A Study on Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht

INTRODUCTION

The dramatic ideas and political thoughts of Brecht are visible in Mother Bravery and Her Children. It exposes the reality of war, business and morality, and challenges the traditional instincts of maternity. That's why he didn't want Mother Bravery, who doesn't gain much about her failures, to be empathic with the crowd. He needs to explain, like Ibsen, the horrible side of reality. Interest has the last word in Mother Courage's conflict between love and interest. By the pressure of things, she is thoroughly defeated. Whoever does not have any choice is not guilty. Mother Strength and Her Children's genuine interest is put into how the seeming inconsistencies lead to the theatrical experience. While many critics prove that Mother Courage is a perfect Aristotelian tragedy, Brecht never took that into account. It is the common opinion of Brecht that he developed Mother Courage as a pessimistic, villainous character. He wanted his audience to watch her more as a battlefield hyena than as a tragic heroine seeking sympathy for her. Mother Bravery was not meant and considered by Brecht as a disaster, although it turned out to be one.

Brecht was born in Augsburg, Bavaria, Germany, on February 10, 1898, to Eugen Bertolt Friedrich Brecht. He was the son of Friedrich Brecht, a Catholic father who worked as a paper mill salesman, and Sofie, a Protestant mother. Brecht grew up in a middle-class household and was intelligent at school early on. While still in high school, he started writing poetry and had some written in 1914. He was still involved in theatre by the time Brecht graduated. However, instead of continuing on this path, to avoid the draught, he studied science and medicine at university. It did not succeed, and at the close of World War I, he was enlisted in 1918. He worked in the military hospital in Augsburg as an orderly. Brecht and his writing were deeply affected both by his upbringing and his experience in the military. He rejected his youth's bourgeois values and also developed a keen understanding of religion, informed largely by the conflicting influences of the respective faiths of his parents. The wartime horrors in the military hospital that Brecht experienced firsthand led to his life-long pacifist views. In his 1949 play Mother Courage and Her Children, he expressed these beliefs in his depiction of the horrific Thirty Years ' War. As early as 1922, with the production of his first work, Baal, Brecht began writing plays. His anti-war beliefs led him to sympathies with communist politics at the same time as his artistic work; he In 1919, at the end of World War I, a lengthy association with communist groups started. Brecht became the dramaturge ("drama expert" or writer in residence) at a theatre in Munich at eventually leaving his intermittent university studies and began writing full-time by 1920. Brecht wrote many short stories and poetry during the next thirteen years, and successfully staged several of his own plays. He worked on many musical plays with the composer Kurt Weill, including communism would solve many of the social inequalities and political problems of the world. Brecht and his works were effectively outlawed after the National Socialist Party (the Nazis) rose to power in Germany in the early 1930s. In 1933, he and his family left the deeply violent environment; the playwright went into exile for the next fifteen years, effectively. In exile, Brecht continued to write, hopping between European countries and the U.S. He created several plays that were specifically critical of the Nazi government and, in general, the political condition of the world, in addition to the novelization of The Three penny Opera. Of these stories, one of his best-known and critically praised works was the anti-war Mother Bravery and Her Children. The vanquished Germany was broken into eastern and western factions at the close of World War II. Brecht was welcomed home with the hostility of the Nazi faction dispelled. He wanted to stay in East Germany, which was run by the Communists, partially because they gave him a theatre and support. The Berliner Ensemble was formed by Brecht, debuting in 1949. The same year, Brecht published his last original script, The Days of the Commune, while he dedicated all his attention to operating the theatre and acting as its stage manager (although the script would not be produced until 1957). He kept writing poetry and adapting the fiction of other playwrights for his theatre, however. The significance of Brecht 's plays had been realized by the mid-1950s and they became popularly recognized. Brecht died of coronary thrombosis on August 14, 1956, in East Berlin.

