IN THE SEPTEMBER 10, 1771, letter of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Lotte recalls the death of her mother and the heavy responsibility she is assigned in her absence:

With these deathbed words, Lotte's mother simultaneously secures her replacement in the family and complicates the familial bonds that must be renegotiated in her absence. Lotte, in adopting her mother's caregiving role, reflects a contradictory and complex social ideal of woman as both a maternal and a virginal being, a figure whom I call the “virginal mother.” A young, chaste woman who provides unpaid care for children not her own and simultaneously practices her maternal skills before consummating marriage, the virginal mother marks a departure from the sexualized woman of the seventeenth century and negotiates the eighteenth-century fetishization of virginity with contemporary discourses of domestic motherhood. Rousseau, in particular, was influential in emphasizing the role of maternal nurture in the child's moral development, and it was assumed that a woman's “natural” body predisposed her to this role. In the eighteenth century, this maternal nature is located in the virginal mother, who is charitable and self-sacrificial. She represents an impossible ideal, but one recurring throughout German culture, from Sophie Sternheim in Sophie von La Roche's Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (The History of Lady Sternheim) in 1771 to Maria in Thea von Harbou's novel and Fritz Lang's film Metropolis in 1927.