Ideology and Panopticism in Hwang’s Play M. Butterfly

In my Literary Criticism and Theory Class, we were assigned a final paper that was meant to address two theories for the text M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang. The theories I applied to the play were ideology from Althusser and Panopticism from Foucault. The thesis of this paper is essentially using Foucault’s concept of panopticism and Althusser’s work with ideology, one can reach the conclusion that Gallimard felt trapped and committed suicide because of the panoptic power structures controlling his disillusions within the play.