The Loss of Children:
Mothers in Ghosts, Riders to the Sea, and Mother Courage
Leda Hoffmann
Drama Lit II
Professor Ellen Mease
May 2009
The pieta image of Mary with a dead Christ across her lap is a central symbol of Western
art. This image of the failed, grieving mother is used throughout visual art, literature, and
theatre. Playwrights explore the maternal archetype in a myriad of ways – frequently a mother,
her objective centered on the well being of her children, experiences the loss of her children and
the collapse of the very thing she set out to achieve. This paper focuses on three classics of
modern drama in which a mother fails at her children’s survival and, specifically, must mourn
over the body of her child in a pieta image - Helene Alving’s terrible options of euthanizing her
son or caring for him in an infantile state in Ibsen’s Ghosts, Maurya’s understanding that all her
sons have now been taken by the sea in Synge’s Riders to the Sea, and Mother Courage’s
relentless determination to keep going with the futile belief that she has one last child to live for
in Brecht’s Mother Courage.
These mothers have strong maternal instincts and yet make mistakes that contribute to
their children’s deaths. Often, this maternal archetype follows a pattern, from recognition of her
mistakes through grief, to the release from the responsibility of protecting her children. In
Ghosts, Mrs. Alving discovers that it is her adherence to a strict social code that killed the life
joy of her husband, and infected her whole family, including her son, who she tried to protect. In
the end Oswald lays across her lap, returned to her, but reduced to an infantile state, pleading for
death. In Riders to the Sea, Maurya is unable to bless her son as he leaves and sees a vision that
speaks of his death. As she tries to rectify her mistake, something sticks in her throat. She is left
to preside over the body of her dead son Bartley and the identifying remnants of her dead son
Michael, only to realize that now all her sons have been lost, she can rest. Mother Courage, on
the other hand, does not recognize that she drives a hard bargain at the expense of her children.
1
She mourns her dead daughter Kattrin but is left to struggle on, believing that she still has one
son alive.
In Ghosts, Mrs. Alving’s realization of her error precludes the loss of her son. She
recognizes that her adherence to social norms has suffocated her family but the past cannot be
undone. Oswald explains his inherited illness and Mrs. Alving is left with a horrific choice.
Mrs. Alving’s mistake is her “Christian smug moral sense of having overcome a
spiritually or ethically inferior way of life (the pagan, erotic joy-of-life).”1 Having served her
duty, she destroyed her husband’s youthful exuberance. Watching Oswald’s and Regina’s love,
Mrs. Alving recognizes that her adherence to duty destroyed her husband: “Everything seemed to
come down to duty in the end – my duty and his duty and…I’m afraid I must have made the
house unbearable for your poor father.”2 She realizes that, in fact, “this law and order [is] the
cause of all the trouble in the world.”3
However, this discovery of error and admission to Oswald has great potential for renewal
and correction of errors. Mrs. Alving is now willing to go beyond conventional morality to
reveal to Oswald and Regina that they are stepsiblings so that they can make a free choice.
However, decisions made in the past cannot be reversed. Regina, the source of joy-of-life,
leaves and Mrs. Alving is “condemned . . . to a choice between two equally horrible alternatives:
to kill her child or to spare him and care for him as she did his father. In either case there is no
possible personal happiness.”4
Mrs. Alving’s remorse that she “didn’t exactly bring very much gaiety into [Mr.
Alving’s] home” builds the tragedy of her ending. Society is to blame far more that Mrs. Alving.
1
Ellen Mease, notes on Ghosts, 2.
Henrik Ibsen, “Ghosts” Four Major Plays, Trans. James McFarlene (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1961), 155.
3
Ibsen, Ghosts, 123.
4
Mease, notes on Ghosts, 3.
