The Good Person Of Szechwan Analysis

Understanding The Good and The Bad in Brecht's The Good Person Of Szechwan: Negotiating Identity Through A Marxist Lens of Moral Relativism under Capitalism

It was not until the spring of 1939, around the time of the German annexation of Czechoslovakia, that Brecht began a serious attempt to write this play which he had been ruminating for years. The play epitomizes Brecht’s ‘non-Aristotelian drama’ -a dramatic form intended to be staged with methods of Epic theatre. Originally, the play was called Die Ware Liebe which would have roughly translated as Love as a commodity. This would have had been an obvious pun since the German for ‘true love’ is ‘die wahre liebe’ and is pronounced the same way.

Brecht’s reactionary theorization of this
There has been constant speculation about the choice of location, especially when the question of contemporary politics figures in. This play could not be published until 1953 by which time Brecht had come back and settled in that part of the Germany that came to be known as German Democratic Republic. The war was long from over; Europe was settling into the so-called Cold War but one significant other development had been made alongside: in 1949, after years of guerrilla resistance and civil war, the Communist party, under Mao Tse-tung had taken control in China. So Brecht’s Szechwan, even if it had never meant to be a real picture of China, suddenly seemed an almost embarrassing anachronism. It could be argued that it wasn’t just China but also the number of other European countries that were now under Communist rule, that led to Brecht adding another epilogue which is rarely added and/or
There are perhaps two movements in the early twentieth century theater which gaines his fervent disapproval. The first was Naturalism, the sort of theater that developed in Europe in the late nineteenth century, flourished under the guidance of Henrik Ibsen. This was the theater that attempted to create an illusion of reality through a range of dramatic and theatrical strategies, it opened up the ‘fourth wall’ for the audience who were given a ‘slice of life’. Brecht was opposed to ‘illusionism’ and engaged in a scathing critique of the Naturalists even though they were one of the pioneers in producing socially charged theater. The second was Expressionism, the kind of art that distorted the world radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. For Brecht, the Expressionists were too emotional for them to be rational. He reacted also against their individual and subjective takes on the world. His discontentment could be traced back to the fact that for the modern Marxist, philosophy couldn’t have been simply a question of cooking up theories about a fixed object and an unchanging world. On the contrary, the ideas had to be able to intervene and participate in the reality (the fragmented, collectivist, late capitalist reality) just as the reality intervenes in the ideas. He wrote about it in his