The first and foremost idea of the epic drama is to offer a wide historical sweep. The Mother Courage game meets this requirement entirely. It is a chronicle of the Thirty Years War, which took place between Protestants and Catholics in Germany from 618 to 1648, as the sub-title of the play describes. Brecht picked just twelve years (1624-1636) out of those thirty years, which proved a long enough time for Brecht to accomplish his objective of exploring the current German social structure in contrast with Germany in the seventeenth century. By taking poetic liberties in dramatizing the different incidents, personalities and chronology of the incidents, Brecht resembled the Elizabethan dramatists-Marlow and Shakespeare writing history plays. But he differed from them because Mother Courage's Dramatis Personae were not great historical figures but fictitious people, while the historical personalities themselves were the dramatis personae of the historical plays of Marlow and Shakespeare. Historical personalities do figure in Mother Courage, but not as dramatis personae. They the action of the drama. Max Spalter states appropriately, His eye is always on the sad fact that the high and powerful use those below as their swords, and so while we don't get a single battle scene in Mother Courage, as has always been conventional in epic historical drama, we get battles of a different kind between those representatives of the military establishment whose contribution is to assemble cannon fodder, and people like Moth. Though Brecht wrote it as an anti-war play, it is not directly stated by him. He simply portrays, against the background of war, the misfortunes and sufferings of a family and leaves his audiences to draw their own inferences. The play has a powerful effect on the minds of the audience, particularly because the evils of war have a tragic effect on the main characters in the play itself.

Brecht intended to emphasize his idea of a play as an episodic narrative by using the name 'epic' for his theatre, spread over a long period of time and often involving travel. In the epic theatre, the object of the story was to expose the circumstances in which people existed. Mother Courage is definitely an episodic play that breaks all the classical units of time, location and action-loose in form when it is broken into twelve scenes. Mother Bravery is a series of episodes: the action is always divided by a lengthy period of time from the prior and future episodes, spanning from one to three years. In Mother Courage, the continuity found in the ancient classical plays or the 'well-made' modem plays is seen to be missing. The heroine, Mother Bravery, journeys from place to place and also from country to country with her family and her carriage. At different times and at different sites, multiple events take place throughout her life. In the opening scene, in a Swedish region, Eilif, her elder son, is taken away from her to be enrolled in the Swedish army in 1624. In Poland, two years later, she heard that Eilif had appeared as a war-hero. This is where she meets Yvette and laments the loss of her second son, Swiss Cheese, who is executed under the orders of a Catholic sergeant; and this is where she, Kattrin, her daughter, and the chaplain become prisoners in the hands of the Catholics themselves. Two years later, the conflict extended to more nations. Having driven through Moravia and Italy, Mother Courage and her waggon are in Bavaria. Mother Bravery declines to send the chaplain any linen to render bandages to dress the wounds of the Protestants struck by Tilly's soldiers on the occasion of Tilly 's victory at Magdeburg. And so the play begins, one episode after another. The

episodes have; and some of the unity is also provided to the play by Kattrin, the chaplain, and the cook who appear in several of the episodes. The play is often effective in presenting the social circumstances of the period convincingly. It provides a general view of Europe at the point. In the play, all the protagonists are meek sufferers and not a single one is a revolutionary. The viewer can judge the protagonists in the scenario as helpless; no one will alter the course of events.

The objective of epic theatre was to clarify the process by which their living conditions shaped men and women and by which they were also able to shape those circumstances. This goal was the theatrical foundation for another alienation tactic used by Brecht. He wanted his audiences to see characters with detachment and critical observation and their actions on the stage. In the course of the play, Brecht certainly utilized distancing or alienation devices. We do feel alienated from Mother Courage at various points in the play. The inconsistencies in her personality particularly alienate us. She wants to keep the war going, and yet she does not want her sons to join the army. She denies that she is a ‗hyena of the battlefield 'and yet is the most callous towards the Protestants who have been wounded in an attack by the Catholics. She is full of maternal fear over her own children's wellbeing, but she proves to be hard-hearted against a child saved by Kattrin. She curses the war, and yet continues to desire continuance of the same and even to sing songs praising the war. And yet the audience is filled with the deepest sympathy for her at the end of the play, so that all the alienating devices ultimately lose their efficiency in her case. Mother Courage emerges as a noble, tragic figure despite Brecht's own unfavorable view of her. Kattrln's valiant deed to rescue the townspeople is still strongly regarded by the crowd. The gap is also only reached by the listener in the cases of the cook and the chaplain who, owing to their fluctuating ideas and arrogant attitude, are averted. But alienation does not take place in the audience in the cases of Mother Courage and Kattrin.

