The Sorrows of Young Werther: Exploring Beliefs and Emotions

To most people, analyzing The Sorrows of Young Werther is a simple task. Relying on the worldview of a pragmatic, technology-driven, and self-assured society, they look at Werther and see a young, romantic who, because of personal weakness, developed an obsession with a woman probably because he knew he could not have her. Gradually, as he realized the folly of his attraction, his fanciful emotions turned into a psychosis and a desire to hurt those who had rejected him through suicide. The perverse mental disease underlying the his wild yearnings is thus revealed and the wickedness of his actions thoroughly understood.

This description of Werthers obsession and his "perverse mental disease" is hardly any less sympathetic than Alberts when he calls Werthers passion "intoxication". Dismissing Werther comes easily for most people. They may call him a tragic figure or a spurned lover but their sympathy denies the motivations at the heart of his obsession. Many probably read the story and immediately put it away because they feel Werthers passion has no bearing on their lives. Their dismissal of Werther is conspicuous.

They seem to want to suppress him like some sort of strange rebel representing passion, romance, and all sorts of fanciful notions. They have no idea that Goethe, brilliantly, has forced them to suppress themselves. Werther is a rebel who becomes isolated from society because of his beliefs, and, as a result, must directly confront the loneliness from which most people hide. His failure to overcome his loneliness results in his obsession with Lotte and reveals the universal need for empathic love and mankinds denial of that need.

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Werther represents, on one level, the individual whose beliefs, emotions, and social position isolate him from society. To begin with, artists powers of perception and sensitivities to beauty and nature generally separate them from most people. Werthers sensibilities, including his reverence for nature and feelings about love, disrupt his ability to involve himself with the townspeople in the story. His disdain for the Princes superficial knowledge of art, for example, demonstrates his inability to tolerate anyone who does not share his artistic inspiration.

He empathizes with many of the characters in the story, including the mother at Walheim and the schizophrenic who fell in love with Lotte, but his relationship with them is hardly mutual. His involvement with the mother, for example, only provides him with a subject for contemplation while, in the case of the schizophrenic, the relationship only serves to underscore his own sense of dejection while arousing a sense of pity. No where in the story does Werther find an equal or a superior. Even Lotte, in the end, lacks the powers necessary to resolve his passion and longings. Other than his artistic abilities, psychological difficulties along Freudian lines seem to hinder Werthers ability to interact with others as well.

The language of the novel constantly associates Werthers love with motherly love. For example, he falls in love, presumably at first sight, with Lotte when he sees her carrying out the maternal duty of serving bread to her brothers and sisters. His written promise to Lotte that he will visit her mother in heaven after he commits suicide and his references to the innocence of children in his letters to Wilhelm are all signs of a socially disruptive Oedipal dilemma.. Class distinctions also isolate Werther.

Goethe appropriately places Werther in a position between the lower and higher classes, making it more difficult to find his place in the social hierarchy. His middle-class status first plagues him in town where the lower classes fear he is trying to condescend to their level. His forced exit from a gathering of social elites during his tenure with the ambassador especially increases his sense of isolation as well as his bitterness about the world.

Bitterness about the division of classes relates to the aspect of Werthers personality most responsible for his isolation: his social critique. Werther condemns every social class, from the "rabble" to the aristocracy. He clearly expresses his reasons for scorning the upper class in his description of some of the guests at Count C.s weekly social gathering. "Then in came in the most gracious Lad von S., with her spouse and in passing they gave me looks and twitched their nostrils in their usual, oh-so-aristocratic way: and, since I cannot abide this breed, I was about to take my leave" (81).

Werther cannot tolerate superficial pretense of any kind. He also demonstrates this bitterness towards pretence in his diatribe against "ill-humor" and its close connection to vanity. Werthers belief in passion, speaking from the heart, and complete sentimentality renders him extremely sensitive to the impressions of superiority created by others who must subconsciously nullify their deepest feelings in order to protect themselves. People are terrified of revealing their feelings because they feel others will take advantage of them. In turn, they jealously chastise others who have the courage to open their souls to the world, causing a vicious cycle of bitterness and denial.

