• Maryam Karaminezhaad Ranjbar

  Author

• Soheila Faghfori

  Author

This paper has been done in the attempt to defend Anna Fierling, nicknamed Mother Courage,
the title character in Brecht’s epic drama Mother Courage and Her Children, who has been
vastly criticized for her choices. The fact that she is absent when she loses both of her sons and
her only daughter because of an extreme devotion to her job and a presumed strong love of
money makes her a proper subject for condemnation. What this paper intends to do is to clarify
the turmoil of a woman in the time of war and her confusion about her true identity according to
the views of Bertolt Brecht. Living in a time and place that everybody is fighting for survival,
Courage is definitely confused whether to take the role of a man or a woman in her family. This
identity crisis and the problems and difficulties that are embedded in the nature of any war,
definitely has an impact on the people who endure it, making their decisions hard to understand
for an observer. As a result, this paper at least will explore some of mother's Courage’s
shortcomings based on the problems she had to overcome singlehandedly and it will be accepted
that the name Mother Courage does in fact suit her. To do so, this study consists of three parts,
the first is the introduction which aims to introduce Brecht’s ideas of war and position of women
in it, the second part tries to show how he utilizes the elements of epic theatre in order to express
these ideas, and in conclusion the play Mother Courage will be analyzed to point out that much
of the wrong decisions that courage made is the outcome of war.

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