2
2
By adherence to a social code, she did what she thought was best for her family. As Brian
Johnson argues, Mrs. Alving’s recognition of her guilt is not realization of her guilty motives,
but rather a flaw in her allegiance to a social force: “It is not Mrs. Alving who stands condemned
by the action of the play . . . it is an inadequacy destructive of a whole cultural tradition in the
West that is condemned.”5
The final scene’s depiction of a mother as she loses her son reveals her powerful maternal
drive and the denial, grief, and potential release that comes with losing a child. Mrs. Alving’s
tragic error is punished when the remnant of her husband’s dead joy-of-life, syphilis, comes back
to claim her son. The past cannot be reversed. John Northam describes this as the “gradual
process by which a noble woman, who imagines herself to be enlightened enough to exorcise the
ghosts of past actions, comes at length to know the complete irrevocability of deeds done long
ago.”6
For all of Oswald’s life, Mrs. Alving has tried to be a good mother and believed that she
is protecting Oswald by sending him away from his father’s corrupt house. She says, “I felt the
child would somehow be poisoned simply by breathing the foul air of this polluted house.”7 She
continues to attempt to protect him, believing that she will be able to restore her son’s joy-of-life:
“And now, my darling, I am going to take a great burden off your poor, tormented mind . . . all
the remorse and the self-reproach, as you called it, all those things that have been worrying
you.”8
5
Brian Johnston, The Ibsen Cycle: The Design of the Plays from Pillars of Society to When We Dead
Awaken, Rev. Ed. (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 173.
6
John Northam, "Ghosts," in Ibsen: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 73.
7
Ibsen, Ghosts, 118.
8
Ibsen, Ghosts, 154.
3
However, as John Northam puts it, “her reward is be valued, not as a mother, but as an
agent of death.”9 Northam calls this the “most painful reversal to her confident expectations.”10
The time apart has left Mrs. Alving with a son who does not love her but who needs her to accept
the burden of his death. She continues to recognize her error, as she realizes, “Oswald . . . then
you don’t love me.”11 Oswald replies, “at least I do know you”12 and Mrs. Alving remains
committed to winning his love, “I can see that I haven’t made you completely mine yet – I must
still win you.”13 Her maternal instinct will fight with everything she has to get his love.
However, this maternal love and determination to “take a great burden off [his] poor,
tormented mind”14 is what makes Mrs. Alving’s situation at the end of the play so terrible. As
Oswald sits his mother down to talk to her about his disease he says, “Mother, earlier on this
evening didn’t you say there was nothing in the world you wouldn’t do for me, if I asked.”15 As
a woman with a powerful maternal instinct, she replies, “You can depend on me, my dear,
darling boy. I have nothing to live for but you.”16 As Daniel Haakonsen points out, Oswald is
young in this mother-son relationship, going to his mother for consolation. He asks to “sit beside
[her] on the sofa [as he] can’t bear it any longer.”17
Oswald then asks his mother take his suffering upon herself. Ibsen highlights the fact
that Mrs. Alving’s grief is that of a mother with her lines, is, “Me! Your mother!” and “Me! Who
9
Northam, 72.
Northam, 72.
11
Ibsen, Ghosts, 158.
12
Ibsen, Ghosts, 158.
13
Ibsen, Ghosts, 158.
14
Ibsen, Ghosts, 154.
15
Ibsen, Ghosts, 159.
16
Ibsen, Ghosts, 159.
17
Daniel Haakonsen, "The Function of Sacrifice in Ibsen's Realistic Drama, in Contemporary Approaches
to Ibsen Volume I (Proceedings of the First International Ibsen Seminary, Oslo, August 1965) (Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget, 1965), 30.
10
4
gave you life!”18 But Oswald frames her decision in the context of her love for him stating, “If
you love me, Mother . . . how can you let me suffer all this unspeakable terror!”19 Mrs. Alving’s
desire to love and be loved by Oswald leads her to make her promise: “Here is my hand on it.”20
Mrs. Alving must now destroy the men in the family: Oswald now asks his mother to “do
consciously was she unconsciously has done to his father – destroy him.”21 Brian Johnson
highlights the pattern of the past repeating itself saying, “She had helped destroy her husband
and the memory of him, through hatred; now, when she has come to love her husband in her son,
she must, out of this same love, repeat the action she has come to loath.”22
Mrs. Alving deals with this grief by denying Oswald’s illness and remaining steadfast in
her determination for him to be happy. Like Lear over Cordelia’s body, she refuses to believe it
is true. Her initial reaction to Oswald’s news is to shout, “It’s not true, Oswald! It’s impossible!
It can’t be!”23 As Oswald describes his illness and asks for her help, she remains optimistic that
“it won’t be necessary.”24 John Northam explains this in terms of maternal instinct:
“all the years of frustrated maternal longing show in her pathetic gratitude at
having her beloved boy back home with her again . . . She will win back his love;
she will be good and patient, yes, happy too, as Oswald pathetically asks her to
be. That, surely, must take away his resentment and self-reproach.”25
She believes that Oswald will see the sun again, telling him, “It’s early morning. Dawn is
breaking over the mountains. And it’s going to be fine, Oswald! In a little while you’ll be able to
18
Ibsen, Ghosts, 162.
