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 III, Scenes 5-7Act Summaries & Analyses
Act III, Scene 5 Summary
In a bedroom, Wendla is attended by her sister, Ina; her mother; and the public health officer, Dr. Seltzer. Dr. Seltzer explains that he is prescribing Wendla Blaud’s Pills (a treatment for anemia) to treat the “anemia” causing her vomiting. He advises her to increase the dosage as rapidly as she can to regain full health. Mrs. Bergmann sees the doctor out.
Wendla tells Ina she feels better than she ever has, as long as the image of her mother crying stays from her mind: “Sometimes I’ll feel so wonderful—everything sunshine and happiness. I wouldn’t have thought it was possible to feel so good! I’ll feel like going outside, out on the grass in the evening sun, and looking for primroses along the river” (71). Mrs. Bergmann returns and Ina leaves.
Wendla asks her mother whether the doctor really thinks she has anemia; her mother confirms. Wendla thinks she actually has edema and is going to die, because her mother has been crying. Mrs. Bergmann exclaims that Wendla is pregnant: “You have a baby!—Oh, why did you do this to me!” (72). Wendla doesn’t think this is possible because she’s never loved anyone but her mother. She asks why her mother didn’t teach her everything about sex. Mrs. Bergmann beseeches Wendla not to make things harder for either of them, explaining that she treated Wendla in the same way her mother treated her.
Mrs. Bergmann tells Wendla that the situation is still salvageable. The abortionist, Mother Schmidt, arrives.
Act III, Scene 6 Summary
After having sex together, Ernst and Hansy frolic above a vineyard as people harvest the last of the crop. They talk in allusions and sexual double entendres. Too tired to have sex again, they share their dreams for their futures. Ernst imagines himself as a respected reverend leading a contemplative life served by a housewife. Hansy’s dreams are more material: He envisions being a millionaire surrounded by attractive lovers. He believes adults conceal their true nature with a mature facade: “Look, our parents wear long faces is to cover up their stupid thoughts. When they’re by themselves they call each other blockheads just like we do” (74).
Ernst initiates sex again. Hansy kisses Ernst, who declares that he loves Hansy. Hansy proclaims that in 30 years they’ll reminisce about how nice the evening is: “The mountains are glowing; the grapes are hanging in our mouths, and the evening wind is stroking the cliffs like a little teasing kitten” (75).
Act III, Scene 7 Summary
Melchior scales the wall into the town cemetery, knowing the search party from the reformatory will be scouring the brothels for him. He has no money, his coat is shredded, and he is in despair: Wendla is dead. He asks God why he killed Wendla instead of him, the guilty one. He finds Wendla’s gravestone, which says she died of anemia and is inscribed with the biblical passage “blessed are the pure of heart” (76). He screams that he murdered her and that he has nothing left, continuing, “I wasn’t bad!—I wasn’t bad!—I wasn’t bad…” (76).
Suddenly, Moritz’s ghost appears, with his severed head under his arm. Moritz bids Melchior to take his hand, promising it will never be as easy to kill himself. Moritz spends his time like other ghosts, judging the human world to feel a sense of sublime schadenfreude: “We know that everything people do and strive for is stupid, and we laugh at it” (78). Melchior asks why Moritz isn’t ashamed of himself for laughing at other people and says he has no interest in ridiculing himself. However, Melchior is tempted by Moritz’s promise that ghosts can forget whatever they choose.
Overcome by self-hatred and a desire to forget he raped Wendla, Melchior is on the verge of accepting Moritz’s offer when a masked man appears, telling Melchior that hunger is clouding his judgment. The man orders Moritz away, rebuking him for polluting the air with his lies and stench of decay, declaring: “The sublime humorist is the most woeful, pitiable creature in creation!” (81). Moritz begs to stay, explaining that it’s horrible underground.
The Masked Man refuses to identify himself to Melchior. Melchior decides that between Moritz and the Masked Man, the Masked Man is more likely the devil. The Masked Man reveals that it was Mother Schmidt’s abortion methods that killed Wendla, not natural causes. He promises to help Melchior become the person he wants to be. Melchior maintains that he cannot trust someone he doesn’t know; the Masked Man says he has no choice.
