The Ignorance of Adolescence: a Behavioral Influence

The Ignorance of Adolescence: A Behavioral Influence

Adolescence is a time when children begin to experience heightened emotions and are unable to suppress them. These waves of new feelings tackle the confused and curious minds of the young, building up tension in their bodies and minds. Eventually, this tension comes out in various acts of rage, rebellion, and depression, but something must be an influence to these acts. Elsa Bernstein’s Twilight and Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening showcase these various emotions and address the influencers of these actions as the adults in the plays. Parents during the late 1800s seemed to have superior roles in influencing the children of that time. Whether children were influenced to behave or rebel, the actions of the elders in these plays caused for great emotional changes in each child character. Along with loneliness and depression, extreme feelings of love and lust, as well as pressure to succeed, are deeply felt by the young. Each adult figure influences a child character in some way. This influence is responsible for the child’s reaction to a specific situation. When the adults in both plays do not recognize the child’s current state of emotion, the children’s fate ends much more extreme, than if the adults had acknowledged the struggling feelings of the young.
Adolescence brings out multiple emotions which cause children to become vulnerable to change and higher influences. In Twilight, of Adolescenceedgment xtreme, than if the adults acknowledged the struggling feelings of the young. ld 'er children were influen Isolde displays her most dramatic feelings of loneliness and depression in act three. At this point, Ritter and Sabine have been spending much time together, rather than with Isolde who is used to constant admiration from her father. While on page 50 Isolde asks her father if he loves her, he admits to loving her more than anything else, more than Grandmamma. This notion of love dwindles away and causes Isolde to feel lonely, her only confidant becoming Carl, an adolescent as well. Isolde’s depression is prominent when she exclaims, “Before this, he wouldn’t have refused me – it’s all her fault, hers! Without her, he’d never ever have dared. (Suddenly jumps up with a wild outcry.) What do I care about the hat! But I want my papa back, my papa! Carl, if he doesn’t love me anymore, if he loves her now, the clever one – then I’ll jump out of the window, so they find me dead on the ground” (Bernstein 92). Not only does the ignorance of her father hurt her, but because he now visibly loves another female, it breaks Isolde’s heart, therefore leaving her to feel alone and depressed. Her cry for death escalates her pain to the point where the reader may ask: if the father did not lose himself in love, acknowledged his daughter a little more, would Isolde’s final fate of blindness still have occurred?
Melchior from Spring Awakening deals with his variation of loneliness due to a decision made from his parents. By receiving a note from Wendla’s mother, Mr. and Mrs. Gabor find out that Melchior wanted to show Wendla his remorse for sinning against her, and that he takes responsibility for his actions on her (Wedekind 66). Realizing that their son has committed a lustful sin, they agree to send him away to a reformatory. At this point, Melchior is mourning the death of his best friend Moritz, and now in a reformatory, he is lonely and upset how Wendla, “hates me- she hates me because I stole her freedom. No matter what I do, it’s still rape” (Wedekind 69). Since Mr. and Mrs. Gabor were judgmental about their son’s act, they did not consider the emotional baggage that Melchior was carrying around. This ignorance to their sons built up guilt and sadness causes Melchior to become depressed and eventually rebel against the reformatory rules and run away.
One of the most difficult emotions that parents in these plays struggled to acknowledge were the feelings of love and lust, which clouded the minds of many children within each story. Twilight showcases Carl with frustrating feelings of love towards Isolde, and when dismissed by Isolde’s father, he pours his feelings out to Ritter in attempt to convince him that love will keep Isolde happy. In Carl’s effort to prove his love for Isolde to Ritter, they argue: RITTER (continues). You can prove it by swallowing your unhappy love as quickly as possible. I cannot give her to you. Don’t you see that for yourself? It would be an irresponsibility— also toward you. CARL. Because you don’t know the first thing about my heart, because you don’t know what a deep, eternal feeling— RITTER (moodily). Eternal feeling— stuff and nonsense
CARL. I will take better care of Isolde than you, even if we’ll be poor.
RITTER: You’ll take care of her on pub grub?
CARL: Because I will love her more. You only love her on the side, as long as it doesn’t affect your other interests. You don’t know anything about sacrifice, about renunciation, you don’t have any ideals- (Bernstein 103).
This quarrel between Ritter and Carl not only affects Carl’s future, but also indirectly changes Isolde’s. If Ritter embraced the young love, the adolescents would most likely end up together and Isolde would become a much happier character, for feeling loved is what keeps her more positive than not. Since this was not the case and Ritter did not allow this love to occur, Carl went away to school, leaving Isolde to be unloved, causing her breakdown at the end of act four. This breakdown ultimately led to her blindness, which in turn allowed Ritter to see how his ignorance and selfishness caused his daughters downfall. Similarly in Spring Awakening, most of the characters undergo feelings of love, usually overthrown by sexual confusion and suppression. Rather than acknowledging love as Carl did in Twilight, Wendla from Spring Awakening is an example of how confusion of love led to her downfall. In scene two, Mrs. Bergmann has a prime opportunity to help ease her daughter’s confusion on sex and love, yet completely fails to