The Good Woman of Setzuan by Bertolt Brecht

First published:Der gute Mensch von Sezuan, 1953 (English translation, 1948)

First produced: 1943, at the Zurich Schauspielhaus, Zurich, Switzerland

Type of plot: Epic theater

Time of work: Between World War I and World War II

Locale: Fictive province of Setzuan, China

Principal Characters:

• Wang, a water seller
• The Three Gods, who are searching for a good person
• Shen Te, a woman of Setzuan
• Shui Ta, Shen Te disguised as a ruthless businessman
• Yang Sun, an unemployed flier
• Mrs. Yang, his mother
• Shu Fu, a wealthy barber
• Mrs. Mi Tzu, the house owner
• Lin To, a carpenter and father of four

The Play

The plot of The Good Woman of Setzuan winds through a prologue, ten scenes with numerous interludes separating them, and an epilogue. The action centers on the desire of Shen Te to be good and the impossibility of living up to that standard in society as it is presently configured. She has a small amount of money, which she must use to help herself and those around her to a better life if she is to be good. She discovers very quickly, however, that in order to survive she must invent a tough cousin, a formidable businessman, to protect her interests. Thus throughout the play she alternates between two roles: As herself, she is the gentle, generous, sweet Shen Te, but when she must meet business crises head-on, she assumes the identity of a man, the harsh and sometimes vicious Shui Ta.

In the prologue, Wang, the water seller, speaks directly to the audience, explaining that he is waiting to greet the gods, who are secretly searching for a good person to help end the horrible poverty and the intense drought that plague the province. Wang easily recognizes the gods—they are well fed and well dressed compared to the poor citizens of Setzuan. Wang hopes to find lodging for the gods but is turned away from the homes of all the wealthy. He shelters them in the home of Shen Te, a prostitute. In the morning, as they prepare to depart, certain that they have found a good person in Shen Te, the gods give her one thousand silver dollars, with the proviso that she must remain good. Shen Te uses the gift of the gods to buy a tobacco shop, turning away from her previous profession. However, as claim after claim is made on her food, shelter, and money, she recognizes that she will be able to save no one if she herself does not survive.

As the second scene begins, Shui Ta introduces himself as Shen Te’s cousin. He makes friends with the local police, rids the shop of a family of eight who have moved in, cheats the carpenter of his shelves, and rents the shop space on less stringent terms than those proposed by Mrs. Mi Tzu in the first scene. With a tough business approach, it seems, the shop and Shen Te will survive.

As scene 3 begins, Shen Te hurries to a teahouse to meet a rich man who might marry her at Shui Ta’s request. She interrupts Yang Sun’s attempt to hang himself out of despair over not being able to ply his trade as an airplane pilot. She falls in love with Sun and forgets the meeting with the old man in the teahouse who could save her shop.

In a dream, Wang sees the gods. Shen Te is as good as ever, but Shui Ta’s cheating of the carpenter besmirches her reputation; the gods are discouraged by this imperfection. Their physical condition is deteriorating. Their search is leading them to more contact with the misery of the human condition.

Outside Shen Te’s shop at dawn, the hungry people who depend on her rice await her return. There is an altercation between Wang and the wealthy barber, Shu Fu. The barber breaks Wang’s hand. Shen Te arrives, glowing with the joy of her night’s encounter with Yang Sun and happy to give rice to the hungry. The carpet dealer and his wife recognize the look of one in love. They ask if she met the man at the teahouse. Shen Te realizes that she has forgotten about paying the rent in the flush of romantic love. The old couple happily loan her all they have, two hundred silver dollars, to pay her rent. Moments later, Shen Te impulsively and lovingly turns this money over to Yang Sun’s mother to help him get a pilot’s job. She also promises to testify for Wang that she saw Shu Fu break his hand.

In an interlude, Shen Te appears, carrying the clothing and mask of Shui Ta. Before the eyes of the audience, she becomes Shui Ta. Yang Sun meets Shui Ta in the fifth scene. Sun reveals that he is not in love with Shen Te but is only using her. Mrs. Mi Tzu arrives to collect the rent. Sun, who needs three hundred dollars more to get the pilot’s job in Peking, offers to sell Shen Te’s shop to Mrs. Mi Tzu for that amount. The deal will be sealed in two days. Wang enters to have Shen Te help him file his suit against Shu Fu, but Shui Ta refuses to let Shen Te perjure herself. Shu Fu offers to allow Shen Te to continue her good deeds through marriage to him; he will make his houses behind the cattle yard available to her to shelter the poor. Yang Sun returns. Shen Te appears and chooses Sun, rather than accept Shu Fu’s offer.

