Goethe's Werther and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

Roswitha Burwick

The Wordsworth Circle, 24:1 (1993), 47-52

Critics have shown that for Mary Shelley birth and writing were interconnected, that the concept of "hideous progeny" not only applied to her novel but to herself, because her birth had cost her mother's life. The search for her own origin necessarily led her to the writings of her parents, especially her mother's, where she could trace her heritage and define her self (Johnson 61-65), adopting her mother's name when she married Shelley. While the treatises A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman displayed her mother's intellectual qualities and powers of reason, the Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark attested to her emotional intensity and keen perception combined with a good sense of judgment (Myers 169f.). Although the Letters are autobiographical testimonies, they read like an epistolary narrative in which the heroine roams the landscape as a solitary wanderer suffering from the pangs of unrequited love. However, in spite of all the despair and yearning for death, Wollstonecraft establishes herself as an independent, active woman and author whose apparent self-entered nature is belied by her sincere sympathy for the unfortunate and her distress about the indignities and sufferings of women in general (Todd 14).

To give to the ever-censorious public some account of Wollstonecraft's life who as a person of merit was also "subject of thoughtless calumny, or malignant misrepresentation" (Memoirs 1 ) Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of The Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798, and in two volumes the Posthumous Works of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which contained the fragment The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria, Lessons for Children as well as her letters, especially those to her lover, the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. He stressed that it was his foremost concern to show that Wollstonecraft was not the "sturdy, muscular, raw-boned virago" but a "woman, lovely in her person, and, in the best and most engaging sense, feminine in her manners" (Memoirs 83). Godwin's Memoirs and her letter exposed her infatuation with Fuseli, her love affairs with Imlay and Godwin, the illegitimacy of her daughter Fanny, and exemplified that "female tendency" to create and be captured by an imaginary figure (Todd 10). In other words, they bared her "sensibility" as that vulnerable other Self which her philosophical works were able to mask.

In contrast to the assertion of the right of women to reason, and the polemics in support of independence and self-reliance in Vindication, her infatuation with Fuseli revealed the intensity of her emotional needs as well as her disposition towards "suffering":

I am a mere animal, and instinctive emotions too often silence the suggestions of reason <. . .> I am a strange {48} compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind -- my wayward heart creates its own misery -- Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child -- long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it (Posthum. Works IV, Letter XI)².

The letters must have been bitter reading for young Mary: they sound like a typical eighteenth-century sentimental narrative about an abandoned unwed mother who clings in tearful outpourings to her unfaithful lover, refuses to recognize that the man she idolizes is undeserving of her love, and, after repeated rejections, attempts twice to commit suicide. They reveal the "sorrows" of a woman overcome by her passions and sensibility who is desperately struggling to make sense of her inner torment caused by the imbalance of reason and heart.

I am strangely deficient in sagacity. -- Uniting myself to you, your tenderness seemed to make me amends for all my former misfortunes. -- On this tenderness and affection with what confidence did I rest! -- but I leaned on a spear, that has pierced me to the heart. -- You have thrown off a faithful friend to pursue the caprices of the moment. -- We certainly are differently organized; for even now, when conviction has been stamped on my soul by sorrow, I can scarcely believe it possible (Posthum. Works, II, Letter LXVII).

The publication of the Posthumous Works and the Memoirs were not only detrimental to Godwin's own literary career but also to Wollstonecraft's reputation. For five years, reviewers attacked the works calling Wollstonecraft a "philosophical wanton" and a monster, her Vindication of the Rights of Woman a "scripture, archly fram'd for propagating w[hore]s" (Wardle, Biography 316-322). Godwin's prefaces to the Memoirs and the Posthumous Works not only indicate that the books were meant to be a loving husband's attempt to change his wife's public image, the themes of unrequited love, suffering, suicide and repeated allusions to Goethe's Werther also suggest that he was fictionalizing her into the figure of a "female Werter." He praises Wollstonecraft's letters as "the finest examples of the language of sentiment and passion ever presented to the world."

