‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’: A Portrait of Destructive Passion
A review of ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; 1774.
In 1777, the Seyler Theatre Company, one of Europe’s most famous, performed Sturm und drang (‘storm and stress’), a play by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. Klinger wished to depict characters with the grandeur of Shakespeare’s, so rejecting the conventions of the period. His play gave its name to a short-lived, proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music whose hallmarks were the elevation of feeling and subjectivity. Being all about extremes of emotion, self-discipline was not one of the movement’s strengths, and it soon exhausted itself. Before it did, however, it inspired Johann von Goethe, then 24, to write (in the course of five-and-a-half weeks) the novel that would make him famous: The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Werther is an epistolary novel that, fittingly, explores untamed emotion and its destructive consequences. Written as a series of letters, it depicts the turbulent inner life of a young man consumed by love, despair and a kind of existential longing. Werther is a dreamer, and one whose thoughts, feelings and ideas cannot help but gush forth from his pen. He describes in his letters to a friend his unrequited love for Charlotte, or Lotte, who is already engaged. From the moment Wether meets her, be grows obsessed. His letters become more and more frantic and raw as he struggles to come to terms with the impossibility of their marriage.
Werther is a dreamer, and one whose thoughts, feelings and ideas cannot help but gush forth from his pen.
Goethe communicates much of Wether’s feeling indirectly. In his early letters, Werther paints the countryside in rich and lovely colours: ‘How happy I am that I am gone!’ he declares. ‘My dear friend, what a thing is the heart of man!’ Nature, for Werther, is a place of boundless joy and inspiration; it reflects his vitality and hope. But as Werther’s longing grows, and he begins to indulge the possibility that he might not get the woman he loves, the same scenes that once delighted him become dull and overcast, oppressive, isolating. Werther gaze soon turns inward, and his joie de vivre collapses into an almost adolescent self-absorption.
Goethe does not develop the object of Werther’s love. Lotte thus becomes a symbol of unattainable perfection. Goethe shows us, through Werther’s longing for Lotte, that our ideals are creations of our minds, not ideals in themselves. Werther lifts Lotte up to such a place that she seems to stands above mundane humanity, and in doing so gives away his fatal flaw: an inability to distinguish between dreams and reality. ‘I possess so much, but my love for her absorbs it all,’ he writes, in a spare, desperate entry in the second half of the novel. ‘I possess so much, but without her I have nothing.’ That Lotte is kind to Albert, her fiancé, worsens Werther’s misery, and puts the blame for his sorrow squarely on his own slim shoulders.
If Werther is the embodiment of Sturm and drang — intensely individual, emotional and artistic—then Albert, his foil, stands for something like the man of the Enlightenment which, with its emphasis on reason and order, its aim to iron out the creases of life, many had grown disillusioned. But Albert is depicted as admirable. Even Werther cannot help but esteem him. He is calm, rational and secure. The tension between Werther and Albert reflects a broader philosophical conflict between reason and passion, the Apollonian and Dionysian—a conflict explored by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, and to some degree by the polymath Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary. Goethe does not condemn Werther’s zeal: rather, he shows that feeling is both noble and ruinous, that which gives life meaning but can also destroy. Werther is not an unlikeable character. There is a great deal of beauty in his world, but his passion uproots him from reality.
The tension between Werther and Albert reflects a broader philosophical conflict between reason and passion.
We inhabit this mind. Goethe, by writing his novel in epistolary form, gives Werther’s thoughts and feelings a directness. We experience his ecstatic highs and crushing lows, the giddy roller-coaster ride that is his inner life. It is both intoxicating and exhausting. And we find that his endless self-analysis, for all its dreamy poetry and insight, reveals an emotional immaturity verging on narcissism, a choking self-obsession that can only end badly. Our tolerance for Werther’s enormous self-involvement should be stretched as the novel unfolds, but we find instead wondering how much suffering the soul can bear, questioning the cost of living with an open heart.
The ending of the novel is well known; but I will nonetheless refrain from discussing it. Instead I will just note that there is something very modern in The Sorrows of Young Werther, in its concern with subjectivity, idealisation, isolation. I will avoid the hackneyed term ‘cautionary tale’, but here we find a very profound examination of unchecked passion, and how, regardless of its beauty—for passion is often beautiful—can destroy both lover and the loved. Goethe’s achievement, and why he became a literary celebrity after publishing Werther, is presenting his subject as a person, that is, one with strengths and weaknesses which as we so often see are two sides of the very same coin. It is a sympathetic study of the human condition.
