So it's my first proper week back at uni, and one of the modules we are doing is called "Romanticism". Basically, it was a movement late 1700s-1800s whereby writers focused on nature, the country folk, and sensibility, aka an awareness of personal feelings.
So we studied this book called "The Sorrows of Young Werther" by this famous German writer called Goethe. The gist of the book is there is a man named Werther, who meets a girl called Lotte and falls in "love". Lotte is already engaged and doesn't want Werther, so Werther goes all creepy stalker on her, tries to be as involved in her life as possible, becoming her fiance's BFF, and being super weird with her little brothers and sisters, making the youngest cry and then acting like it's the best thing that ever happened to him. Lotte then talks real to him, rejects him flat out and tells him to back off. Werther responds by shooting himself in the head, kind of fails and spends 12 hours bleeding out, dying slowly and painfully in front of Lotte and her family. The novel ends with Lotte stricken with grief and guilt, and considering taking her own life.
Now, those who know me closely enough know that I am no stranger to attempted suicide, and there are a few things with this novel that kind of bug me. Supposedly, Goethe was struggling with rejection-caused depression when he wrote the novel, but clearly he did not suffer in the same way I did. It was a long time ago, and I'm not looking for any attention by writing about it, but I felt it's enough of an issue for me to write about it.
Let's face it - the majority of people have someone in their lives that they care deeply for and would never want to hurt. Parents, friends, spouses, siblings, there is almost always someone. For me, it was Alex, and for Werther, it was Lotte.
When considering suicide, I felt guilty. I knew it would hurt Alex, but at the same time I truly believed he would be better off without me. This meant that I spent weeks planning what I believed would have the least impact on him. So I decided to take a whole bunch of pills whilst in the shower, and then go to bed. The plan was that I would just never wake up.
I planned the whole thing around my care for Alex. I would never have wanted to hurt him by him finding me in a pool of blood, or seeing me after having hanged myself. I knew that would destroy him. I wrote a note explaining that it was not his fault at all, and that it was my own feelings I couldn't cope with.
Werther writes in his suicide note that he wants Lotte to tell her younger siblings why he has killed himself. This means he essentially wants her to tell them that she is to blame for his death, after all he says himself that the reason he is doing it is because she doesn't want to be with him. I feel as though, if Werther really loved Lotte, he would not want her to go through the trauma of A) finding him lying in a pool of his own blood, and watching him die and B) of believing that she was the person solely responsible for his death. There is a total lack of empathy there, and I believe that the whole "it's your fault I killed myself" attitude is not associated with depression, but with a different form of mental illness. It's another way to get her attention, and a way for people to go "poor Werther, what a tragic hero". But that belief is a complicated one.
Why is it complicated? Well, there are two things that you absolutely cannot say about a person with depression/who has attempted suicide.
Number one: Selfish. You absolutely cannot say they are selfish. The belief in depression is that you are doing everyone a favour by essentially disappearing. You believe that you are a burden on your loved ones, and on society, and you feel that the best thing for everyone would be your demise. On the other hand, Werther did not believe that, and thought that through killing himself, he could have Lotte's heart, by forcing her into grief. While depression is not selfish, Werther's motives were.
Number Two: Attention-seeking. This one is my personal, absolute bugbear. People really think that by trying to kill yourself, you're going "look at me, look at me!" No. The point is, you want to disappear completely, and for people to move on and forget about you. There is a "cry for help", which is STILL not attention-seeking, and should still be treated in the same manner as a suicide attempt.
When giving evidence in Court several months ago, against a man who sexually assaulted me, the defence lawyer attempted to use my history of depression against me. He tried to claim to the magistrates that, because Alex had been absent at the time, I had fabricated the story of sexual assault in order to get his attention. He used my history of self-harm and depression as a means of justification, claiming that I was a compulsive attention-seeker. I explained that I stayed in a public place as I did not want to be alone, for fear of hurting myself, and the lawyer claimed it was really because I wanted the attention of my assailant, and enjoyed it. Naturally, as in so many cases, the man was found not guilty due to insufficient evidence, and I was left reeling from the awful experience, and was offered no support afterwards. How, in this day and age, it is still okay to use things like that as a defence to a crime committed, I am not sure, but there was nothing to be done other than to move on with my life and try to get over it.
Suicide is not about attention seeking, however, in Werther's case, it does appear to be. He wants a way to immortalise his "love" (otherwise known as unhealthy obsession) for Lotte, and a way to ensure he has her attention, and she never moves on from him. And it upsets me to believe that someone would commit suicide for selfish and attention-seeking reasons, but then again, I don't believe Werther suffered from depression at all.
I see it as more likely that Werther suffered from some kind of delusion, and that he had a God-complex. He believes Lotte should be with him because he's more like her, he deserves her more. His frequent mention of The Odyssey and Ossian shows that he has an obsession with Gods. He is also incredibly vain, and believes himself to be awfully intelligent; in other words, he has a huge ego. He wallows in self-pity, and believes that inanimate objects contain a part of a person. He acts like a child, and his attraction to Lotte is related to her mothering nature. No, Werther is not a mentally stable character. But he doesn't have depression.
Immediately, when someone commits suicide, we immediately think that they are depressed. However, I've watched enough Criminal Minds to know that this isn't the case, and that suicide can be just as much about ego (think suicide by cop). Werther certainly had a huge ego, and by rejecting him, essentially Lotte stamped on it. From a Criminal Minds perspective, it was going to go one of two ways. Werther was either going to become a serial killer, killing women as substitutes for Lotte, or killing himself, as a sadistic way to torture Lotte for the rest of her life. It also meant he went out with a bang, so to speak (apologies for the crude analogy). People would remember him as a tragic hero, rather than that nutter who stalked the bailiff's daughter.
Depression is clearly a big part of romanticism, and of literature in general. The wallowing, the tragic hero, the never ending misery that seems to compel us as readers more than a happy ending. But I don't believe that "The Sorrows of Young Werther" is really about his sorrows at all. I see it as more a story of sadistic behaviour, and a deeply disturbed individual.
Yes, I know it's a fictional novel, and I know that people display illness in different ways. However, I can't understand how anything that Werther does reflects depression at all. Blaming someone for your suicide, making them live with the guilt, making yourself a martyr in the process is not something an individual with depression would do.
As an ending to my own story, my plan didn't work out how I intended. Rather than put me to sleep, the medication I had taken instead meant that I was wide awake, yet not consciously. I began moving objects around the bedroom, genuinely believing I was serving people cappuccinos at work. Alex naturally realised what had happened, and I was taken to hospital, ripped around 3 cannulas out of my vein from fighting the staff. I believed Alex was my best friend Trish, and I thought that my step-dad was around the corner as I believed the hospital was the swimming pool I volunteered at. Essentially, I was as high as a fucking kite. I was put on a drip, the staff wished that they could have tied me to the bed, and though I was seriously poorly, I recovered, and got the help I needed, and was encouraged to remove the toxic influences from my life. I don't remember anything at all from a 3 day period, and I am at the point where it was so long ago that Alex and I can talk about it openly, as something that we both went through, and a stage of my life that is over. I encourage anyone out there who suffers from the kind of feelings I have discussed to seek help, because while it may not seem possible, help is out there, and it's possible to get better. It may seem hopeless now, but I promise, it's never hopeless.