They bear a striking resemblance of Werter, though the incidents to which they relate are of a different cast. Probably the readers to whom Werter is incapable of affording pleasure, will receive no delight from the present publication. The editor apprehends that, in the judgment of those best qualified to decide upon the comparison, these Letters will be admitted to have the superiority over the fiction of Goethe. They are the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion it essays to describe. (Posthum. Works III, Preface)

Goethe's Werther was not only valued by Mary Shelley's parents, she and Percy Bysshe read it in 1815 after their elopement and it was one of the books the creature found in the portmanteau. A consultation of her reading lists of 1815/16 soon makes the personal as well as literary interconnections between the "male" and "female" Werther and Mary Shelley evident. Mary Shelley's own status as an unwed mother living with her lover and her half-sister in a troublesome menage à trois while Shelley's first wife was expecting their second child must have conjured associations with the fate of her mother.³ Posthumous Writings and Sorrows of Werter, the "tales" of the "male" and "female" Werther, are consecutive entries in the journal and provide a pattern for the creature's response to his reading. Ketterer has observed that Mary Shelley's first novel Frankenstein was composed of many literary parts similar to the creature's body assembled from human pieces. The analogy can be expanded: the creature is rejected because of its {49} horrid appearance and can only reveal its true inner self to those who listen to his story with compassion. Mary Shelley's "hideous progeny" is a composition of identifiable texts from the male literary canon; to penetrate this outer layer the reader is forced to decipher the subversive discourse as well as her use of structure, narrative technique and application of traditional genres, such as the epistolary novel. Mary Shelley's intricate application of Goethe's Werther may serve as example for her reading of a text that was part of her private life and only significant for herself, a text whose associations she was not ready to share overtly with her readers (see preface to 1831 edition of Frankenstein). Wollstonecraft's writings, then, become a subtext to Goethe's novel: two epistolary narratives are interwoven into a continuous discourse with an audible male voice and a silent female voice. It is also interesting to note that Mary Shelley not only read the books the creature read but also Ossian, the book Werther reads to Lotte on their last evening together and Emilia Calotti, the book Werther left open on the table when he committed suicide (Journals I, 88).

Werther's account of his "happiness" and "sorrows" becomes an important text in the education of the creature who was only familiar with the "tales" of the De Lacey family. Unable to distinguish between "fiction" and "reality" he was moved by the "gentle and domestic manners it described" (Frankenstein 123, Werther 41) which echoes the manners of the De Lacey family. The book taught him about "lofty sentiments and feelings" (123) and enlightened him on the "hitherto <. . .> obscure subjects" (122) of love, suffering, and death. It also intensified the feeling of alienation once he had realized that his hideous appearance was the primary cause for his rejection by the human race including his creator. On one hand, he identified with Werther as the voyeur of domestic happiness; on the other hand, he disassociated himself from him. Unlike Werther who destroyed the blissful existence of those he loved through his self-centered nature and his desire to possess what belonged to another man, the creature demanded a mate who is just as hideous as himself and posed no threat to humankind. Werther indulges in his own happiness and/or sorrows while the creature thinks about the welfare of the human community. Since he will be excluded from any human intercourse but knows that certain "wants" will be "forever alive" in his "own bosom" he is willing to remove himself from humankind and create his own race of natural species in the paradisical setting of the "vast wilds of South America" (139). Mellor has pointed out that the De Lacey's embody Mary Shelley's ideal of the egalitarian family; they stimulate the creature's emotions and arouse his desire to do good to others (49). As long as the creature considers himself a protegé of the De Laceys he cannot comply with Goethe's emphasis on the rights of the individual (male), but shares Mary Shelley's profound commitment to an (female) ethic of cooperation, mutual dependence, and self-sacrifice which the characters of the Russian sea-master, Clerval, Caroline Beaufort or Elizabeth Lavenza exemplify. (Mellor 125)

