A Man's a Man, but What about Woman?

Widow Leocadia Begbick in Bertolt Brecht's Play (1926-2006) Margaret Setje-Eilers (bio) Abstract This essay argues that Bertolt Brecht's play, A Man's a Man (Mann ist Mann), is not merely about men, as its title suggests. Indeed, the play seems to tell the story of Galy Gay, a civilian who assumes the name and identity of another soldier. However, canteen owner widow Leocadia Begbick, who follows the British Army in India, not only drives the action of the play forward, but also analyzes the play's events as the narrator. Until it attracted the interest of feminist critics in the 1980s, her character had been almost ignored. Yet the gender critique put forward by Brecht persists through changing political circumstances and his deliberate adjustments to them in different versions of the play. Given the fundamental alterations that he made to the play without modifying Begbick's character, feminist inquiries might do well to examine Begbick's role in his texts, and particularly in contemporary interpretations. (MSE) As if predicted by the title, A Man's a Man (Mann ist Mann), discussions of Bertolt Brecht's play have virtually ignored the role of widow Leocadia Begbick, a camp follower of the British Army in India, until it attracted the interest of feminist critics in the 1980s.1 Even then, however, the gender-subversive quality of her character was overlooked. Strikingly, Brecht scholarship has not devoted much attention to the character Galy Gay either, a civilian who assumes the name and identity of another soldier and whose transformation drives the plot. A careful look at the play in its various iterations will demonstrate that the gender critique put forward by Brecht persists through changing political circumstances and his deliberate adjustments to them in different versions of the play. Given the fundamental alterations that he made to the play [End Page 96] without modifying Begbick's character, feminist inquiries might do well to examine Begbick's role in his texts, and particularly in contemporary interpretations. Set in British colonial India, the plot of A Man's a Man is motivated by a theft in a pagoda, during which the soldier Jeraiah Jip loses a large clump of hair. Because the resulting bald spot points not only to his guilt, but to that of his fellow soldiers, he is no longer welcome in their machine-gun detachment. When docker Galy Gay comes along in search of fish for dinner, he agrees to step in for Jip to help his three comrades. In the course of the play, his personality comes apart and is put together again "like a car" (35).2 Begbick takes on a crucial role in one of the many playswithin-the-play to reconstruct Galy Gay as Jip, but as much as he changes within the play and from one version to the next, her adaptable identity remains paradoxically stable in each version. She chooses to adjust and sings a song about the importance of adapting to changing circumstances. But whereas she resists manipulation and influences others for her purposes, Galy Gay, by contrast, willingly becomes whatever personality suits the other characters at the moment. The implications of Galy Gay's malleability also changed according to Brecht's perception of the political environment from the play's premiere in 1926 to its last published version in 1953. Brecht is known for frequent theatrical rewrites. He also dismantled and reassembled A Man's a Man: from 1918 to 1953, a period that spans the Weimar Republic, the

Third Reich, and the early GDR, he admitted to ten revisions ("Notes" 252). Three versions were published in 1926, 1938, and 1953. The collected works include the first two versions, but the third appeared only in Erste Stcke (First Plays) and in English translation. Ana Kugli explains that the 1953 play combines the first two published versions, which intensify Galy Gay's negative aspects (Handbuch 154). Yet I will argue here that the third published version warrants separate treatment. The three versions tell the story of Galy Gay's central transformation, as promised in the subtitle, The Transformation of the Docker Galy Gay in the Army Camp of Kilkoa in the Year Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-five, but they also demonstrate the "remodeling" of several other men (35). One soldier is turned into a god, two pretend to be an elephant, and their sergeant becomes a civilian. What matters, according to Galy Gay, is taking a chance "and to be what people want you to be, because it's so easy" (20). He is the man who cannot say no, especially if there is something in it for him. Although the theme of changeability drives the drama's events, if not Brecht's entire oeuvre, canteen owner Begbick not only remains relatively unchanged in the play's numerous versions, but [End Page 97] her unwavering role also stands out conspicuously against the other characters' altered identities. In the following analysis of her difference, I will consider models of gender available to Brecht in the Weimar Republic when the play was first published and performed and the extent to which Begbick's character embodies them. I will argue here that the play's gender constellations help answer the question, if man is Mann and exchangeable, what keeps Begbick from changing as well? What about woman? Why not A Person is a Person (Mensch ist Mensch)? One cannot easily dismiss the entrepreneurial, army-follower Begbick as a minor figure. On the contrary, her character is the only one who offers insights and commentary. She appears in six of eleven scenes and is missing only from Galy Gay's conversation with his wife about a fish (scene 1), the robbery (scene 2), and three follow-up scenes, one of which takes place in her canteen (scenes 5-7). The soldiers' "Song of Widow Begbick's Rolling Bar" introduces her, and her own songs, notably several versions about the "flux of all things," also reflect on the action. She recites a weighty speech in the interlude between scenes 8 (Galy Gay tells his wife he is Jip) and 9 (his mock trial and execution). Her text mentions Brecht's name three times, states that his purpose is "to show / That you can change a man from top to toe," and summarizes what is to come (35). Why does Leocadia Begbick have a privileged role as commentator, and why does the play's theme of shifting identities not affect her own character? Is she merely Brecht's voice, one of Brecht's first narrator figures who interrupts and comments on the action, as several critics claim (Ritchie 226; Fhrich 27)? This theory seems satisfactory until one notes that her position as narrator changes from initial admiration of Galy Gay's transformation in the first version to later critique of his unreflective conformity to popular opinion in the later versions. But in the action of the play itself, her character is not altered from 1926 to 1953. Ana Kugli joins several scholars in suggesting that Begbick's identity does not change in the play because she alone understands how to adapt to new circumstances (Handbuch 159). The versions of her song about eternal flux corroborate how crucial adaptability is (Man 36-37). While one cannot argue that Begbick does not adjust to new circumstances, soldiers Uriah Shelly, Jesse Mahoney, and Polly Baker also find a solution to their

predicament, even if they are forced by circumstances. Since Jip's missing hair reveals their complicity in the theft, they ask Jip and Begbick to help carry out their scheme to replace him in the detachment and proceed to stage several mini-performances to attain their goal. Galy Gay finally agrees to play along. Jip reappears at the end of the play and sees that the three soldiers have become subservient to Galy [End Page 98] Gay. He observes, "You know, you fellows have really changed" (67). If Begbick's secret lies in her adaptability, she does not adjust in the same manner as Galy Gay, who is asked to "run with the wolves," literally, to adapt to the course of the world (35).3 Why does her flexibility not threaten her identity, while the identities of other characters who adjust to circumstances are dramatically transformed? Recognizing that Begbick is the only figure that does not change, Angelika Fhrich's 1992 study of the feminine in Weimar drama defines Begbick in terms of her vampish-masculine qualities, or "the masculine gest of her character" (26).4 Because her role is set apart from the other women's roles like Galy Gay's wife and Begbick's daughters (in the 1926 version) and from the male roles, the play needs to be examined in terms of gender relations.

