Impossible Ideals: Reconciling Virginity and Maternity in Goethe’s Werther

Abstract

IN THE SEPTEMBER 10,1771, letter of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Lotte recalls the death of her mother and the heavy responsibility she is assigned in her absence:Sey ihre Mutter! Ich gab ihr die Hand drauf! Du versprichst viel, meine Tochter, sagte sie, das Herz einer Mutter und das Aug' einer Mutter. Ich habe oft an deinen dankbaren Thranen gesehen, das du fuhlst, was das sey. Habe es fur deine Geschwister, und fur deinen Vater: die Treue und den Gehorsam einer Frau. Du wirst ihn trosten.1[Be a mother to them.-I gave her my hand.-Dear daughter, she said, you are promising is a great deal. It is the heart of a mother and the eye of a I could often tell from your grateful tears that you felt what that means. Show a mother's care to your brothers and sisters, and be as faithful and obedient to your father as a wife. You will be a comfort to him.2]With these deathbed words, Lotte's mother simultaneously secures her replacement in the family and complicates the familial bonds that must be renegotiated in her absence. Lotte, in adopting her mother's caregiving role, ref lects a contradictory and complex social ideal of woman as both a maternal and a being, a figure whom I call the virginal mother. A young, chaste woman who provides unpaid care for children not her own and simultaneously practices her maternal skills before consummating marriage, the mother marks a departure from the sexualized woman of the seventeenth century and negotiates the eighteenth-century fetishization of virginity with contemporary discourses of domestic motherhood.3 Rousseau, in particular, was influential in emphasizing the role of maternal nurture in the child's moral development, and it was assumed that a woman's natural body predisposed her to this role. In the eighteenth century, this maternal nature is located in the mother, who is charitable and self-sacrificial. She represents an impossible ideal, but one recurring throughout German culture, from Sophie Sternheim in Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Frauleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sternheim) in 1771 to Maria in Thea von Harbou's novel and Fritz Lang's film Metropolis in 1927.4Although examples of motherhood are more prevalent in the works of female authors,5 Lotte is not Goethe's only mother figure. Both Therese and Natalie in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-96) willingly serve as surrogate mothers, and even Gretchen in Faust I (1808) selflessly devotes herself to her young sister before her encounter with Mephistopheles and Faust. In the works of Sophie von La Roche and later female authors, the mother functions to negotiate prescribed gender roles along with the pursuit of education. Her devotion to reading does not inspire sexual passions, as was feared with the reading of novels,6 but rather benefits the children in her care. As a positive example for young girls, the mother thus serves as an appropriate character for women writers to enter the male-dominated publishing world.7 Goethe, however, did not write under the same social constraints as his female contemporaries. And although he maintained relationships with many educated women (including La Roche), he did not argue for advancements in female education like Christoph Martin Wieland or Johann Christoph Gottsched. Why then does the mother represent the ideal feminine in Goethe's work? And how is the love of the mother- represented as ennobling and a precursor for domestic happiness in other texts-linked to Werther's suicide?Much has already been written about Lotte. Where Goethe's contemporaries heralded her as ein Kind der Natur (a child of nature), modern scholars debate her role in Werther's suicide.8 But little attention has been paid to her unique position as mother in relation to her siblings and father and as the love object of Werther. …