Gardy Gilbert

Colin Hart
Modern Theatre History
September 28th, 2016
Small Group Assignment
Ramanathan, Geetha. Sexual Politics and the Male Playwright: The Portrayal of Women in Ten
Contemporary Plays, McFarland, Jefferson, N.C, 1996.
This source observes the gender differences within the play, The Good Woman of
Setzuan. Specifically, this brings to mind the reasoning why Shen Teh takes on her male
persona. At the beginning of the play, once Shen Teh comes into money and takes on her new
tobacco shop, many people from her past begin taking advantage of her new found wealth.
Primarily, the reason behind this is because the original portrayal of women and the portrayal of
Shen Teh are drastically different in that Shen Teh has technically become a person with power.
In result of people taking advantage of this, Shen Teh takes on her male persona in order to
reestablish her dominance.
Brecht portrays Shen Tehs desire for power and credibility of the phallus. This is why
the play is not about the neutered mensch but the female who craves entrance into the
symbolic - the realm of law, economics, language that the male sex has appropriated. It is in her
desire for the phallic signifier that Brecht locates madness of the text. Shen Teh may not want to
be a man, but Brecht portrays her as a woman who wants to enjoy the effects of masculinity.
The portrayal is consonant with the Freudian thesis that the girl child, when she first recognizes
sexual difference, desires either to be male or have a male child. Yet, the desire lends Shen Teh
an escape into potency and power. That it is only through madness that the female can insert
her subjectivity is troubling to the female viewer, who nevertheless sees the splitting as
indicative of the extremity and the specificity of the females material and psychic condition is
patriarchy (pg 73).
Leach, Robert, 1942. Makers of Modern Theatre: An Introduction, Routledge, New
York;London;, 2004.

The following excerpt helps bring to life the man behind the pen, Bertolt Brecht. This
section of the book provides insight on the many facets of Brechts upbringing that helped
shaped into the playwright that we know today.
Brecht the young man was a fascinating, charismatic young mass of contradictions:
shabby provincial, who yet seemed worldly wise, a wildly romantic cynic, someone who was
frequently ill, yet whom many remembered as laughing with gusto, and inspiring laughter in
others. He noted in his diary in August 1920: Im continually forgetting my opinions, [and] cant
ever make up my mind to learn them off by heart. In October 1921 he derided Wagner (Enough
to make you sick) one day, and lauded Charlie Chaplin (pg 105)
Now was formed the persona of Brecht the Berliner: combative, sexy, and
unpredictable, who was associated equally with new drama and scandal. The artist Wieland
Herzfelde remembered a very argumentative, very polished, and even sharp-tongued person.
He had passion...for saying things that shocked (pg 105).

. verfremdung, Oxford University Press, 2010.

I found this source to be quite useful in understanding why Brecht chose to have a
female protagonist in this play. The fact that Brecht wrote such a bold female protagonist for
Good Woman was a bizarre idea for his time. But after reading the following excerpt, by bring
this strange idea that a woman can be in control causes much more of a stir. The premise of
Lysistrata comes to mind. Within that play, these women are attempting to stop a war that is
keeping their men from them by withholding sex. In the context of that time period, this was
seen as the most outrageous form of comedy. But flash forward to the 1943, where women are
actually gaining ground in how the patriarchy has chosen to view them and challenging the idea
that women are only seen as objects that are meant to stay at home and produce babies. Shen
Teh is a sex work that turns around and creates a business for herself. What really creates the
conflict of this play is how Brecht did not sugarcoat how difficult running a business would be for
a woman in this time.

Since *Brecht's first use of the term in 1936, the German word has been translated
variously as disillusion, alienation, de-alienation, distanciation, estrangement, and
defamiliarization, each of which alludes to a relevant feature of this concept. In his 1948 Short
Organum for the Theatre Brecht described Verfremdung as aiming to free socially conditioned
phenomena from that stamp of familiarity which protects them against our grasp today through
a defamiliarizing representation which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time
makes it seem unfamiliar. On occasion Brecht applied the term to the strategies of diverse
artists down the ages who have sought to arouse new or revitalize old perceptions through a
process of making strange. However, Brecht remained critical of those Verfremdungseffekten
(defamiliarization effects, or V-effects), which he felt made the objects represented seem
incomprehensible, given, or unchangeable. Brecht wished to expose habitualized behaviour as
the product of a socio-economic condition that is alterable.
A major component of Brecht's political aesthetic, Verfremdung is underpinned by his
engagement with the Marxist tradition. Close to the practice of Verfremdung is Marx's idea that
social reality is not timeless and universal but an ever-changing, man-made construct. Brecht
defamiliarized those conventions of *illusionist theatre which he believed inhibited the
appreciation of that idea: hence his overt display of human productivity and technologymaking
*lighting apparatus and musicians visible, or scene shifting behind a half-curtainand his
interruption of the flow of *action by inserting narration, song, and direct address. In addition
Brecht introduced historicizing devices such as scene titles, projections, and summary reports
which present the action played out as a critical recreation of past events. For performers, he
devised a method of distancing actor from character through the *rehearsal technique of
quoting text and turning it into the past tense. Most importantly, Brecht asserted that the
realization of a socialist Verfremdung was dependent upon a historicizing method of
interpretation. For instance, in the case of Shakespeare's Othello he advocated that the fatalist
tendency to interpret Othello's jealousy as eternal should be estranged by showing instead how
the character's behaviour is a product of the battles for property and position specific to the
*early modern context.
While Brecht initially argued that Verfremdung required the minimizing of familiarizing
processes such as empathy, he later modified this position and placed greater emphasis on the
dialectical interplay of empathy and detachment. In the Western world many of the playful and
visually striking techniques employed by Brecht to create V-effects, such as non-illusionist
stylization and overt displays of technology, have been adapted by the commercial theatre and
mass media industry, where they are often disconnected from Brecht's socialist project and

used to promote the consumption of pleasurable wit and spectacle. However, interventionist
theatre critics and practitioners worldwide continue to find the interruptive, historicizing, and
denaturalizing potential of Verfremdung an important source of inspiration.