Werther is the protagonist of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774. A sensitive, artistically inclined young man, Werther falls deeply and hopelessly in love with Lotte, a woman already engaged, and later married, to another man, Albert, and the novel, told through Werther's own letters to a friend, traces his growing emotional despair as he is unable to either win Lotte or free himself from his feelings for her. Unable to reconcile his intense inner emotional life with the constraints of the society and conventional relationships around him, Werther ultimately takes his own life, a conclusion that shocked and captivated readers across Europe on the novel's publication. The book's emotional intensity and the wave of reported imitative suicides it inspired among some readers, sometimes called the Werther effect, made it one of the most controversial and influential works of its era, and it helped define the Sturm und Drang movement and the broader emotional sensibility of early European Romanticism.
Facts
Narrative RoleTitular character of Goethe's 1774 epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, whose fictionalized despair over an unattainable love was drawn from the real suicide of Goethe's acquaintance Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem. 1 Defining TraitConsumed by an unrequited, all-encompassing passion that Goethe modeled on his own unrequited loves, ending in the despair that drives Werther to suicide. 1 Narrative role (class) FAQs
Did The Sorrows of Young Werther really cause a wave of copycat suicides?
Contemporary reports claimed it did, and the term Werther effect is still used today for copycat suicide, though historians debate how large the real number was.
After Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, contemporary reports described young readers imitating Werther's dress and even his suicide by pistol, leading some German towns to ban the book. The sociologist David Phillips coined the term Werther effect in 1974 for the observed rise in suicides following widely publicized suicide, whether real or fictional, a term suicide researchers still use, though modern historians regard the eighteenth-century reports themselves as exaggerated and difficult to verify.
Connections
Sources
1. The Sorrows of Young Werther (Wikipedia)
Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedia)Lead section, paragraph 3Quote, Lead section, paragraph 3
who kills himself in despair after he falls in love with a woman engaged to another man.
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