As a believer in the importance of passions, Werther resents anyone who participates in this cycle. His argument with Albert over the alleged dangers suggests this view. Reason is Alberts means of evading the true expression of his feelings, even from his wife. People who are open with their feelings or passionate are "intoxicated". Aristocratic arrogance, an institutionalized form of pretense based on arbitrary titles and money, is clearly the most vile and pathetic form of emotional protection for Werther.

Aristocrats engage in pompous ceremony in an attempt to deny their feelings, but they also do so to display and preserve their power. The pretense, thus, has an added dimension of vanity and social injustice. The coarse language Werther uses to express his disdain for aristocratic arrogance, including calling Lady von S.s daughter a "scheming goose of a flat-chested, trimly corseted daughter" (81) is not arrogance but an expression of his utter frustration with their behavior.

The consequences of Werthers opinions are indirect but disastrous. His "deprecatory view" of the aristocracy and his "arrogance" plays at least some role in his removal from Count C.s social gathering, the removal from his job, and his return to Lotte (83) Ironically, the humiliation of the event ends the only beneficial relationships Werther has in the entire story with Count C. and Miss von B. and forces him to return to his much more destructive relationship with Lotte.

The other aspect of Werthers critique is his contempt for the monotonous drudgery of the lower and middle class lifestyle. According to him, the constant toil of men like the ambassador distracts them from the glories of nature and limits the opportunity for genius to flourish in society. "The human race is a monotonous affair! Most of the people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it" (29). Werthers critique of the lower classes, unlike the aristocracy, is based on pity rather than contempt.

The aristocrats have actively used their titles to erect walls of emotional defense as well as social power. The middle classes and lower classes, on the other hand, suffer from a passive acceptance of the expectations of constant labor placed on them by society. They work under delusions of happiness to achieve the sole purpose of prolonging their existence. Yet, nothing meaningful exists in their life to justify existing. Werthers life is dedicated to the pursuit of abstractions such as love and beauty. For him, they are the true meaning of life. Doing nothing other than contemplating on nature and reading Homer would be a far greater career than farming or working in a mill.

Of course, Werther notes that mortal men cannot eat love or drink beauty, but he believes that the wealthy exploit these natural limitations to maintain their disproportionate share of wealth. Their exploitation prevents man from ever pursuing meaningful abstractions and inhibits the work of geniuses as a result. "You ask why the torrent of genius so rarely pours forth? Because on either bank dwell the cool, respectable gentlemen, whose summerhousese, tulip beds and cabbage patches would all be washed away and who are therefore highly skilled in averting future dangers in good time, by damming and digging channels" (33).

Once again, Werthers fervent language is not an expression of arrogance towards the lower class but rather with his frustration in their inability to live freely. Werthers opinion of work and the activities of the lower classes, especially compared with the freedom of his own artistic pursuits, severely inhibits his ability to interact with people in his own and lower social classes. A critical element of any meaningful relationship is equality. Werther cannot possibly have fulfilling relationships with people he believes are slaves to societys dreary expectations of lifelong toil.

Only an individual who had removed those shackles and learned to focus on the genuine aesthetic and philosophical qualities of life could befriend Werther. With the exception of Miss von B., Count C., and, for a time, Lotte, he never finds such an equal and remains completely isolated as a result. Considering his artistic sensibilities, social status, psychological difficulties, and social critique, Werther is effectively isolated from society except, of course, for Lotte and her family.

Some comment on the accuracy of Werthers social critique is necessary. Hardly anyone would disagree with Werthers negative opinions of the aristocracy. The pompous extravagance of the wealthier classes has devastated societies for thousands of years even through today. Elites in American politics and culture still continue to assume an air of superiority over "the rabble". Speaking generally, the interpretation of aristocratic arrogance as a hollow emotional defense applies to many other forms of pretense, ill-humor being only one other example.

