47 pages • 1 hour read
Frank WedekindSpring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1891A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Act II, Scenes 1-3Act Summaries & Analyses
Act II, Scene 1 Summary
The next evening in Melchior’s study, Moritz describes studying until he collapsed the previous night. Moritz vows to kill himself if he doesn’t secure the spot in the next grade, explaining that his parents have sacrificed everything for him to attend school. Melchior says life is cruel, then quips, “I could see hanging myself in a tree.—What’s taking Mama with the tea!” (30).
Moritz feels detached from his own body and sees a dreamlike vision of veiled figures crossing the moonlit lawn outside. The rustling leaves outside remind Moritz of his grandmother’s story of the Queen Without a Head. The queen is the most beautiful woman in the world but cannot partake in the basic joys of life, such as eating and kissing, because she lacks a head. One day, she marries a king with two heads—one between his shoulders and one between his legs—that are always arguing, who gives her his extra head. They live happily ever after. Moritz feels like the headless queen.
Melchior’s mother, Mrs. Gabor, brings the boys tea. She remarks that Moritz looks unwell and advises him to take time from his homework to go outside. Melchior tells his mother about the heartless response their friend Hansy Rilow got from their headmaster, Hart-Payne, when Hansy informed him of the death of a classmate from brain fever.
Melchior is reading Goethe’s Faust for school. Mrs. Gabor worries that the scenes of Faust impregnating Gretchen and her drowning her baby will corrupt him. Melchior has learned many great things from the book and knows he doesn’t fully understand it. Mrs. Gabor allows Melchior to make his own decision but reserves the right to revoke her permission: “Do whatever you think you can justify to yourself. I’ll be the very first to express my gratitude if you never give me any reason to have to deny you something” (33).
After his mother leaves, Melchior laments that people fixate on Faust and Gretchen’s tryst while ignoring the rest of Faust, concluding that the world seems to revolve around sex. Moritz agrees: Reading Melchior’s explanation of sex mysteriously felt to him as though he were reading his own distant memories.
Moritz envies girls because he thinks that in merely submitting to sex, they avoid the guilt of initiating sex that taints a man’s pleasure. Melchior, who wants to fight for his pleasure, tells Moritz to keep his envy of girls’ pleasure to himself.
Act II, Scene 2 Summary
Mrs. Bergmann tells Wendla that the stork brought her sister, Ina, a baby boy the previous night. Mrs. Bergmann lied about Ina’s pregnancy to Wendla, explaining her morning sickness as a long bout of flu. Mrs. Bergmann evades Wendla’s questions about the stork.
Suddenly, Wendla exclaims that there’s a giant outside the window. Mrs. Bergmann rushes to the window and, realizing that Wendla was lying, chides her for her immaturity: “I’ll be surprised if you ever start showing good sense.—I’ve stopped hoping” (37). Wendla thinks it’s ridiculous for her mother to expect her to still believe the story about the stork and beseeches her to explain reproduction. Mrs. Bergmann is torn between Wendla’s pleas and her belief in the immorality of explaining sex to her daughter. She tells Wendla that babies are the product of marital love before ordering her to Ina’s house.
Act II, Scene 3 Summary
The teenage student Hansy locks himself in a bathroom with a reproduction of Palma Vecchio’s Venus that he masturbates to. He plans to throw the picture into the toilet, as he has done with five previous pictures. Addressing Venus, he asks, “Have you prayed tonight, Desdemona?”—quoting Othello’s question to his wife prior to murdering her (41). Hansy praises Vecchio’s Venus, telling her of the rapture he felt when he first saw her and the pleasure she has given him since. He has decided to “murder” her (trash the reproduction) despite the loneliness he knows will ensue, because her frozen form saps him of energy.
Hansy is torn by guilt over this “murder” and begs Venus to move so that he won’t need to discard her. He consoles himself with plans to replace her with another reproduction by Bodenhausen. He laments the apparent contradiction that Venus’s chastity excites his “debaucheries.” He repeats Othello’s question before throwing the picture into the toilet.
Act II, Scenes 1-3 Analysis
In these scenes, Wedekind uses allegory, allusion, and setting to develop his theme about the Impact of a Sexually Repressive Culture.
Neither Melchior’s mother, Mrs. Gabor, nor Wendla’s mother, Mrs. Bergmann, knows how to talk to her children about sex. Mrs. Gabor criticizes Melchior for reading Faust—despite his enjoyment of it and his awareness of the limitations of his understanding—because she is afraid that Faust and Gretchen’s tryst, the pregnancy, and the subsequent infanticide will corrupt Melchior. Her doublespeak belies the authority behind her permissive parenting: “Do whatever you think you can justify to yourself. I’ll be the very first to express my gratitude if you never give me any reason to have to deny you something” (33). In Act I, Scene 1, Mrs. Gabor provoked Wendla to threaten to do the very thing she feared; here, Mrs. Bergmann’s similar blend of resentful permission foreshadows Melchior’s rebellion—enacting his mother’s worst fear by raping and impregnating Wendla in Act II, Scene 4.
Mrs. Gabor’s ignorance of how to talk to talk to her daughter about sex affects Wendla differently because, unlike Melchior, Wendla is completely ignorant of sex. Wendla deftly exposes the absurd hypocrisy of her mother’s lies about the stork by pretending there’s a giant outside the window. With this gag, she asserts that she’s not the child her mother treats her as. This challenge throws Mrs. Gabor into conflict: She is torn between her daughter’s pleas and her belief in the immorality of teaching her about sex. By replacing the story of the stork with a vague explanation of marital love producing babies, Mrs. Gabor seeds Wendla with an incomplete understanding; this will later cause Wendla confusion over her pregnancy that results from Melchior’s rape.
Moritz’s allegory of the Queen Without a Head and Hansy’s tormented ode to Vecchio’s Venus illustrate the motif of feeling incomplete without a lover. In Moritz’s story, neither the headless queen nor the two-headed king lives happily before they meet each other. The moral is twofold: You need a partner to live happily, and men complete women (a view Wendla also expresses in Act I, Scene 3). Typical of the play, the story suggests a lewd double entendre: One of the king’s heads hangs between his legs. The head on his shoulders and the head between his legs don’t stop fighting until he meets the queen, who satisfies his sexual desires.
In Scene 3, Hansy is troubled by loneliness; he is a lover without his queen. Masturbating to a reproduction of Vecchio’s Venus as a substitution for sex ultimately proves inadequate. The degree to which he nonetheless invests Venus with life—talking to her as if she were real—attests to the strength of his desire and imagination. Hansy’s repetition of Othello’s question to Desdemona before he kills her (“Have you prayed tonight, Desdemona?” [41]) fleshes out the nature of his distress to tragicomic effect. Like Othello, Hansy still loves his lover but resolves to “kill” her to escape the pain she causes him (Desdemona by purported unfaithfulness; Venus by lifelessness). Hansy’s lament is melodramatic—he’s talking to a picture, after all—but it’s not without pathos: Locked alone in a bathroom, Hansy is just trying to avoid the loneliness and shame he feels over having sexual urges.