Political alienation comes to work as a concept that denotes almost any sort of 'dissatisfaction' with any part of society with politics. In this way, in the social structure, a politically marginalized topic is often isolated. "Alienation" shows how, since the harder he works and the more he produces, the more miserable more powerful the universe of things he makes which encounters him as foreign artefacts, appears from this idea. The greater the activity of mankind, the more useless his existence becomes. The theory of alienation is the philosophical construct through which Marx reveals the destructive impact of capitalist development on human beings, their physical and mental conditions, and their social structures. Marx claims that "everything is under the control of inhuman power" is one of the embodiments of alienation. It means that the force of capital r through capitalist culture is the force of capital r. Capitalism is, thus, an exploitative mechanism that induces and needs fighting. Brecht shows that the 'company' of Mother Courage and capitalism are the same in a text from Courage Modell. In terms of Brecht: The war is the company of the great men who, for their own gain, control politics, misuse society, primarily render the interaction of man with man a business relationship. In doing so, Mother Courage has no chance to compete with the authorities as an alienated person. Not only does Mother Bravery sell her strength to the capital master, the alienated subject, but even the 'influence of inhuman power' threatens her and her children's lives. The alienated objects of patriarchy are dehumanized. This dehumanization corresponds to the reduction of the subject to a item or product in Marxian terminology, since all is measured according to profitability in capitalism. Now it seems appropriate to point to the inhuman uncertainty of Courage for the slaughtered peasants, and to her business interests as regards the labor of her children and the ransom of Swiss Cheese. Only profit motivates Mother Courage. Her decision to stay with Kattrin is not only guided by maternal affection in scene nine, but also by the hope for profit in war: The Cook: Ultimate word. Think that over. Mother Courage: I don't have to think now. I won't leave her here. The Cook agrees to propose a relationship to Bravery, becoming mindful of the privations endured in battle. Outside the chaos of war, Utrecht appears to stand. Courage certainly recognizes this as an escape from war. Courage, however, rejects Utrecht because she favors war. She relies, as a trader, on war for her benefit. According to Marx, the state of modern man, stripped of, cheated of, or separated from the entirety of human existence that should be his, is alluded to as alienation as the result of capitalism. He assumes that under capitalism in a society, a worker is forced to offer his power and his expertise carry on with her company, even after losing all her children. The play, Mother Courage, attempts to show how Mother Courage herself is brutalized by capitalism. Her war business is causing the deaths of her men. Inhumanity is revealed in her connection with participation in the conflict. The play gives an image of the inhumanity of courage that is integral to her company. I mean, Courage's company is connected to the misery of others. In reality, the notion that one's satisfaction is bought at the expense of another's unhappiness is obviously part of Courage's thought. In a capitalist system because mankind's skill is measured according to his or her sum of benefit, then everybody becomes a competitor. Individuals become independent monads that only affect themselves and those without reference. All the following examples reveal the fact that courage shows that there is no compassion for her desire for profit. Mother Courage's company is combined with the suffering of others in the play. Her desire for war over harmony, destruction over life, also applies to her own children. Courage uses the general hunger at Walhoff's siege in scene two to extort an inflated price for her capon from the cook: The Cook: Sixty hellers for such a miserable bird? Mother Courage: Wretched bird? Such a fat brute? Meaning to say some greedy old general can't afford sixty hellers for him-and watch your step if you got now for his dinner? ... Mother Courage: What, can you get a cap on like this just down the road? ... A rodent that you could have.... In time of siege, fifty hellers for a giant capon!

