SOURCE: “The Mystery of Mignon: Object Relations, Abandonment, Child Abuse and Narrative Structure,” in Goethe Yearbook, edited by Thomas P. Saine, Vol. VII, 1994, pp. 23-26.

[In the following essay, Mahlendorf interprets the figure of Mignon as the embodiment of eroticism and incest in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, seeing her as a symbolic threat to the order of the Bildungsroman.]

From her first appearance in the novel, the mysterious strange beauty of the child Mignon excites the protagonist's curiosity even as the gender of the “Geschöpf”¹ remains ambiguous. From the beginning, Wilhelm's erotic impulses are awakened in her presence. Compassion with her strange contortions (96) and irresistible attraction to the “geheimnisvollen Zustand” of the child, this “Rätsel” (98), change during that first evening to outrage at her being beaten and abused by the master of the acrobats (103). The air of mystery remains attached to the child's figure until the denouement, when protagonist and reader learn of the mystery's core, that Mignon is the issue of brother/sister incest in an old feudal family. What, then, is the relationship between the ideology of the Meister novel and the insistence of the narrative on mystery, abusive violence, and eroticism?

This particular combination of themes and their undercurrents with regard to the Mignon figure has, of course, not been the focus of the critical literature. To be sure, Mignon's aura of suffering and mystery, her unfathomable yearning have led scholars to interpret her as metaphor of Wilhelm's wounded genius seeking expression in poetry,² as metaphor of natural poetry (Naturpoesie),³ or as figure of the divine child,⁴ to mention a few of the many interpretations. In their efforts to see Mignon as an ideal, scholars have followed the lead of the Romantic interpreters, all the more so as the novel itself problematizes the response of two characters to her, namely the representative of rationalism, Jarno, and the youthful, emotional protagonist, Wilhelm. Because Wilhelm as a figure engaged the emotions of the Romantics and Jarno alienated them, the Romantics and scholarly readers since then have rejected the overly rational Jarno's negative judgment on and dismissal of the child. Attention to the literal level of the text concerned with Mignon by reading it in terms of a person's behavior and developmental life history will help us to demythologize the figure. The context of the character's appearance, the sequence of events, and actions in which she is involved, as well as her associations with other characters will then be seen as related and interpreted by means of developmental psychoanalytic theory. It is highly significant, for example, that Wilhelm meets Mignon immediately following his encounter with Philine, the representative of eroticism and sexuality in the novel, and that the Mignon action begins with Mignon's abuse by the master of the acrobatic troupe.

If we distinguish, as is usual in film criticism, between story and plot in analyzing the novel's narrative structure, the plot is designed to encapsulate Mignon's mystery while the story gives us the history and prehistory of her life and pathology. The reader's sense of her tragedy is not lessened by this pathology because the novel itself takes the pathology so seriously.⁵ But let us begin with the plot. The strategy of plot narration allows none of the persons involved in Mignon's life history access to her whole story, but rather all of them, at considerable intervals, add their fragment—Wilhelm, Natalie, the physician, the Abbé, and finally her uncle, the Marchese, who in turn tells of her grandfather's, her mother's, and her father's relationships. The fragmentation of Mignon's life history by this plot strategy formally renders and communicates to the reader Mignon's own experience of life, which is as discontinuous as the reader's experience of the narrative. Only rarely does the narrator report Mignon's own words, so that the reader must construct her inner life from actions as reported second- or third-hand, from songs attributed to her, from surmises given by those close to her and from the narrator's descriptions. It is striking that the seven sentences devoted to the infant Mignon's relationship to her mother are the only space in the novel given to mother/infant relations, making that relationship a prototype of all object relations in the novel as a whole.

Let us briefly recall the sequence of plot events. The narrator reports Wilhelm's dealings with Mignon until her stay at Natalie's. Then Natalie relates Mignon's history from her abduction by the troupe of acrobats to her meeting with Wilhelm. Enclosed within Natalie's narrative we find the physician's report on Mignon's emotional and physical health, in particular on her heart condition, the symptoms of which only appear in connection with Wilhelm. The narrator then takes up the plot again from Wilhelm's and Mignon's reunion at Natalie's and continues through Mignon's death and interment. In the next chapter, the Abbé reveals the core of the mystery: Mignon's incestuous origins, her infancy, her childhood, and the fate of her mother. Significantly, as we shall see, the narrator's report on the death of her father, the harpist, rounds out the mystery. The sexual and pathological core of the Mignon story appears third-hand as a transcript of confidential talks between the Marchese and the Abbé—a manuscript so explosively dangerous that its reading leads to the death of the harpist, the only direct participant still alive. These narrative plot strategies of shrouding Mignon's being in mystery, of delaying information about her origins, of encapsulating the story of her origins in a secret manuscript, all work together to present the sexual and pathological life histories to the reader as shameful (they can only be told in confidence) and in need of narration from a safe distance (they are so dangerous that direct exposure might harm readers as well as listeners).

