Word: wertherisms
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...behind the screen of natural facts. Thus one of the master images of romantic contemplation was Friedrich's Moonrise on the Sea, 1822, three figures on a rock, silhouetted in a loneliness as absolute (though not as flamboyant) as Manfred's, Childe Harold's or Young Werther's, gazing in immobility at the slow unfolding of light on the darkened, violet-tinged flatness of sea and sky. Like most of Friedrich's paintings, it is soaked in allegory-the moon representing Christ, the ships serving as emblems of the voyage of life...
Exams after Christmas also ruined the vacations of William W. Fisher and Ellen R. Werther. He returned to study on December 28, and she came back Christmas...
...septicemia eleven days later. The final indignity was more ironic. When Godwin published his memoirs of Mary, he was honest about her love affairs, suicide attempts and pregnancies but apparently misunderstood the meaning of her life and death. He wrote about her, as Biographer Tomalin observes, "as the female Werther, a romantic and tragic heroine," ignoring her intellectual development and failing even to appraise her feminist ideas...
Perhaps it is too much to suppose that Mary Shelley had her mother in mind when she created the arrogant genius Dr. Frankenstein and subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus. How much better a tribute than Father Godwin's female Werther: Mary Wollstonecraft, having stolen the fires of social equality for her sex, chained and suffering on the rock of her female biology...
...about the spirit, the soul? No man can serve two masters. I still prefer the old religious ethic and Goethe's Werther to Nabokov's Lolita...