On the way to her wedding, Shen Te tells the audience that the wife of the carpet dealer needs the two hundred silver dollars back because her husband is gravely ill. The wedding never takes place, because Yang Sun first wants possession of the three hundred silver dollars. Shui Ta never brings the money.

As scene 7 begins, Shen Te is preparing to move away in ruin. Shu Fu brings her a blank check to save her business. However, owing to her love for Yang Sun, she refuses to take advantage of Shu Fu’s generosity. She also discovers that she is carrying Sun’s child. Reversing herself, Shen Te commits herself to Shu Fu by promising to find shelter for the whole Lin family in his houses. She gives all of her possessions to Wang so that he can receive medical care for his hand. Members of the family of eight show up with three bales of tobacco, which they ask Shen Te to hide for them. Shen Te realizes that she must save her own unborn child, so she calls upon Shui Ta once again. He uses Shu Fu’s blank check and commandeers the bales of tobacco. He announces that only those who work will be fed, and that the barber’s houses are not available for living because they will become the location of a tobacco factory.

The gods appear to Wang in the interlude. They are suffering terribly from their earthly sojourn. Wang tells them of a dream of seeing Shen Te almost drowning as she tries to cross a river with a heavy load of moral precepts on her back.

Scene 8 is set in Shui Ta’s tobacco factory. Mrs. Yang narrates the rise of Yang Sun in Shui Ta’s business. He ingratiates himself to owner Shui Ta and rises to become foreman in just a few months by cheating and brutalizing his fellow workers.

By scene 9, Shui Ta has grown fat. The neighbors think that it is caused by prosperity and complacency, but the audience knows that it is Shen Te’s pregnancy. Wang the water seller stops outside the shop and cries out for Shen Te and her goodness. Sun hears from Wang that Shen Te is pregnant and assumes that it is his child. Sun also hears weeping from the back room, yet only Shui Ta emerges. The police are called, Shen Te’s clothes are found, and Shui Ta is arrested for the murder of his kind cousin.

The gods are almost finished as they appear to Wang in the interlude. They recognize that their moral precepts may make it impossible for people to live. They vanish quickly. The final scene of the play is the trial of Shui Ta for the murder of his cousin. The gods will serve as judges. Shui Ta promises to make a confession if the courtoom is cleared. He strips off his costume and Shen Te stands before the judges. She explains that she could not be good and still survive, especially when she had to think about the future of her unborn child. The gods shut off her discussion of the predicament of humankind. They are overjoyed to have found their good person again and quickly depart for heaven now that their work is done. As they leave on their pink cloud, they ignore her cries for help.

The epilogue is a kind of tongue-in-cheek summary of the action. The audience is challenged to find a solution to Shen Te’s dilemma in spite of the contradiction between the way society is structured and the domination of the moral precepts of the gods.

Dramatic Devices

The Good Woman of Setzuan has an episodic structure that allows the playwright to establish the problems of poverty and generosity and then depict them in different ways. Each restatement of the problems is accompanied by a raising of the stakes—first it is just a night’s business Shen Te will lose, then her shop, then someone else’s shop, then the future of her child. Each time, Shui Ta finds some solution to save Shen Te through cold-hearted business tactics. The loose episodes, with the counterbalancing effects of the two sides of the character, lead to an alternation between the scenes of Shen Te and Shui Ta, until in scene 10 they both make appearances.

The episodic structure also allows for the interludes, which interrupt the development of the plot. In one, the audience sees Shen Te transform herself into Shui Ta; the effect is reminiscent of the Chinese theatrical convention in which characters change costume and become other characters before the eyes of the audience. In many interludes, Wang talks with the gods about Shen Te’s tenacity in goodness or about the problems of being good. In each, the audience sees that the gods are deteriorating as a result of their contact with the real world of human problems. Their clothes become more and more ragged, they look increasingly haggard and travel worn, and intervention in human disputes earns one a black eye and another a crippled leg from the jaws of a trap. This is a strong visual statement that human problems must be solved by humans—gods are incapable of doing so.

The plot of the play is frequently interrupted by songs, poems, or characters speaking directly to the audience. The songs and poems are used to focus the attention of the audience on specific and critical philosophical issues. Shen Te sings “The Song of the Defenselessness of the Gods and the Good People,” in which she questions why evil exists at all and why, if the gods are so powerful, they do not wage war against evil and win. The song forces the audience to consider that evil is not otherworldly, but purely human in its source, just as goodness is a purely human virtue.