Ibsen, Ghosts, 162.
20
Ibsen, Ghosts, 163.
21
Johnson, 198.
22
Johnson, 198.
23
Ibsen, Ghosts, 160.
24
Ibsen, Ghosts, 163.
25
Northam, 101.
19
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see the sun.”26 She anticipates a “lovely day” with “brilliant sunshine” where he will be able to
“see the place properly.”27
John Chamberlain compares this loving mother to Ibsen’s Peer Gynt:
Mrs. Alving, the loving mother comforting her son and distracting his mind from
morbidity with talk of a delightful new beginning, is as tender as Peer, the loving
son, inventing soothing fantasies . . . to ease the dying mind of his frightened old
mother. Her tone is that of infinite reassurance. She wants to grant his every
wish and to be the guardian of his happiness, just as Solveig, at her most
motherly, accepts the charge of Peer’s soul.”28
Chamberlain’s analogy shows Mrs. Alving as a loving, positive, mother. Like the tenderness of
Solveig when she accepts maternal responsibility for Peer, Mrs. Alving, the boy also in her lap in
an image of pieta, promises, as Solveig does, to “watch over” him as he “sleep[s] in [her]
arms.”29
This positive pieta image from Peer Gynt recalls the fact that, at the end of Ghosts, Mrs.
Alving has, in a twisted way, achieved what she desired – her son in her arms. After Oswald
tells her he will be “turned into a helpless child again,” Mrs. Alving responds, “my child will
have his mother to look after him.”30 Some critics suggest that Mrs. Alving got exactly what she
desired, a dependant child. John Northam says she “relies upon a mother/child relationship that
is horribly at variance with the foul reality – she can actually find comfort in being a mother to a
son reduced to childlike imbecility.”31 David Thomas calls Mrs. Alving’s desire for Oswald’s
love “feverish possessiveness” and says she is “a child-devouring mother who has reduced her
schizophrenic son to apparent acquiescence in his loss of all power of independent action.”32
26
Ibsen, Ghosts, 159.
Ibsen, Ghosts, 163.
28
John S. Chamberlain, “Ghosts: The Vision Blurs” Ibsen: The Open Vision (London: Athlone, 1982), 82.
29
Ibsen, Peer Gynt, 209.
30
Ibsen, Ghosts, 160.
31
Northam, 104.
32
David Thomas in Chamberlain, 83.
27
6
However, Mrs. Alving’s desire for Oswald to love her is a natural expression of maternal desire
and, while she would have her son, caring for a man who has been turned into an infant is not
what Mrs. Alving hopes for. Hans Georg Meyer articulates this bleak reversal in more
understanding terms: “Helene, whose whole life has been devoted to maneuvering Oswald back
into the nursery, is grimly taken at her word. Her son is restored to her – infantile for the rest of
his life. She herself is finally fixed in her maternal role.”33 John Northam calls these facts,
“compressed ironies that attend the progressive revelations.”34 Since Mrs. Alving postponed the
real mother-child relationship for ideals taught to her by society, now a grown man will be a
child through disease.35
Mrs. Alving is left with a terrible choice – to sacrifice her son to relieve herself of caring
for him or to sacrifice herself to his care. Daniel Haakonsen, who writes on sacrifice in Ibsen’s
plays, comments that it is right that we don’t see Mrs. Alving administer the morphine or find
out if she does.36 We know “the blind idealist has recovered her sight, and is now endeavoring to
act independently. And the mere endeavor to do so is a sign of heroism, because one of the
alternatives she has to face is terrible almost beyond human understanding.”37 Haakonsen claims
Mrs. Alving is a hero because of her devotion to her son.38 Mrs. Alving’s anguish over Oswald’s
broken body “exposes at one and the same time her guilt and innocence, her greatness and her
limitation.”39 The audience hears Mrs. Alving torn between these two terrible decisions: “I can’t
bear it – Never! . . . Where’s he put them? . . . No, no, no!. . .Yes!. . .No, no!”40 Like another
33
Hans Georg Meyer in Chamberlain, 78.
Northam, 103.
35
Northam, 103.
