>>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):
Not a symbol but a representative!
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.
>
Same with the Threepenny Opera, where Mac comes off as a glamorous gangster and people tend to nod their heads approvingly at Peachum's cynical songs. They don't get the identity of the two charcaters. Brecht went a way to fixing that in the Threepenny Novel, a vastly underrated work of modernism, and one of the great business novels--one of the few whose plots turn essentially on a complex (and crooked) business deal.
It's interesting to reflect on how few novels in a business society essentially involve matters of business as opposed to love, war, social position, or even law, and the like; even the 19th century bourgeois novels where money matters turn more on inheritedwealth than the practical problems of doing deals. The Threepenny Novel is a major exception. Any others?
back to the suvject: why does the alienation effect fail? People do identify with Mac, Courage, Galileo, but they're not supposed to. Is is just thatitis very hard to break normal viewing and reading habits? Is it that people aren't used to thinking as opposedto being entertained?
I once saw Galileo in the National Theater in London, and the Threepenny on Broadway, in both cases, the audience was well off people dressed to the nines, fur coats, etc. No critical thinking one could see or expect, Brecht would have vomited. Best Brecht I ever saw was an "off Broadway" (Fullerton St. Chicago) prodyction of St. Joan of the Stockyards, there the alienation effect really worked. The director had to go to some extremes to make the commodity traders sympathetic and Joan not, however, maybe that's the trick.
jks
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