Characters who speak directly to the audience confront the playgoers with the social and political messages of the play. They also narrate action that is about to take place, telling the audience what to expect. This telling all in advance encourages the audience to, rather than watching the play to see what happens, watch to see why and how things happen. This device renders audiences capable of solving the problems rather than simply accepting their presence in the human condition. For example, Mrs. Yang tells the audience that her son, Yang Sun, has risen high in Shui Ta’s tobacco factory through a little bit of luck and hard work. Then she narrates each of the events that led to Sun becoming the foreman. As she does so, the scenes are enacted, complete with dialogue. The audience watches Sun make a coworker look lazy, a paymaster seem dishonest, and the assembly line workers appear incompetent until he takes over as their taskmaster. The spectator sees how he does this and understands that it is for his own advancement at the expense of others. There is no suspense over whether he will succeed, because his mother has already revealed that he does.

Bertolt Brecht sprinkles the play with tales and anecdotes that contribute to the sense of the exotic. They also provide an opportunity to preach directly to the audience. The spectator sees the contradictions inherent in accepted notions of good and evil in human behavior in Wang’s tale of the trees who pay the penalty for usefulness by being chopped down in their prime instead of being able to live to a ripe age.

Critical Context

The first full text of The Good Woman of Setzuan was offered for production in 1942. The play came from a mature writer who was in his ninth year of exile from his homeland, Germany. During his nomadic travels to avoid Nazi rule and certain death, Brecht was constantly in need of money. By the time he settled in California in 1941, he hoped to create a play that would have some commercial success. The Good Woman of Setzuan is, for this reason, less strident in its revolutionary preaching and less concerned with the intricacies of Marxism than most of Brecht’s earlier works.

Despite the softer approaches to revolutionary issues, this work raises the same economic question as earlier and later plays. In The Good Woman of Setzuan, as with his other plays, Brecht attacks the myth that human destiny is in the hands of gods. He replaces that myth with a call for human action to replace the social or political complacency that accepts things as they are rather than creating society as it should be.

The Good Woman of Setzuan is ranked as one of Brecht’s greatest plays, along with Leben des Galilei (pr. 1943; Life of Galileo, 1947), Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (pb. 1949; The Caucasian Chalk Circle, 1948), and Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (pr. 1940; Mother Courage and Her Children, 1941), all begun or completed in the difficult days of exile. Less political and not as obscure philosophically as his earlier works, these plays tend to be more accessible to theater artists and audiences steeped in the twentieth century Western dramatic tradition of domestic realism. All four are based on the premise that humankind is responsible for its own destiny and must structure society and the world in such a way as to dispense with the myths that contradict or discourage positive human action. In each play Brecht also confronts the moral issues involved in human action. Generosity in the face of poverty (versus the creation of more personal wealth), the containment and suppression of knowledge for what seems a greater good of society, the nurturing and use of resources, and personal responsibility in the advantageous economics of war are all strong themes in Brecht’s great plays.

The sweep of The Good Woman of Setzuan is both typical and unique in Brecht’s work. He chooses the large issues of the modern world for his works, expressing them in everyday terms but setting them in either distant times or places. Often he uses extraordinary people as his characters, but in having them do ordinary things he brings their efforts to a level that encourages audience contemplation and criticism. With The Good Woman of Setzuan, he creates a play of China that is really about Western ideas and problems. What might be expected to be an exotic fairy tale is a grim confrontation with the realities of labor and poverty and the philosophies that propound the problems.

Sources for Further Study

Benjamin, Walter. Understanding Brecht. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Verso, 1983.

Bentley, Eric. Bentley on Brecht. New York: Applause, 1999.

Bentley, Eric. The Brecht Commentaries. 2d ed. New York: Grove Press, 1987.

Casabro, Tony. Bertold Brecht’s Art of Dissemblance. Brookline, Mass.: Longwood Academic, 1990.

Esslin, Martin. Brecht, a Choice of Evils: A Critical Study of the Man, His Work, and His Opinions. 4th rev. ed. London: Methuen, 1984.

Ewen, Frederick. Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art, and His Times. New York: Citadel, 1967.

Fisher, James. Review of The Good Woman of Setzuan. Theatre Journal 52 (March, 2000): 20-21.