We shall meet again (13 day challenge) - 04
04 Neither Jane Austen nor Friedrich Nicolai
He seeks her out after class, book bag slung over his shoulder, notes clutched in his hand.
“You don’t agree with Charlotte being cruel?” he asks. The teacher raises her head to look at Anthony - something lurches uncomfortably in that infatuated teenage heart of his - and then sighs softly.
“Why do you think she is?” she responds.
“Because Werther offers her more than just his love; he offers her dreams, too. Isn’t that a lot more precious than the life that Albert is offering her?” Anthony argues.
“You make it sound so easy, Anthony. I assume you would have her ditch Albert in favour of Werther?”
“They are two of a kind - Albert doesn’t understand who she is or what moves her. Werther does. They both know and yet she refuses him.”
“Don’t delude yourself - her decision is not one made easily. In fact, it is not even her decision to make. Even if Lotte wanted to, she could not leave with Werther. She is bound by her duty towards her parents and her fiancé. She can’t allow herself to disgrace her family like that so she has to stay with Albert and hope for Werther to see reason.”
“You mean she had no other choice? But that’s not true!”
“Well, what choice did she have? Don’t forget that we are talking about a society in the first half of the 1770s - the duty of a woman such as Charlotte was to marry a man, bear him sons and raise them. This is not a Jane Austen novel, Anthony. And not Friedrich Nicolai, either. Even if she did love Werther, which she didn’t, the relationship was doomed to fail right from the start.”
“What makes you think that she didn’t?”
“Because the real Charlotte, Charlotte Buff, refused Goethe’s charms and he fled her hometown. ‘Werther’ is only partially fictional, after all.”
For a moment, Anthony silently ponders the response of his teacher.
“So either way, she would have to put duty above dreams, whether she liked it or not?”
Miss Williams nods.
“Even if it meant she would pay dearly for it for the rest of her life?”
The student receives another nod.
“Such a pity,” Anthony drawls. He leisurely stalks to the classroom door, moving like someone not quite from this world.
Shell-shocked, she watches him leave, a voice from the past echoing in her ears.
Such a pity…
* * * Author's Note * * *
Friedrich Nicolai wrote, in response to Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, the book Joys of Young Werther. The book, which was heavily resented by Goethe himself, altered the Werther 'canon' (aren't we fanfiction people familiar with that?) so that Werther's suicide did, in fact, not take place. Nicolai had Albert confront Charlotte about her returning Werther's feelings. He promises not to stand in their way and to release Charlotte from the engagement, which Charlotte doesn't believe. Albert then sends the pistols to Werther, however, he loads them with chicken blood, which he reveals to Werther on his supposed death bed. Albert steps down from the engagement and Charlotte and Werther are married. Thanks to Albert's influence, several struggles of Werther and Charlotte take a good end.
I have mentioned him and Jane Austen because Nicolai's Joys as well as Austen's work (at least what I know of it) tend to happy endings, which is most certainly not the case for the original Werther. And apparently, not the original Labyrinth, either. Well... the romance part.