Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of the Young Werter) by Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe (1749-1832) was originally published anonymously in Leipzig in 1774. Almost
instantly it became a best seller, catapulting its young and unknown author into fame
and a major literary career that would span more than half a century. By the end of
the decade the novel had been translated into the other European languages, attaining
a pan-European success that continued well into the nineteenth century: as late as
1892 it afforded Jules Massenet one of his greatest musical triumphs at the Paris
Opera.
The first French translation was published in 1777 as the work of C. Aubry, a pseudonym
for Friedrich Wilhelm Karl, Graf von Schmettau (1742-1806), and it was frequently
reprinted in that language. The first English version, by Daniel Malthus, was published
in 1779 as The Sorrows of Werter, using the French text, rather than Goethe's original,
as its base.
The novel coincided with what has come to be known as the Age of Sensibility, whose
flames it helped to fan. It is an epistolary novel, told in Werther's voice and from
his perspective, and there is little in the way of plot. Charlotte, the oldest of
six children, is left an orphan by the sudden death of her mother, and she marries
the sensible, if somewhat plodding, Albert as a means of holding the family together.
Onto the scene comes the young student Werther who is befriended by the couple but
then falls passionately in love with Lotte. His infatuation progressively deepens
to a point of desperation in which he commits suicide. The novel was said to be responsible
for making suicide fashionable among the young men of Europe.
What the Creature responds to are less the episodes of the plot or even the dynamics
of infatuation than the sense of moral emptiness that Werther finds in the world and
from which he turns for refuge to the somewhat maternal Lotte. Precociously intellectual
with a late-adolescent intensity, Werther too seeks to understand his identity and
to discover his place in a middle-class milieu that cares for little that is not prudent
and sensible, the world represented by Albert. In reference to the particular dynamics
of Mary Shelley's novel, this milieu would appear very much on the order of the temperate
Swiss world of Alphonse Frankenstein and Henry Clerval's father. Thus, curiously enough,
the novel establishes a link to Goethe's fiction both through the intense self-questioning
and bleak alienation of the Creature as well as the obsessive behavior of his creator
Victor Frankenstein, who also turns away from the commonplace Geneva expectations
in which he was raised to fathom a new mode of being.