This dissertation interprets Brecht's Mutter Courage through its protagonist. Most interpreters have derived Courage's meaning from only one term of the contradiction of merchant and mother that constitutes her, either blaming the inhuman, war-mongering merchant for her participation in war, or defending the vital, productive, and nurturing mother for that same (unavoidable) participation. Some have stressed instead the unity formed by Courage's contradiction, without being able to elucidate its meaning. The present interpretation, proceeding from a clue given in scene 7 to the meaning of the text, draws parallels between the drama and Brecht's view of the world, and shows that the world of Mutter Courage is the symbolic representation of capitalism as Brecht knew it during the rise of fascism and the approach of the Second World War. Courage is then shown to be a concentrated form of this symbolic representation; indeed, she turns out to be a representation of capitalism in its "totality". This representation is inseparable from the invocation, through Courage, of the Great Mother archetype. The Great Mother describes a contradictory capitalism that is both a Good Mother in its promising productivity, and a Terrible Mother in its destructive warring and oppression; but she, as the symbol of Nature, also describes a capitalism that had begun to seem even to Brecht like a second Nature. Courage also represents the totality of capitalism (as the Marxist Brecht saw it) by embodying both its "affirmative" aspect (as a merchant who engenders soldiering sons), and (undermining the archetype of the Great Mother) its "critical" aspect as the representation of the resistance of the oppressed to their warring world (as the outlaw who engenders a daughter who rebels against war). The meaning of the drama, then, is the story of Courage as the incarnation of the dialectic of capitalism, a dark tale whose conditions seem eternal, but which contains the promise of something bet
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.37527 |
| Date | January 1996 |
| Creators | Fowler, Kenneth Ray. |
| Contributors | Goldsmith-Reber, T. E. (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of German Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001656570, proquestno: NQ44651, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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