Special Topics in English: Frankenstein

• Module 5A
• Reading Prompts:
1. Feeling and judgment: Werther often treats the intensity of his emotions as evidence of their truth. How does Goethe invite us to sympathize with Werther while also encouraging us to question his interpretations?
2. Love and companionship: What does Werther seek from Lotte, Albert, Wilhelm, and the other people around him? When does he recognize them as independent individuals, and when does he make them part of his own emotional story?
3. Nature and melancholy: Notice how Werther describes landscapes, seasons, and natural beauty. When does nature comfort or enlarge him, and when does it reflect or intensify feelings he already possesses?
4. The individual and society: Where does Werther resist social rank, employment, manners, emotional restraint, or other forms of convention? What makes his rebellion appealing, and what limitations emerge when personal feeling becomes his highest authority?
5. Sensibility and education: What does Werther learn through feeling, reading, observation, nature, and experience? How might Wollstonecraft help us distinguish between sensibility that develops sympathy and sensibility that overwhelms reason or judgment?
6. Connections to Mary, A Fiction: How does Werther's longing for emotional fulfillment compare with Mary's search for an "object to love"? How do both works connect melancholy to isolation, imagination, education, and disappointed attachment?
7. Connections to Frankenstein: Why might The Sorrows of Young Werther become especially meaningful to the Creature? What can the novel teach him about love, identity, rejection, and society--and what might it fail to teach a reader who has no companion or teacher with whom to test his interpretations?
• Re-read Frankenstein Volume 2, Chapter 7 (p. 141-8). Note references to Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.
• Read the first half of The Sorrows of Young Werther (through the end of Book One).
• Lecture: Educated by Werther, Pt. 1
• Frankenstein, Romantic Individualism, and the Creature's Sentimental Education
• "I learned from Werter's imaginations despondency and gloom."
• Shelley makes reading part of the Creature's formation, not a pause in the action.
• The books supply models of feeling, identity, society, heroism, rebellion, and death.
• The question is not simply what he reads, but isolation shapes his interpretation.
• Creature reads: what kind of books is Werther?
1. Epistolary intimacy: Werther's letters place readers inside a fluctuating consciousness rather than outside it as judges.
2. Emotional authentic: Intensity of feeling appears as evidence of inward truth--even when judgment is unstable.
3. Social friction: Rank, employment, marriage, and decorum become restrains against the singular self defines itself.
4. A catastrophic ending: The novel converts private despair into a scene readers must interpret: warning, tragedy, protest, or seduction.
• The novel's form makes identification unusually powerful.
• the German-speaking lands
• Two authorized reprints appeared in 1774, followed by further editions and piracies.
• Readers copied Werther's dress, manner, melancholy, and language of exceptional feeling.
• Clerical and rationalist critics feared that sympathy could become approval or imitation.
• The Leipzig theological faculty sought to suppress the novel in 1775 as a dangerous defense of suicide.
• Countertexts rewrote the ending, converting tragic singularity into comic domestic discipline.
• Reports of imitation circulated, but modern research does not confirm a vast, measurable epidemic.
• Critical tension: the same emotional power that won admiration also made the book seem socially dangerous.
• Reception in England
• First English translation: Goethe first reaches a broad English audience though the translated novel.
• Rapid imitation: New edition, adaptations, poems, and novels make Werther a familiar cultural type.
• Moral management: Editors and critics praise emotional force while warning against self-destruction.
• One-book reputation: By century's end, Goethe's English fame still rests overwhelmingly on this one book.
• Why it fit: Richardson, Rousseau, epistolary intimacy, and sentimental suffering already shaped readerly expectations.
• Why it troubled: Some readers saw a moving tragedy; others saw an apology for suicide and uncontrolled sensibility.
• Why it matters here: Mary Shelley's readers could recognize Werther as both powerful sentimental education and potentially dangerous identification.
• England did not merely receive the novel; it translated, adapted, corrected, gendered, and moralized it.
• changes the Creature's reading
1. Isolated: He reads without friendship, institutional guidance, or any chance to test interpretation in conversation.
2. Emotionally intense: The book gives language to feelings already produced by abandonment and exclusion.
3. Without a teacher: No one distinguishes sympathy from imitation, recognition from entitlement, or tragedy from instruction.
4. Hungry for a script: Werther offers a ready-made story in which singular suffering appears to explain identity and fate.
• Werther as a Romantic figure
• Emotion as truth: Emotion becomes a mode of knowledge and a warrant for authenticity.
• Nature as Mirror: Landscape registers inward weather and magnifies change of mood.
• The singular self: The individual claims authority against conformity and ordinary measure.
