The Good Woman Of Setzuan

“Hesitating doesn’t matter if only you win out.”

The first god suggests that actions are more significant than thought. Shen Te admits that she hesitated when Wang asked her to take in the gods, even though she ultimately agrees. This means that, in terms of goodness, intention is less important than outcome. Therefore, someone who wants badly to do good does not qualify as a good person unless they actually manage good deeds.

“It would be nice not to covet my neighbor’s house. It would be pleasant to attach myself to one man and be faithful to him. I too should like not to exploit anyone, not to rob the helpless. But how? How? Even when I break only a few of the commandments, I can hardly survive. […] How can I be good when everything is so expensive?”

Early in the play, Shen Te confesses that poverty has threatened her ability to be good. She admits that she is not entirely selfless and wants more. She wants to survive but cannot support herself without breaking commandments. Shen Te raises the central question of the play, which is whether a capitalist society makes it impossible to both succeed financially and be a good person. Although Shen Te agreed to help the gods and take them in, she nearly didn’t. Goodness, therefore, is precarious.

“All of these, Shen Te, are but the doubts of a good woman.”

The first god responds to Shen Te’s question about remaining good while trying to survive by reassuring her that she is good. However, this is an empty statement. The gods only single out Shen Te as good because she does something selfless by taking the gods in for the night. Even though, as she admits, she hesitated. One decision nearly set her on a different path. Goodness in the play is about deeds rather than thought.

“That’s important, to be a new man. I’ll open the store with you as my first customer. You’ll bring me luck.” 

When the unemployed man in rags tells Shen Te that a cigarette will make him feel like a new man, Shen Te optimistically provides. However, the opposite is true. The man simply returns over and over to exploit Shen Te’s generosity. The act does not bring her luck, but it does set the tone for the way her store will run. Shen Te feels like a new person because the gods have given her money and therefore a chance to lift herself up out of poverty. In actuality, a small windfall does very little in the long run unless one protects and invests it shrewdly and is either unscrupulous or very lucky.

“She has no claim, but she’s hungry: that’s more than a claim.” 

Shen Te voices an important tenet of anti-capitalist thought, which is that human beings deserve to have their basic needs met. Mrs. Shin sold the tobacco shop and no longer has a claim to anything in it, but she and her family are hungry. Shen Te’s formulation of goodness leads her to see that if someone needs something that she can provide, she ought to provide it whether they can pay or not. The gods value this goodness when they are on the receiving end but have little regard for the well-being of the woman who provides. 

“Never recognize a claim, justified or not, or in two minutes you’ll be swamped with claims, justified or not. Throw a piece of meat into a garbage can, and all the mangy dogs of the district will be at each other’s throats in your back yard. What are our law courts for?” 

The elderly woman who moves her family into Shen Te’s shop offers this advice when Lin To attempts to collect the debt he is owed for building the shelves in the shop. Although this advice is antithetical to Shen Te’s determination to be good, the woman is not entirely incorrect. The moment that Shen Te has something to take, the people of Setzuan swarm around her to grab it. Ironically, the woman and her family are the first example, capitalizing on their claim that Shen Te owes them because they gave her a place to live when she first came to Setzuan. 

“The rats climb onto a sinking ship!” 

The pregnant sister-in-law recognizes immediately that the family is infesting and exploiting Shen Te, and that Shen Te will not be able to hold onto her shop if she continues to allow it. Rats climbing onto a sinking ship are desperate, and a sinking ship only provides a momentary respite from drowning. The family expects to bleed her dry and then move on to the next sinking ship.

“We will continue our journey. We will search and find other people who resemble our good woman from Setzuan: the talk about good people being no longer able to live on our earth will stop.” 

The first god expresses his expectation that Shen Te cannot be unique. And rather than recognizing that she is the exception rather than the rule, which means that it is at least nearly impossible for good people to survive in the world, the gods are determined to use these few examples to silence those who are crying out. From the beginning of their journey, the gods are not seeking to understand the true nature of the world as inhospitable to goodness. They are looking for justification for their decision not to intervene and change what they have created even though it is illogical that one voice should drown out billions. 