Since the "simple and affecting story" of Sorrows of Werter also becomes a "never-ending source of speculation and astonishment" (122f), Mary Shelley's reception of Goethe's novel warrants closer scrutiny. Interspersed in Frankenstein are "tales" of triangular love relationships that range from selfless love to passionate, even pathological possessiveness and destruction. The scale reaches from the Russian sailor who gives his bride and his fortune to his rival to secure their happiness, to the widow's jealous servant who resorts to murder and whose words find a resonance in the creature's threat: "No one shall have her, and she will have no one" (Werther 125). And: "I shall be with you on your wedding night" (Frankenstein 161). Whereas in Goethe's novel, Werther is the central character marginalizing Lotte and Albert, Shelley distributes the weight on all of the characters thus shifting the theme of triangular relationships to include the possibility of incest and homoeroticism: (Frankenstein's parents, Elizabeth and Frankenstein, Clerval and Frankenstein, Walton and Frankenstein, Margaret and Walton). Elizabeth is not only marginalized but replaced by Clerval since she found it impossible as a woman to nurse Frankenstein back to health in Ingolstadt or to join him on his trip to England. Frankenstein's creation of a female for the creature is another attempt of replacing Elizabeth as mate. The destruction of the body, the creature's vow to be with him on his wedding night, Elizabeth's murder and the association with Fuseli's painting The Nightmare stress the interconnection of sexuality, passion, and fear of the female which results in her ultimate elimination. Clerval is finally replaced by Walton whose compassion for Frankenstein again creates friction: Walton's tenderness eases the fierceness of the creature's wrath on Frankenstein and Frankenstein marginalizes Margaret in Walton's affections. While in Goethe's novel all relationships are defined through the subjectivity of the hero and supported by the narrative structure of the text, the mutual bondages in Mary Shelley's work are multifaced. Like Frankenstein, Werther is isolated by his self-centeredness which ultimately prohibits any close human relationship. Like Frankenstein, Werther is loved despite his own inability for altruistic affection. Like Frankenstein, Werther is doted on and treated with indulgence. Only the creature is excluded from human intercourse, not because he is lacking the necessary inner qualities but because he is hideous in appearance. The dual nature (male/female) of the creature has been noted before and it can be reiterated in this context; while the internal hideousness of the male protagonists is tolerated and even meets in its contortion with general compassion the creature's external repulsiveness is received with hostility as the unknown Other and parallels the marginalization, replacement and ultimate elimination of the female laid out in Mary Shelley's novel. In addition to these overt passages in the text, Mary Shelley's reception {50} of Werther can be traced through the representation of the female and through silences.

While Werther's friend Wilhelm and Wollstonecraft's husband Godwin appeal to the "admiration and love" (Werther 13) and compassion of the reader and recommend the book as friend to those whose "fate or <. . .> own fault present [them] <. . .> from finding a closer one" (Werther 13), they integrate Wollstonecraft, the "solitary Walker," (Wardle, Letters 337) and Werther, "the rover on earth" (Werther 98), into the community of equally anguished and lonely "souls" (Werther 13). The voices of the two male "editors" attempt to solicit the readers' sympathy and compassion for their protagonist's sensibility and sufferings. The author Mary Shelley and the "editor," Margaret Saville, (note the same initials M.S.), use the male discourse for their albeit silent commentary. Margaret does not manipulate the reader but receives, preserves and presents her brother's tale without comment.

