The Sorrows of Young Werther | Part 1

 “I have so much in me, and the feeling for her absorbs it all; I have so much, and without her it all comes to nothing.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther

    If ever there was a single book that captured all the difficulties of young love—the sorrow, the joy, the utter despair—it is this one. In 1774, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe penned The Sorrows of Young Werther, an epistolary novel that tells of the devastating unrequited love of Werther, a young aristocrat who falls deeply and hopelessly in love with Lotte, a girl promised to another man. 

    This is the first time I’ve read this book—which is really a novella—and I have found it by turns both rapturous and yet ever sinking, down to the “depths of despair” (as Anne Shirley would say) as Werther realises more and more how hopeless his situation is. This post is the first in a series of two that I’ll be doing on this book. My intent is to go through and analyse the plot, the characters, and their motives—my intent, mind you. What might actually happen is me railing about Werther’s infatuation and Lotte’s edging him on and really how hopeless the whole affair is. But first, let’s get into a bit of context. 

    Werther was actually a sort of fictionalised autobiography of Goethe himself. Yes, that’s right—it was the author’s own lovesickness that prompted him to write this book. He was infatuated with Charlotte Buff (fine job he did disguising her name!), a sweet-tempered young woman engaged to marry a man eleven years her senior. When they eventually did marry, Goethe could stand it no longer and left. He wrote Werther in four weeks and became an overnight sensation. People loved his tale of tragic love doomed to fail! But they had no idea that it was based on his own life. Yet perhaps that was what made it—and still makes it—so appealing. 

The book may be appealing, but this picture certainly is not!

    More will come next week, with my thoughts on the (horrific!) ending and what all this romanticism really means in the context of Christianity. 

What are your thoughts on Werther’s absurd obsession? What should he do about it?

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Namarië,

Astrya