Mother Courage and Her Children: General Idea

‫مصطفى صادق خليل‬ Mother Courage and Her Children
E ‫مسائي – شعبة‬
General Idea
Anne Fierling, a.k.a Mother Courage, a canteen woman during the Thirty Years War. She
spends the entire play trying to keep her business and her three children alive. Mother Courage
only wants to survive the war, but she needs the war, because war is what her business thrives on.
Throughout the play she balances her business and her family’s survival.
Analysis
The story proceeds and ends with the two thoughts, the business in war and war for
business. In this tale, Anna Fierling has a name as ‘Mother Courage’. She is a camp follower who
in her small way helps the prosecution of the Thirty Years War by providing shoes, ale and
commodities for the soldiers. Mother Courage creates an appropriate protagonist while the play
has two major themes. The first theme is of war and second is of motherhood. It is an anti-war
play, which conveys the futility of war and at the same time, deals with the role and glory of
motherhood.
Anna Fierling, is a tough, no nonsense woman. She does things her own way and the rest
of the world be damned if they do not fall in line with her sense of purpose. She is driven to
survive, which explains much what she does and who she is, how she runs her life, and how she
manipulates the lives of her children. Mother Courage is unapologetically herself. She does not
take orders from anyone, especially from men, and yet she is fiercely protective of her children.
They are her meal tickets, after all. Throughout the course of the play one might conclude that
she is cold hearted and does not love her children. In fact, however her love for them motivates
her to sacrifice everything, even her own happiness, to protect and save her children. Her choices
are not always the right ones, and they backfire on her fairly often. The best examples of such
backfires are the deaths of her children, which she could have in part avoided. But Brecht contends
that the play’s circumstances made their deaths unavoidable, and she is then left alone to continue
her miserable life with only her increasingly ruined wagon for companionship.
Mother Courage points out the evils of war and the corruption that prevails among the
army officers. In an ironical way she says, as long as there is corruption, there will be merciful
judges. Even the innocent may go free. Certainly, Mother Courage wanted her son to be honest
but like a wise a mother, she warns him against being too honest to survive. Swiss Cheese
sacrifices his life in order to save the cash box of his troop from falling into hands of enemy. She
endures the death of Swiss Cheese in a calm manner.
Mother Courage realizes the cruelty of war. She is aware of destructiveness and terrible
misfortunes that have befallen in her personal life. The contradictions in Mother Courage are
understood throughout the play. Once she praises the war for feeding its people better than peace
does. Immediately in the very next utterance, she shows her disatisfaction and warns the soldiers
of the early death they would meet. She considers herself as ruined by peace.
The elegy of Mother Courage provokes the Chaplain to describe her as a hyena of the
battlefield. Mother Courage sings another song inviting men to join the army in order to fight and
continue the war. At the same time unaware of Eilif’s death, she hopes to see him. Here again
the contradiction between the desire of Mother Courage for the continuation of war and her
awareness of destructiveness of war is emphasized.
The attitude of Mother Courage points out that, circumstances always force human beings
to accept compromises in living. The continuation of war leads both Mother Courage and Kattrin
undergo the hard labour of pulling the wagon. It is remarkable that neither of them complain or
grumble about their hardships. Despite of all the misfortunes Mother Courage has suffered
consequential to war, she could not give up her dangerous profession.
The two themes, of motherhood and anti-war compassion for humanity subsequently give
rise to the third theme that is the sense of loss. In Mother Courage and Her Children, Brecht
mirrored the horror of poverty in the Post-World War world. The poverty consequential to the
world war creates multiple issues for people in struggle for life. The need deprived the spirit of
life from common people. The central character and some of the other characters suffer from the
sense of loss.
In the chaos of war, Mother Courage has to face the loss of her three children one by one.
Though her live asset of her three children has been vanquished by the war but not her spirit.
Perhaps it may be her miseries which made her heart as hard as stone.

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‫مصطفى صادق خليل‬ Mother Courage and Her Children

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