Both, Frankenstein and Walton, have been shaped by women, Elizabeth (37) and Margaret (19), however, since they have merged the role of mother and sister they evoke Lotte's image:⁴ although the male characters are the testimony of female powers they define the woman as passive, maternal, and unthreatening females. Both Walton and Werther can indulge in their affection since the woman they love is sexually unavailable in her role as mother/sister. While Goethe emphasized the patriarchal model of the family -- Lotte and her father as "parents" in the midst of a number of children of different ages and sex -- Mary Shelley stresses the intimate, almost incestuous relationship of Walton and his sister, Frankenstein's parents, or Elizabeth and Frankenstein. Only the creature's demand for a female as hideous as himself who selects her mate poses with the creation of a new race a threat to humankind, i.e., the established patriarchal society and its dominance in literary production. Whereas Goethe uses Wilhelm's voice to provide a linear (authoritative) narrative for the events of Werther's last days, Mary Shelley employs a concentric (organic) narrative structure: the tales of the creature, Justine, and the DeLaceys are embedded in Frankenstein's autobiography which is told by Walton to Margaret. Goethe's novel ends with the death of Werther whereas Shelley does not give a definite answer about the creature's final destiny. While Goethe follows the traditional model of the 18th century epistolary novel, Shelley uses the genre in a unique way: the tale of Frankenstein, the man who attempted to eliminate women by replacing their natural presence with his scientific progeny, is preserved by a woman with a silent commentary to his eloquent narration.

Goethe and Shelley both integrate literary texts into their writing, which have a profound effect on the readers. While Shelley links the texts with her characters and provides multidimensional structures, Goethe stresses the onedimensionality of Werther's interpretation of his reading. Duncan has shown that every text that Werther reads centers on the theme of mourning: Homer, Ossian, Emilia Galotti. Mourning is a form of love; it is an expression of pain and suffering over the loss of someone dear, no matter how "hideous" this being may have been. Goethe's description of Werther's suicide is loaded with irony: while Werther envisions his death as the self-sacrifice of a noble soul, the reality of his twelve-hour "sufferings" is gruesome: "his pulse was still beating, his limbs were all paralyzed. Over the right eye he had shot himself through the head, brains had oozed out. Uselessly, they opened a vein in his arm; blood flowed, and he was still drawing breath" (159). The image of the pining lover is voided by the lifeless and bloody body with the "fearful rattle in the lungs" (160); the idealized Christ-like "martyr" has actually become a "hideous" creature. However, Lotte is so grief-stricken that one fears for her life, and her brothers express "the most uncontrollable grief" and even kiss his cold hands and his mouth. The sympathy and compassion that Wilhelm's voice solicited in the preface from the reader is now acted out when Werther's friends express their sorrow and love at the sight of his lifeless and bloody body.

While Goethe's text secured tenderness and compassion even towards a repulsive object, the theme in Frankenstein is relentless isolation (Marshall 181). Since the hideousness of the creature is associated with the female, it does not constitute weakness that evokes pity but power and becomes a direct threat to the established male order. In this context, another theme becomes relevant since it amplifies the male/female dichotomy. While Werther is continually talking about death and dying, the creature values life. Goethe's character then poses no immediate danger since Werther destroys himself. With his request for a mate and his vision of a new race Shelley's creature poses a threat not only to Frankenstein but also the whole human race. For Goethe the life/death dichotomy is an either/or; for Shelley life and death are linked through the precariousness of pregnancy and birth, as she had experienced in her own life: her mother had died at her own birth and her firstborn daughter did not survive. When she wrote the second preface in 1831, she had experienced four pregnancies with one son surviving. While she was composing the novel, two women took their own lives: in October, 1816, her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, took an overdose of laudanum and in December, 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife Harriet drowned herself. The creature's reaction to Werther is Mary Shelley's own: "The disquisitions upon death and suicide were calculated to fill me with wonder. I did not pretend to enter into the merits of the case, yet I inclined towards the opinions of the hero, whose extinction I wept, without precisely understanding it" (123).

