War From Above vs. War From Below

The idea of "below versus above" is an interesting concept. In The Iliad, (the main) women are goddesses. In pictures we have seen, most of them are depicted or drawn sexually and wrote out to be manipulative. In Mother Courage and Her Children, women are treated more brutally. Courage struggles for money and struggles to keep her family a priority, her daughter is a mute, not able to speak for herself and is raped in the novel, and this play is seen as "war from below".

Although the terms are classified more commonly with class rather than gender, I believe we can see them from both ways. While in The Iliad, because women are placed in a higher power, they are more demanding, mischievous and manipulative. The way they are drawn out/portrayed are as sexual symbols and threats to men. Whereas in plays and/or novels, such as Mother Courage and Her Children, women from a more belittled background are depicted as crazy or selfish.

Men, in both works used as examples, are more passionate and driven in their duties and are determined and feared and loved by others. They are strong-willed and seen as idols. Although the goddesses in The Iliad are depicted as stronger women, and in special cases seen with a heavier pull with decisions (Hera over Zeus), it still does not diminish the fact that they must be drawn out to be a sex symbol in order to be seen as significant to the reader(s).

Theater vs Literature

In Mother Courage and Her Children there is a scene where Courage and is warning off the commanders from her eldest son. In theater we see the humor of the scene and we do not fail to laugh, though when I read the scene, I felt almost sorry for Courage.

I feel she is an internally conflicted person and, especially because she is in a dire state of money, people are quick to label her as an ironically, mentally "ill" character - or crazy - because, not the sole fact, that she is a woman. In other works (A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams), it is easy to see the woman as "crazy" than to think she may actually have something internally wrong with her. I also feel that courage has a deeper struggle than what readers want to believe, or what the author leads readers to see.

The live version of the play is already distracting enough. There are scenes happening at the same time and the audience is faced with decided which act to pay attention to. Detail can be missed in the play, where as while reading it, you are able to refer back to the text if you misinterpreted something or missed a slight detail.