The ability of man to delude himself and others into believing he is above his emotions and weaknesses is truly remarkable. Americans are better at this technique than perhaps any culture in the history of the world. Popular culture, religious fervor, intellectual airs, cultural snobbery, and male assumptions of dominance (as well as female assumptions of subservience) are a few of the most useful means of escaping the vicissitudes of the soul. In fact, the pretenses mentioned above have developed into ideologies designed solely to help Americans suppress their feelings. The vanity necessary to maintain these ideologies is no less repulsive than aristocratic form observed by Werther.

Moreover, societies still rely on similar ideologies to encourage, as Werther notes, the less prosperous classes to toil constantly but never seek any meaningful satisfaction in their lives. The dominance of the Pupride in their careers as a the means of achieving the fabled American Dream. Yet, the task of maintaining the society-driving ideologies of lifelong toil has become more difficult than ever before. Advanced technology allows businessmen, whose grandparents were probably day laborers, to take their work wherever they go.

Understanding the world has grown increasingly complex in an age of regional trading blocs and uneasy, post-Cold War foreign relations. People are living longer than ever before, producing an enormous elder class completely dependent on the young for its survival. Employers require ever higher levels of education from prospective employees, even for jobs as simple as telemarketing and copy-machine repair. The greatest impact of the Information Age seems to be a tremendous increase in the amount of work required to understand the information.

The legacy of technology has been an increase in the ability of work to intrude in the lives of human beings. Simultaneously, entertainment and the news media have become increasingly "industrialized" to hypnotize the new masses of disgruntled, overworked men and women into believing their standard of living is higher than their parents was. Sitcoms are the "Model Ts" of a new millenium.

Indeed, both then entertainment and new industries have become all-powerful entities in todays society, faced with the enormous task of keeping an increasingly neurotic society away from the brink of revolution. They have become the "channel-diggers" for a society who must mesmerize society into not washing away the "summerhouses" and "cabbage patches" of the elites who depend on them. The only significant change in the drudgery and denial of middle-class life and has been the increasingly more sophisticated means of making the denial seem more like "freedom" or "happiness". Without doubt, Werthers criticism is still relevant in todays society.

No matter how accurate Werthers ideas about society are, they are undoubtedly a chief cause of his isolation. Of the few people he can positively interact with, he is forced to desert them all. As a result, he must endure the suffering of loneliness, and this loneliness becomes the cause of his sentimental passion. While loneliness typically produces a strong desire for companionship and heightens the ability to empathize others, a full explanation of the mechanism underlying this connection is beyond the purpose of this paper.

The answer probably lies in the mysterious relationship between suffering and wisdom, so common in Western literature. However, social and psychological forces along the lines of aristocratic arrogance and middle-class drudgery seem to play a role. These forces are expressed in the concept of group identity. Because they are isolated, lonely people are not involved with groups or institutions. These institutions are often partly responsible for the pretenses people rely on to conceal their emotions.

The loyalties and interests usually implanted in a person as a result of belonging in a particular group often become a part of that persons identity and, ultimately, a means for them to avoid realizing their true nature. For example, political beliefs are hardly a reliable test of a persons character, but members of different political parties often refuse to associate with one another. Obviously, people are biased towards their own beliefs, but they often use the support their group affiliation to attempt to prove their superiority over their fellow man.

In the absence of a real reason for distinguishing themselves, they will say "Im a Republican and youre not." or "Im a Christian and youre not." to diminish the other person. In other words, group identity, especially cultural and religious identity, provides an excellent weapon to use against people to enhance their self-image. This type of arrogance, like all other forms of pretense, is a defense mechanism ultimately designed to keep people from having to cope with their feelings and weaknesses, including feelings of passion about the world. To some extent, groups draw people away from their emotions and towards the interests of the group because they rarely benefit from their members self-examination.