“The unfortunate thing is that the need in this city is too great for a single person to manage.” 

When telling the family to leave the tobacco shop, Shui Ta absolves Shen Te from the responsibility of giving everything she has to those in need. In helping others, she must stop short of depleting her own personal resources and compromising her ability to survive. When the gods need a place to stay, she gives up working for the night even though she needs the money to pay rent. This creates an expectation that she must give everything to those in need, even if it means that she will be in need herself.

“But the fact remains: it isn’t respectable. Why not? First: one doesn’t sell love—beware of the love that’s for sale! Second: it’s respectable to go with someone you love but not someone who’s paying for it! Third: the proverb says, not for a handful of rice but for love!” 

Ironically, although the policeman looks down on prostitution as selling love, he has no qualms about selling Shen Te’s love by placing an ad in the newspaper and finding her a husband who can support her financially. Giving away love is a luxury that Shen Te cannot afford until she has her shop, and even then, she is buying love from Yang Sun. 

“With horror I see how much luck one needs to keep above water. How many ideas! How many friends!” 

Shui Ta realizes that even with Shen Te’s gift from the gods, it is impossible to be financially successful without luck, influential friends, and creative ideas. With no good reputation to bank on, Mrs. Mi Tzu will not trust Shen Te to pay the rent monthly like she might with another tenant. Therefore, Shen Te nearly loses her business immediately after she buys it. The people may love Shen Te for her goodness, but they trust Shui Ta as a businessperson. 

“To speak without hope, they say, is to speak without goodness.” 

When Shen Te meets Yang Sun, he is hopeless and ready to die. He tells Shen Te not to trust anyone, including her cousin (who he has not yet met), because his friends have turned away from him in his moment of depression and unemployment. Shen Te frames hope as a necessary aspect of goodness. To be a good person, she feels that cannot give up on the people around her or the hope that they can learn to be better. Shui Ta, however, does not have this same open faith in other people and neither do those people in the play who are financially successful such as Mrs. Mi Tzu and Mr. Shu Fu. In a world where the gods make it their policy not to intervene, blind optimism is dangerous. 

“People probably like to show what they can do, and how could they show it better than by being kind? Being wicked is just being clumsy. When someone sings a song or builds a machine or plants some rice, that’s really a sort of kindness.” 

If goodness in the play is about deeds rather than intention, Shen Te’s statement clarifies that it makes no difference if the person does good deeds to feel self-important. For Shen Te, her goodness brings her praise and recognition. However, she presumes that everyone values the sort of recognition one gets from being kind over the satisfaction of being selfish. In fact, wickedness is often carefully calculated rather than clumsy. Sun, for instance, is very purposefully wicked to Shen Te because he values himself above all others.

“What does business have to do with an honest and dignified life?” 

The first god presents goodness as a pure, transcendent quality that should outshine circumstance. As the play demonstrates, goodness is impossible to maintain when a person’s basic needs are not being met. A person needs money to live an honest and dignified life. By divorcing goodness from personal self-preservation, the gods are ignoring the fact that poverty breeds desperation.

“We can’t change the world.”

The pregnant sister-in-law, unwilling to testify against Mr. Shu Fu on Wang’s behalf, acknowledges that the circumstances of their world make it extremely uncomfortable and even dangerous to stand up for another person against someone with power. This sense of hopelessness opposes Shen Te’s notion of goodness, but the sister-in-law is not incorrect to recognize that they have very little power. While the sister-in-law and many others in the play choose to function by accepting the unfairness of the world and cheating, lying, and exploiting as necessary to survive, Shen Te chooses to act as if the world is not an unfair place.

“The hungry dog pulls the cart home faster.” 

