“Brecht’s Split Characters and His Sense of the Tragic” by Walter H. Sokel: What does it mean when split personality is pervasive in a writer’s work?

“The theme of the split personality is a striking phenomenon in Brecht’s dramatic work. It occurs in A Man’s a Man. The ballet The Seven Deadly Sins and the two major plays The Good Woman of Setzuan [aka The Good Person of Szechwan] and Puntila are built around this theme. Indirectly…an essential aspect of Mother Courage and an important one in Galileo. The theme of the split personality is one of Brecht’s major devices for expressing one of his basic concerns. A proper understanding of it will shed light on his deep-seated though oft-denied sense of the tragic and on the relationship between that and his political utopianism…

“Shen Te, the good woman of Setzuan, invents the person of her cousin Shui Ta, a hard-hearted, level-headed businessman…even as the civilized Dr. Jekyll turns into the monstrous Mr. Hyde” (1, p. 127).

Having read the introductions of the Penguin Classics edition of The Good Person of Szechwan (2)—also Wikipedia and browsed online—I have not found anyone wondering whether a fiction writer’s frequent use of split personality might reflect a split personality of his own.

1. Walter H. Sokel. “Brecht’s Split Characters and His Sense of the Tragic,’’ pages 127-137, in Brecht: A Collection of Critical Essays, Edited by Peter Demetz. Englewood Cliffs N.J., Spectrum/Prentice-Hall, 1962.

2. Bertolt Brecht. The Good Person of Szechwan [1943]. Forward by Carl Weber. New Introduction by Norman Roessler. Edited with an Introduction by John Willett and Ralph Manheim. Translated by John Willett. New York, Penguin Books, 2008.