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.

The Creature turns from Goethe's novel of isolated sensibility, where he sees his
own reflection (and we to some extent see Victor's) to contemplate the public and
civic models of Plutarch's biographical accounts, engaging a world of social interaction
and nation-building of which he has no experience whatsoever. Thus the accounts draw
him forth from his own isolation to imagine a larger cultural sphere of action in
which he might participate.

That the Creature proposes to make a virtue out of necessity and embrace his alienation
as a mode of existence indicates what two years of experience have cost him. The pathos
of this declaration does not call attention to itself, but is all the more affecting.

Elizabeth's faith that a retreat from the world would allow the two of them a relief
from the buffeting of experience is understandable, if sadly ill-placed. The ensuing
chapters seem deliberately designed to test this hope both in their exemplary tale
of a collective retreat (involving not just the DeLacey's and Safie, but the Creature
as well) and in the very fact that, themselves taking place in an almost inaccessible
retreat, they present Victor Frankenstein with a moral crisis of a kind he has never
known and is unprepared for.

These might be said to be the root questions of all philosophy. They are in a substantial
way the end toward which the progressive education of the Creature has been tending.
That they are unanswerable has larger implications than for just him. They contribute
to the exploratory tonalities of a novel that resists easy answers and unambiguous
truths.

Elizabeth's comparative innocence does not allow her the larger perspective held by
the reader, who might want to apply the force of these words to the accruing series
of contrasts between herself and Victor being offered by this paragraph. In his lack
of candor, justice, and sympathy, Victor appears specifically to negate the virtues
of Elizabeth, who stands here as something of an emblem for truth itself.

A lengthy pattern of self-analysis and attendant self-alienation is implicit in this
passage. The Creature's divorce from himself is linked to the imagery of doubling
throughout the novel.

That the Creature has as yet no notion of how words that define feelings can be applied
suggests that the next stage of his education must be metaphysical, involving an understanding
of the self and an exploration of self-consciousness. For him this will necessarily
entail what Byron called "Consciousness awaking to her woes" (Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
1.941: st. 92).

"Wretch" is the first term Victor applies to his Creature (I:4:3), as well as his
appellation for him at his reappearance in this chapter. It is apt that the creature
thus picks up this resonant word and by shifting its form alters its meaning. For
her debut as a novelist Mary Shelley adopts a daring and difficult but brilliantly
successful strategy, keeping the Creature out of sight for most of Volume I while
Victor heaps terms of abuse on his felt presence and renders him for the reader the
monster he is wont to call him. The urbane calm of the Creature's opening statement,
"I expected this reception," is a startling reminder of just how much Victor, in his
narration of his story, has skewed the perspective on its events. In effect, the Creature
takes the opportunity of his finally being heard to rename, to reconceptualize, himself.
And the reader is left hanging in doubt—perhaps, even distrust—about rendering a verdict
from having listened only to one side of the case.

Alphonse Frankenstein has so chastized Victor over his slippery sense of his family
obligations that he ought to experience some confusion to hear his father's words
echoed from the mouth of his Creature. In a world about to be turned upside-down,
it would not be surprising if Victor's putative son were not in some odd sense to
assume the role of his father.