As they form an important part of the play, Brecht put great emphasis on music and songs. He saw them as 'sister arts'. But his thoughts were unconventional and novel about the inclusion of songs-musical insertions. They were treated as distinct elements and were not intended to be part of dialogues or to convey a specific psychological condition of characters or to provide a subjective explanation of the drama and not to release feelings or to elucidate the text. In the opposite, the songs can be viewed as instruments of interruption such that the audiences have some opportunity to focus on the play's behavior. Music is the manifestation of a mood and a social act. The songs illustrate the drama's key concepts, focus on different developments in the action, identify previous occurrences, and predict potential developments. Thus, amid Brecht's divorce from conventional drama, in classical tragedy, the songs play the role of the chorus. In Mother Courage, there are as many as eleven songs. With the exception of scenes V and XI, a song is included in every scene in the play and two songs are included in the final scene. A song in the play is sing one song each. There are two songs the soldiers play. Mother Courage sings a song in the opening scene announcing her trade as a canteen woman, inviting soldiers to come and buy food and drink from her canteen waggon because, as a result of the war, they would soon be killed and burned underground. The song seems to be the keynote of the piece. Eilif sings The Song of the Wife of the Fish and The Soldier in the second scene. The song tells the story of a soldier lad who had the ambition to distinguish himself in the war, but who, in the course of the war, is subsequently killed to a premature end. For Eilif, the song proves to be unconsciously ironical. She sings about her youthful love affair in Yvette 's autobiographical The Fraternization Song (scene III), which filled her with ecstasy but proved a catastrophe for her because the army man, who had professed to love her and who had enjoyed the pleasures of sex with her, had subsequently deserted her and never returned to her. The song also provides Mother Courage with an opportunity to sound a note of warning to her own young daughter against engaging with a soldier. The Song of the Homs Chaplain (scene III) describes Jesus Christ's summary trial, the sentence of death against him, his agony inflicted on him under the torture and execution known as crucifixion. The impending execution of Swiss Cheese is caused by this song, which is compared to the crucifixion. It is possible to label the song a dirge. The Song of the Great Capitalization by Mother Courage (scene IV) is often autobiographical as it traces the events of the singer's life and demonstrates the disillusionment she endured of her dreams and ambitions becoming disappointed. There is a lot of worldly sense in this song, as one can never live up to one's values and resolutions. The song is therefore closely related to the theme of this play, which not only depicts the destruction of a war, but also other dark aspects of the war. In scene VI of the play, a soldier's song describes the feelings and attitude of a soldier who is on the move and who would like to snatch from life whatever pleasure he can. In the scene that follows, Mother Courage's song echoes her first song as well as the song of the soldier just seen above. In this song, Mother Courage speaks of war as a "business proposition." This song indicates that she is not willing to learn much about the destructiveness of this battle for herself form.

available, war can take care of its entire people. Once more, here. Mother Bravery demonstrates her determination to pursue the fight because it is indeed a means of survival for people such as her. In the following scene IX, the cook sings a long song, described as The Song of the Wise and the Good. The cook sings about the futility of this universe of intelligence, strength, integrity, unselfishness and, of truth, every kind of goodness. The cook also characterizes himself and his companion in the poem, i.e. Mother Courage as God-loving individuals whose faith brought them no reward, but only caused them misery. Symbolic significance is also found in the song. The three children owned by Mother Courage represent three cardinal virtues. Like Julius Caesar, Eilif was brave; Swiss Cheese, like Socrates, was honest; and Kattrin, like Martin, is unselfish; and they all come to a tragic end. Scene X's next song is The Song of Shelter and Security, sung by a prosperous farmhouse inmate and heard by Mother Courage and Kattrin, who stop to listen to it. The song makes the spectators acutely and painfully aware of the contrast between the farmhouse's security and prosperity and the hardship and the toil that must be experienced by homeless Mother Courage and her daughter. Then in the concluding scene there are two songs. One is a lullaby, sung to Kattrin by Mother Courage, who seems to have fallen asleep with Mother Courage. In relation to both of her sons, Mother Bravery is still painfully conscious of her misfortunes: "One lad in Poland fell." The other is where? She does not realize, even at this stage, that her other son is also gone. The last line of the lullaby thus strikes a note different from the seven preceding lines. The last scene concludes with a song sung collectively by the soldiers. The soldiers here echo the song which we heard in the very opening scene from Mother Courage. The soldiers are well conscious of the "dangers, surprises and devastations" caused by the battle; and they are also aware of the reality that the fight is endless: "The war takes over and may not cease." At the same moment, the soldiers realize that they may get nothing out of the fight themselves and that their pay will not even be paid. The war may last for three generations. They would most probably die in the course of the war: ―Only a miracle can save us and miracles have had their day.‖ Thus, the music that the play concludes with just helps to intensify the gloom and hopelessness created by the continuing conflict. a way of diluting the reality of the play and also to stand in a dialectical connection to the dramatic activity. The songs in this play, however, actually strike us as being an integral part of the dramatic action. The dramatic effect of the episodes during which they appear is increased by nearly all the tracks. For eg, the opening scene. The song of Mother Bravery shows the very subject of the play, which is battle and its horrors, and also reveals it. This song also shows the desire in which Mother Bravery has become a canteen-woman. Similarly, in the second scene, Eilifs' song illustrates the dark side of the war by pointing out the premature death that a soldier is bound to face, and, furthermore, this song ironically leads to the sad end of Eilifs' own ambition as a soldier. The songs in this play often function as a sort of feedback on the play's action and on the action 's development. Therefore, the listener is inclined to consider that these songs also have some emotional influences on them, thus raising the attractiveness of the play.