Remodeling Galy Gay: "A Man's a Man, Says Mr. Bertolt Brecht"
Before considering Begbick's role, one should be aware that the social contexts of the three main versions of the play-from 1926, 1931 (published with some changes in 1938), and 1953-frame its messages quite differently. Moreover, the three publications not only portray collective identity in increasingly negative terms, they also link gender identity and financial security. Aggression is gradually masculinized and, as a result, the performance of this gender stereotype depends on the stable economic conditions of the military. At the same time, as I will argue below, the play locates sensuality in uncertain socio-economic constellations, thereby separating sexual desire from aggression. To illustrate these points, I will draw from Brecht's text "Aufgeben des Geschlechts" (Giving up Gender, 1931-32). The following discussion of the play's revisions will outline how drastically Brecht changed its message, while leaving the role of Begbick intact. She is able to transcend the clichd gender stereotypes and seemingly "strong" positions of the other figures. It is easier to appreciate the consistency of Begbick's character if one considers how Brecht refashioned the role of Galy Gay as the political climate changed during and after the Weimar Republic. The play premiered in Darmstadt and Dsseldorf in 1926, was broadcast on the radio in 1927, and was produced at the Volksbhne in Berlin a year later. A new version was staged at Berlin's Staatstheater in 1931.5 From 1926 to 1928, Galy Gay is a weakling who grows strong enough to fire the shot that destroys a fortress, opening a passage for the army. At the end of the 1926 play, he declares that he is Jeraiah Jip, and a soldier shouts, "Jeraiah Jip, the human fighting machine" (Mann 1926: 69). Implicitly critiquing [End Page 99] both the exchangeability of the individual and the strength of the collective, Brecht adds that Galy Gay has no opinions of his own: "a man who adopts such an attitude is bound to win. But possibly you will come to quite a different conclusion. To which I am the last person to object" ("Speech" 237-38).

In response to political developments, a 1929 revision recasts the envisioned socialist collective of 1926 as fascist and Galy Gay's transformation as negative. The 1931 production, an about-face from the first published version, now warns against the dangers of allowing oneself to be manipulated by others. In light of emerging fascism, the political implications of dismantling Galy Gay's identity interest Brecht more than the phenomenon of identity itself (Kugli, Handbuch 153). The play attracted public attention, and it was recorded on film and in photographs for a "model book" (Modellbuch), an elaborately documented publication meant to serve as a model for subsequent productions. Yet the production was cancelled after only six performances, possibly because it criticized what had become reality. In 1931, the negative collective already existed in the form of the SA (Birnbaum 6). These changes form the basis for the play's second version, published by the London-based Malik publishing house in May 1938 during Brecht's exile years (Kugli, Handbuch 153). Although the second version omits the fall of the fortress and a reference to the fighting machine, it draws an undeniable connection between fascism and late capitalism. Brecht admits that he could not see how to portray this hero becoming strong within a collective. The third published version (1953) revives the fortress scene from 1926, makes Galy Gay considerably more evil, and reinserts the notion of the fighting machine (69).6 Brecht comments, "this growth into crime can certainly be shown, if only the performance is sufficiently alienating" (First Plays 245). The main distinction lies between the 1926 version, which sees Galy Gay's development as positive, and those of 1938 and 1953, in which he changes for the worse. But the 1953 play adds an atrocity: the fortress destroyed by Galy Gay's cannon harbors seven thousand refugees. In light of this new moral disaster, an additional line situates him among imperial type aggressors, which links conquest with clichd images of the male as soldier and breadwinner: "Galy Gay: Oh!-But what's that to me? The one cry and the other cry. / Already I feel within me / The lust to sink my teeth / In the enemy's throat / The instinct to kill / The breadwinner / To carry out the orders / Of the conquerors" (Man 70). Begbick's interlude speech in the second and third published versions lets the audience anticipate Galy Gay's coming evil and unfeeling personality: "And whatever they may choose to make of him / They have made no mistake in him. / He's capable, if we let him out of [End Page 100] sight / Of turning into a butcher overnight" (Man 1953: 35, Mann 1938: 203, Mann 1953: 229-30).7 Despite Brecht's anti-war stance and Begbick's insight into how easily a man can be led to kill, she moves together with the army. However, in the context of government censorship of pacifism in Brecht's works, particularly with regard to the The Trial of Lucullus after the onset of the Korean War and the ensuing Party support of North Korea, her willingness to follow the military instead of condemning Galy Gay is less surprising.8 If Begbick can be faulted for failing to resist, one should note that even initially, she possesses a level of awareness that Mother Courage never achieves. Throughout the many revisions, Begbick's ability to assess situations and make decisions to ensure her survival is crucial to an adaptability that nonetheless keeps her from being manipulated.

