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
Back in Wong’s sewer pipe, the gods come to Wong in a dream once again. Wong tells them that he has seen Shen Te—she is in love and she’s “doing good deeds all the time.” She is kind to everyone, he reports, and she often gives away tobacco to customers who can’t pay. In addition, she is once again housing the family of eight. The cherry on top, Wong says, is that Shen Te bought a cup of water from him even when it was raining. Shen Te, Wong reports, has earned the nickname “the Angel of the Slums.” The only person in town who doesn’t like Shen Te, Wong reports, is a carpenter who claims that Shen Te’s cousin, a businessman, refused to pay him for some shelves. The first god admits that he doesn’t know what is “customary” in the “unintelligible” realm of business.
Wong is impressed by how charitably Shen Te has continued to behave toward everyone around her since her meeting with the gods. Her goodness has earned her a reputation as an “Angel” throughout town, which equates her with the realm of the divine. Shen Te’s good deeds, however, have been enabled by the fact that she received a gift of money from the gods. Brecht calls into question whether the Shen Te readers met at the beginning of the play would have come to this kind of “goodness” on her own.
Themes
The gods tell Wong that they’ve been turned away quite often lately—the rich send them to the poor, but the poor don’t have enough room to house them. No one is “heroic” anymore, the first god says. As the gods depart, Wong calls out to the “illustrious ones,” suggesting that they refrain from asking too much of people at one time.
