Lotte's Bird, Female Desire, and the Language of "Sexuality" in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers

Abstract:In the 1787 edition of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, the revised second edition of the text, Goethe added a brief episode that shows Lotte having a bird (a canary) kiss her on the mouth—something she has trained it to do with breadcrumbs. Werther is deeply affected by what he sees, and one can read the couch scene, Werther's assault on Lotte that causes the final breakup between the two of them, as linked to this scene. The canary episode touches on one of the central problems in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers: the fact that Werther and Lotte are driven by desires and urges that we nowadays would call "sexual" (they are physical in nature, closely linked to their sense of self, and experienced as absolutely imperative), but for which they have no vocabulary—the term "sexuality" would not be invented until the second half of the nineteenth century. Read in the context of the history of sexuality, the significance of Goethe's novel consists in its production of a series of images (metaphors) as means of communication to help us understand this (sexual) dynamic as it develops between Lotte and Werther—in particular, the depiction of female desire in the text. Interpreted from this perspective, the image of the bird kissing Lotte (and also Werther) turns out to be remarkably complex but may help us understand where on the fault line between biology and culture "sexuality," in Goethe's view, is to be situated.