama Butterfly/Madamu Batafurai* (Cambridge University Press, 2023)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/madama-butterflymadamu-batafurai/madama-butterfly-a-conflicted-genesis/1E6A9ADBA45806ECF7FE51D8BA4C76D1)
4. [Discovery and Recovery, Madama Butterfly program, Bloomsbury](https://www.bloomsbury.com/media/enajksyw/madama-butterfly-program.pdf)
5. [Arthur Groos, "Madame Butterfly: The Story," Cambridge Opera Journal 3/1 (1991)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/cambridge-opera-journal/article/abs/madame-butterfly-the-story/6A5C101733A5FFAA605E189AB7489FA4)
6. [The Creation of Madama Butterfly timeline, Metropolitan Opera educator guide](https://www.metopera.org/globalassets/discover/education/access-opera/educator-guides/butterfly-aoguide.pdf)
7. [The Butterfly Effect: Creating and Recreating the Story of Madame Butterfly, Text Matters](https://czasopisma.uni.lodz.pl/textmatters/article/download/15537/15323?inline=1)
8. [Madama Butterfly, Puccini Museum](https://www.puccinimuseum.org/en/giacomo-puccini/le-opere/madama-butterfly/)
9. [An Introduction to Madam Butterfly, English National Opera](https://www.eno.org/discover-opera/articles/an-introduction-to-madam-butterfly/)
10. [Orientalism in Madama Butterfly, Columbia University](https://www.columbia.edu/itc/music/opera/butterfly/orientalism.html)
11. [Decorative Orientalism, in *Asian American Literature in Transition, 1850–1930* (Cambridge University Press, 2021)](https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/asian-american-literature-in-transition-18501930/decorative-orientalism/E921B82B95EAE95838BB9D760A15C858)
12. [The American Butterfly: Reflections of the Other and Self in Film Adaptations of "Madame Butterfly," JAm It!](https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/jamit/article/view/6083)
13. [East is East and West is West: a literary and historical view from the perspective of Madame Butterfly, Bournemouth University](https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/27045/)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Literature and written works › Creative written works and worlds › Prose fiction › Novellas, novelettes, and short stories › Individual short stories › Literary and modernist classic short stories*
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