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A blog to connect Humanities Core concepts with my creative side |
| In Bertolt Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht uses conventions of epic theater to argue the 30 Years War was a war of politics. Brecht utilizes the alienation effect and irony to prevent the audience from feeling for Mother Courage and other characters at specific moments in the play. One recurring thing we see in the play is how business and money come before family. Mother Courage’s self-involvement shows how she acts out of self-interest than love for her children. She is more of a mother to the war than she is to her kin. Also, on page 95, the first soldier even points out the farm is the family’s priority. It also goes along with the idea of the state becoming a “military-industrial complex”. The farmer’s wife does not thank the soldiers for sparing her son after his impudent attitude towards them; she thanks the soldiers instead for sparing the ox. This shows how war has turned more into a business than a fight. Business and war are in a paradoxical situation, because war funds the business; however, without business to supply the army, there can be no war. As a mute person and a female unable to fight in the war, it would be reasonable to assume Kattrin would be safe from the horrors of the battle. However, Kattrin’s death at the end of scene eleven is particularly disturbing to the readers. She is considered a martyr for her cause, and she died thinking she did not succeed. The fact that the bells and cannons sound out right after Kattrin dies makes us pity Kattrin, yet when Mother Courage comes back in the beginning of scene 12, Brecht jolts the audience away from their connections when Mother Courage begins singing about how her child will be better off than all the others in heaven. The farmer family who turns Kattrin in to the soldiers is symbolic of the desperation of war. When Kattrin goes onto the roof to beat the drum. the farmer’s wife pleads with the soldiers, telling them Kattrin is not related to the family, in an attempt to prevent the soldiers from killing her and her family. This act of self-preservation shows how the characters’ actions are determined through self-interest. Kattrin’s fatal virtue, kindness, helps display her as a mother-figure in the play, Kattrin is obviously distraught when she hears the farmer’s prayer. She is willing to sacrifice herself and her own material possessions for a town she does not even live in, and that in itself is more than anyone else has done. The farmer family ends up in league with the soldiers, trying to kill Kattrin. They show how individual action is useless when acting out against authority: the farmer’s son refuses to tell the soldiers the path to town, and he is beat up. Kattrin beats the drum to warn the village and is shot down. At the very end, Mother Courage is seen continuing on with her wagon, without Kattrin, Swiss Cheese, or Eilif to help pull it. She has not learned that the war is her ultimate undoing; it has killed her children, and slowly, it will also kill her. Works Cited: Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013. Print. |
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