Begbick's Constancy: "Song / About the Flux of Things"

Because Begbick can step outside her role and interrupt the progression of events, she can also transcend and enact gendered stereotypes to fit changing circumstances. In all three published versions, she is a savvy, widowed businesswoman in control of her identity and desire, comfortable with and able to use her sexuality to her advantage by performing an exaggerated, feminized role whenever she wishes. She sees through appearances and asserts herself in her role and as narrator, while Galy Gay remains a clueless coward who only becomes strong in a group and achieves a voice through the collective. In the 1927 radio play, Brecht chides him as a weakling without views of his own, but also cautiously suggests that he might be the "ancestor" of a "new human type" that will "not let himself be changed by machines but will himself change the machine" ("Speech" 236-37). If the Galy Gay of 1926 even remotely resembles an ancestor of this type of "new man" in an imaginary socialist community, Begbick stands out as an anomaly whose self-assured, shrewdly professional behavior contains multiple gender roles. At any moment, she chooses the most opportune feminized or masculinized model, while other characters merely slip into clichd roles. Consequently, one could read the play-within-the-play in which Galy Gay adopts Jip's identity, "dies," and delivers his own funeral oration, not only as James Lyon does as the death of Aristotelian tragedy and its heroes, but also as the last rites for traditional gender models (519). Confronting gender stereotypes with one another in a subversive fashion, Begbick's role offers a serious gender critique that highlights her [End Page 101] particular adaptability. Despite the widespread changes in Brecht's revisions, she retains her ability to manipulate and influence, while resisting this kind of maneuvering herself. Describing the "new" woman during the fin de sicle, Rita Felski cites British feminist Frances Swiney whose 1899 The Awakening of Women singles out women's efficiency and adaptability as qualities that help society progress, in contrast to the traditional attitudes that burden men (161). Laureen Nussbaum's overview of the feminine principle in Brecht's work includes Begbick among the women with the resilient and nurturing qualities that were crucial to his early critique of the patriarchal bourgeoisie. Interestingly, because these qualities are often associated with Brecht, they also suggest that his sympathies lie with Begbick (314). Begbick displays many models of masculinized behavior (Fhrich 26). She smokes cigars, survives alone, understands machines, and is sexually liberated. Possessing the strength of a lion, as her name suggests, Leocadia Begbick climbs a hill in Tibet with the barrel of the cannon strapped to her back, assembles it with Galy Gay, and shows him how it functions (Mann 1926: 152-55). While Fhrich sees the cannon as a castrating phallus that signifies power, Begbick maintains control and smokes her cigar even after she surrenders the cannon to Galy Gay (27). Moreover, in the scam that tricks him into becoming the illegal owner of the army's "elephant" Billy Humph (played by soldiers Jesse and Polly on their knees, holding a whisky bottle and covered by a map), and selling it to her, she agrees to play the masculine-coded capitalist customer, provided that the soldiers dismantle her canteen when the army

moves on. Gisela Ritchie notes that these behavioral patterns distance Begbick from clichd feminine models (226). Apart from assuming masculine positions, Begbick also steps out of her role in instances that call for specifically feminine models of sexual behavior. Early on, she sells a suggestively large cucumber to Galy Gay against his will, admitting as they walk along a sparsely traveled road: "A woman might have a hard time dealing with a man who wanted to embrace her" (9). Later, conscious of the performative power of feminine sexuality, and aware that Sergeant Fairchild's sexuality overpowers him whenever it rains, she promises the soldiers to keep him from noticing that their fourth man is missing: "(She takes a mirror and goes to the rear) I'll stand here where Bloody Five is sure to see me, and lure him in. (Second bugle call. Fairchild enters. Begbick looks at him seductively in the mirror and sits down in a chair)." He advances and she demands that he approach her despite his contradictory feelings, "As doesn't-want-to-but-must / Come now as a man!" (18). She knows that he cannot control his conflicting identities and is willing to abandon his military persona to [End Page 102] satisfy his sexual desire. At another crucial moment, she feigns interest and distracts him from the soldiers' mock trial of Galy Gay. Nowhere do the published versions of the play imply that Begbick could not avoid the sergeant's advances if she wanted to. On the contrary, she recognizes and utilizes cultural and gendered expectations. When the army travels by train in scene 10 (reinserted in 1953), she performs a feminized role in another play-within-a-play. To keep Galy Gay from inquiring about his identity, soldier Jesse begs, "Lie down with him, pretend he's spent the night with you, and make him feel good" (59). She agrees to do it for seven weeks' pay. As Ana Kugli observes in Feminist Brecht? (2006), even Brecht's prostitutes are often clever businesswomen who forfeit dignity to exploit the system for their economic needs (199). She concludes persuasively that Brecht takes decidedly feminist positions. In addition, as I argue here, Begbick calls into question stereotypes by isolating, demonstrating, and stylizing them. While Brecht was reevaluating Galy Gay in negative terms, he articulated thoughts on gender relations in "Das Aufgeben des Geschlechts." Written in 1931-32 after his initial engagement with Marxism, the text provides a useful backdrop for the play's polarized depictions of gender. Around the same time that Brecht's play asks what a "man" is, the six points of his theoretical text criticize "absolute" societal gender norms, drawing from the Marxist tenet that social being determines consciousness. Instead of seeing gender as socially constructed, he exposes its underlying political and economic conditions. Establishing and sustaining a strong gender identity depends on financial security, while uncertain conditions destabilize the assumption of having established a specific gender image: "Under increasing economic pressurereduced demand for workers-people give up even their gender" (539).9 Furthermore, "4. 'Gender = absolute' means: the consciousness of a man is determined by his masculinity, not by his societal (but by his genderized) being. 5. The being (reactions) of a man (within society) is determined by his consciousness (of belonging to a certain eternal gender category)" (540).10 Except for Begbick, who transcends what Brecht calls "absolute" or essentialized gender, as I will show below, all the characters fulfill the cultural and gendered expectations created by certain economic situations.

