Blog Post Mother Courage

Mauricio Arnal

4/2/2014

 The Underlying Messages Behind Mother Courage

           In drama, as well as other literary works, many audiences and play writers depend or rely on the fundamental assumptions of a story. Audiences are typically accustomed to having a main character, a protagonist, who represents moral goodness and is seen as someone that can be looked up to. In Mother Courage and Her Children Brecht makes a clear choice in which he violates that notion by assigning the main role and the play’s name to Mother Courage. While Courage is the leading role of this play, she is definitely not the typical protagonist that audiences are accustomed to. Instead of being a person of morals and compassion, Courage is a person driven solely by wealth and the notion of capitalism. Mother Courage is an opportunist and vulture of the war whose morals are so intertwined with money that she indirectly kills her own son for undervaluing him. While some can dislike when an author deviates from the fundamental assumptions of literature, such as having a morally sound protagonist, doing so sets the play apart from others, evoking more focus and analysis of the work. By choosing to have an unconventional protagonist, Brecht can cause a feeling of unease in his audience evoking curiosity and further analysis to Mother Courage and enhance the message he is trying to send through his work.

            While the play’s main character is undisputedly Mother Courage, as the play is focused around her and the title bears her name, she is not the main character we are used to having. From the beginning of the play we see that Brecht does not intend for Mother Courage to be a character that is liked by the audience. Courage represents an opportunistic scavenger of the war that makes a living from its aftermath. If not disliked by then, Brecht shows the full extent of Courage’s capitalistic morals at the end of Scene Three when she under bids her son, gets him murdered, and does not even claim his body when it is presented. Courage underbids Swiss because he does not poses the moneybox that she thought he did. For her, the value of retrieving her son went down when she found out that he had thrown away the moneybox when was captured. The nature of Courage’s character not only deviates from the traditional ways main characters are expected, but it causes the audience to question why Brecht would make such a decision.

So why would he make the character whose name is in the title of the play, so morally wrong? By causing this disturbance, Brecht is able to spread a feeling of unease or discomfort as the audience is taken away from the traditional fundamentals of drama. This not only sparks curiosity, but it grabs a hold of his audiences in ways other plays don’t. By making Mother Courage stand out so much, Brecht is able to easily spread his message of the horrors and impacts of capitalism. In a time when war and industrialization are on the rise and a prominent factor, Brecht shows the innate horrors and morally wrongdoings of capitalism by displaying them in his main character, Mother Courage.