• Rebellion: Rank, bureaucracy, restraint, and convention appear spiritually deadening.
• "What is the world to our hearts without love?" -Werther
• <"Sturm und Drang" (storm and stress) was a German literary movement that emphasized intense emotion, individual genius, rebellion, and resistance to social convention and rational restraint.
• Shared architecture of longing
• Werther
• socially embedded
• has family, friends, education, mobility, and a recognized place in society
• turns one desired relationship into the measure of all meaning
• experiences convention as the barrier to fulfillment
• The Creature
• socially expelled
• begins with no kin, name, species-community, legal status, or social note
• learns companionship by watching domestic life from outside
• desires recognition before he can test ordinary forms of belonging
• Key asymmetry: Werther resists limits within a society he can enter; the Creature is denied membership from the outset.
• Companionship: salvation or possession?
• Werther: Love promises plentitude; Charlotte appears to gather nature, home, beauty, and moral order into one figure.
• The Creature: Companionship promises first recognition: a being who will see, answer, and remain beside him.
• Werther's danger: The beloved becomes the condition of existence. Refusal cannot be accepted as a limit; it becomes annihilation.
• The Creature's Danger: A legitimate need hardens into coercion when recognition is demanded as a debt and refusal produces revenge.
• When does longing for companionship become entitlement?
• Melancholy: the feeling becomes a world
• Werther: Nature first enlarges joy, then echoes despair. Letters keep converting momentary feeling into a total account of the self.
• "I treat my poor heart like a sick child." - Werther
• The Creature: Season, sublime landscape, and reading intensify self-consciousness. Knowledge makes the fact of exclusion increasingly legible.
• His melancholy emerges from both inward comparison and outward rejection.
• Melancholy is not only a mood; it is a theory of what the world means.
• Individualism and rebellion from convention
• Werther
• resists class hierarchy and bureaucratic discipline
• treats emotional intensity as evidence of authenticity
• rejects counsel when it feels like normalization
• defines freedom as fidelity to inward feeling
• The Creature
• rejects the creator's authority after abandonment
• claims sympathy and personhood without social authorization
• refuses the social order that names him monster
• moves from resistance to retaliation when recognition fails
• Does rebellion enlarge ethical freedom--or make relation to others more difficult?
• Prompts: First Half of The Sorrows of Young Werther
1. Emotion
2. Love & Companionship
3. Nature & Melancholy
4. Individual & Society
5. Sensibility & Education
6. Bridge to Frankenstein
• Discussion:
• In the first half of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Goethe introduces a protagonist who treats intense feeling as a source of truth. Werther’s experiences of love, friendship, nature, social convention, and melancholy become part of a larger struggle to define himself as an individual. His letters invite readers into his changing consciousness, but they also raise questions about how reliably he understands other people and the world around him.
• For this discussion, place the first half of The Sorrows of Young Werther in conversation with Frankenstein and/or Mary Wollstonecraft’s Mary, A Fiction. Consider how these works represent sensibility, education, companionship, isolation, melancholy, nature, and individualism. The lecture emphasizes that Werther's emotional intensity can appear both appealing and troubling, and that the Creature reads his story without a teacher or community who might help him distinguish sympathy from imitation or feeling from judgment. 5a Werther
• Develop a 250-400 word post that responds to one of the questions below. Support your interpretation through close reading of at least one specific passage from the first half of The Sorrows of Young Werther and at least one relevant passage or moment from Frankenstein or Mary, A Fiction.
• Quote or closely describe important language, imagery, narrative choices, or characterization. Move beyond identifying a similarity: explain what the comparison helps us understand about the characters, their education, or the values of the works.
1. Feeling as truth: Werther often treats the intensity of his emotions as evidence that those emotions reveal something true. How does Goethe invite us to sympathize with this outlook while also questioning it? How does Werther's reliance on feeling compare with the sensibility of Mary or the Creature?
2. Love and companionship: What does Werther seek from Lotte, Albert, Wilhelm, or other people in the first half of the novel? To what extent does he recognize them as separate individuals, and to what extent does he make them part of his own emotional story? Compare his longing with Mary's desire for an "object to love" or the Creature's longing for recognition and companionship.
3. Sensibility and education: What does Werther learn through emotion, nature, reading, observation, and personal experience? How might Wollstonecraft help us distinguish between a sensibility that develops sympathy and a sensibility that overwhelms reason or judgment? Compare Werther's education with the self-education of Mary or the Creature.
4. Nature and melancholy: Examine one passage in which Werther describes the natural world. How does the landscape reflect, enlarge, or reshape his emotional state? Compare this use of nature with a scene from Frankenstein or Mary, A Fiction. What does nature allow the character to feel or understand—and what problems can it not solve?