In comedic form, the play reflects the ideas advanced in "Das Aufgeben des Geschlechts." Compared to Sergeant Bloody Five, who lives in a masculine world of wartime aggression under the secure socio-economic conditions of British army officers, the gender identities of dock worker Galy Gay and his wife are not clearly defined. But when Galy Gay takes on Jip's identity and position in the army, his economic [End Page 103] stability is ensured, and violence soon becomes part of his new role. On the other hand, Bloody Five's sensuality periodically causes him to surrender his military status and become the civilian Fairchild in Begbick's arms. In his new, uncertain economic position, his passive state resembles a traditional feminine role. Consequently, the play associates sensuality with weakened masculinity and violence with strongly masculinized traits, subverting the traditional combination of aggression and sexual prowess, thereby characterizing war and sensuality as mutually exclusive. The play outlines the socio-economic foundation of gender construction. According to Helmut Heinze's 1992 study of gest, Brechts sthetik des Gestischen (Brecht's Aesthetic of Gest), Brecht's play is a theatrical model of social individuation (211). Galy Gay, Heinze argues, does not forfeit his identity, but establishes it during the play through gest, one of Brecht's most complex concepts. Brecht's 1948 "A Short Organum for the Theatre" ("Kleines Organon fr das Theater") defines gest as interpersonal behavior: "The realm of attitudes adopted by the characters toward one another is what we call the realm of gest. Physical attitude, tone of voice and facial expression are all determined by a social gest" (Willett, Brecht 198). The concept of gest also helps explain the web of gender relations in the play, in which the behavior of figures to each other polarizes their gender identity into two areas. Begbick occupies the space between them. The army (the exploiters) exists in an economically secure realm in which masculinity is identified with aggression. The working class (the exploited) inhabits a genderless space of economic insecurity that includes sensuality and feminized passivity. The play offers no positive model for sexual desire. Since Begbick's socio-economic status is neither completely secure because her canteen depends on the soldiers' business, nor entirely insecure since she is an entrepreneur, her character moves in the space between these two poles. To suit a given economic situation, she chooses a genderized role from a variety of models. Tongue-in-cheek, just as she takes control, she describes herself as fragile: "How helpless a weak woman is against four such strong men!" (15). Shortly thereafter, she seduces the sergeant. The rich assortment of gender clichs in Begbick's role was well suited to the talents of Helene Weigel in early productions. As early as 1928, critic Max Hochdorf emphasized in the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger how well Weigel's "manly-female tone fit in with the idiocy of the military."11 Begbick was Helene Weigel's first leading role, and her embodiment of it prefigured future enactments that extended into the 1960s, much like her Mother Courage. She performed the role in Berlin in Alfred Braun's radio broadcast (Funk-Stunde, 1927), on stage under Erich [End Page 104] Engel (Volksbhne, 1928), and in a new version directed by Ernst Legal and Brecht (Staatliches Schauspielhaus, 1931; Hecht, Weigel 258-64). In a production photo of 1928, Weigel wears the bobbed hair style (Bubikopf) of the 1920s (Hecht, Leben 70). Many of Brecht's women collaborators shared this look, and Weigel's Begbick displays the free-spirited, gender ambiguity of the so-called "new

woman," which included a revolutionized body image but also universal suffrage, sexual emancipation, and legal equality as promised by the Weimar Constitution. She played the role as an exaggerated construct with stereotypical attributes from both genders-masculine, capitalist survival skills, and feminine sexuality (in 1926 she also included motherhood). In a "both/and" dialectic, to adopt Nussbaum's phrase, Begbick's character incorporates maternal attributes with those of the seductive, calculating entrepreneur, and thus contains the potential for the multiply-gendered iconicity of Weigel's stage performance of Begbick (297). While Weigel's characterization of Begbick overstates the androgynous new woman of the Weimar Republic, this role model strongly influenced the appearance and behavior of performers until at least the sixties in the GDR, judging from photos, costume design, and artwork (Birnbaum 7, 14, 21). For Sabine Hake, fashion constitutes the "most visible sign of women's newly gained freedom of movement" (185). Likewise, as Janet Ward observes in Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (2001), modernity was most clearly written on the female body, despite the male-driven character of Weimar culture. She describes the "architecturalization of the body of the New Woman" in terms of masculinity and an almost adolescent figure. But the social role of modernist man had not changed as dramatically (Ward 86-88). Patrice Petro even calls the masculinization of female identity a masquerade intending to destabilize male power (quoted in Ward 88). The new woman in the 1920s became a widely circulated public image, as Ute Frevert emphasizes in Women in German History (1988), and although the transformed image of femininity prevailed in Weimar Germany, most real women's lives hardly matched this ideal. The number of women wage earners remained, for example, relatively stable from 1907-25. Psychologist Alice Rhle-Gerstel reported in 1932 that women who did work occupied ambiguous, contradictory positions, at once proletarian and bourgeois, with jobs coded as male and a female attitude toward work. RhleGerstel's comments reveal her own essentializing of gender, which was not unusual at the time (Frevert 177-78). Having acquired the skill to instruct Galy Gay in assembling and using the cannon, Begbick has already traveled deep into maledominated territory. Technical work was predominantly male in the mid 1920s, but in 1925 [End Page 105] around 22% of employees in electrical engineering and the chemical industry were women (Frevert 184). Along with traits of the so-called new woman, the ideological position of motherhood in Weimar Germany figures into the 1926 play, in which Begbick has three daughters: Hiobya, Ann, and Bessie (who might be interpreted as a reference to collaborator Elisabeth Hauptmann). Later, as a mother who openly displays her own sexual desire, Begbick's role diverges from what Iris Smith calls the "asexual mother" in famous Brechtian maternal roles, such as The Mother (496). In 1926 Weigel's son Stefan was one year old, and although she did not play the role in the premieres outside Berlin, Brecht reportedly wrote it with her in mind (Hecht, Weigel 161). During the Weimar years, many women who might have come close to qualifying as a new woman had to balance the roles of mother and full-time employee. If motherhood without a job was not easy, combining both had its own problems, and feminists often resorted to eugenics to argue that working women would add vigor to the workforce. According to Felski, women argued that being in the workplace would improve, not weaken, their productive capacity (155). Fascist stereotypes of the mother in the 1930s may

have influenced Brecht not to depict motherhood and to cast his female character as a vamp instead. When he was writing the 1953 version, the double burden of full-time work and caring for a family had become more acceptable in the GDR, because in 1952 legislation had been enacted to improve conditions for working mothers (Frevert 284). Portraying Begbick as a mother and entrepreneur under Walter Ulbricht had lost its earlier subversive flair. But even in her vampish performances, Begbick resists being objectified by male desire. Her liberated, business-like attributes and male-oriented fashion set her apart from other women in the play. One of these women is Hiobya, who is cast in various roles in the early versions. In 1926, she is one of Begbick's daughters; in 1928, she is Begbick's sister, and in later versions the role of Hiobya is entirely cut (Hecht, Chronik 241; Heinze 169). In a 1928 production shot, Hiobya wears a dress revealing her knees and leans against Fairchild in an objectifying pose (Hecht, Leben 70). Another woman appears in all the versions: Galy Gay's wife, who does not even have a first name. She and Begbick were the only women in the play after 1928, despite Fenn's claim that Begbick is the "sole" woman (112). Having waited in vain for the fish her husband went to buy for dinner, Mrs. Gay leaves the kitchen to search for him at the army camp, bringing to mind the Wilhelminian notion of "children, kitchen, church" ("Kinder, Kche, Kirche") because she is so closely associated with her place at the stove. When he denies knowing her after [End Page 106] she locates him, she acquiesces and leaves. Mrs. Gay and her working-class husband move in the undefined "genderless" area that resembles traditional feminized zones of weakness and passivity, where they inanely discuss the size of a fish he never buys. When Fairchild succumbs to his sexual desire, he describes himself as "weak" (63). By contrast, Begbick moves in and out of this feminized sphere to get what she needs for pleasure as well as for survival.

