GOETHE's DIE LEIDEN DES JUNGEN WERTHERS (The Sufferings of Young Werther) marks a watershed moment in the German literary tradition: published in 1774, the semiautobiographical epistolary novel was an instant sensation, inspiring both rhapsodic praise and intense criticism from its earliest readers. Its success signaled that the genre had definitively arrived in Germany as a form with a significant readership and major social influence. Although Werther is often read as the virtuosic expression of an individual subjectivity, at key moments in the novel Goethe portrays precisely the interlocking issues of expression and narrative, love and sense of self, and affective family connection that are the subject of this book. I focus in the remainder of this project on later novels, but the case of Werther demonstrates that these questions are present in the very earliest exemplars of the genre in Germany, including those that have not traditionally been approached as being explicitly concerned with family. Reading a pivotal scene from Werther in terms of affective familial relations thus illuminates a core claim of this book: that the novel, in being “about the individual,” is always already also about the family.

In the pages in which Werther describes his first encounter with Lotte, Goethe uses his protagonist to express both the struggle for appropriate forms of self-expression and the openness of the constitution of the family as it pertains to reproduction and domesticity. Werther begins with one of his frequent remarks on the inadequacy of writing—after telling Wilhelm to guess why he has not written for a while, he claims that it will be difficult for him to recount “in der Ordnung” (36; “in an orderly fashion,” 34) because, being happy, he is “kein guter Historienschreiber” (36; “not a good chronicler,” 34). Bliss undoes the composure necessary to write a letter. He continues by exclaiming “Einen Engel!” but then once again gives vent to his frustration: “Pfuy! das sagt jeder von der seinigen! Nicht wahr? Und doch bin ich nicht im Stande, dir zu sagen, wie sie vollkommen ist, warum sie vollkommen ist, genug, sie hat all meinen Sinn gefangen genommen.”