Reading Order
The Good Woman of Setzuan Reading Order
The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943) by Bertolt Brecht is the most fully developed of the Brecht parable plays — three gods arrive in the fictional Chinese city of Setzuan looking for a good person, and the only good person they can find is the prostitute Shen Te, who uses the money they give her (as a reward for housing them) to start a tobacco shop. The play is organized around Shen Te's discovery that it is impossible to be genuinely good in the capitalist system: every time she tries to be generous, she is exploited, and the only way she can maintain the shop (and her goodness) is to invent a ruthless male cousin, Shui Ta, who manages the business with the harshness that the business requires. The play ends without resolution: the gods, who have reappeared, are confronted with the impossibility of the demand they have made on Shen Te, and the play ends with the actor who has been playing Shen Te/Shui Ta stepping out of character to address the audience directly and ask them what the right answer is.
Where to start
The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943) — in Eric Bentley's translation. Best Brecht reading order: The Threepenny Opera → Mother Courage → The Good Woman of Setzuan → The Caucasian Chalk Circle → Life of Galileo
Complete The Good Woman of Setzuan Book List
- 1Buy
The Good Woman of Setzuan
Bertolt Brecht·1943·The most fully developed Brecht parable play — Shen Te, the three gods, and the impossible demand of goodness in a capitalist system. The play with the most explicitly unresolved ending in the Brecht canon; the actor who has played Shen Te steps out to ask the audience for the answer that the play cannot give - 2Buy
Mother Courage and Her Children
Bertolt Brecht·1941·The companion — Mother Courage, the cart, and the Thirty Years War. Companion investigations of the same Brecht question: what does it mean to be good in a bad system? Both plays refuse any comfortable answer, but where Mother Courage shows the consequences of complicity, The Good Woman of Setzuan shows the impossibility of avoiding it - 3Buy
The Threepenny Opera
Bertolt Brecht·1928·The earlier companion — Mack the Knife and the analogy between criminality and capitalism. The Threepenny Opera and The Good Woman of Setzuan are companion investigations of the capitalist system from different angles: The Threepenny Opera shows the equivalence of criminal and business enterprise from a satirical distance; The Good Woman shows the impossibility of goodness within that system from the inside - 4Buy
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Bertolt Brecht·1948·The companion Brecht parable play — the servant girl Grusha who flees with the governor's baby, and the rogue judge Azdak. The Caucasian Chalk Circle is the more hopeful companion to The Good Woman: where Shen Te is driven to double life and the play ends without resolution, The Caucasian Chalk Circle ends with the chalk circle test and a kind of imperfect justice - 5Buy
Crime and Punishment
Fyodor Dostoevsky·1866·Dostoevsky's companion in the literary tradition of the investigation of the relationship between principle, necessity, and the actions that principle can license or condemn — Raskolnikov's theory of the extraordinary person and his inability to live with the consequences of acting on it. Both Crime and Punishment and The Good Woman are organized around the question of what happens to a principled person who tries to act rightly in a system that does not reward rightness - 6Buy
The Secret Sharer
Joseph Conrad·1910·Conrad's companion in the tradition of the literary investigation of the double — the captain and the murderer Leggatt who is his alter ego. The Secret Sharer and The Good Woman of Setzuan are companion investigations of the double as a formal device: both are organized around a character who must maintain two identities simultaneously, and the question of which identity is the 'real' one - 7Buy
Middlemarch
George Eliot·1871·Eliot's companion in the literary tradition of the investigation of the relationship between goodness and the world's failure to reward or even accommodate it — Dorothea Brooke's 'unhistoric acts.' The Good Woman of Setzuan and Middlemarch are companion investigations of the difficulty of being genuinely good in a world organized to reward a different set of qualities - 8Buy
The Plague
Albert Camus·1947·Camus's companion in the post-war tradition of the literary investigation of what it means to be good in a situation that makes goodness difficult or impossible — Dr. Rieux's work during the plague in Oran. The Plague and The Good Woman of Setzuan are companion post-war investigations of the ethics of action in a world organized against goodness: Camus's from the Existentialist perspective; Brecht's from the Marxist
The Good Woman of Setzuan — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the message of The Good Woman of Setzuan by Brecht?
Brecht's message in The Good Woman of Setzuan is that goodness and capitalism are incompatible — that the system of private property and profit that organizes bourgeois society makes genuine goodness impossible, and that any person who tries to be genuinely good within that system will be forced to become bad (or to pretend to be bad) in order to survive. The play demonstrates this through Shen Te's experience: every act of genuine generosity produces a situation that exploits her (the relatives who move in, the pilot Yang Sun who tries to use her money to finance his career, the old woman who takes advantage of her tobacco sales). The only way Shen Te can protect her goodness is to invent Shui Ta, the ruthless male cousin who runs the business with the harshness that the market demands. At the play's end, when the gods return and discover that Shen Te and Shui Ta are the same person, they are confronted with the impossibility of their own demand (that there be good people) and the social system that makes goodness impossible. The actor who has been playing the role steps out to address the audience directly and ask for the answer: 'We do not ask whether these conclusions are well founded; they will be reached in any case.' Brecht's formal conclusion (the open ending, the address to the audience) is his way of saying that the play cannot give the answer, because the answer requires not a theatrical gesture but a political one: the transformation of the social system that makes goodness impossible.
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