An examination of oneself can lead to loyalty towards the self rather than the group and the self may ultimately grow independent enough to leave the group entirely. Werther, as an isolated individual, has no real group identity and, consequently, cannot use it to withdraw from his emotions. No group exists to entice him away from his pain and he must confront his own emotions and passion. Such a confrontation is usually beneficial to a persons character.

However, in the absence of any companionship or a place to belong, those inescapable passions begin to define his character. He is not a lawyer like Albert, an ambassador, or a prince but only a man. He is an artist, of course, but his art is a purely individual pursuit and he never defines himself as "the artist". His art is a part of his individual self, a manifestation of his isolation and passion. He does not paint because he feels he is a painter but because he yearns for an outlet for the passions he already feels. With no means of defending himself or alleviating the passion he feels, Werther finds himself in the irreconcilable dilemma of resolving his terrible loneliness alone.

Everyone must have some means of releasing the tensions caused by his passions. Directly experiencing rather than running away from passion is only the first step. Next, the person must share his passions with others such as his family or friends who are capable and willing of absorbing the tensions his passion has created. Love could even be defined as a relationship between two person in which one person has the sensitivity and the desire to carry the burden of the others suffering.

Yet, Werther has no one to love because, in his initial estimation, he has no equal in the entire world and knows no one who shares the same feelings. Empathic love, the kind Werther desperately needs, is rare because most people participate in either a vain defense or drudgery to avoid confronting their own feelings, much less the feelings of others. Most dejected people, in fact, must resort to paying a psychiatrist large sums of money for the sole purpose of listening to their plight. An empathic lover must have the ability to confront their feelings and have the maturity and strength to have previously dealt with those feelings. More likely, they found another outlet of empathic love, such as their family. If not, they cannot deal with the feelings of others. Selfish love, by definition, cannot exist.

Without love, a relationship with a person who cares enough about him to suffer with them, Werther is lost. He tries to repeatedly to find a means of resolving the mounting loneliness he cannot escape, including reading Homer, delighting in nature, writing to Wilhelm, and painting. None of these pursuits, unfortunately, can make him happy. Perhaps, one of the chief lessons of The Sorrows of Young Werther is that solace for pain and passion only exists in the bond of love with another person and not nature or art. For when Werther can no longer find a companion in nature, he invents one in Lotte.

Appropriately, his infatuation begins after he tells Wilhelm in a letter that he should "keep [my books] away from me. I do not want to be led on, simulated, inspired any more, for this heart of mine is turbulent enough of its own accord" (28). The tension of his passion is so great that fits of melancholy constantly threaten to plague him if he suffers any more inspiration. The invention of a lover seems to come at the precise moment when the tension of his emotions has become unbearable.

Clearly, Werther must invent the Lotte he loves because her personality, while vibrant, does not have the qualities of complete empathy required to return the tremendous power of Werthers love. She shares, to some extent, Alberts appreciation of reason and moderation since she choose to marry him. More importantly, she later says that she appreciates Werther as a kind of confidante for her emotions. Thus, Lotte finds solace in Werther rather than Werther finding solace in Lotte. She is, ironically, the opposite of what Werther really needs, an empathic lover. Perhaps, Lotte and Werther could have never loved one another because they were emotionally too similar. She needed an outlet for her feelings of loss concerning the death of her mother. He needed an outlet for his loneliness.

Only, Lotte has an advantage because she can find some degree of happiness in a man like Albert while Werther, with his individualist passion, cannot. She also has close ties to her family, but Werthers ties are apparently not close. Lotte is not the Sonia of Dostoevksys Crime and Punishment who can fulfill a spirit with the power of a tortured soul. Goethe cleverly chooses not to reveal too much of Lottes personality until after she has rejected Werther in order to prolong the possibility that she may actually love him and enhance the tragedy when the reader discovers she does not.

