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Spring Awakening: A Children’s Tragedy
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Symbols & Motifs
Fear of Shame
Shame, and fear of it, figures prominently in Spring Awakening. The motif of the fear of shame helps illustrate the impact of a sexually repressive culture. Shame is used to suppress sexual curiosity and desire, thereby enforcing the repressive attitude toward sex the adults pass on to the teenagers. In late 19th-century provincial Germany, the teenagers of the play all learn to be ashamed of their sexuality. Shame isn’t confined to the teenage world; it is a major reason the parents—e.g., Mrs. Bergmann—avoid the topic of sex and the Gabors send Melchior to the reformatory. The motif of the fear of shame reveals the lengths to which characters will go to avoid revealing something they’ve done that they fear will bring shame onto them.
The Headless Queen
Moritz’s story of the Queen Without a Head is an allegory that conveys the idea that a person needs a lover to be complete, and specifically that a woman needs a man to complete her. The story is rich with symbolism and meaning.
The queen is fantastically beautiful—“as beautiful as the sun, more beautiful than all the maidens in the land” (31)—and yet without a head she cannot eat or laugh or kiss or talk. The two-headed king completes her (and fixes himself) by giving her one of his heads, which were always fighting with each other. Moritz hates this story and can’t stop thinking about it: It expresses a painful fact of his own existence. He confesses to Melchior, “Whenever I see a pretty girl I see her without a head—and then suddenly it seems like I’m a headless queen myself…Sometime maybe someone will put another head on me” (31). In the character of the headless queen, Moritz sees another person fatally and fatefully flawed since birth. In his monologue before he dies by suicide, Moritz expresses this feeling of being fundamentally broken: “I must have been dropped on my head” (45). He wants “another head” because he feels imprisoned by his own broken head and believes it is impossible to escape by himself.
It is fitting, then, that Moritz kills himself by shooting himself in the head. Convinced that he cannot escape the torment of puberty and schoolwork that consumes his thoughts, Moritz resolves to eliminate the problem. In the final scene, he appears headless, symbolizing freedom from the source of his troubled thoughts. However, as the Masked Man exposes, having no head is not the solution Moritz thought it would be. Killing himself to escape the difficulty of life gives him “the soothing awareness of having nothing” (83), but this is a hollow consolation—Moritz is miserable as a ghost who can only scorn living people for their efforts.
Scylla and Charybdis
When a black cat crosses their path in Act I, Scene 2, Melchior tells Moritz that in thinking the cat has no meaning, he has escaped the Scylla of religious superstition only to fall into a Charybdis of nihilism. Scylla and Charybdis, two sea monsters in The Odyssey, live on either side of a narrow straight. In avoiding the many-headed Scylla, boats would be sucked into the whirlpool Charybdis. The expression “to be between Scylla and Charybdis” means to be between a rock and a hard place—to face a dilemma. Moritz sees the danger of religious superstition in that it gives a false sense of reality, so he flees in the opposite direction, only to land in the trap of pure rationalism. This all-or-nothing, immature way of thinking plays a role in Moritz’s tragic fate. If he fails in school, he’ll kill himself; if he succeeds, he won’t. He sees no middle ground, just as he sees no middle ground between seeing the cat as an omen and seeing it as meaningless.
Although Scylla and Charybdis are mentioned by name only once in Spring Awakening, this motif of two opposing but equally simplistic beliefs recurs throughout the play. For example, Hansy flees from the Scylla of sexual repression to the Charybdis of satyriasis, and Moritz rejects the Scylla of conformity for the Charybdis of nothingness. One of the “children’s tragedies” of the play is that none of the adults can alert the adolescents to the pitfalls of this developmentally normal yet reductive way of thinking, because the adults have never learned to think critically themselves.
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