>Brecht wrote her as a symbol of capitalism -- a war profiteer, but
>audiences sympathized with her as a person who was trying to make
>the best of a bad situation -- the ambiguity that you mentioned.
Mother Courage is not so much a war profiteer villain as a symbol of small business buffeted by circumstances beyond its control and yet clinging to what dooms it (= capitalism, war, and the myth of self-sufficiency): "I hope I can pull the wagon by myself. Yes I'll manage, there's not much in it now. I must get back into business" (Mother Courage's penultimate line). Brecht was frustrated, I think, that the audience fatalistically affirmed her as she is in the play, as a representation of "the indomitable human spirit in the face of adversity" or something like that, whereas he wanted the audience to take a critical look at her, examining why she "learns nothing" about war and business.
From Brecht's notes on _Mother Courage_:
***** Mother Courage learns nothing
In the last scene Weigel's Courage seemed to be eighty years old. And she understands nothing. She reacts only to remarks connected with the war, such as that she mustn't be left behind, and takes no notice when the peasants brutally accuse her of being to blame for Kattrin's death.
In 1938, when the play was written, Courage's inability to learn from war's unprofitable character was a prophesy. At the time of the 1948 Berlin production the wish was expressed that at least in the play Courage would understand.
In order that the realism of this play should benefit the spectator, that is, in order that the spectator should learn something, the theatre must work out a way of playing it which does not lead to audience identification with the principal character (heroine).
To judge by press reviews and statements of spectators, the original production in Zurich, for example, though artistically on a high level, merely pictured war as a natural catastrophe and ineluctable fate, confirming the belief of the petit-bourgeois members of the audience in their own indestructibility and power to survive. But even for the equally petit-bourgeois Mother Courage the decision whether or not to join in was left open throughout the play. It follows that the production must have represented Courage's business activity, her desire to get her cut and her willingness to take risks, as perfectly natural and 'eternally human' phenomena, so that there was no way out. Today the petit-bourgeois can no longer in fact keep out of the war, as Courage could have done. And probably no performance of the play can give a petit-bourgeois anything more than a real horror of war and a certain insight into the fact that the big business deals which constitute war are not made by the little people. A play is more instructive than reality, because in it the war situation is set up experimentally for the purpose of giving insight; that is, the spectator assumes the attitude of a student -- provided the production is right. The proletarians in the audience, the members of a class which really can take action against war and eliminate it, must be given an insight -- which of course is possible only if the play is performed in the right way -- into the connection between war and commerce: the proletariat as a class can do away with war by doing away with capitalism. Here, of course, a good deal depends on the growth of self-awareness among the proletariat, a process that is going on both inside and outside the theatre.
(Brecht, _Collected Plays: Five_, Trans. John Willett, London: Methuen Drama, 1995, pp. 321-322) ***** -- Yoshie
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