Alienation Effect in Brecht's a Good Woman of Setzuan
Alienation Effects in Bertolt Brecht’s
The Good Woman of Setzuan Bertolt Brecht uses a variety of techniques in his narrative style which is called epic theatre. Notable among these techniques is alienation effect. To achieve alienation effect, he uses many devices in writing his plays (internal devices) and also in performing them (performing devices). This paper will investigate some of the internal and performing devices in Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan which is one of his most important epic plays. In this paper, quotations from the play are according to the English translation by Eric Bentley. When he was a student at Munich, Brecht wrote essays criticizing German classical theatre which was the basis of the theatre at his time. He believed the twentieth century needs another kind of drama that could serve as “an instrument of social change” (qtd. in Esslin 107). Therefore, he tried to adapt the earlier drama to the twentieth century in his epic theatre. He claimed that only epic theatre could depict “the complexity of the human condition” in a society in which people’s lives are under the influence of “social, economical, or historical forces” (111). Brecht’s comment on his play The Threepenny Opera in 1931 describes his motive behind choosing the epic form for his works: Today when human character must be understood as the totality of all social conditions the epic form is the only one that can comprehend all the processes, which could serve the drama as materials for a fully representative picture of the world. (146) His ideas about creating a new non-Aristotelian theatre are best understood in terms of the German tradition against which he revolted. Traditional theatre created an illusion of witnessing a slice of life for the audience, while Brecht intended to “banish trance, illusion, magical effects, and orgies of emotion from the theatre” and replace them by “lucidity,
The Good Woman of Setzuan Bertolt Brecht uses a variety of techniques in his narrative style which is called epic theatre. Notable among these techniques is alienation effect. To achieve alienation effect, he uses many devices in writing his plays (internal devices) and also in performing them (performing devices). This paper will investigate some of the internal and performing devices in Brecht’s The Good Woman of Setzuan which is one of his most important epic plays. In this paper, quotations from the play are according to the English translation by Eric Bentley. When he was a student at Munich, Brecht wrote essays criticizing German classical theatre which was the basis of the theatre at his time. He believed the twentieth century needs another kind of drama that could serve as “an instrument of social change” (qtd. in Esslin 107). Therefore, he tried to adapt the earlier drama to the twentieth century in his epic theatre. He claimed that only epic theatre could depict “the complexity of the human condition” in a society in which people’s lives are under the influence of “social, economical, or historical forces” (111). Brecht’s comment on his play The Threepenny Opera in 1931 describes his motive behind choosing the epic form for his works: Today when human character must be understood as the totality of all social conditions the epic form is the only one that can comprehend all the processes, which could serve the drama as materials for a fully representative picture of the world. (146) His ideas about creating a new non-Aristotelian theatre are best understood in terms of the German tradition against which he revolted. Traditional theatre created an illusion of witnessing a slice of life for the audience, while Brecht intended to “banish trance, illusion, magical effects, and orgies of emotion from the theatre” and replace them by “lucidity,
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