The irony of Shui Ta’s aphorism is that those who are hungry have less strength and energy to work. Although desperation will drive someone to work harder, it can make a person unethical and ruthless. Yang Sun is convinced that if he takes the pilot job, he will have no trouble keeping it because he will work hard. The previous pilot also worked hard and had a clean record of good service. There is no guarantee that his friend will not turn around and sell him out of the job to the next desperate person. 

“Because you shouldn’t get on well with him. If you love me, you can’t love him.”

Shen Te creates a dichotomy between herself and Shui Ta. She sees her fictional cousin as her opposite. Those who love Shen Te for her goodness cannot possibly love Shui Ta because those who love Shui Ta do so because of what he can do for them financially. This moment reveals to Shen Te that Yang Sun only loves her for her money, which is to say that he does not truly love her at all.

“Better drink some more! Or are you a cautious person? I don’t want a cautious wife. If I drink, I’ll fly again. And you, if you drink, you might possibly understand me.”

Yang Sun is impulsive and thinks of his own needs and desires before anything else. Choosing to marry Shen Te was a rash decision, grabbing at what he sees as an opportunity. He taunts Shen Te by withholding his love unless she can prove that she is also able to be impulsive. However, this is not because he wants a wife whose sensibilities are like his own, but because he needs Shen Te to act irresponsibly, sell her shop, and betray the carpet shop couple so he can achieve his dreams. Flying requires the ability to act on instinct since overthinking slows down reflexes and might cause a crash. By the end of the play, Sun has become more responsible and stable, and he no longer wishes to be a pilot. Drinking will lower Shen Te’s inhibitions and give her a sense of what it is like to live like Sun.

“Such are the tribulations of usefulness.”

Wang’s parable about the trees shows how something that is good and useful will be consumed by a materialistic and capitalist society. Therefore, it is to one’s detriment to be too useful. This applies particularly to Shen Te, whose commitment to being useful threatens to destroy her.

“Things aren’t what they might be with our search. Now and then we find some good beginnings, gratifying intentions, many high principles, but all that hardly constitutes a good human being. And when we do find halfway good people, they don’t live in a dignified, human way.” 

After searching the world, the third god expresses what they have found: Goodness cannot thrive in their world because a person cannot be good without living a miserable, undignified life. Despite this, however, the gods decide that Shen Te is proof that goodness and dignity can coexist. They ignore the fact that to live a dignified life, Shen Te must act unethically as Shui Ta. In fact, they learn that goodness exists but the world they have created stamps it out, but they choose to dismiss this and return to living in privilege.

“O joy! A human being is growing in my womb. Nothing can be seen yet. But he’s there already. The world awaits him secretly. In the towns, people are saying: Someone’s coming now who’s got to be reckoned with. A flier!”

Shen Te expresses hope that this child, a son, will achieve heights that she cannot. By using Shui Ta to build a tobacco factory, she works toward a privileged upbringing in which her child will not have to contend with poverty and desperation but will also have her to model goodness. 

“A noble man is like a bell. If you ring it, it rings, and if you don’t, it don’t, as the saying goes.” 

Mrs. Yang proudly describes Shui Ta’s influence on her son Yang Sun. Before taking the job in the tobacco factory, Sun was immoral and a thief, even stealing her belongings to sell them. However, the job has placed him on an honest, legal path, even though he becomes the oppressor by taking the position of authority over the workers. She points out that a person does not act noble on their own. They must have the proper motivation and guidance, unlike goodness, which the gods expect to generate and sustain itself. Of course, nobility and goodness are not the same qualities. A noble person has dignity, self-respect, and privilege. A good person must be willing to forgo all these things for the sake of others. 

“A good person isn’t so easily forgotten. There aren’t many.” 

Wang offers this statement to Shui Ta as a warning since he believes that Shen Te’s disappearance is likely the result of foul play. Because Shen Te is Shui Ta, he unknowingly emphasizes that goodness is not so easily destroyed, even if it is masked. After six months, Shen Te’s friends worry that she is dead, and although she is alive, if she becomes Shui Ta, she is figuratively dead. This determination to remember and find her shows that Shen Te is not irredeemable or hopelessly lost.