Little Empathy in Brecht's The Good Person of Szechwan and Mother Courage and Her Children
Brecht is very successful in creating a form of drama where empathy plays little part. In The Good Person of Szechwan it would seem that every action and word is an attempt to alienate us and halt any identification one may chance to make. The indiscernible use of names for characters exaggerating the oriental sound of them is immediately noticeable i.e. 'Wang', 'Shin' 'Sun', 'Shen Te', 'Shu Ta', etc. There is also the use of language and intonation in relation to others revealing personality and social position, which comes in the form of oriental 'bows'. Many of these gestures are already to be found in Asian theatre. Brecht calls it the 'social gestus.'
Songs also interrupt the plot, but it is not the kind of 'bursting into song' which one finds in musicals. The music itself sounds sometimes out of tune and there is an offbeat that one would find difficult to tap one's foot to so one cannot become involved or relate to the music, although songs from The Threepenny Opera became very popular. The moon being likened to 'green cheese' as a slur on society's belief in 'a child of low birth will inherit the earth' and 'The Song of the Eighth Elephant' when there are really only seven anticipates the underhand actions of Sun who represents a number of people in society who destroy others welfare for their own individual interest. All these songs are successful in alienating the audience and have a similar message; the impossibility of a society being saved by an individual. Brecht strives to create a drama in which empathy plays little part by drawing one's attention away from any kind of identification one might make, particularly with...
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... our own society and one wishes to challenge it. One is actually allowed to come to one's own conclusions freely and critically particularly through the eyes of the overwhelmed Shen Te who has to invent a ruthless cousin for herself who can save the business by applying the cruel laws of the market. But I find myself slightly swayed by sub-themes which do hint a little at identification and emotion.
Works Cited
Brecht, Bertolt. "Mother Courage and Her Children." Worthen 727-751.
Brecht, Bertolt. Collected Plays. London: Methuen, 1970.
Benjamin, Walter. "Conversations with Brecht." Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: New Left Books, 1973. 105-121.
Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre. Ed. and trans. John Willett. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.
Worthen, W.B. ed. The Harcourt Brace Anthology of Drama. 3rd ed. Toronto: Harcourt, 1993.
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Brecht, Bertolt. Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic. Hill & Wang New York,
Thom, P (1992), For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Arts and Their Philosophies), Temple University Press
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Wells, Stanley. Shakespeare in the theatre: an anthology of criticism. Oxford University Press, USA, 2000.
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Melchert, Norman. The Great Conversation: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy. 4th ed. Toronto: McGraw Hill Companies, 2002.