Reflections on "Sorrows of Young Werther”

I just finished my first Goethe novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” and was surprisingly caught off guard. I thought I was going to roll my eyes at the antiquated themes within the plot and merely enjoy Goethe’s beautiful, lyrical writing style.

However, I ended up interpreting this tragedy as a portrayal on undiagnosed mental health disorders. There were a few lines where Werther expressed his extreme highs and lows as an illness similar to a cough or cold; that his emotional responses were in a similar vain to that, and that he wished that he could live a more “normal” and balanced life. There were many instances where his love, Charlotte, implored him to moderate his emotions and bring them to center, suggesting that he became unstable rather frequently.

I feel that this story was way ahead of its time, and that aside from the tragedy itself, Goethe was also attempting to explain mental health in a way that characterized it synonymously to a physical ailment; not as cowardly or weak in the way that one of the other protagonist, Albert, suggests throughout. Mental health due to its seemingly “invisible” nature has always been viewed as a taboo subject.

Reading stories that portray mental illness from as early as the 1700’s confirms that these struggles have always been prominent in society, and that they are finally becoming more visible as society begins to wake up and accept these struggles as not a form of weakness, but as issues that need more focus and attention.

This was an article I found after completing the book that validated some of these thoughts for me:

https://www.thoughtco.com/sorrows-of-young-werther-goethe-739876