6 - Lotte, Sex, and Werther

Summary

THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY'S theoretical concern with the body finds a variety of reflections in Werther scholarship. Such studies often begin with Lotte. At one extreme we find inquiries that seek to establish her real self, an entity that has been obscured by Werther's subjectivism. Some of these investigations stress the material, including corporeal, forces that impinge upon or even define her. At the other extreme are critics who start with the assumption that, rather than the self, “The body is the site upon which the various technologies of our culture inscribe themselves, the connecting link to which and from which our medial means of processing, storage, and transmission run” (Wellbery 1990, xiv). Common to all of these approaches is a concern with problems of agency, historicity, and gender, a concern which then extends to the figure of Werther.

It was not always thus. Until relatively recently, critics felt that Lotte's every quality so conforms to traditional, ideal gender norms that she seemed to be a paragon of female virtue, rather than a rounded individual. Even the earliest readers noted this ostensible fact, which they largely welcomed for its inspirational effect (see Meyer-Krentler 1989). Later critics, too, celebrated her status as the ideal woman who uncomplainingly fulfills the roles of submissive wife, nurturing mother, and compassionate caretaker of the sick.