36
Haukonsen, 33.
37
Haukonsen, 33.
38
Haukonsen, 34.
39
Haukonsen, 34.
40
Ibsen, Ghosts, 164.
34
7
Ibsen mother, Aase, when she believes her son is lost forever, Mrs. Alving “clutch[es] her hair,”
staring at [Oswald] with speechless horror.”41
Mrs. Alving, while at fault for the destruction of Mr. Alving’s joy-of-life is a courageous
mother. She has continuously fought to make life better for her son. Only when she recognizes
her error and takes steps to free her son, does she learn that he will be destroyed by a remnant of
the past. As she leans over the motionless body of Oswald, she remains a courageous mother: “It
takes great courage, but she possesses it, not to simply collapse.”42 While some critics argue that
she is selfish in her desire for Oswald, Northam articulates her great sacrifice best when he says,
“The element of maternal selfishness is minor compared with the selflessness that has made her
sacrifice her own happiness to her son’s well-being.”43
Maurya in Riders to the Sea also undergoes recognition of her mistake of not accepting
the sea and blessing her son. This recognition leads Maurya to a point of release when she is
able to stop worrying about her sons and the sea and find “great rest.”44 The image of pieta as
Maurya leans over the body of Bartley and the remaining clothes from Michael, reflects the grief
of mothers over the inevitable deaths of their sons.
While Synge characterizes Bartley’s death as an inevitably, he also places emphasis on
Maurya’s action (or inaction) in her inability to bless him on his way. It is Maurya’s concern for
her son, and fear that Bartley will be “drownd’d with the rest”, that causes her to not reply to
Bartley’s “The blessing of God on you.”45 In keeping with the tradition of the Aran Islands, one
41
Ibsen, Ghosts, 164.
Northam, 104.
43
Northam, 107-108.
44
John M. Synge, “Riders to the Sea” The Complete Plays (New York: Random House, 1935), 98.
45
Synge, 87.
42
8
should respond to this greeting with “God and Mary bless you.”46 People believed that danger
could result from failure to reply to the opening phrase.47 Maurya’s inability to bless her son is a
serious offence and Cathleen makes her mother take Bartley the bread and say “God speed you”
so that “the dark word will be broken.”48
It is the business of men to go to sea and Maurya’s determination to keep Bartley at home
defies that natural order. Cathleen reminds her mother, “It’s the life of a young man to be going
on the sea.”49 Withholding her blessing in the house and then failing to give him the sustaining
bread at the well, emphasizes her failure to fulfill the maternal role. Eugene Benson argues that
Riders to the Sea is not a tragedy in the Greek or Shakespearean sense as there is “no causality
which dictates a fitting punishment.”50 While Maurya’s missing blessing is not as large an
initiative incident as many causes in Greek and Shakespearean tragedies, Maurya’s inability to
bless her son can be seen as a cause of her son’s death. Edward Kopper agrees that, the “evil
influence of Michael [as a ghost on the grey horse] could have been mollified had Maurya been
able to bless Bartley either before he left the house or when she saw him at the spring well.”51
However, like Mrs. Alving, Maurya is not ill intentioned. The reason she does not bless Bartley
is that she does not want him going to the dangerous sea, just as Mrs. Alving tries to get Oswald
away from the dangerous household.
Daniel Davy’s also argues that Maury is not a passive figure, centering his argument on
the vision of Michael on the grey pony. He claims, “Maurya consciously and actively
participates in the essential ‘event’ of the play (if not ‘action’), and in doing so moves beyond
46
Edward Kopper, “Riders to the Sea.” A J.M. Synge Literary Companion (NY: Greenwood Press, 1988),
44.
47
Kopper, 44.
Synge, 88.
49
Synge, 87.
50
Eugene Benson, “Riders to the Sea” J.M. Synge (London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1982), 60.
51
Kopper, 44.
48
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her status of passive ‘object’.”52 It is after Maurya “trie[s] to say, ‘God speed you,’ but
something choked the words in [her] throat”53 that she looks up to see Michael on the grey pony.