Dismantling Gender: "Begbick Looks at Him Seductively in the Mirror"

If A Man's a Man takes apart the individuality and identity of a man, it also demonstrates through Begbick that feminine identity as well can be dismantled and reassembled. Since 1990, when Judith Butler introduced the notion of the performative in her study Gender Trouble: Subversive Bodily Acts, gender has been understood as a "stylized repetition of acts" (179). Precisely the concept of stylization with regard to the new woman helps to unravel Begbick's character and her position in Weimar Germany. Frevert points out that women between the wars were not business owners, like Begbick's character, but at the most white-collar office workers. She suggests that the image of the independent woman in the office was the result of male fear of competition or a distorted idea of women's achievements (179). Begbick's androgynous character hovers between exaggerated independence, including the ability to make advantageous use of her sexuality, and her dependence on income from the soldiers. As entrepreneur and mother (1926), she incorporates various images of the "new" Weimar woman according to (male) public opinion in cinema and print media, foregrounds them in Butler's sense of performance, and displays them as Brechtian gests.

Reconstructing the theory of epic theater as an aesthetic of gest, Heinze argues that Brecht's revisions of A Man's a Man in the 1920s gradually incorporate gest, which "shows" social attitudes by communicating contradictions (146). Gest can be defined narrowly as non-verbal expression or gestures, or more broadly as staging that displays the mechanics of theater, including the gender roles embodied there, that imply alternative forms to that which is critically presented on the stage. The development of gest is important to my argument, since Brecht's thoughts on epic theater coincided with his reflections on the interdependence of strong gender identity and stable economic circumstances. As Heinze argues, the changes made between 1926 and 1931 were pivotal in helping Brecht to formulate his concept gestic acting (146-49). At the same time, it exposed the workings of socio-economically [End Page 107] economically constructed gender. Begbick's polarized gender roles vividly illustrate this new theater aesthetic. One good example of textual style in epic theater is Begbick's interlude speech about how easily a man can be remodeled, set between two scenes in her canteen (8: Galy Gay denies knowing his wife, and 9: his execution). Here, she warns about the danger of turning a man into a butcher and expresses "Mr. Brecht's" hope that the audience will recognize the present political instability (35). As Lyon observes, this speech puts epic theater on stage before Brecht's theoretical essays appeared (516). On 30 July 1926, months before the 1926 production, Brecht first mentioned "epic theater" in print (Hecht, Chronik 217). Only later did he begin to theorize his new theater aesthetic (Brecht 22-23). Specifically referring to Peter Lorre's delivery of Galy Gay's lines in 1931, Brecht discussed the concept of gest as contradictions that urged spectators to "make discoveries." In a letter to the Berlin press, he noted, "As against the dramatic actor, who has his character established from the first [ ], the epic actor lets his character grow before the spectator's eyes out of the way in which he behaves" (Brecht 243). Begbick shows early on how gender emerges through gestic contradictions in social interactions that imply other possibilities. Unlike Begbick, who represents many layers of gender identity, and the genderless Mrs. Gay, who at the other extreme seems to have no feminine gender except for her connection with the kitchen, other characters take conspicuous, essentialist positions: soldier Galy Gay, Sergeant Fairchild, and soldiers Polly, Uriah, and Jesse behave according to certain masculine models. A production photo from 1931 shows the sergeant, the three soldiers and Galy Gay (after his transformation) on stilts and with giant hands that amplify the army's masculinizing power (Hecht, Leben 101). Despite conflicting images of gender models for women in New Objectivity and the reality of emancipated lives, as Frevert notes, "[t]here was no fundamental questioning of traditional male and female stereotypes," and many men still followed patriarchal gender models instituted by Wilhelminian society (185). Yet Begbick announces in her interlude speech that a man, like a car, can be remodeled "[w]ithout incurring the slightest loss or scar" (35). Counterbalancing Begbick's thoughts on masculine soldiers, Galy Gay's character conforms to feminine Wilhelminian role models upheld by many men in Weimar Germany. "Masculine" culture was in a crisis of de-individualization and alienation, inspired by objectifying technology, according to an observer in 1927 (Frevert 171). Asking his wife's advice about the fish he wants to buy, Galy Gay combines emasculinization with feminization and neediness: "Do you think I should buy a big

