The Catharsis of Prose: A Strategy Employed by Goethe and Chamisso Anonymous College

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) composed the semi-autobiographical epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther at the young age of 24 and under the timespan of two months. This highly riveting “Briefroman,” as the genre is called in German, is a series of letters from May 4, 1771 until December 1772 written by the first-person narrator, Werther, to his friend, Wilhelm. As time passes, the letters written to Wilhelm increasingly reflect the deterioration of Werther’s mental state and it becomes evident that his anxiety and depression burden him more than he can bear (Zimmerman 1). The certain events in Werther’s life which are based upon Goethe’s experiences make this novel semi-autobiographical, such as his romantic shortcomings, and Goethe described the text as “an innocent mixture of truth and fabrication” (Appelbaum viii). In addition to life events, however, Goethe molds Werther’s mental distress after his own struggles in a way to manifest and rationalize his innermost thoughts (Holm-Hadulla).

Along with Goethe, the French author Adelbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) also employs writing as a cathartic strategy to externalize conflicted feelings. In the Romantic novella Peter Schlemihl, von Chamisso creates a Faustian...