Women are the creators of humans as a whole. Across the planet, women are worshipped and glorified. The depiction of women in literature, then, was considered to be one of the most significant ways of 'socialization' as it presented the role models that showed women and men what were appropriate versions of the 'feminine' and valid feminine goals and ambitions. Many writers came forward with their thoughts and they were driven out with this thought into the form of writings. Feminists pointed out, for instance, that very few women work for a living in nineteenth-century fiction, unless they are driven to it by dire necessity. Instead, the heroine's choice of marriage partner is the focus of interest, which will determine her ultimate social position and solely determine her happiness and fulfilment in life, or her lack of them. There are also progressive men who in their works lead to focusing on women's suffering. One of them, Bertolt Brecht, also highlights the suffering and circumstances of women in wartime. Although Elaine Showalter defined the terms 'Feminine',' Feminist' and 'Female' in her play Mother Courage and Her Children, the term was coined in 1837 by the French philosopher Charles Fourier. The term "feminine" is defined as the phase of the dominant tradition's imitation of the prevailing modes. The term "feminist" is described as a resistance process against the norms and principles Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht is a European drama concerned with the plight of women during the Thirty Years ' War. The lead character in this play was Anna Fierling, who was nicknamed Mother Bravery because of her brave disposition. Due to the nature of her business, she was bold and heartless, but she lost her boldness as a mother of three children towards the end. Bertolt Brecht depicts women's lives and their sufferings in wartime by her character. Mother Bravery has a powerful and healthy mind, and for three girls, she steps out to find herself as a mother. She is a realistic lady who does not have any fantasies or unrealistic expectations. The Chaplain and the Cook offer to marry her, but she refuses them because she is not drawn to the Chaplain as a husband might be. A recruitment officer and a sergeant are trying to enlist soldiers on the highway near the Swedish town under the order of Swedish Commander Oxenstierna, so both of them stopped Mother Courage's waggon and her children. She doesn't like missing her sons because of the current conflict. Her motherhood did not encourage her to send Eilif, her baby, to fight. She feels worthy of being his mother as the officer speaks about the courage of Eilif. Mother Courage is a heartless creature as she declines to send any linen from her stock for making bandages to the wounded citizens. Mother bravery stands for her boldness, and in the following terms that can be seen. A song is performed by Mother Courage: ―You captains, tell the drumsto slacken And give you infanteers a break: It‘s Mother Courage with her wagon Full of the finest boots they make. With crawling lice and looted cattle With lumbering guns and straggling kit- How can you flog them into battle? Unless you get them, boots that fit?‖ The characters are also unique. Kattrin stands for her innocence and as a sacrificial lamb, since Mother Courage stands for strength and boldness. For the good of others and for their livelihood, she risks her life. Kattrin is sympathetic, bold and kind-hearted. After two years, her second baby, Swiss Cheese, also entered the army as the second Finnish paymaster. After the triumph of the Swedish king in Poland, the battle was favorable for the businesswoman Mother Bravery. She's making a lot of money from the war. Yvette Pottier, a slut who later becomes the wealthy widow of a colonel, encounters Mother Courage. injured people are not supported by Mother Bravery, but Kattrin sacrifices her life and reaches a farmhouse and rescues a boy who may have died inside. And if she is not a married child, because of her kindhearted disposition, she has the feeling of motherhood. "There's already a boy in there! In ", Kattrin runs." The preference of the heroine here is not marriage, but battling for their survival. As a mother, Mother Courage often thinks of Kattrin's ugly scar on her forehead, so she's scared of her marriage. In the war, Mother Bravery loses her two daughters, but she is pleased about the war because by selling her supplies and purchasing a ring and a necklace, she receives money from the soldiers. Suddenly, King Gustavus of Sweden is killed and the battle comes to an end. She encounters the cook as Yvette arrives to visit Mother Bravery. As Peter Piper, she remembers him. The cook professes and deceives her. It is the cook who drives Yvette to adultery, but then becomes the wealthy wife of a colonel. She considers the cook an inveterate seducer and a wretched antidote. As the war comes to an end, Mother Courage feels bad because she thinks her waggon is still not sold. She goes to town along with Yvette to sell this provision. Eilif comes to visit his mother while she is in the region, since he is now incarcerated for assaulting the family of a farmer. He was unable to locate his mother, so he went back. The cook has permission to remain with Mother courage. Again, the fighting continues, the markets are silent, and the cities are burning down. The cook gets a letter saying that his mother is gone, so he returns to his hometown immediately. The cook asks Mother Confidence to follow him, but she declines because she doesn't want Kattrin to come with her. She's not ready for her daughter's loss. It's because of the affection she has for Kattrin. Mother Bravery has her waggon parked outside the Protestant town of Halle. She goes to town hoping to make some dollars, but Kattrin comes to take care of a Protestant family at the farmhouse. In order to initiate a surprise assault, Catholic forces are secretly moving through the forest towards Halle. They have to prepare to destroy the Protestant residents as they reach the area. Kattrin comes to realize from the dialogue between the soldier and the Catholic officer that when they are asleep, they have plotted a surprise assault on the Protestants. She starts pounding a drum to warn the citizens of the town to save them from the Catholic soldiers' unexpected invasion. Catholic troops are attempting to avoid her. They're gunning her out, because she's gone now. The town's inhabitants are rescued by an act of sacrifice by Kattrin. She arrives with her three kids to drive the waggon in the opening scene and sacrifices all but her waggon at the end of the play. She just brings a cart with her now. She has three children from separate