fish, or do [End Page 108] you require a small one?" He expresses surprise at her reminder that his "soft nature" makes him susceptible to lecherous fishwives and dangerous soldiers: "They wouldn't want to hurt a simple docker" (3). He is unsure of his identity, dependent on the opinions of others, afraid of his sexuality, and his views can be influenced easily. Incapable of refusing a single request, he reluctantly purchases the large cucumber that Begbick offers him when their paths first cross. Galy Gay misses its abundant phallic associations and easily slips into Jip's recently emasculated identity. Their roles are well matched: Jip's violent scalping at the pagoda robbery is a kind of castration, and there is no place for him in the male sphere of the military. Moreover, after illegally purchasing the army's "elephant," Galy Gay hopes to escape accountability as the man who sold it to Begbick by asking her to cut off his mustache. In this act, Angelika Fhrich views Begbick as a castrating vamp who plays on the soldier's fear of emasculation and their compensatory need to fight (26). Before his transformation into Jip, Galy Gay is weak, needy, easily exploited, and dependent on his spouse. After he assumes Jip's identity, he denies knowing his wife and thus stops relying on her. When he enters combat with his comrades, the collective male-dominated domain of technology and machines increases his virility. Gradually, military life transforms his initially feminized character into a classically aggressive male role, leading him to fire the cannon shot that destroys the fortress. Within the potential violence of the military, technology is double-edged; it both confirms traditional masculinity and threatens individuality. While Galy Gay grows more manly, Bloody Five's gender is also dismantled and reassembled in the military context. Comically, rain activates his sexual desire and moves him toward feminized passivity, as he willingly submits to Begbick's conditions that he discard his violent military persona. But whereas Galy Gay's gender moves from (indistinctly gendered) feminine powerlessness to masculine violence, the sergeant's character oscillates between his conceptualization of masculine behavior, defined at some times via aggression and at other times as sexual drive. In practical terms, however, Begbick insists he behave in a manner that in fact connects sexuality and passivity. Nonetheless, he wants to be thought of in terms of his macho fighting identity, not the erotically driven civilian Charles Fairchild. Galy Gay and Fairchild can both occupy only a single position at one time. Neither figure "plays" at gender as Begbick does, and neither can embody multiplicity. Bloody Five's character recalls Freudian models of hysteria: he fears his own sexuality and finally denies his desire. His sexual desire makes him so uncomfortable that Begbick is able to manipulate him into castrating himself with a gunshot in the last moments of the 1953 play, rather than [End Page 109] forfeiting his reputation and the reputation that he acquired after ruthlessly shooting five prisoners. Fairchild states, "Don't you realize that my manhood makes me weak when you sit there like that?" When she suggests castration, he agrees: "I've got to do it if I'm to go on being Bloody Five" (63). In an early version, he screams in a falsetto (277). Galy Gay warns him in 1938, "A man's a man! But no man is no man." He remains sergeant in name only and actually becomes a child who will not procreate (Brecht, Mann 1938: 153).12 Unlike Fairchild's polarized identity, Galy Gay's is a stereotypical female vessel, a vacuum waiting for content. It is easy to convince him to change his name. Not sharing Galy Gay's eagerness to adopt a new name, Begbick's composite character maintains her identity in the play and in the numerous plays-within-theplay-the elephant sale, the "death" of Galy Gay, and his "seduction" in the train. The

sergeant, however, clings to his macho self-image so ardently that he is willing to forfeit his sexuality for it. For Galy Gay and Bloody Five, the names Jeraiah Jip and Charles Fairchild map new identities onto their characters. In the transition phase, when Galy Gay insists as prospective elephant owner, "I mustn't be named of course," Begbick admonishes, "Don't harp on your name. What's the point / When the person you're referring to is always another?" (38-43). Her reprimand illustrates the elusive quality of identity. Simultaneously, in view of the play's connection of identity and gender, her remark also implies the particularly contradictory roles of women in Weimar Germany defined by characteristics ranging from emancipation to biological difference. For the women's movement not only recognized women's equality in the Weimar Constitution in political, professional, and family matters, but it also believed in essential differences between biological sexes (Frevert 203). From 1926 onward, Begbick's role has invited reflection on these conflicting views, and particularly since the 1980s, feminists have become aware of parallels between their own objectives and those of epic theater.

Feminist Responses: "You Can Change a Man from Top to Toe"

In the 1980s, Brecht's resistance to traditions of all sorts began to fascinate feminist theater critics and practitioners who sought to reject the Method acting's call for actors to identify with their roles. For example, Gillian Hanna, co-founder of the British Monstrous Regiment Theatre Company in 1975, was early to recognize epic theater's potential to highlight gender relationships within their social context via alienation effects. She suggested combining Method and Brechtian epic acting to [End Page 110] express the dialectic relationship between socialism and feminism (Case 92-93). Pointing to the affinity between the Brechtian agenda and feminist goals in Hanna's new theater, Sue-Ellen Case's book, Feminism and Theatre (1988), inspired quests for alternate ways of acting. But despite feminist interest in epic theater, A Man's a Man has not been the subject of much feminist analysis. An early essay by Sara Lennox (1978) on Brecht's women dismisses Begbick's sexual behavior as satire (85); later, Fhrich's brief discussion (1992) sees her mainly in terms of vamp-like sexuality (26). By contrast, in "Rethinking Brecht: Deconstruction, Feminism, and the Politics of Form" (1990), Janelle Reinelt focuses on identity in the play and finds that it exemplifies the subversive agenda that epic theater and feminism share with deconstruction. In their rejection of deconstruction's infinitely deferred meaning, she concludes, they both affirm agency and longing for change. Yet although she argues persuasively that epic and feminist theater reject the open-ended play of the signifier in favor of subjects that can initiate political-social transformation, she does not mention Begbick (105-06). Nor does Elin Diamond examine Begbick in her influential article on what feminism can learn from the theory of epic theater, "Brechtian Theory/Feminist Theory: Toward a Gestic Feminist Criticism" (1988, revised 1997). She notes that both epic and feminist theater hoped to find reflective spectators able to recognize resistance to traditional roles, in addition to techniques such as interruption of the narrative, alienation that foregrounds social expectations, and gestic acting that implies

