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
It is evening in the local park. Yang Sun, a young man dressed in rags, watches as a plane flies overhead. He removes a rope from his pocket and he moves toward a tall tree. Two prostitutes enter. One is old and the other is the niece from the family of eight. The niece tries to pick up Yang Sun, but the old whore tells the niece that she shouldn’t waste her time on him because he’s unemployed. The women move on. Yang Sun throws a noose over a branch of the willow tree—but the women return again, hurrying through the park and announcing that it is about to rain. Shen Te enters. The old whore points out the “gorgon” who threw the niece’s family out into the streets. The niece, however, insists that Shen Te’s cousin Shui Ta was the one who threw them out.
This passages offers a glimpse into the many kinds of desperation and hopelessness which poverty inspires. Yang Sun is suicidal, while the niece of the family of eight is out on the streets to support herself and the rest of her kin. Brecht laments that so many suffer while so few profit—and as Shen Te walks onto the scene, it seems that she is now regarded by her fellow villagers as someone who’s firmly in the latter camp.
Themes
Yang Sun urges the women to move on. After cursing him, the old whore and the niece leave. Shen Te notices Yang Sun’s rope and she tells him he mustn’t kill himself. Yang Sun tells Shen Te to mind her own business. Suddenly, it starts raining. Yang Sun softens and he asks Shen Te to take shelter with him beneath the tree. Shen Te asks Yang Sun why he was trying to die. He tells her that he is a “mail pilot with no mail”—the government has enough “flyers” and he is not needed.
Because water serves as a symbol throughout the play for the inequality, greed, and corruption which thrive under capitalism, the rain that begins to fall in this scene underscores Yang Sun’s lament that although he wants to work, he is barred from his dreams. Both symbols—water and flying—underscore aspects of capitalism’s failed promises, and Yang Sun is most certainly a victim of those failures.
Themes
Shen Te says she understands Yang Sun’s predicament. Yang Sun says she couldn’t possibly understand him. Shen Te tells Yang Sun about a beautiful crane that came to her when she was little—it had a broken wing. It became her playmate for a long time—but every spring and autumn, when the other cranes flew overhead, the crane became restless and sad. Shen Te begins crying. Yang Sun helps comfort her and he wipes her face with a handkerchief. Yang Sun asks why Shen Te saved him. Shen Te tells him that he only wanted to die because of the bad weather. Shen Te addresses the audience and she states that “with all the misery” in the world, “a very little [more] is enough” to make men throw their lives away.
Yang Sun dismisses Shen Te’s inability to understand him—perhaps on the grounds of her having recently come into money, of her being a woman, or a combination of both. Shen Te, however, proves herself a good person as she empathizes with Yang Sun by relating a sad, poignant story from her youth. Shen Te knows how difficult it is to live in the world—and how hopeless things can feel under the constraints of capitalism.
Themes
Yang Sun asks Shen Te about her life. Shen Te says that there’s nothing interesting about her other than the fact that she owns a shop. Yang Sun asks if Shen Te walks the streets, and she replies that she stopped walking the streets when she opened the shop. Yang Sun ironically declares the change “a gift of the gods.” Shen Te tells him that that’s exactly what happened—but Yang Sun doesn’t believe her. Shen Te says she plays the zither and she imitates men well. Though she made a vow of celibacy when she opened the shop, she’s now going to marry soon.
Shen Te doesn’t share her full story with Yang Sun—but as pieces of it emerge, it becomes clear that she sees herself as an average woman who has been pulled all her life between goodness and desperation.
Themes
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Yang Sun asks Shen Te what she knows about love. “Everything,” she says. Yang Sun asserts that she knows nothing and he reaches out to stroke her cheek. The two share an intimate moment before Yang Sun breaks away from her. The two share more about their lives. Yang Sun says he has friends but they’re all sick of him complaining about being unemployed. Shen Te says she has only one friend: a cousin who only came to town once and who will not return.
As Yang Sun and Shen Te explore their feelings of intimacy, they air their insecurities. Shen Te seems to relinquish Shui Ta in this passage—the feelings of love she has make it seem like she’ll never need him again.
Themes
Yang Sun asks to hear more. Shen Te tells him a story about receiving a penny from a poor man as a little girl. It is remarkable, she says, how those who have very little seem to be the most generous. Shen Te notices a drop of rain hit her head. Wong enters singing “The Song of the Water Seller in the Rain.” He laments that when it rains, no one will buy his water. He wishes there was lovely weather and no rain for half a dozen years—then everyone would “go down on their knees before [him.]”
As Shen Te muses about the ways in which people strive to be good to each other even in the face of suffering, Wong enters singing his lament about the nature of his work. Brecht is continually contrasting a sense of hopefulness for change with a sense of doom and overwhelm over capitalism’s vice grip on society.
Themes
Shen Te spots Wong and runs to him, telling him that his pole is at the shop. Wong thanks Shen Te for keeping it. Shen Te asks to buy a cup of water for Yang Sun. Wong suggests Yang Sun simply tilt his head back and open his mouth. Shen Te, however, insists that she wants Wong’s water—she knows how hard he's been working and she wants to help him out. She tells him about Yang Sun, the “bold” and generous flyer who can’t find work. After buying a cup of water, Shen Te runs over to Yang Sun—but he has fallen asleep.
Shen Te patronizes Wong because she wants to do something good. By buying water even when it’s raining, she shows that she wants to support her neighbors and share what she has. Shen Te is a good person who wants to share her resources—but Yang Sun falling asleep as she returns to him with a treat symbolically demonstrates how often her good deeds go unseen and unappreciated even as the “bad” deeds she perpetrates as Shui Ta are more and more noticeable.
Themes