The narrative technique of the epistolary novel is determined by the subjective perspective of the main character. The reader of Goethe's Werther sees Lotte exclusively as the idealized woman created by Werther's excessive {51} sensibility and imagination. Finding Lotte in the midst of her "children" provides the nurturing and caring image of the mother intensifying Werther's need for protection. Playing with her "children" turns the young stranger into a "cousin" and shifts Lotte's image from mother to sister who will naturally include him in her affection (31, 42). Werther is conveniently abroad when Lotte and Albert get married; when he returns Lotte has complied with the laws of a patriarchal society: like a "treasured" object she has gone from the hands of her father to the hands of her husband. Created out of Werther's own imagination, she is not only the ideal woman but also the ideal bourgeois wife incapable of committing adultery. Lotte, then, can be linked to the women in Frankenstein who are domestic icons, "beautiful, gentle, selfless, boring nurturers and victims" (Johnson 63). Their sexuality, however, is perceived differently by the male narrators: while the women in Frankenstein never experience inner conflict or true passion (Johnson 63), Lotte responds to Werther's advances and is driven by his sexual desires to the verge of adultery. It is important to note that despite the passion of their last encounter Lotte's virtue is never at stake since Werther's idealization of her ultimately excludes adultery. Since he fuses love and death, he gains possession of Lotte with his suicide. While the "female Werther" Wollstonecraft included adultery as a fulfillment of personal happiness in the rights of woman, the "male" Werther denied her these privileges. The creature's silence about Lotte is insofar significant that she does not serve as a model for an ideal female representation.

Critics have noted Safie's active pursuit of her lover and interpreted her as a tribute to Shelley's mother. Safie's Christian mother, "who, born in freedom, spurned the bondage to which she was now reduced" had instructed her daughter "in the tenets of her religion and taught her to aspire to higher powers of intellect and an independence of spirit forbidden to the female followers of Muhammad. <. . .> The prospect of marrying a Christian and remaining in a country where women were allowed to take a rank in society was enchanting to her" (119). Even after her mother had died, her teachings "were indelibly impressed on the mind of Safie" (119). The absence of the mother in the De Lacey family and the final destruction of the idyllic setting by the appearance of the creature also signals the end of Safie's Otherness: if her story has a happy ending in marital bliss with Felix, their lives will have to be re-integrated into accepted traditional social norms to fulfill Safie's dream to marry a Christian and take a rank in society (119). Safie's story, too, lacks closure and is a silent comment on the apparent harmonious segment of the De Lacey family who are the last link for the creature to humanity and who destroy their paradisical existence when they react in horror to the Otherness of their secret benefactor.

If Wollstonecraft was indeed Shelley's model for Safie, she represents the intellectual and independent side of her self. Since Safie's story is followed by the story of Werther, Goethe's novel about the "male Werther" becomes the text in which the story of Wollstonecraft's other self, the "female Werther," is imbedded. Both share intense sensibility and imagination; they create an imaginary figure as an object of their affection and, driven by the desire to break down restrictions, they become vulnerable and subject to "suffering." However, Werther's suffering is self-inflicted since he leaves Leonore whose feelings of love he aroused and chooses Lotte who is unavailable. As a man he has the privilege of mobility; he can elect to stay or he can leave and retain his freedom. Choosing Lotte he can now "love" and "suffer" without commitment of marriage and the duties of bourgeois life. A woman's choices are restricted: if she follows her sexual desire and is abandoned by her lover, her sufferings are increased by economical and social hardships. If she decides to live an independent and active life, including sexual fulfillment, she is vulnerable through her nature. Not only do pregnancies and births bring about physical pain and possible death, their illegitimacy cause financial hardships and social alienation. While Goethe's Werther is free of economic worries, the "female" Werther has to earn her own living if she wants to remain independent. While Werther gives in completely to his sufferings and finally succumbs, the "female Werther" wavers between "mortification," the desire to preserve her dignity and the will to end her life. While the fictional Werther withdraws completely from reality, the "female Werther" Wollstonecraft finally faces reality, gains financial independence through her writing, establishes her own social circles, and finally finds new happiness with another man.

