Dara Rasami as Madame Butterfly: Picturing the “Northern” Woman
From Concubines with Cameras: Royal Siamese Consorts Picturing Femininity and Ethnic Difference in Early 20th Century Siam (by Leslie Woodhouse):
At the same time all things ‘foreign’ became all the rage amongst Siamese elites, stories from the West such as Cinderella and the Arabian Nights became fodder for creators of Siamese dance-dramas. Once introduced in the palace, these productions could go on to great success when opened to the public; the king’s approval was endorsement enough to guarantee a production’s success. One such production—which has a direct bearing on our discussion of Erb’s [Erb Bunnag, one of the royal consorts] photographs of Dara Rasami—was the Siamese adaptation of the Italian operetta Madame Butterfly, entitled Sao Khrua Fa.
Having been impressed by Puccini’s Madame Butterfly during his 1906 tour of Europe, King Chulalongkorn assigned his half-brother, Prince Narathip, to create a Siamese version of the work. In the Prince’s adaptation, the roles of the American soldier and Japanese woman are transposed in a uniquely Siamese way: the American soldier becomes a Siamese man, while his Japanese lover becomes a maiden from—where else?—Chiang Mai. The actors were dressed in costumes appropriate to contemporary characters, with the heroine dressed like Dara Rasami herself: long hair worn pulled up in a bun, a lace blouse on top, phasin skirt below, worn with stockings and shoes. This production, entitled Sao Khrua Fa, became a huge hit when it was first staged in the summer of 1909. In the following letter, King Chulalongkorn wrote about its popularity to Dara Rasami, who was visiting her hometown of Chiang Mai at the time:
“Talking about ‘madness,’ the courtiers are now ‘mad’ about [Prince Narathip’s opera], every person, every name, from the masters to the servants. Since you left [for Chiang Mai], ... the men who did not see [Sao Khrua Fa] are very frustrated. It’s up to [Prince Narathip], whether he will perform the play again after having performed it in the royal court at the Pridalai Theatre. If he does, the audience will be large. In the past, I went to [his] theatre, and there were not more than 500 present. But since he has performed in the Royal Palace, there are not enough seats. This happens only to the plays which have been performed in the palace and are later performed outside. The money collected from outside performances is over 10,000 baht. Prince Nara exclaimed that it was due to ‘the glorious virtue of the king.’"
As the usual takings for a week-long performance run at a Bangkok theatre averaged around 1,000 baht at that time, we can see that Sao Khrua Fa was hugely popular with Bangkok’s theatre-going populace.
We might see this performance of Lao “other-ness” through dance-drama as domesticating an otherwise exotic ethnic identity for Siamese consumption. At the same time, Lao difference is literally feminized: Lao ethnic identity and femininity are fused together in the figure of Sao Khrua Fa (Miss Butterfly) herself. The tragic heroine is depicted here as a naïve “northern beauty:” innocently bewitching, yet vulnerable to Siamese seduction, conquest and betrayal. As crypto-colonial discourses go, the message of this drama could hardly be less cryptic: to make plausible the need for the Siamese to exercise their colonial-style authority over the Lao territories in the interests of paternalistically “protecting” the culturally “backwards” people there.
As previously discussed, while discourses of Dara Rasami’s ethnic difference had carried political value within the palace earlier in her career, her role as a political hostage ensuring her homeland’s loyalties had declined with the implementation of Siam’s new, semi-colonial administrative structure in the governance of its provinces. In the era following this change in 1897, Dara Rasami’s role evolved to that of cultural “other” within the palace, whose ethnic difference—yet close proximity—became an exotic commodity upon which she could profitably trade. After Sao Khrua Fa’s successful debut in 1909, Dara Rasami was enlisted once again in the depiction of exotic Lao-ness. When Prince Narathip began work on a revamped version of the old dance-drama Lilit Phra Law, which was originally based on an old Lao story, King Chulalongkorn sent parts of Narathip’s script to Dara Rasami for her to review while she was traveling. Mom Luang Tuan, who was Prince Narathip’s wife and also musical director for her husband’s theatrical productions, visited Dara Rasami’s palace household to learn Lao vocal styles and instruments from her in order to enhance the northern setting of the play. “[Princess] Dara Rasami was pleased to have Mom Luang Tuan visit her often for instruction in Lao musical intonation. This resulted in the palace playing Lao songs more often.” In addition, since part of the Prince’s specialty was incorporating “foreign” elements into his productions to enhance their appeal with audiences, it was only appropriate that Phra Law’s dancers also “dress in Lao-Thai costumes, dance and sing to Lao-type musical tunes, and speak with touches of Northern dialect.” Through their relationship with a Lao “other” residing within the palace—Princess Dara Rasami—authentic Lao cultural elements could be utilized to create an exotic appeal for Narathip’s plays to a popular audience outside the circle of elites within the Inner Palace.
