Puccini’s Images of “Oriental Women”: Cio-Cio-San and Liu in Cross-cultural Perspective

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_42How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Puccini; Asian Female Images; Feminism

Abstract

Based on the cross-cultural perspective, this paper combines the theories of Orientalism and feminism to analyse the construction of the image of “oriental women” in Puccini’s operas, Cio-Cio-San in Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly, and Liu in Turandot. It is found that Puccini’s use of Asian folk songs and other musical materials, as well as the fusion of major and minor keys and the Chinese pentatonic scale, creates an exotic style, but cannot avoid cultural misinterpretation from a Western perspective. Cio-Cio-San is portrayed as a mixture of Japanese and Italian music, demonstrating her identity dilemma and gender power imbalance, while Liu is portrayed as an “othered” devotee through pentatonic modes and marginalised narratives, both of which together embody the binary imagination of the West towards “oriental women”. The study highlights the synergy between music and theatre in constructing cultural symbols and calls for cross-cultural artistic creations to be wary of stereotypes and to promote equal dialogue and expression of the female subject.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Luoxi Dong
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/12/31
TI  - Puccini’s Images of “Oriental Women”: Cio-Cio-San and Liu in Cross-cultural Perspective
BT  - Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 364
EP  - 379
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_42
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-511-9_42
ID  - Dong2025
ER  -