address it properly. Wendla is told by her mother that, “In order to have a child – you have to – love – the man – you’re married to – love him, I tell you – in a way that you can only love a husband” (Wedekind 38). With this vague definition of love, and completely not addressing sexual reproduction, Wendla believed that only loving someone with your heart will make a child. This false information leads to her downfall by being unaware that Melchior, who performs this unknown act which is sex, is what really makes a baby. If Wendla was only told the truth about love and sex, her fate of death by an unnecessary abortion would not have happened. Another largely ignored issue during adolescence is the abundance of stress, specifically the pressure to succeed. Whether it is succeeding in a job, school, or just going somewhere larger in life, children are pressured by adults to keep up with the status quo. Bernstein hints at Isolde’s struggle to succeed in act five of Twilight, where she attempts to walk by herself, blind, and her father reluctantly abides, only because he is too sad and depressed. While walking to her bedroom, Isolde walks against the door and her father tries to convince her she will hurt herself and fall (Bernstein 129). Isolde tells her father to go away to let her practice and learn to walk on her own without him bothering her. In this case, although Ritter does allow his daughter to learn on her own, his attitude towards the situation is just as bad as when he is ignorant to her other feelings. Ritter should be positively motivating his daughter to live her life, rather than mourning her disability due to his ignorance of her needs in the past. He doubts her ability to learn, while she exclaims to him, “You’ll see, I can still learn a lot of things. If you wanted to read to me sometimes from clever books…” while Ritter simply replies, “No, no. Can’t strain your poor head” (Bernstein 136-137). Ritter’s doubt in Isolde’s success can only negatively affect her and cause her frustration, although the play ends before any of that can be shown. It does allow the audience to view a poor way to act towards the disabled, especially disabled children, for they are capable of much more than what people, specifically adults, assume. Wedekind addresses the stress for success motive in a more direct way than Bernstein. Spring Awakening shows Moritz from the very beginning of the play as a character who struggles in his studies, “There’s nothing you can think about without homework getting in the way” (Wedekind 9). Stating this, the audience also can understand that the general confusion of adolescent puberty is what is distracting Moritz, making his studies that much more difficult. While the professors disregard their students’ personal matters as reasons for unsuccessful studies, Moritz risks his education by sneaking into his teacher’s office to check his midterm grades. This rebellious act is noted by his classmates who all know of Moritz’s struggle. Even after finding out he passed his grades, Moritz continues to feel the academic pressures and explains to his friends, “— From now on, I’m going to grind like hell! – I can say it now – you can take it or leave it – nothing matters now – I – I know how true it is: if I hadn’t passed, I would have shot myself” (Wedekind 22). This statement alone shows how the need to succeed is such a prominent thought in an adolescent’s mind. Moritz would go to the extreme of ending his own life if he became a failure. This alludes to his fate at the end where he succumbs to the pressure and does in fact shoot himself.
While parental pressures are usually a large motive of stress for success, Moritz did have one adult ally: Mrs. Gabor. Looking at both plays, she is the only adult character who attempts to see the adolescent’s struggle and support them in their feelings of confusion and stress. She states in her letter to Moritz, “No matter how undeserved one’s misfortunes may be, one should never, ever allow oneself to be driven to choose underhanded methods” (43). By noting her knowledge of his suicidal remark and to in fact remain focused, Mrs. Gabor allowed for Moritz to contemplate his fate for a longer amount of time. The only reason why the adult reassurance was unsuccessful in the end was because there was no further help given to Moritz. If his suicidal tendencies were further watched by Mrs. Gabor, her attempt to help most likely would have been more successful.
While Wedekind and Bernstein both address adolescent stressors during the late 1800s, they also note how adults are the influencers behind the bold reactions of the children in their plays. Although depression, love and sexual confusion, along with stress for success were all separate points for being adolescent themes, they all link together in causing daily emotional overloads for these young people. While Isolde in Twilight began as a character filled with love for her father and Carl, she quickly turned depressed when the love went away, eventually causing her blindness to be an overbearing stress to prove she can still be successful in life. Moritz from Spring Awakening undergoes a constant battle in balancing his academic success with this sexual frustration and confusion. He ends up in a severe depression which finally leads to his suicide. Each point is linked to each other in their own distinct pattern, causing the adolescents to endure unique struggle cycles. With the ignorance the adults have for the young children’s emotions, each character, young and old, meet a fate which could have become positive due to acknowledgement of adolescence.

Works Cited
Bernstein, Elsa. Twilight: A Drama in Five Acts. Trans. Susanne Hord. New York: The Modern
Language Association of America, 2003. Print.
Wedekind, Frank. Spring Awakening. Trans. Jonathan Franzen. New York: Faber and Faber,
2007. Print.

Cited: Bernstein, Elsa. Twilight: A Drama in Five Acts. Trans. Susanne Hord. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003. Print. Wedekind, Frank. Spring Awakening. Trans. Jonathan Franzen. New York: Faber and Faber, 2007. Print.