48 pages • 1 hour read
Bertolt BrechtThe Good Woman Of Setzuan
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1943A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Water
Wang sells water, monetizing a necessity of life just as food, shelter, and medical care are monetized in capitalism. Although it is necessary, the supply and demand change with the whims of nature and the weather. When there is no water, Wang has none to sell and so he starves. And when there is too much, Wang cannot sell any and he also goes hungry. Only Shen Te buys water when there is rain, giving Wang money as a kindness. She offers water to Yang Sun as a form of care and nurturing. In capitalism, money becomes like water—it is just as necessary to survive. Wang refers to Shen Te’s tobacco shop as a gift from the gods, “a little fountain of goodness” (102). Shui Ta responds, justifying the way he has managed Shen Te’s business in the courtroom by asserting, “[O]therwise the fountain would have dried up, fool!” (102). However, although too little water is deadly, so is too much. For instance, flooding has plagued the province of Kwan for decades.
Brecht uses drowning and flooding imagery to describe living in poverty. The pregnant sister-in-law refers to her family as “rats climb[ing] onto a sinking ship” (18) as they move into Shen Te’s shop. When the family threatens to ruin the tobacco shop, Shen Te sings, “The little lifeboat is swiftly sent down. Too many people greedily reach for it as they drown” (20). When Wang dreams about Shen Te in danger, she is trying to cross a river where many commit suicide, desperate to keep the water from erasing the book of rules she carries. While the ebb and flow of water seems like, alternately, the bounty or wrath of the gods, it is arbitrary because the gods do not intervene in human affairs. As one god explains, Kwan faces flooding not because they aren’t religious, as Wang supposes, but because “they neglected the dam” (5). Similarly, life and circumstance are random and uncontrollable. After agreeing to post an advertisement to find Shen Te a husband (and financial benefactor), Shui Ta exclaims, “With horror I see how much luck one needs to keep above water. How many ideas! How many friends!” (30).
Flying and the Sky
When Shen Te meets Yang Sun, he is an unemployed pilot who dreams desperately of returning to the sky. Sun wants to fly so badly that he is about to kill himself. Flying represents the far-off promise of success that fuels capitalism—the idea that a person can transcend poverty either through hard work and dedication in this life or through goodness that will guarantee it in the next. Yang Sun stares up at the planes as they fly overhead, dreaming about reclaiming the career he has lost. He is willing to exploit Shen Te and destroy the life of a good pilot and his family to achieve this dream. Financially, a job flying means a high salary and wealth. Flying is the opposite of drowning and poverty, or even managing to tread water or swim. By the end of the play, Yang Sun views flying as a pipe dream, satisfied to have the stability of a prominent job in the tobacco factory. Capitalism leads him to give up on his dreams, even though earlier in the play the loss of those dreams nearly drove him to suicide. The sky is unreachable, and Sun can only touch it briefly and with the permission of those who own the airplanes and the companies that fly them.
The sky also represents distance from the issues of the mundane. The pilot in the sky is faceless, and to him, so too are the people on the ground. The gods live in the sky and must descend to earth in order to learn how humans are living. This suggests that they are not omniscient or even paying attention to most of what those living on earth endure. On the ground, the gods are susceptible to hardship and suffering. However, even after their long journey, they still have the privilege of returning to the sky and they quickly dismiss what they have learned to take what they see as their rightful place. The gods are like the wealthy. Those who wish to be like them treat the gods as all-powerful and venerate them. In actuality, they are not interested in improving the lives of the workers at their own expense. At the end of the play, Shen Te reaches toward them as they leave without offering their help, rising back up to where they will no longer see her struggles.
The Cement and Tobacco Factories
The city of Setzuan is dominated by a cement factory. Shen Te discovers quickly after buying the tobacco shop that only the cement workers have money to shop there. This suggests that, until Shui Ta creates the tobacco factory, there are no other reliable jobs. When Wang tells the gods the parable of the trees that live short lives because of their usefulness, he explains that he read it in a book that he found “in the ruined hut of a priest who has moved away to become a laborer in the cement factory” (68). The priest gave up a career that is ostensibly a calling from the gods for the sake of stable income and self-preservation. A priest would presumably live his life trying to do good in the world, but the “ruined hut” suggests that faith has become obsolete and he was forced to trade a life of spiritual service for the drudgery of a factory worker.
Additionally, the cement factory represents industrialization and the crushing of individuality. Cement is bleak, paving over nature to facilitate commerce. It stifles all growth. Factory jobs are typically dangerous at their worst and back-breaking labor in the best circumstances. Factories cause pollution, and the cement factory workers contribute to this pollution as well as the destruction of their bodies by spending their money on tobacco. The companies exploit workers to make more money for the wealthy, and the rich do not redistribute any of that wealth to those whose labor created it. Capitalists consider the factory employees as interchangeable, unskilled workers who they can easily replace.
When Shui Ta turns Shen Te’s little tobacco shop into a tobacco factory, he builds it on top of three stolen bags of tobacco. Shui Ta creates jobs for those who have been taking everything from Shen Te. However, those jobs are exploitative, as demonstrated when Shui Ta discovers that Lin To is not strong enough to carry as many bags of tobacco as Yang Sun. Although Yang Sung attempts to pick up the carpenter’s slack, Shui Ta orders Lin To to carry an extra bag, extracting more labor for the same wages. The police want to shut the factory down for having too many workers, implying that they are enduring poor, overcrowded working conditions. The tobacco factory contributes to the industrialization of the city and adds smog and pollution. Tobacco is a product that is in-demand, but it is not life-sustaining or even healthy.
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By Bertolt Brecht