preferable behavior without showing it. Seeing its significance for feminist theater, she analyzes the close connection between Brecht's theory of acting and the sexgender system and defines gest as "a gesture, word, an action, a tableau by which, separately or in series, the social attitudes encoded in the playtext become visible to the spectator" (89). The Brechtian actor suggests behavior that is absent from the performance: "The Brechtian not-but is the theatrical and theoretical analog to the subversiveness of sexual difference, because it allows us to imagine the deconstruction of gender-and all other-representations" (86).13 Although she that Brecht's early plays thematize this absence, Diamond's analysis does not specify A Man's a Man. As I have maintained, Begbick displays the socio-economic construction of clichd gender models and inspires the spectator to imagine other modes. Thus one could see Begbick's role as a disrupted signifier that compels the actor to show culturally established expectations of gender, while implying "what [s]he is not doing" (Willet, Brecht 137). Diamond proposes a "gestic feminist criticism" that would lead to reflection on social conceptions of gender by rendering them [End Page 111] visible (91). If gender is ideology, or a sign system that reveals itself "as a sign system," A Man's a Man provides rich material for her argument (Unmaking 46-49). J. Ellen Gainor's 2002 essay, "Rethinking Feminism, Stanislavsky, and Performance Theater Topics," sums up the changes in feminist theater since the 1980s. She observes that although feminist theater has privileged Brechtian techniques, while claiming to have resisted Method acting since the 1960s, many feminist theater performances have conflated both styles (173). Nevertheless, while Begbick's character is open to various types of acting, the degree to which she "shows" agency and gender intensifies the mutual objectives of epic and feminist theater. As I have argued, Begbick, the new woman who combines insight with the contradictions of gender as gest, calls for feminist analysis. As a consistently overstated prototype in all versions of the play, she maintains a subject position that demonstrates and subverts models of stereotypical gender behavior. She responds to change neither as Mrs. Gay does, simply by accepting, nor as the soldiers do, by asking others to help. Her song about the "flux of all things" challenges this type of reaction; after er husband dies, she rents out their room: "And now that it feeds me no longer / I am still eating" (37). Her sympathetically drawn character neither mocks nor criticizes "feminized" men and "masculinized" women, but instead questions absolute gender models, particularly masculinized roles nurtured by strong socioeconomic positions. Begbick's multi-voiced perspectives and unique adaptive qualities are especially rich territory for feminist analysis. Discussing feminist theater in general extends beyond the scope of my essay, but as I suggest below, two new productions of Brecht by male and female directors have continued to encourage spectators to reflect on gender by inviting the actor playing Begbick to alienate, step outside the character, and expose essentialist positions. Based on the attention they have received recently, the play and Begbick's role are worthy of reevaluation today.

Rethinking Androgyny: "Of All Things Certain / The Most Certain Is Doubt"

Recent productions in Berlin (2006) and Washington, DC (2004) open A Man's a Man to feminist inquiry particularly because they update Begbick's look, but not her character. For example, in Manfred Karge's fast-paced staging, Begbick (Franziska Junge) as the new woman is neither new nor androgynous in appearance, but instead young and sexy (even sexually enhanced) in a short skirt, net stockings, and high heels. [End Page 112] The cast is considerably younger than in previous productions.14 His how premiered on 30 March 2006 as the play's third staging at the Berliner Ensemble after those of Uta Birnbaum (1967) and Konrad Zschiedrich (1981). In keeping with Brecht's text, Junge's Begbick deliberately uses her feminized appearance to seduce the sergeant. Similarly, Hungarian director Eniko Eszenyi made her Begbick (Valerie Leonard) a foxy young pole-dancer at the Arena Stage in Washington, DC in 2004 (Roessler 64). Both productions create Begbick's androgyny through behavior rather than physical embodiment, in contrast to Weigel's iconic combination of appearance and behavior. Junge's and Leonard's portrayals express the contradictions of gestic acting and imply something beyond the stereotypical gender roles they expose. As critic Christoph Funke comments, Karge's actors want to avoid appearing "real" at all costs.15 The new Begbicks deliberately exaggerate feminized behavior through their bodies, without buying into the notion that essentialist "feminine wiles" are the only means of achieving their goals. Adding a younger and sexier appearance to Begbick's self-confident gender role play does not mean that she no longer plays masculinized roles. On the contrary, even if Karge's Begbick now smokes cigarettes instead of cigars, she displays masculinecoded behavior. Junge remarks that her Begbick still enacts stereotypical male qualities: "Cleverness, economic, practical thinking. She is actually aloof. She uses her 'sex appeal' only as an economic factor. She fights like a man at the front, she smokes like a man, she manages her bar like a man. She is autonomous, [and] does not depend on anyone, not on men either."16 A woman soldier even joins the final shoot-out, and Begbick gives the command to destroy the enemy in the final scene at the front: "She has a gun, she is one hundred percent soldier." But Junge adds that her Begbick still also plays the feminized role with her "beloved" sergeant. Along with this fresh look at Begbick's androgynous character within the play's socio-economic view of gender construction, Karge brings out the social-critical aspect of the 1953 version in which Galy Gay takes down a fortress that shelters thousands of refugees. A video montage calls up associations to current American military action abroad, and thus addresses contemporary political issues. He explains that he could cut entire scenes-the temple robbery and Fairchild's self-castration-because today's no longer "pedestrian" audiences understand more quickly. Instead, aware that Brecht called the play a comedy, Karge packages his anti-military, anti-imperialist message in the contradictory wrapping of fast-moving musically accentuated slapstick. A variety of stereotypical behavioral models meet in Begbick's role, and her multifaceted gender roles have been maintained in the published [End Page 113] versions and on stage for almost a century, including Karge's and Eszenyi's recent productions. In what Nussbaum might call the interstices of Begbick's character, "the seemingly unstructured space in the perceived pattern," one sees afterimages, ways of envisioning gender that are free from clich (297). Her role does not change from version to version and within one version, even in the recent productions, because it is already multiple, and contrary to the essentialist positions of other figures, her character implies a world that resists conceptions of gender that can be remodeled like

cars. Although the political and ideological contexts of the play shift considerably, Begbick's critique of oppositional gender roles does not. She adapts by "making herself" in a transitive sense, while other characters merely react. Galy Gay buys Begbick's cucumber, agrees to the soldiers' request to become Jip, and consents to holding a eulogy for his own supposedly dead body: "I'll shed what is disliked in me, and then I'll be / Agreeable" (Man 57). Fairchild promptly acts on Begbick's suggestion to self-castrate. Unlike the male figures who submit to clichd roles, Begbick chooses to play a range of gendered roles that chart alternative behavior in the spaces between these stereotypes. As she insists in the 1938 and 1953 versions, "of all things certain / the most certain is doubt" (46).17 She displays doubt as resistance to prescribed gender roles in A Man's a Man, regardless of what the play's message might be about man. Margaret Setje-Eilers Margaret Setje-Eilers is Assistant Professor of German and Teaching Assistant Supervisor in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages at Vanderbilt University. She earned her Ph.D. in German at the University of Virginia with a dissertation entitled "Faces: Maps, Masks, Mirrors, Masquerades in German Expressionist Literature, Cinema, and Visual Arts." She has published articles on Bertolt Brecht, George Tabori, German film and technology and teaching. Her article, "Keeping Time: Sound and Image in Volker Schlndorff's Film The Tin Drum," appeared in the MLA volume, Approaches to Teaching Grass's 'The Tin Drum' (2008). She is currently working on new productions of Brecht's plays at the Berliner Ensemble in which Helene Weigel initially played the lead role.

