Character Analysis
No one in Mother Courage has a more dramatic change of fortune than Yvette. She starts out as a prostitute and ends up the wealthy widow of an aristocratic military man. Not bad, right?
Hold up. Yvette might succeed in acquiring a comfortable life for herself, but she lives in a world in which sex sells and love is, well, non-existent. She was in love with the cook once, back in Flanders (see her Song of Fraternization, III, 84-113), but she lost track of him after he joined the army. When they're reunited in Scene VIII, she's not exactly pleased to see his face again. Check out her final line of the play:
YVETTE: as she leaves: Fancy a creature like that ever making me leave the straight and narrow path. Thank my lucky stars I managed to reach the top all the same. But I've cooked your goose, Puffing Piet, and that's something that'll be credited to me one day in the world to come. (VIII, 242-247)
Yvette resents the cook not just because he seduced and ditched her, but because he's the reason she ended up as an army prostitute in the first place. If she hadn't tried to follow after him, she never would have left "the straight and narrow path." She never would have given up on love. So, even now that she's at "the top," having hopped, skipped, and jumped over many social classes, what she says still seems to indicate that she regrets what it took to get there.
The point? Money doesn't solve all of Yvette's problems.