Gender Trouble in Asian American Literature: David Henry Hwang`s The Sound of a Voice = Gender Trouble in Asian American Literature: David Henry Hwang`s The Sound of a Voice

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Asian American literature appears to have been productive recently and the reception of critics and mainstream American audience has been warm and positive. The issue of gender has kept coming up in relation to Asian American literature, probably because the Asian American writers themselves found their creative inspiration from Asian history, literature, arts, and films. Thus the representation of gender has been somehow trapped within the tradition. David Henry Hwang, one of the most actively writing Asian American playwrights and author of M. Butterfly, which won 1988 Tony Award, produced an opera, The Sound of a Voice, in June 2003. The production consists of two short plays, The Sound of a Voice and Hotel of Dreams, written by David Henry Hwang in 1983. Influenced by Japanese ghost stories and modern Japanese literature and films, both stories tell of the difficulty of human relationships and intimacy between two genders. The Sound of a Voice as a text invites resistant feminist reading with its complex layer of symbols. In theatre, however, gender reality is constituted by the typical binary opposition between two essentially different characters, a man and a woman, and like most melodramas, the major structure of the drama is highly reliant on the heterosexual romantic tension between the two different genders. Since the unbalanced gender reality is embedded in the language and the narrative itself, when presented to the mainstream audience, the drama does not leave much space for resistant reading. Therefore, an act of reproducing a drama highly influenced by traditional Japanese ghost stories might lend itself to a reading of gender reality that is backward and reinforces the binary. In this regard, the play follows the archetypal pattern of narrative meaning in traditional patriarchal spectacle. The surreal allegorical representation of the gender relationship is constrained by the binary structures of gender embedded in the playwright`s own fear of the feminine. The two sets of stories in The Sound of a Voice confer a false sense of legitimacy and universality to a culturally specific, and, in some contexts, culturally oppressive, version of gender identity and also contribute to the heterosexual ideal by intertwining gender identity and sexual orientation. Hwang`s narrative still dwells in the modernist sense that men and women are incommensurably different subjects.