5. Individualism and social convention: Where does Werther resist class hierarchy, employment, manners, restraint, or other social expectations? What makes this rebellion attractive, and what limitations does the novel reveal in his determination to treat inward feeling as his highest authority? Compare his resistance with that of Mary or the Creature.
6. The education of the Creature: Why might The Sorrows of Young Werther be especially powerful for the Creature? What might Werther’s story teach him about love, identity, society, and rejection? What might it fail to teach an isolated reader who has no one with whom to discuss or test his interpretations? The lecture presents reading as part of the Creature's formation because the books supply models of feeling, society, heroism, rebellion, and death.
7. Melancholy as interpretation: Choose a moment when Werther turns a particular disappointment or emotional experience into a larger conclusion about himself, society, or existence. How does this habit compare with Mary's melancholy or the Creature’s growing awareness of his exclusion? What is gained--and what may be distorted--when a character understands the whole world through present feeling?
8. A question of your own: Develop another focused comparison among the first half of The Sorrows of Young Werther, Frankenstein, and/or Mary, A Fiction. Your post should remain centered on sensibility, education, companionship, nature, melancholy, individualism, or social exclusion.
• Write a 100–150 word reply to one classmate’s post. Your reply should do more than express agreement or disagreement. Extend, question, or complicate your classmate’s interpretation by doing at least one of the following:
• introduce another passage or moment from one of the texts;
• suggest a different way of interpreting Werther’s emotions or behavior;
• deepen the comparison with Mary or the Creature;
• distinguish between understandable emotional need and potentially harmful self-absorption;
• ask a question that encourages further close reading.
• The goal is not to decide whether Werther is simply admirable or blameworthy. Instead, consider how Goethe--and the later works of Wollstonecraft and Shelley--invite us to examine the possibilities and dangers of an education shaped by intense feeling, reading, imagination, and isolation.
• Discussion Post
• Prompt: Choose a moment when Werther turns a particular disappointment or emotional experience into a larger conclusion about himself, society, or existence. How does this habit compare with Mary's melancholy or the Creature’s growing awareness of his exclusion? What is gained--and what may be distorted--when a character understands the whole world through present feeling?
• Werther's letter from May 22nd offers his view of society that helps us understand his melancholy. He writes:
• "All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want; but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motive, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod." (31)
• Werther sees everyone else pursuing their lives with great efforts that "have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn serve no purpose but to prolong [their] wretched existence" (30). Werther, unlike how he sees everyone else, is not wandering the earth in a daze. Werther is convinced he lives his life with purpose and motive. He "humbly perceives where it is all leading;" he may even be unhappy as he "goes willingly on his weary way," but he perseveres because he has "the knowledge that he can quit this prison whenever he wishes" (31).
• Werther's uncharitable view of how everyone else lives their lives--that everyone else acts like children--does distort his view of dealing with challenges. If perhaps he gave more credit to his fellow adults who struggle on with their lives with real motives and ambition, he might not be so eager to call his own struggles a prison from which he might free himself.
• In Frankenstein, the Creature's thoughts about society lead to a similar distortion when confronted with his own rejection. Almost immediately after reading Werter, the Creature makes his attempt to formally join the De Lacey family, but is quickly rejected. When rejected, the Creature gives his own Werther-ian exclamation of resignation, questioning "Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?" (149).
• The Creature is seeking acceptance. He wants companionship. And he has now been rejected multiple times, but if we think about the Creature in light of Werther's own suicidal ideation, perhaps the Creature also does not give society enough credit. Victor has his own issues. And he has in some way taken everyone else he has met by surprise. Maybe I am just using my not-a-monster privilege, but I think the Creature is going to charm his fellow humans if he gives them a chance. But like Werther, he views his struggles as completely separate from everyone else and wants to do harm to himself, or others.
• Discussion Reply
• Madison - I also found the conversation that Werther recounts between him and Albert quite impactful. To me, it seems Werther is taking a much more compassionate view on suicide. Albert's argument is that only a coward would commit suicide. But Werther suggests dying from suicide is no different from succumbing to a bad fever.
• If I ask myself how this conversation helps us understand the Creature better, I think about Werther's motives in this debate. Ultimately, Werther is defending himself. He is going to make this choice, and he does not view himself as a coward. So could that help us understand the Creature? Maybe Werther's defense of suicide parallels the Creature's defense of revenge. When Victor ultimately breaks his promise to the Creature, the Creature tries to logically explain his future revenge, asking "Are you to be happy, while I grovel in the intensity of my wretchedness?" (176). I guess I feel like the Creature is more in line with Werther in this debate than Albert.