No matter how incompatible they are, Werther does fall in love with Lotte, and as long as he can continue to bask in his delusion, his melancholy no longer afflicts him. "And how well she know when to play [the song], often at time when I would gladly put a bullet through my head! The darkness and madness of my soul dispelled, and I breathe more freely again" (53). His happiness suggests that love, even when contrived, is the cure for excessive passion and loneliness.

The feelings of ecstasy he experiences while with her make even nature, once his only source of happiness, seem like a nightmare. Here, love not only exceeds but distorts other ways of alleviating suffering. Love makes nature and art seem dark and frightening. Inevitably, of course, Werthers delusion must ultimately fail. He ironically learns about Lottes marriage to Albert at the time when his individualist scorn of the pompousness of the aristocracy and the drudgery of middle class life is highest.

Among the aristocrats and the ambassador, he cannot possibly accept living without her and his infatuation regresses to an obsession as the mental exertion required to maintain the perfection and availability of his invention increases. Finally, the tension between the real Lotte and the Lotte Werther has invented becomes so great that he begins displaying the symptoms of psychosis. The psychosis comes, not from the effort required to maintain his invention, but the fear of having to suffer his isolation without her. His observing of the seemingly random suffering in the world, such as the death of Hans, reinforces his belief that suffering is the only constant without Lotte or love. Werther then begins to project his fantasy of marrying Lotte into the afterlife.

"Lotte, I said giving her my hand, my eyes filled with tears, we shall see each other again! We shall meet again, both here and in the hereafter!" His dream, in his mind, can only continue to exist if he dies and, consequently, he must die. His defense of the servant who killed the widow demonstrates the loss of his moral sense as a result of his delusion. Ironically, Werther seems to realize that he is the cause of his undoing near the end. That he never even thinks of blaming Lotte or Albert shows the tragic nobility of his obsession and his desire to escape pain rather than hurt others.

Lottes final rejection of him after he tries to kiss her, perhaps, causes Werther to finally realize, on some subconscious level, that he can never have Lotte. Without any other recourse other than to suffer alone, he concludes that he must commit suicide. The deliberacy with which he prepares for death could suggest the certainty of his belief that he can never have Lotte.. Yet, deep within him, he may realize that the real tragedy is not that he cannot have Lotte but that his isolation from society will forever prevent him from experiencing true love.

Werther, then, does not commit suicide because he wishes to hurt himself, Lotte, or Albert but because he is afraid to live while isolated from society. As an artist with strong opinions about the arrogance of aristocrats and the monotonous drudgery of lower class labor, Werther is completely incapable of forming meaningful relationships with people he did not regard as his equals. His resulting loneliness and lack of a group identity makes him passionate and emotional but leaves him without an outlet of empathic love for either his passion or his emotions.

Desperate, he subconsciously creates an ideal in Lotte who nevertheless can never love him, not only because she was engaged but because she had a family to love her. In the end, The Sorrows of Young Werther expresses the complexity and futility of the emotional battles all people face. Some people Some people conceal their emotions through defense mechanisms such as arrogance or try to flee through them through toil. Others, like Werther, recognize the folly of such behavior and tread onward despite the risk of inadvertently isolating themselves from society.

Neither group in this basic dichotomy can ever escape the need for empathic love. Even the most arrogant aristocrat probably experienced feelings of loneliness similar to Werthers. Titles, reason, work, or nature can never release man from the longings of his soul. Familiarity with those longings provides, at best, a frustrating sense of separation from the ordinary mass of men. Suffering through loneliness may lead to wisdom but even wisdom cannot ease pain.

None of these virtues or pretenses can ever remove man from a fate tied ultimately to his emotions. The only real defense anyone has is strength and hope until a real, empathic love can finally relieve the burden of their suffering. The necessity of empathic love is Goethes greatest lesson for man in The Sorrows of Young Werther. "Without doubt, the only thing that makes Mans life on earth essential and necessary is love" (64).

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