The reversal of Michael’s image on the grey pony (a contradiction of the literal truth) is central
to the recognition of the fact that Bartley will die. Synge approaches the supernatural without
explanation or question, such that “we not only believe[s] that Maurya saw Michael on the grey
pony, we believe Michael was there.”54 Simon Williams acknowledges that, just as we accept
Maurya’s vision, “we accept the fact of Bartley’s death as a result of this pursuit.”55 As soon as
Cathleen and Nora establish Michael’s death, Maurya enters, claiming to have “seen the
fearfullest thing.”56 The women recognize the vision as a certain sign that Bartley will die: “It’s
destroyed we are from this day. It’s destroyed, surely.”57 In this short tragedy, reversal and
recognition take place at the same time.
As the women lament the boys’ deaths, Maurya lists the men that have died: “a husband,
and a husband’s father, and six sons.”58 Now all of Maurya’s sons have gone and she has no
more need to worry about losing her sons to the sea: “They’re all gone now, and there isn’t
anything more the sea can do to me . . . I’ll have no call now to be up crying and praying when
the wind breaks from the south.”59
As the men carry in the body of Bartley and the women begin to keen, Maurya’s grief
“seems to contain the whole passionate rage that lurks somewhere in every native of the
52
Daniel Davy, "Tragic Self-Referral in Riders to the Sea," in Assessing the Achievement of J.M.Synge, ed.
Alexander G. Gonzalez (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 45.
53
Synge, 93.
54
Nicholas Grene, Synge: A Critical Study of the Plays (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1975), 54.
55
Simon Williams, in Davy, 39.
56
Synge, 92.
57
Synge, 93.
58
Synge, 93.
59
Synge, 96.
10
island.”60 Maurya sprinkles the last of the holy water over Michael’s clothes and Bartley’s feet
knowing that she’ll, “have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark
nights after Samhain, and I won’t care what way the sea is when the other women will be
keening.”61 Nora comments that Maurya’s reaction to Bartley’s death is quite different from the
anticipation of Michael’s: “She’s quiet now and easy; but the day Michael was drowned you
could hear her crying out from this to the spring well.”62 Maurya’s suffering is over, she has no
more sons to try to protect. T.R. Henn characterizes Maurya’s development as the gradual rise
“through a hieratical dignity of sorrow in word and gesture, to her acceptance of defeat.”63
The death of her last son releases Maurya from the suffering responsibility of motherhood. Now
she can have her “great rest” and “great sleeping in the long nights after Samhain.”64 Like the
Mother in Blood Wedding, “They’re all dead now: and at midnight I’ll sleep, sleep with out
terror of guns or knives.”65 As Maurya articulates in acceptance of her fate: “No man at all can
be living for ever, and we must be satisfied.”66
In her grief, Maurya is the symbol of mourning motherhood. Critics call her the
“universal mother”67 and the “voice of humanity uttering its resignation to an incurable human
plight.”68 When she asks for a blessing for “every one left living in the world,”69 Maurya is
transformed from the human mother of Bartley and Michael to “a visionary facing death itself,
60
Synge, The Aran Islands, in Mease, 9.
Synge, 96.
62
Synge, 97.
63
T.R. Henn, "Riders to the Sea" in "Introductions to the Plays," in J.M. Synge, The Complete Plays, ed.
intro. and notes by T.R. Henn (London: Methuen Drama, 1963), 41.
64
Synge, 96.
65
Federico Garcia Lorca, Blood Wedding, Trans. James Graham-Lujan and Richard L. O’Connell, 571.
66
Synge, 97.
67
David Corkery in Kopper, 46.
68
Seamus Dean in Kopper, 46.
69
Synge, 97.
61
11
resentful and angry, terrified, bitter, and finally resigned.”70 Benson identified the fascinating
aspect of Maurya’s grief: “Synge saw both the godlike and the human in his subjects. Maurya is
a priestess; she is also a tired old woman who bickers with her daughters and son.”71
Brecht’s Mother Courage shares the loss of children with Mrs. Alving and Maurya but
she does not recognize her faults and she is not release from the burden of trying to protect her
children from their deaths. At the end of the play, she still believes her son is alive. More so
than Mrs. Alving and Maurya, Mother Courage is responsible for her children’s deaths. As
Robert Brustein identifies the spine of the play, “Mother Courage haggles while her children
die.”72 Mother Courage’s endless desire to drive a bargain kills one of her children. To Brecht,
Mother Courage’s most devastating aspect was her inability to learn and realize her mistakes. As
a result of the lack of recognition, unlike with other maternal characters, Mother Courage has no
release from the pressures of motherhood and must struggle on.