Although Godwin edited Wollstonecraft's letters and his Memoirs as a tribute to his wife, the public outcry about her "scandalous" conduct must have left an "indelible" mark on Mary Shelley. However, Mary Shelley was neither the bloodless domestic icon depicted in her female characters nor the sufferer unable to bridle the overflow of her emotions aroused by her imagination. A woman of a new generation she combined intellect and sensibility with a firm control of her passions often interpreted as "coldness." While her mother's stylization of herself and her sorrows from unrequited love inevitably led to the identification with the figure of Werther, Mary's ironic designation of Edward Holmes as "Werter the II" (Bennett 392) signaled her distance to the concept of 18th century female representation and male self-dramatization. If the readers of her Journals are looking for equally scandalous revelations about her private life, they will be disappointed. The entries in the journals are brief and do not reveal any private matters, (for example, the birth of Byron's daughter Allegra is marked with "Four days of idleness,"); pages are missing and suggest that she carefully eliminated any evidence that could be harmful if brought to the public eye. Although the journals are a record of her daily life, provide her reading lists, and reflect her intellectual growth, they {52} also mirror her reserve. (Journals I:XV-XXIII) While the "sorrows" of the "female Werther" Wollstonecraft were made public by Godwin and must have contributed to young Mary Shelley's anguishes, the "female" sufferings of the mature woman so carefully wrapped in silence in the Journals find only expression in the "silent" subtext of her literary work. Like her personal happiness and grief associated with her life with P.B. Shelley, they belong to her private self and have to be protected from the prying eye of the public: "And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper. I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words which found no true echo in my heart. <. . .> But this is for myself; my readers have nothing to do with these associations" (XII).

NOTES:

2 The letters to Fuseli, from which John S. Knowles quoted some excerpts, were transferred in 1866 to Sir Percy Florence Shelley by Knowles' son and are presumably destroyed (Wardle, Biography 19).

3 Hannah More, too, attacked Wollstonecraft in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female education (1799) for her "direct vindication of adultery <. . .> for the first time attempted by a woman, a professed admirer and imitator of the German suicide Werter. The Female Werter, as she is styled by her biographer, asserts in a work, entitled 'The Wrongs of Woman,' that adultery is justifiable, and that the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England constitute part of the wrongs of woman." (Tomalin, 244f )

4 Another link is established between Lotte, Elizabeth, Margaret, and Wollstonecraft's friend Fanny Blood: all four women have been entrusted by dying mothers to care for siblings. Wollstonecraft finds Fanny under circumstances similar to the "first interview of Werter with Charlotte" as 'a young woman of slender and elegant form, eighteen years of age, busily employed in feeding and managing some children [. . .]" (Memoirs 20). In the case of Elizabeth the motive of incest is evoked when she is not only designated as nurturing mother but also as the future bride of Frankenstein.

WORKS CITED:

Duncan, Bruce. "'Emilia Calotti lag auf dem Pult aufgeschlagen': Werther as (Mis-)Reader," Goethe Yearbook I (1982) :42-50.

The Journals of Mary Shelley. 1814-1844. 2 vols. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Clarendon, 1987,

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale UP, 1979.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Suffering of Young Werther. Trans. Bayard Quincy Morgan. Ungar, 1982.

Johnson, Barbara. "My Monster, My Self," pp. 61-65; Mary Poovey, "My Hideous Progeny," pp. 81-106, in: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House, 1987.

Ketterer, David. "Frankenstein's Creation: The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality." ELS 16. (1979).

Knowles, John S. Life and Writings of Fuseli. 3 vols. 1813.

Marshall, David. The Surprising Effects of Sympathy: Marivaux, Diderot, Rousseau, and Mary Shelley. University of Chicago, 1988.

Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley. Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Creatures. Routledge, 1988.

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by William Godwin. 1798. Rpt. Woodstock Books, 1990.

Myers, Mitzi. "Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written <. . .> in Sweden: Toward Romantic Autobiography Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Roseann Runte, University of Wisconsin, 1979): 169-170.

Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen. University of Chicago, 1984.

Posthumous Works of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1798. Rpt. Augustus M. Kelley, 1972.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. The New American Library, 1965.

Todd, Janet M. A Wollstonecraft Anthology. Indiana U.P.. 1977.

Tomalin, Claire. The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974.

Wardle, Ralph M. Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Cornell U.P. 1979; Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography. Univ. of Kansas Pr., 1951.