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Scene 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Mother Courage and Her Children, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
War, Failure, and Despair
Profit, Violence, and Power
Love and Nurture
Faith and Identity
Theater, Performance, and History
Summary
Analysis
The stage directions explain that, in this scene, King Gustavus will die, Mother Courage will worry about her business collapsing, and Eilif will “perform one heroic deed too many” and perish. One summer day, an elderly woman and her son approach Mother Courage’s wagon at the camp. They have a huge sack of bedding to sell, but Mother Courage doesn’t want to buy it. In the distance, church bells ring and a voice yells that the King of Sweden is dead. Mother Courage is furious—the war can’t end; she just stocked up on supplies. But the distant voice says the war ended three weeks ago. The old woman is stunned; her son rejoices and leads her away.
Mother Courage’s war profiteering leads her to a profoundly cruel, deeply ironic conclusion: she desperately wants the war that has destroyed her family to continue. She doesn’t care whether her king, Gustavus, is dead or alive, or whether Kattrin will finally get to live the quaint married life she dreams about. Rather, she cares only about pursuing her fantasy of getting rich off the war—even though she has spent nearly all her life trying and failing. In contrast, the peasants’ attitude is far more understandable: as the war’s innocent victims, they keep their moral priorities in order.
Themes
The Dutch Cook comes to see Mother Courage, who is glad to see him after so many years. He reports that Eilif is on his way. The Chaplain leaves to go put on his pastor’s robes, and Mother Courage tells Kattrin to give the Cook some brandy, but she does nothing and refuses to leave the wagon. Mother Courage brings the Cook’s drink herself, then starts complaining that the peace is going to bankrupt her. The Cook says she was wrong to listen to the Chaplain, who is misogynistic and unreliable. Mother Courage jokes that the Cook is no better and asks if the soldiers have gotten their back pay. The Cook says no—in fact, the army disbanded after it stopped paying the soldiers.
The Cook and Chaplain aren’t happy about the war ending, either, because their jobs also depend on it. But the Cook’s comments about the Chaplain are ironic, given what the audience has already learned about the Cook from Yvette Pottier: he’s at least as much of a womanizing rake as the Chaplain. Moreover, the army’s haphazard decision to disband itself when it runs out of money again shows that the powerful people running the war are no more organized, dedicated, or realistic than the ordinary people fighting it. They seem to have no greater moral purpose, either: they discard the soldiers as soon as they prove no longer useful.
Themes
The Chaplain returns in his robes, and the Cook confronts him, accusing him of interfering with Mother Courage’s business. The Chaplain says he sees the Cook’s intentions and compares Mother Courage to a hyena, as she prefers war over peace. The Cook encourages Mother Courage to start selling her goods at a discount, before they become totally worthless. Mother Courage gets in her wagon, and the Cook and Chaplain start trading threats.
The Cook, the Chaplain, and Mother Courage start taking out their frustration at losing their jobs on one another. In other words, as soon as the war ends, they ironically break out into conflict. After all, they are the falsest of friends: they may have stuck together during the war, but it was only out of self-interest. None of them truly care about the others, and they would all be willing to undermine the others to get ahead. In fact, the Cook’s comments about Mother Courage’s prices suggest that he is trying to get a discount for himself.
Themes
Suddenly, Yvette Pottier arrives. She is now older, heavyset, and dressed in a widow’s black. She introduces herself as the Colonel’s wife and asks to see Mother Courage, then calls out her first name. At this point, the Cook realizes who she is. Yvette and the Cook stare at each other in shock, then insult each other’s weight. Yvette remarks that she will finally have the chance to tell the Cook what she really thinks of him, and the Chaplain begs her to do it once Mother Courage arrives.
The war is over, but the conflicts continue. Yvette Pottier’s transformation underlines how much time has passed since the beginning of the play. In theory, this should remind audiences of the work’s epic scale and ambitions: Brecht is capturing Mother Courage’s entire life, not just one unfortunate period in it. Yvette’s newfound wealth and status show that she actually managed to achieve her dream—unlike Mother Courage, the Cook, and the Chaplain.
