Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Good Woman of Setzuan, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Pursuit of Goodness
Greed, Capitalism, and Corruption
Women and Dual Identities
Humanity vs. The Divine
Summary
Analysis
An epilogue—not attributed to any character in particular—addresses the audience directly. The epilogue points out the futility and insufficiency of the play’s “nasty” ending. The players, too, feel “deflated” by the lack of resolution. The epilogue calls for the audience to decide what will change the world—whether new gods, atheism, materialism, or “moral rearmament” will do the tricks. It is up to the audience, the epilogue declares, to write the happy ending to the play—there must, Brecht himself declares, “be a way!”
This short monologue (often delivered by the actor playing Wong or the actress playing Shen Te) places the burden of solving humanity’s problems on the audience. Brecht points out that if audiences have come to find a solution to questions of identity, greed, wealth, and religion in a play, they are sorely out of luck. Healing society is up to humans living within that society—not gods, not actors, and not fictional characters in a parable.
Themes
