Violence Against Women In Bertolt Brecht's Iphigenia

In "Iphigenia," there were many reoccurring motifs, but the central theme was violence against women. Women were targeted by those with power and are left either brutally scarred, both mentally and physically, or dead. No one protested these abuses or attempted to protect them. There were many illustrations of this theme throughout the play. In the opening scene, two women were dancing together. When one of them left, the other was confronted by a soldier and stabbed. Iphigenia was confronted by Violeta Imperial 's scarred chest and she explained how she got them. She had kissed a girl who turned out to be an informant. After she was taken by the soldiers, she woke up in a field with the girl 's dead body next to her. In the factories, there were hundreds of pink crosses for women who had disappeared. The ghosts of three of these girls were shown. Their throats had been slit.
Iphigenia 's cast did not do a great job communicating the central theme of the play. Although the play was formatted after Bertolt Brecht 's philosophy of detachment, the dearth of all emotion took away from the theme. The only significant emotional outbreak was the opening scene involving the woman and the soldier that murders her; her piercing scream went straight through the audience 's gut and set the stage for the rest of the play, effectively …show more content…
The action she performs is convincing Iphigenia. To persuade her, Violeta showed the scars on her chest and told Iphigenia the story of how she was mutilated by the soldiers for kissing a girl. Additionally, she spoke of the girls from the factory that continued to disappear and the growing number of pink crosses. The tactics she used range from shock and sympathy to anger. By the end of the scene, Violeta had succeeded in convincing Iphigenia so well that she ran away, scared to hear anymore of the awful things that she might have discovered from