But destiny comes in the form of splitting her from her kids. Yvette Portier was made a prostitute for the soldiers by the impact of war. She is married to an elderly man who is the colonel's brother. She becomes the prosperous widow of the colonel after his death and inherits his wealth automatically. Kattrin, the daughter of Courage's mother, is stupid. By nature, she is compassionate. She wants to save the people in the farmhouse from Catholic attacks. And then she's risking her existence. The war has changed these three women's lives. Because of the war, including their identity, these women lost everything in their lives. The play was written by Bertolt Bercht as an anti-war play. He provides war instruction and creates awareness of the war through the play.

This paper attempted to analyses the main character of the play, Mother Courage, under the devastating effects of alienation as the capitalist production of alienation and identity, which deals with the sensual experience of a subjective process of loss of sense of belonging and utility in the social environment of mankind as a result of living in a capitalist society and in a larger zone. Culture, episodic form, music and songs are further discussed. The plot revolves around a woman who depends on war for her personal survival and who, in protecting her merchandise under enemy fire, is known as Mother Courage for her coolness. Her profiteering is not interrupted by the deaths of her three children, one by one.

1. Mustapha Ruma Bala (2013) on "Brecht's MOTHER COURAGE as a Critique of War and Religion." 2. Brett D. Johnson (2007) on Mother Courage and Her Children (review) 3. Shilpa Nain (2016) on A STUDY ON MOTHERS FROM BERTOLT BRECHT‘S MOTHER COURAGE AND HER CHILDREN AND RUTA SEPETYS‘ BETWEEN SHADES OF GRAY 4. Sepetys, R. (2011). Between Shades of Gray 5. Brecht, B. (2015). Mother Courage and Her Children. Courage and Edward Bond‘s Saved. 7. Periyasamy, A. (2017). The Portrayl of Alienated Mother in Mother Courage and Her Children by Bertolt Brecht. 8. Sampler. (26 June, 2015). Mother Courage‘s Unnatural Selfishness. 9. Grade Saver. (5 December, 2015). Mother Courage and Her Children Summary 10. Mahmoud Daram, Abolfazl Ahmadinia (2014) on Bertolt Brecht‘s Mother Courage and Her Children: Marxist Concept ofAlienation 11. Farmer, P. E. (2008). ―Mother Courage and the Future of the War 12. Ghadyalji, Vaishali Kiran (2013) on Changing trends in tragic expressions in drama a journey three classics Oedipus Rex King Lear mother courage and her children.