Women in Brecht's Works

Abstract

For feminists with an allegiance to Marxism the case of Brecht is a difficult one. Brecht is generally considered by the Left as the single writer whose works can be regarded, from the standpoint of both form and content, as authentically Marxist1 -however that concept is understood. One recalls the scene in La Chinoise where, searching for a writer of use to the revolutionary cause, the hero finally erases every name from his blackboard but Brecht's. Yet as one's feminist consciousness develops, one's discomfort with Brecht increases. In his personal life, Klaus Volker has told us, Brecht was often a veritable pillar of sexism: He changed women like his shirt.2 A cursory examination of Brecht's works suggests that related problems exist in the portrayal of women there. What seems necessary, then, is a closer examination of the image of women in Brecht's work to ascertain the degree to which he remains trapped in stereotypes. Cynthia Griffin Wolf has observed: When a society gives its sanction, even its praise, to stereotyped images of womanhood, the women who live in that society form their own self-images accordingly. A stereotype may become, by a sort of perversity, an image of reality that even women seek to perpetuate.3 To also understand ourselves and our lives as changing and changeable (Brecht), we must, as a necessary first step in feminist analysis, examine and criticize women figures in the works of male writers like Brecht in the light of what we know to be the real historical capacities of women in their time and our own.