Mother Courage (German Mutter Courage) is a character from a Grimmelshausen novel Lebensbeschreibung der Ertzbetrügerin und Landstörtzerin Courasche (The Runagate Courage) dating from around 1670. The character had played a cameo role in Der abentheuerliche Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668).
The Bertolt Brecht play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children) gave her currency in the 20th century. Mother Courage is cast as a walking contradiction by Brecht. She is torn between protecting her children from the war and making a profit out of the war.
Cúruisce (Courasche) appears in Ireland as a fictional character in Darach Ó Scolaí's Irish language novel An Cléireach. After travelling from Flanders in the company of a junior officer in the Tyrone regiment she serves in 1650 as a camp follower in the regiment of colonel Edmund O'Flaherty in the Royalist army.
Famous quotes containing the words mother and/or courage:
“Why is it every careerist tries to turn his mother into a Madonna—to prove his intellect is a virgin birth, papa had nothing to do with it? It’s the sign of the misogynist.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)
“Like all men who are Napoleonic in their ambitions ... he has instincts about the nature of growth, a lover’s sense of the moment of crisis, and he knew ... how costly is defeat when it is not soothed by greater consciousness, and how wasteful is the profit of victory when there is not the courage to employ it.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)