There is, however, another event which contributed to Siamese notions of Dara Rasami’s Lao-ness, particularly as it related to her long hair. As previously discussed, Dara Rasami traveled to her hometown of Chiang Mai for several months in 1909. Due to the political necessity of keeping her in Bangkok to ensure her relatives’ loyalties to Siam, she had not returned home for a visit to her family since she entered the palace as a consort in 1886. However, with the consolidation of British and French control in the territories surrounding her homeland at the end of the twentieth century, the circumstances keeping Dara Rasami from returning home had disappeared. When her half-brother, then governor of Chiang Mai, visited Bangkok in January of 1909, the princess requested permission to make her first-ever return visit to her hometown.
King Chulalongkorn granted her request, additionally granting her the funds necessary to make the long journey by train and riverboat north to Chiang Mai. Just before her departure from Bangkok in April 1909, she bade a formal farewell to King Chulalongkorn at the Samsen Road train station, adjacent to Dusit Palace. On this occasion, she deployed a gesture which quickly became well-known around Bangkok. Before the king and the assembled retinue, she “let down her muan [hair bun] and ‘wiped’ the king’s feet [with her hair] in the northern custom, bursting into tears.”
The Siamese cultural proscription against touching the feet, much less with the hair on one’s head, goes only part of the way towards explaining the emotional and cultural import of this gesture. Dara Rasami’s farewell references a particular northern episode that had occurred just a few years earlier (1903), a story still well-known in Chiang Mai today: the tragic love affair between a Chiang Mai prince and a Burmese woman named Ma Mia. When, in this story, the ill-fated lovers are forced to part, Ma Mia “washes” her lover’s feet with her tear-soaked hair. This story provides the additional context necessary for reading Dara Rasami’s performance of this “foot-washing” gesture. As such, Dara Rasami’s deployment of this grand gesture on departing Bangkok for Chiang Mai can be read as both personal and political discourse: it expresses both her personal attachment and gratitude to King Chulalongkorn, and serves as a reminder of the Ma Mia incident (and its additional Burmese element) to point up her long-standing political loyalty as his consort.
Dara Rasami’s deployment of this gesture on her departure in 1909 may well be what provoked Erb’s interest in photographing such a toilette scene in particular. To be sure, a Lao woman unpinning, unwinding and combing out her knee-length hair undoubtedly would have been an exotic bodily practice, unknown to most Siamese in that era. Certainly, to witness Dara Rasami in such an act would additionally allow the viewer to share in a moment of intimacy with a royal consort until then reserved for the king himself.
However, if indeed Erb shot these photographs following Dara Rasami’s return from Chiang Mai in 1909, there is yet another factor to consider: that of the subject’s changed status. Following her departure to Chiang Mai, King Chulalongkorn took the extraordinary step of promoting Dara Rasami to the rank of high queen, adding a potential element of royal status to Erb’s images.
Newly-promoted Queen Dara Rasami had professional portraits taken during her visit to Chiang Mai in 1909, and they pose a significant contrast to Erb’s images of her. In these images [the two that follow below], Dara Rasami poses in a setting analogous to that of her Siamese counterparts, with a similar level of dress, dignity and remove from the camera’s gaze.
Recently promoted to the rank of High Queen [พระราชชายา], Dara Rasami poses for a formal portrait in her hometown, Chiang Mai. Note that she wears a phasin [skirt] made from a Burmese court textile called luntaya. (Probably taken at the Chiang Mai studio of Japanese photographer S. Tanaka, 1909.) Image URL here.