Melchior tests the Masked Man with a question about the nature of morals. The Masked Man argues that morals are the decisions we make after weighing what we want to do against what we’re supposed to do. The Masked Man refutes Moritz’s claim that his parents’ morals led him to kill himself, arguing that he was ultimately responsible for his own death, despite his parents’ enjoyment of getting angry at him. Moritz asks the Masked Man why he didn’t appear before his own suicide. The man challenges Moritz’s attempt to shirk his freedom of choice: “You don’t remember me? Even at the last instant you were still standing between death and life, weren’t you?” (83). Melchior asserts that his own morals would have been responsible if he had accepted Moritz’s invitation to suicide.
Melchior chooses the Masked Man’s viewpoint over Moritz’s. Melchior and Moritz bid each other heartfelt farewells before Moritz returns to the hollow pleasure of his grave. The man says each boy got the fate he chose: “[Moritz], the soothing awareness of having nothing;—[Melchior], the enervating doubts about everything” (83).
Act III, Scenes 5-7 Analysis
Scene 5 develops the theme of The Impact of a Sexually Repressive Culture in a tragic and emotionally powerful way. Wendla is so ignorant of the facts of life that she has no way to interpret the changes in her pregnant body, except to imagine that she is dying. Her mother knows the truth but is too ashamed to share what she knows with Dr. Seltzer, who prescribes her pills for anemia. Even when Mrs. Bergmann tells her daughter that she is pregnant, Wendla does not understand how it happened. Mrs. Bergmann takes further action to avoid shame for the family by bringing in Mother Schmidt to perform an abortion. Wendla dies, still largely in the dark about her own body and unable to make choices about her own life.
Scene 6 depicts the joy of escaping the repressed sexuality of the provincial German town. The imagery of people harvesting grapes in the vineyard establishes an idyllic atmosphere while humorously intimating the sexual nature of Ernst and Hansy’s rendezvous: “The mountains are glowing; the grapes are hanging in our mouths, and the evening wind is stroking the cliffs like a little teasing kitten…” (75). The choice of the words “stroking” and “teasing” and the image of grapes hanging in Ernst’s and Hansy’s mouths contribute to the scene’s thinly veiled sensuality.
Hansy disdains adults’ pretense of maturity and rejects Ernst’s dream of becoming a reverend, seeing such vocation as clinging to the false respectability and lofty morals of the adult world. Instead, Hansy envisions a hedonistic life of wealth. He sees a world of adults who never mature but only learn to hide their immaturity and baseness. Lacking any examples of a mature adult, and in the grip of adolescent desire, Hansy believes the best things in the world are money and sex: “I imagine half-closed eyelashes, half-open lips, and Turkish draperies” (74).
The play’s conclusion highlights the divine senselessness of the main characters’ fates. Hansy, the lonely masturbator, finds companionship in Ernst, while Wendla, the cheerful, good daughter, dies from a botched abortion. Melchior, guilty of rape, is saved from suicide by a deus ex machina in the form of a Masked Man, whereas Moritz, guilty of no such crime, received no such salvation. The varied fates of the protagonists challenge the Christian idea of divine justice, suggesting that fate is primarily the product of a web of human interaction and choice, not a divine system of reward and punishment. This implication contradicts Bleekhead’s earlier (and misattributed) platitude about providence—that “for those who love God all things work together for the best” (60).
Moritz and Melchior personify two distinct attitudes in a world without divine justice, without rhyme or reason. As the Masked Man underscores in his conversation with the two, Melchior takes responsibility for himself and his actions, whereas Moritz does not, blaming his death on his parents. Moritz’s “stench of decay” symbolizes the lifelessness of the nihilistic schadenfreude he embraces: “We know that everything people do and strive for is stupid, and we laugh at it” (78). The Masked Man chastises Moritz for fleeing life in all its hardship and joy to “the soothing awareness of having nothing” (83).
Scene 7 departs from the play’s customary realism into surrealism, dramatizing the contrast between Moritz’s and Melchior’s psyches. Like the headless queen with whom he identified, Moritz appears in the graveyard without his head. This symbolizes both the obvious—he’s a ghost—and the fact that shooting himself in the head fulfilled the prophecy he derived from the story of the Queen Without a Head. Unlike Moritz, Melchior refuses to believe that he lacks agency in his fate and takes responsibility for even his most reprehensible actions.
