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The Self According to Brecht

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The Self According to Brecht

In Brecht’s play “The Good Woman of Setzuan” we are introduced to Shen Te the prostitute and her alter ego Shui Ta, supposedly her cousin. Upon being pressured by her landlady Mrs. Mi Tzu for character references, Shen Te creates Shui Ta. In making these characters one and the same, Brecht attempts to show his disillusionment with a world in which he believes that it is impossible to be good and survive. He strives to show how it is possible to be moral, however in the struggle for survival within society morality often becomes the victim to what needs to be done. This conflict between morality and necessity is personified in Shen Te and Shui Ta. Shen Te, the good woman of Setzuan, is instinctively kind hearted and incapable of refusing to help anyone in need. In the beginning of the play, despite her poverty she gives up her client for the night in order to board the three Gods that need a place to stay. As a reward for her kindness, the Gods give Shen Te one thousand silver dollars “Isn't it true she might do better if she had more money?" (Brecht 1941) and she uses the money to buy a tobacco shop. She is immediately assailed by some of the townspeople for help, beginning with Mrs. Shin the previous owner of the tobacco shop and then by the elderly couple (who had first boarded her when she arrived in Setzuan) and their extended family who move into the shop. Being overwhelmed, Shen Te withdraws and Shui Ta enters. Shui Ta is able to impose his authority on the parasites that descended upon the tobacco shop in a way that Shen Te could not, “You won’t find Miss Shen Te. She has suspended her hospitable activity for an unlimited period. There are too many of you. She asked me to say: this is a tobacco shop, not a gold mine” (Brecht, 1941). He prepares the shop for business, negotiates an appropriate price for the store shelves with the carpenter and in a firm and decisive manner prepares to evict the extended family that has moved into the shop taking advantage of Shen Te’s hospitality. Shen Te and Shui Ta are exact opposites of each other. Shen Te is moral, upright and kindhearted while Shui Ta is direct, decisive and business-like in his approach. They are incompatible yet they complement each other as together, they make up the attributes that each would lack on their own. By creating these characters Brecht is successful in conveying his message to the public. One cannot survive in the world today by being purely moral, upright and kind. The world is a cruel and harsh place and to survive, one must create a hard shell or exterior that allows one to survive this harshness. In the Good Woman of Setzuan, Shui Ta is the hard exterior or shell that Shen Te has created in order to survive.

References

Brecht, B. (1941). The good women of Setzuan. In M. Puchner (2012) The Norton Anthology of World Literature (3rd ed., Vol. 2, pp. 1881-1913). Norton & Company.

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