Second formal portrait of Dara Rasami taken in Chiang Mai in 1909. Image URL here.
In these images Dara Rasami projects the dignity of a high queen, while simultaneously affirming her ethnicity via her dress and hairstyle. The items utilized here are not random props: in both images, the carved box resting on the tabletop next to Dara Rasami is a gilded betel-box, the insignia of her new queenly rank. The new queen’s outfit here includes elements drawn from both Lao and Siamese elite cultures: Firstly, a phasin skirt made from luntaya (a textile which references Chiang Mai’s history and proximity to Burma); a high-necked lacy Victorian blouse in the style favored by Siamese royal consorts, complete with the diagonal bunting utilized by high consorts who had been decorated with the order of the Chula Chom Klao; a folding fan; and a plethora of jewelry, including hair ornaments, brooches, bracelets and a necklace encrusted with diamonds. Two different sets of furniture are used in these portraits. In the first [see here] the chair in which Dara Rasami sits resembles an elephant howdah—suggesting the traditional ride of Asian kings; while in [the second image just above] her chair appears to be a high-backed wooden chair (or similar), which lends a modern air to the portrait. The tablecloth and backdrop also appear to be different, suggesting that the two portraits may not have been taken at the same time (though Dara Rasami’s dress and jewelry appear identical in every respect). The most interesting difference between the two portraits, however, is the direction of Dara Rasami’s gaze. In [the first photo posted above], her serious look is directed into the camera lens, while in [the second photo above], she directs her gaze away from the camera and out of the frame, suggesting greater remove from the viewer. The setup of both these shots is completely consistent with photographic portraits of high-ranking Siamese royal consorts, such as the images of Queen Saowapha Phongsri previously discussed. Here, Dara Rasami’s dignity is clearly on display: there is no illusion of intimacy with the photograph’s queenly subject. Yet we also find a number of contemporary Western elements (such as the chair, table with brocade tablecloth, lace blouse, etc.) combined with decidedly Lao ones (Dara Rasami’s hair and phasin skirt). Taken together, these elements produce an image of a siwilai ['modernized' or 'civilized'] Lao woman as dignified and modern as her elite Siamese counterparts.
Erb Bunnag’s career as a photographer of her fellow consorts came to a close following the death of King Chulalongkorn in 1910, at which time the women of the Inner Palace were dispersed from the palace at Dusit. Erb and her sisters moved into the compound they had built nearby, where they lived for the rest of their lives. As for Dara Rasami, she continued to live in her Dusit palace residence until 1915, when she retired to Chiang Mai. The image of the ‘northern beauty’ popularized by the Siamese Madame Butterfly, Sao Khrua Fa, however, has persisted in the Thai imagination down to the present day. Following the wildly popular dance-drama of 1909, Sao Khrua Fa migrated into cinematic form, where it has been made and re-made for new audiences over the past several decades—most recently for television. Thus contemporary media continues to keep alive the trope of the exotic and beautiful yet tragic ‘northern’ heroine. Surprisingly, it has even been embraced by the people of Chiang Mai as an element of their self-perception, and is still deployed today as part of the city’s self-promotion as an ‘exotic’ destination for Thai tourism within Thailand.
Lady Erb’s images of Dara Rasami help explain the confusion of Siamese elites as to where to place the Lao in the hierarchy of siwilai: was she ‘backwards’ or was she siwilai? Certainly the latter Chiang Mai portraits fully embody Dara Rasami’s queenly rank within the palace, and the possibility of reconciling her ethnic difference with her royal status. On the other hand, Erb’s images of Dara Rasami depend upon an intimacy with a subject sought out for her ethnic difference, and an emphasis on her most exotic feature: her long hair. Yet when comparing the two sets of images, Erb’s portraits of Dara Rasami remain more engaging for their staged intimacy and informality, despite (or due to?) their subject’s cryptic expression. While Erb’s portraits allow us to see Dara Rasami’s role in constituting an exotic feminine “other” that played into Siamese crypto-colonial discourse, the images get us no closer to an understanding of Dara Rasami’s motives, desires, or notions of her own ethnic identity. Foreign outsider or palace insider, diplomat or hostage, mere consort or Queen: who, indeed, was the woman in the mirror?
