Review: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Since I last wrote, I've received countless rejections and a couple acceptances. I've performed in my first poetry slam competition, and been recruited as a featured poet for a festival in Oxford. I'll post next week about that, but just know the swings and roundabouts are giving me motion sickness and I guess that's a good thing.

Why Werther? Why now? Why review it at all when it's been done to death?

For some context: I was moaning to some friends about my novel, how difficult it is to convince literary agents to take a chance on it (and me, by extension). I had just received some feedback from a published author friend that essentially urged me to restructure the whole thing because, understandably, not many people write letters anymore, and I was spiralling over whether another big restructure would improve my chances at all. One friend asked me to give her the elevator pitch, after which she thought for a moment, then said I had to read Werther. There was literally a copy of it in the house, which she handed to me with a few caveats: it's way better in German, she initially found the character of Werther annoying, etc. But her main point was that my novel sounded very similar to Werther, and I might get some use out of reading how an author like Goethe uses epistolary, cerebral writing to rope the reader in.

I can now say with absolute certainty that Werther does much more than that. For anyone who hasn't read it, The Sorrows of Young Werther is a semi-autobiographical story about a young man, Werther, who spends his summer at a bucolic German estate, where he develops a limerence for Charlotte (Lotte). Their friendship is fierce, and they spend endless afternoons talking about philosophy, human nature, music, and death. However, Lotte is engaged to a stoic, resolute man whom she eventually marries. Despite his attempts to distance himself from Lotte, Werther eventually succumbs to despair.

The parallels to Goethe's own experience are well-accounted for, so I won't delve into them much here. Michael Hulse's introduction to the Penguin edition I read was quite thorough, but there are plenty of summaries out there. This was the first proper confessional novel that took Western Europe by storm, and set the scene for Romantic movement.

Technically speaking, it uses letters, diary entries, undated fragments of lunacy and editors' notes to convey an artistic individual at odds with a society fixated on status, and his mental unravelling in the face of unrequited desire. But to call it a love story isn't accurate, nor is it some discarded tale about rich people problems leading to melodramatic ends. It's a daring confession of the depths of human affection, and a challenge to propriety: where do the brazen, romantic, impulsive souls belong?

When discussing the novel with my friend, she believed that Lotte leads Werther on and plays a significant role in his downfall. I contest that; I think Lotte's love for Werther sits somewhere between platonic and romantic, but she cannot explore the latter because of her commitment to Albert. Seeing Werther every day, letting him meet her family and play with her younger siblings, demonstrates trust and kindred friendship. However, when Werther describes certain gestures that, to him, evince some level of romantic affection (a glance, holding his hand, playing music or dancing with him), it's important to remember this is his account. We never hear directly from Lotte. When reading about obsessed or sexually frustrated young men like Werther, we must remember his infatuation or misinterpretation of her motives is beyond her control. While Lotte sets her boundaries a bit too late—when Werther is completely tortured by his desire and loves the idea of Lotte rather than the actual woman—she may not have known how much he loved her until that point. We as the reader know this has been brewing for a while, but maybe his behavior only becomes evidently disturbed when it's too late. In sum, I'm a Lotte apologist.

There's also some excellent class commentary just over halfway through. When Werther departs from Lotte and Albert's company, as a way to remove himself from disturbing their future together, he takes up a job as an attaché to the ambassador. Soon, he's ranting about what we might call the petty bourgeois: miserable, well-off people who have no purpose beyond the trappings of their wealth and class status, and no will to seek further. So they start petty squabbles and in-fighting to differentiate themselves, to grasp some ounce of power above their fellow man. Werther's observations demonstrate a disregard for class status, and frustration with his own societal position. I also read it as foreshadowing: he sees what his future could be, the immutability of his social status, and how his life in the countryside really was a short-lived fantasy. He cannot conceptualise a version of himself that would be happy in this "real" world.

Like all works of art, it's not perfect. Werther's fetishisation of the poor, often describing them as misguided, tragic or simple folk and only seeing a bit of himself in them once he's fallen off the deep end can be grating. Likewise his lyrical romanticism of the countryside is absolutely beautiful but definitely of its time; it reminds me of Rousseau's exultation of savage man vs. civil man, pining for an existence that cannot be reclaimed. On that latter point, I really can't blame him; the German countryside is something to behold and I'm definitely guilty of lauding the natural world and wishing I could forsake modernity. But I worry that his romanticism undermines him in the eyes of some readers, who might just write him off as a histrionic, lovesick youth who didn't get his way.

As a counterpoint, Goethe does attempt to prevent this interpretation with a striking debate between Werther and Albert—the romantic vs. the stoic—about the morality of suicide and mental illness. Werther, speaking from the heart, tries to advocate for empathy for the suicidal and drive at why people become unwell—a question we still struggle to ask when reading news about criminals or suicides. Albert, speaking in theory and mores, doesn't share this view and considers suicide a criminal or insane act.

I don't want to toot my own horn too much, but I have written an epistolary novel about a lonely, unwell young man who idolises someone to his own detriment and resents class rank to some extent. Whatever blather I've written may never rest on a bookshelf, and maybe only my closest friends and family will read it (though God help my family if they ever do); the fact that I've written it means that there is still a will to acknowledge those society leaves behind, and the destructive impacts of isolation. And these stories need to be published in equal, if not greater, volume than true crime and nostalgia-baiting beachside reads. Werther even states outright that he does not want to be forgotten—a common sentiment among the lonely and outcast, and admits:

When I posted this picture in the hazy July sun, a pal sent me a message describing it as a "sad boi classic". I can't help feeling some cheeky desire to catch that wave Goethe rode so many centuries ago with my own stupid brand of confessional writing (a title I seem to be settling into in both prose and poetry). Surely we all have a tragic love story, a missed chance, a heartbreak that nearly killed us. I want my book to drag that experience out into the open, leave the reader as prone and uncertain as Werther does. I want to publish a story for the people who were never ours.