Mother Courage explores the connection between business and war and argues that the
two are inseparable. As Christopher Sperberg points out, it is Mother Courage’s denial of this
connection that destroys her.73 In Scene Six, when Mother Courage cries, “Curse the war!” at
Kattrin’s disfigurement, she then sits down to continue her inventory. Even at the moments in
the play where she is against war, she is unable to change her actions and continues to feed the
war with her business. For Brecht, the play is unified by the merchant-mother contradiction in
Mother Courage. She tries to make a profit from war and protect her children from war at the
70
Grene, 49.
Benson, 47.
72
Robert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1991), 272.
73
Christopher Sperberg, “Approaching Mother Courage or Who’s Afraid of Bertolt B.?” (Stanford:
Stanford Honors Essay in Humanities, 1979), 22.
71
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same time. As Sperberg articulates, Brecht wishes to make the audience aware first of this
conflict, and then of the equally important fact that Mother Courage never perceives it.74
In Scene One the sergeant and the recruiting officer try to enlist Mother Courage’s sons
in the army. Despite the fact that they make their living following the war, Mother Courage
insists, “A soldier’s life is not for sons of mine!”75 In the 1949 Berlin production directed by
Brecht with Helene Weigel as Mother Courage, Weigel pulled out a knife to defend her sons
from the recruiters (as if this was a routine matter).76 Even though the protection of her sons is
clearly important to Mother Courage, she gets distracted by haggling over the price of a belt with
the sergeant and loses her son to the army.
Courage’s attempts to make a profit can be seen both as sales for the benefit of her
children and simply as profit-making attempts. David Jones mentions that Weigel’s “Courage
wanted to keep her son, but she also needed to make her sales pitch, for that son might starve if
she failed.”77 Despite losses, the family must continue. When Eilif is taken away, Courage tells
Kattrin, “You must help your brother [pull the wagon] now, Kattrin.”78
Not learning from the mistakes of haggling over the belt, Mother Courage loses her
second son, Swiss Cheese, in Scene Three. Swiss Cheese is captured by enemy troops and, after
denying her son to protect herself, Mother Courage tries to bargain for her son’s life. She is not
willing to sell her wagon, just to pawn it, and as Yvette runs back and forth between the men
holding Swiss Cheese, Mother Courage drives too hard of a bargain. Not willing to pay two
hundred at first, Mother Courage waits too long and Swiss Cheese is killed. After yelling, “tell
74
Sperberg, 20.
Brecht, 28.
76
David Richard Jones, Great Directors at Work: Stanislavsky, Brecht, Kazan, Brook (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986), 113.
77
Jones, 109.
78
Brecht, 33.
75
13
him I’ll pay two hundred. Run!”79 she then comes to the realization: “I believe – I’ve haggled too
long”80 and she hears the roll of drums in the distance. Weigel captured Mother Courage’s grief
at this moment with her famous ‘silent scream’. Upon hearing drums announcing Swiss
Cheese’s death, “Weigel’s face was seized by what Brecht called, ‘a look of extreme suffering,’
an ‘unscreaming open mouth and backwards bent head.’”81
Despite her grief, Mother Courage continues to deny her son. The sergeant brings the
body of Swiss Cheese expecting Mother Courage to cry out for her dead son. The sergeant asks
her if she knows him and she just shakes her head. A second time, she denies her son. The
sergeant announces: “Throw him in the carrion pit. He has no one that knows him.”82 Mother
Courage is able to deny her child and hide her maternal grief in order to save herself, her
business, and her other children.
However, Mother Courage asserts her motherhood over her business when the Cook
invites her to start an inn with him but without Kattrin. Courage protects her daughter. When
the Cook says Kattrin will never marry because she is scared, old, and dumb, Courage tells him
to “Shut up” and “not to talk so loud.”83 Courage in concerned for her daughter: “The war
frightens her. She can’t bear it. She has terrible dreams.”84 When Kattrin tries to run away after
overhearing the conversation, Courage pulls her back. Although Courage says the reason she
said no was “the wagon, not you, it was the wagon,”85 she simultaneous shows her maternity by
putting a spoon of soup in Kattrin’s mouth.86
79
Brecht, 63.
Brecht, 64.
81
Brecht, 120.
82
Brecht, 64.
83
Brecht, 97.
84
Brecht, 97.
85
Brecht, 101.
86
Jones, 114.
