Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Werther is a young bureaucrat in a town near Wetzlar who falls in love with a woman already engaged to another man. He befriends the couple and endures greater and greater pain and suffering from being unable to express his desires. After several months (and the couple's marriage), Werther borrows a set of dueling pistols from the husband and shoots himself. The novel is epistolary in form, told entirely through letters written by Werther to an unnamed friend except for the details of the suicide, which are supplied in a notice written by the fictitious editor of the letter collection.

Although Goethe soon rejected the Sturm und Drang technique in favor of his new approach, known as Weimar classicism, and grew to dislike the celebrity brought him by what he considered a youthful experiment, he said that every young man ought have the chance of feeling that The Sorrows of Young Werther was written about him, meaning that the book peculiarly expresses the excessive emotional intensity felt by the young. In fact, Werther's character is highly narcissistic because he is undeveloped and inexperienced. Werther is unable to act rationally because he is overwhelmed by feelings that, though they are common, he himself has never felt. Romanticism, partly in its emphasis on feeling over reason, is liable to be reduced to narcissism.

For instance, at the beginning of the novel, before Werther has fallen love, he imagines that he feels more deeply than others do (as though he had access to others' feelings) and that this gives him a superiority in artistic expression and understanding: “I am alone, and feel the charm of existence . . . which was created for the bliss of souls like mine . . . and . . . I feel that I never was a greater artist than now.” When he merely lies down on the grass, his observational powers outdo all of the acumen of biological science: “A thousand unknown plants are noticed by me.” Although sentiments such as these animated the post-Romantic counter-culture throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, one cannot help but think that Goethe, who knew that art and learning come from hard work and not feeling, took such fancies as satire. At the same time, The Sorrows of Young Werther valorizes the new concept of romantic marriage, the idea that young people should arrange their own marriages based on emotional attachment instead of the relationships between families and other economic concerns that had traditionally governed marriage matches.

The novel delights in various expressions of the irrational as a Romantic reaction to the reason of the Enlightenment. Throughout the text, Goethe hints at signs and portents from a more mysterious world lying just behind the narrative, creating an atmosphere of magic and wonder of the kind that is often equated with the notion of the “Romantic” in the popular imagination. These include, for instance, Melusina, a popular character from medieval folklore who, as a kind of mermaid, took on human form to marry a prince on the agreement that he would not look into her secrets; of course, he does, bringing a terrible punishment down on both of them. Ossian was the supposed author of a medieval epic poem cycle published for the first time in the mid-eighteenth century, a work that became spectacularly popular because it seemed to offer access to an alternative past that was medieval and northern in distinction to the standard classical culture of contemporary education that praised the epics of Homer (though it was soon discovered to be a modern forgery). The Bonona (or Bologna) stone was an example of paradoxography—something undeniably true but that should not be. It is a kind of crystal found in northern Italy that glows by its own light, which ought to have been impossible according to the physical science of the eighteenth century and therefore seemed to court alchemical or magical explanation. (In fact, the crystals glow because they are radioactive.)