Themes
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Mother Courage exits her wagon and asks why Yvette is in mourning. Yvette replies that her husband—the brother of the Colonel from Scene Three—died some years back. The Chaplain reminds Yvette to tell Mother Courage about the Cook. Yvette identifies him as the seducer Peter Piper, who cheated on her. Mother Courage instantly understands (and mentions that she has his pipe). The Cook claims that he’s not like that anymore, but Yvette keeps hurling insults at him. Mother Courage and Yvette leave to try and sell some of Mother Courage’s extra goods.
By marrying the Colonel’s brother for money, Yvette has done exactly what she accuses the Cook of doing to her: turning love and sex into commodities, which deprives them of their true power and significance. Of course, the key difference is that the Cook fooled her into following him to the war, which ruined her marriage prospects forever, while the Colonel’s brother clearly knew what he was getting into. Still, their conflict brims with hypocrisy on all sides, much like when the Cook and Chaplain angrily call each other womanizers.
Themes
The Chaplain tells the Cook that “the mills of God grind slowly.” The Cook admits that he was just hoping that Mother Courage would feed him, but that probably won’t happen now. He complains that he has no job without the war, either. He and the Chaplain reminisce about working for the King.
Even after giving up on the army, raising the Catholic flag, and making sexual advances at Mother Courage and Kattrin in scenes past, the Chaplain somehow returns to his empty religious platitudes. His point is that change and justice often play out slowly, over the course of years or decades, but his statement could also easily be interpreted as saying that God forgets about human beings altogether. Here, unlike the Chaplain, at least the Cook is honest about his motives.
Themes
Eilif arrives, pale, handcuffed, and escorted by two soldiers. He explains that it’s his last visit; one soldier makes a throat-cutting gesture while the other explains that Eilif raided a peasant’s house, murdered his wife, and stole his cattle. The Chaplain points out that this behavior might be a crime now, but it was considered heroic during wartime. Eilif asks for brandy, but the soldiers won’t let him have any. He tells the Chaplain not to tell Kattrin, and to tell Mother Courage that he’s just the same as before. The Chaplain follows Eilif to perform his last rites (even though Eilif asks him not to), and the Cook tries to coax Kattrin out of the wagon.
The circumstances surrounding Swiss Cheese’s death repeat themselves: Mother Courage ends up missing Eilif’s execution, too, because she is away on business. Again, this clearly represents the way that her selfish profit-seeking blinds her to the human stakes of the war and leads to her family’s undoing. But so do Eilif’s actions: they provide the ultimate proof that war turns ordinary people into monsters. The actions that he earned praise for during the war are horrific crimes in ordinary times—again, wartime morality proves to be the opposite of true morality.
Themes
Mother Courage returns with her goods and triumphantly announces that the war has started up again. The Cook admits that Eilif just passed through, and Mother Courage optimistically replies that they’ll meet him soon and he’ll definitely survive the war. She asks how Eilif looked, and the Cook says he looked the same. She asks whether Eilif is still doing heroic deeds, and the Cook explains that he actually just performed one. She asks where the Chaplain is, and the Cook says he’s with Eilif.
Just like her pessimism when the war ends, Mother Courage’s optimism in this section is ironically out of step with reality. She has no idea that Eilif is dead, and tragically, she will never learn, as the Cook can’t work up the courage to tell her. Worse still, the war’s return means that Eilif might not have been breaking the law, after all—and yet, this doesn’t make his actions any less cruel, and nobody, neither he nor his captors, could know the truth.
Themes
Mother Courage assures the Cook that his history with Yvette won’t affect her view of him. She asks whether the Cook will take over for the Chaplain and accompany her and Kattrin, and he agrees and gets in the harness to pull the wagon. They take off, singing “The Song of Mother Courage,” including a new verse about how people support the war and the war supports the people.
Audiences should immediately recognize the dramatic irony in this scene: the Cook already admitted to the Chaplain that he was only approaching Mother Courage in search of food and drink, and it’s clear that the Chaplain has abandoned her for good. She clearly just wants the Cook to go with her so that he can help her run the canteen—and so that she doesn’t have to pull the wagon herself. But she still pretends to respect him, and they both still pretend to make an honest agreement in good faith.
Themes