80
14
Kattrin’s death is the final blow to Mother Courage in the play. It is with Kattrin that we
see Mother Courage as a pieta image, singing a lullaby to her daughter who she refuses to
believe is dead. Yet again, the unlearning Mother Courage is in town buying supplies when
Kattrin takes it upon herself to alert the town of the incoming army and is shot. Scene Twelve
opens with Courage sitting with Kattrin’s body. In the 1949 Berlin production, Weigel “began
kneeling down center and sang the lullaby to her daughter’s corpse, which lay face up, to right to
left across the stage, her head in Weigel’s lap.”87
Like Mrs. Alving denies Oswald’s illness, Mother Courage convinces herself that Kattrin
is asleep: “Maybe she’s fallen asleep,” “She’s asleep now.”88 Like Maurya, she recalls the past
loss of her children: “One lad fell in Poland. The other is – where?”89 Courage’s lullaby
promises all the things she could not give her children – happiness, good clothing, and good
food. She idealizes her dead child and imagines that her “silks are cut from an angel’s skirt.”90
Audiences tend to sympathize with Mother Courage at this moment but Brecht reminds us that,
“Mother Courage learns nothing from her misery, that even at the end she does not
understand.”91
Mother Courage blames the peasant woman for stirring Kattrin’s maternal instinct that
made her climb onto the roof – “You shouldn’t have told her about the children.”92 But the
peasants remind her that she was the one to, again, put business before family: “If you hadn’t
gone off to the town to get your cut, maybe it won’t have happened.”93 For Brecht, learning was
valued above all else and in “Theatre for Learning” he outlines his plan for the didactic theatre in
87
Jones, 122.
Brecht, 110.
89
Brecht, 110.
90
Brecht, 110.
91
Brecht, untitled essay “Misfortune in itself is a poor teacher,” in Sperberg, 32.
92
Brecht, 110.
93
Brecht, 110.
88
15
which “wrong and right actions were exhibited. People were shown who knew what they were
doing, and other people were shown who did not know.”94 Often audiences lose track of this
focus on learning and empathize with Mother Courage because it appears that in spite of her
sacrifice and planning, she loses her children. They are left with catharsis and sympathy for a
woman who cannot escape her fate. However, Brecht argues that Mother Courage can escape
her fate. It is her inability to recognize her flaws that traps her in the pattern of losing her
children to war. Even as she pays the peasants for Kattrin’s burial, she “mechanically put[s] one
[coin] back before giving the rest to the peasants for burial expenses.”95 In an attempt to
highlight Mother Courage’s selfish motive, profit, Brecht added the line, “I must get back into
business”96 in the Berlin and Munich productions.97
Unlike Maurya’s release when all her children are dead, Mother Courage is not allowed
to unload her burden. She continues, stooped over, to pull her wagon onward believing that
“There’s one. My Eilif.”98 Unlike the pieta endings of Ghosts and Riders to the Sea, Mother
Courage ends with the image of the merchant, a woman pulling her wares. Mother Courage is
trapped in the “snares of merchant-mother contradiction”99 and, in the end, Brecht leaves us with
the merchant, unable to recognize her flaws and find the “great rest” when all her children are
gone.
Mrs. Alving, Maurya, and Mother Courage all mourn the loss of their children. Over
their bodies, they are women crying out for a purpose – what is a mother without children? Mrs.
Alving is left to decide whether to sacrifice her son or herself, Maurya has found a “great rest,”
Brecht, “Theatre for Learning,” 309.
Sperberg, 31.
96
Brecht, 111.
97
Sperberg, 33.
98
Brecht, 110.
99
Jones, 112.
94
95
16
and the unlearning Mother Courage will trudge on. All three women work tirelessly to keep
their children alive and happy yet all have contributed to their children’s deaths. The recognition
of responsibility, if it comes, is too late, yet the recognition of their mistakes allows Mrs. Alving
and Maurya to be released.
As maternal archetypes, these characters echo mourning parents throughout dramatic
literature. With Hecuba over the body of Astyanax, Lear over the body of Cordelia, and Hester
holding her son Monster in the Susan Lori Parks’ Fuckin’ A, the pieta image of the mourning
parent continues throughout theatre history. The scenes of recognition and scenes of release for
Mrs. Alving, Maurya, and Mother Courage underscore the basis of this archetype and suggest the
many ways in which women deal with the loss of children.
17
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