Mother Courage and Capitulation

Brecht tells the reader that capitulation is not just an idea but a feeling and the reader's objection to the world is not as strong as it once was.   He tells the reader this through Mother Courage's refusal to capitulate through out the entire work.   In today's world, people like Mother Courage cannot relate to capitulation as a feeling because of the regulations that today's world has that Mother Courage's world did not.   As technology advances in today's world, people place more and more restraints on individual's and society's personal freedoms and choices, such as the decision to refuse to capitulate.


Mother Courage's extremely strong will and refusal to capitulate allowed her children to be killed, a mother's worst nightmare.   She did what she had to do to survive and move on after each child's death.   In today's world, women cannot make the kind of choices that Mother Courage made.   This is because if a mother decided to make a decision that allowed for her survival but in turn the death of her children.   If something like this were to happen, the government would step in and take the children away or imprison the mother for abuse.   The idea of capitulation cannot be a feeling like Mother Courage had because, people in today's world cannot obtain the idea of refusal to capitulate without the repercussions that society has placed on refusing to capitulate especially when the lives of one's children is involved.   In addition, there are greater rewards for capitulation than in Mother Courage's time.   Money and other materialistic reward are given and Brecht shows that today's readers have been desensitized to the horrors that were appalling during Mother Courage's time, thus people of today object less and accept more than the people Mother Courage's time.


However, the people of Mother Courage's time had a different moral value system than the readers of today.   When reading Brecht's work, some readers of today are shocked by Mother Courage's...