Notes
1. Leocadia is the English version of Begbick's first name. The German spelling is Leokadja. 2. Citations from the English translation appear in parentheses. The German versions of 1926, 1938, and 1953 are cited as Mann 1926, Mann 1938, and Mann 1953. Quotations in the titles of the five sections are from Brecht's A Man's a Man: 35, 36, 18, 35, 46. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. 3. "Sich dem Laufe der Welt schon anzupassen" (Mann 1953: 229). 4. "Gestus der Mnnlichkeit ihrer Person" 5. 25 September 1926, Darmstadt (Hessisches Landestheater), dir. Jakob Geis; 25 September 1926, Dsseldorf (Dsseldorfer Schauspielhaus), dir. Josef Mnch; 4 January 1928, Berlin (Volksbhne), dir. Erich Engel; 6 February 1931, Berlin (Staatliches Schauspielhaus), dir. Ernst Legal and Bertolt Brecht (Hecht, Chronik 218-19, 241, 303) [End Page 114] 6. I refer to the three published German versions of 1926, 1938, 1953. There are many unpublished versions.

7. "Und wozu auch immer er umgebaut wird / In ihm hat man sich nicht geirrt. / Man kann, wenn wir nicht ber ihn wachen / Ihn uns ber Nacht auch zum Schlchter machen" (Mann 1938: 203; 1953: 229-30). 8. See Mark Clark for Brecht's responses to Party complaints of pacifism in The Trial of Lucullus (143). 9. "Bei konomischem Druck-sinkender Nachfrage nach Arbeitskraft geben die Menschen sogar ihr Geschlecht auf." See Kugli, Feminist 158. Brecht's German text has a dash only after "Druck" but not after "Arbeitskraft." 10. "4. 'Das Geschlecht = absolut' bedeutet: das Bewutsein des Mannes wird bestimmt durch sein Mannsein, nicht durch sein gesellschaftliches (sondern sein geschlechtliches) Sein. / 5. Das Sein (Reagieren) des Mannes (innerhalb der Gesellschaft) wird bestimmt durch sein Bewutsein (einer bestimmten ewigen Geschlechtskategorie anzugehren)." 11. "Sie pat hervorragend durch den Mannsweiberton in die soldatische Idiotengesellschaft" (Hecht, Weigel 260). 12. "Mann ist Mann! Aber kein Mann ist kein Mann." 13. Diamond's 1988 essay was revised in Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theater. 14. From 1926-2006, increasingly younger actors played Galy Gay; Ernst Legal (1881-1955) was forty-five years old in 1926; Heinrich George (1893-1946) was thirty-five in 1928; Peter Lorre (1904-64) was twenty-seven in 1931; Christopher Nell (1980-) was twenty-six in 2006. 15. "wollen alles andere als 'wirklich' sein" 16. "Cleverness, wirtschaftliches praktisches Denken. Sie ist eigentlich schon sprde. Ihren 'Sexappeal' setzt sie auch nur als wirtschaftlichen Faktor ein. Sie kmpft wie ein Mann an der Front, sie raucht wie ein Mann, sie fhrt ihre Kneipe wie ein Mann. Sie ist autonom, nicht abhngig von anderen, auch von Mnnern." 17. "Da sagte ich mir: von den sicheren Dingen / Das Sicherste ist der Zweifel" (Mann 1938: 213; 1953: 249).

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---. Brecht Chronik: 1898-1956. 2nd ed. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1998. ---. Helene Weigel: Eine groe Frau des 20. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2000. Heinze, Helmut. "Praxis." Brechts sthetik des Gestischen: Versuch einer Rekonstruktion. Beitrge zur Literatur-, Sprach und Medienwissenschaft. Reihe Siegen. Ed. Helmut Kreuzer. Vol. 115. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1992. 144-213. Junge, Franziska. Interview (E-mail to the author in German and English), 13-14 Jan. 2008. Karge, Manfred. Unpublished interview conducted by the author. Berlin: Berliner Ensemble, 22 June 2006. Kugli, Ana. Feminist Brecht? Zum Verhltnis der Geschlechter im Werk Bertolt Brechts. Mnchen: Martin Meidenbauer, 2006. ---. Mann ist Mann. Brecht-Handbuch in fnf Bnden. Stcke. Ed. Jan Knopf, Brigitte Bergheim and Joachim Lucchesi. Vol. 1. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2001. 152-66. Lennox, Sara. "Women in Brecht's Works." New German Critique 14 (Spring 1978): 83-96. Lyon, James K. "Brecht's Mann ist Mann and the Death of Tragedy in the 20th Century." German Quarterly 67.4 (Autumn 1994): 513-20. [End Page 117] [CrossRef] Nussbaum, Laureen. "The Evolution of the Feminine Principle in Brecht's Work: An Overview." A Bertolt Brecht Reference Companion. Ed. Siegfried Mews. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. 296-318. Reinelt, Janelle. "Rethinking Brecht: Deconstruction, Feminism, and the Politics of Form." Brecht Yearbook 15 (1990): 99-109. Ritchie, Gisela F. "Die frhen Stcke." Der Dichter und die Frau: Literarische Frauengestalten durch drei Jahrhunderte. Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. 283. Bonn: Bouvier, 1989. 220-27. Roessler, Norman. "Brecht and Brecht's Women on the 21st Century American Stage." Communications from the International Brecht Society 33 (June 2004): 59-65. Smith, Iris. "Brecht and the Mothers of Epic Theater." Theatre Journal 43.4 (Dec. 1991): 491-505. [CrossRef] Ward, Janet. "Fashioning the Female Body." Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. 81-91. Willett, John, and Ralph Manheim. "Editorial Notes. 1. Evolution of the Play." Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays. Vol. 2. New York: Vintage, 1977. 246-52. ---. "Introduction." Bertolt Brecht: Collected Plays. Vol. 2. New York: Vintage, 1977. xi-xxxii. [End Page 118]