The Difficulty of Being Good

The play is about the difficulty of being good, isn't it? I mean, Shanta tries essentially to be charitable to her neighbours and not react to criticisms of her life as a sex worker. The great Chinese feminist writer Dingling spent a lot of her time thinking about this question of what it means to be good. She also knew European modernism and that literature extremely well. Back in the 1920s, she wrote about uninhibited female sexuality,. By the 1940s, exactly the same time that Brecht was writing, she wrote a character who's a bit like Shanta in about a young woman in a story called 'Shaa Village'

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