But let us look at Mignon's pathology more closely. The plot begins in medias res showing the 12- or 13-year-old as she appears to Wilhelm. In every detail, hers is a classical portrait of a long-abused child. All of the physical, social, intellectual and emotional developmental disturbances that have been observed in abused incest children⁶ are present: her physical growth is retarded (98), her social behavior alternates between submission (“dabei legte sie jedesmal die Hände an Brust und Haupt und neigte sich tief,” 98), wildness and rebellion (her refusal to perform despite threat and punishment). In short, “in alle seinem Tun und Lassen hatte das Kind etwas Sonderbares” (110). She is distrustful of adults (she sizes up Wilhelm “mit einem scharfen schwarzen Seitenblick,” 91), and her expression is serious beyond her years (“der Mund … zu sehr geschlossen,” 99, “düster,” 92, 99). Most striking is her language disturbance. She is silent for days on end (“Tage ganz stumm,” 110), her speech is broken (“gebrochenes … Deutsch,” 98, 110), impersonal and abrupt (“Sie heiβen mich Mignon,” 98). We might note the conversations between Wilhelm and Mignon (98, 106 or 116), which are always in short phrases and end with “Das Kind war still und nichts weiter aus ihm zu bringen” (146).⁷ Her movements are mechanical “wie ein aufgezogenes Räderwerk” (115) and hyperkinetic: she never walks but runs, leaps, or jumps (“Es ging die Treppe weder auf noch ab sondern sprang,” 110; “fuhr blitzschnell zur Tür hinaus,” 99). The pressure she is under is betrayed by a nervous tic (“mit den Lippen nach einer Seite zuckte,” 99). She is obsessively clean (“oft … sich wusch, Kleider reinlich … obwohl … zweifach und dreifach … geflickt …,” 110), and she punishes herself by her ascetic self-abnegation (“schlief … auf der nackten Erde und war durch nichts zu bewegen, ein Bette oder einen Strohsack anzunehmen,” 110). She loses herself in service to Wilhelm (“in seinem Dienst war das Kind unermüdet,” 110) and in religious devotion. She goes “alle Morgen ganz früh in die Messe” and Wilhelm observes her “in der Ecke der Kirche knien und andächtig beten” (110). Despite Wilhelm's and later Natalie's care for her, her disturbed behavior hardly changes in the course of the novel. Her erratic wild movements (Natalie reproves her for racing Felix and endangering her life just before she dies, 543) as well as her language difficulties (she continues to refer to herself as Mignon, “Mignon klettert und springt nicht mehr,” 528) do not disappear. Her strenuous efforts to learn to write and acquire some education fail almost completely (“Buchstaben … ungleich und die Linien krumm,” 135). She remains the “zwitterhaftes Geschöpf” (193) she was at the beginning, vigorously continues to refuse to be dressed as a girl (“‘Nun gar nicht!’ rief Mignon,” 336), and only relinquishes her boy's dress for that of a theatrical angel, thus demurring from claiming a female gender identity. Yet in song, music and poetry she displays a full and mature emotional expressiveness throughout.

Although designated as a child, preferably with the neuter article all the way through the novel, an erotic aura clings to her. As we have already noted, she is introduced to Wilhelm by Philine, while Wilhelm is still under Philine's spell. In Mignon's desire to be dressed like Wilhelm, the reader soon observes the growth of her identification with him and along with it the development of her passion for him. She insists on being the only one to serve him (107) and it is only for Wilhelm, in a singular show of devotion, that she overcomes her revulsion of performance and dances the egg dance, in a ritual suggestive of fertility and erotic surrender.⁸ The development of her love and passion for him finds a disguised, orgasmic release in his embrace on the occasion when he threatens to leave her:

“Mein Kind!” rief er aus, indem er sie aufhob und fest umarmte, “mein Kind, was ist dir?” Die Zuckung dauerte fort, die vom Herzen sich den schlotternden Gliedern mitteilte; sie hing nur in seinen Armen. Er schloβ sie an sein Herz und benetzte sie mit seinen Tränen. Auf einmal schien sie wieder angespannt, wie eins, das den höchsten körperlichen Schmerz erträgt; und bald mit einer neuen Heftigkeit wurden alle ihre Glieder wieder lebendig, und sie warf sich ihm … um den Hals, indem in ihrem Innersten wie ein gewaltiger Riβ geschah, und in dem Augenblick floβ ein Strom von Tränen aus ihren geschlossenen Augen in seinen Busen. […] Ihr ganzes Wesen schien in einen Bach von Tränen unaufhaltsam dahinzuschmelzen. Ihre starren Glieder wurden gelinde, es ergoβ sich ihr Innerstes, und in der Verirrung des Augenblickes fürchtete Wilhelm, sie werde in seinen Armen zerschmelzen. … (143)⁹

From this point on in the narrative until she bites Wilhelm in maenad-like frenzy (327) and attempts to steal into his bed, a smoldering sexuality drives her that occasionally frightens Wilhelm but that he, and later the physician, deny by calling it a “Neigung” or a “verworrener Zustand” (523). As the explanation of her name indicates,¹⁰ Mignon, the nameless child of incestuous passion,¹¹ is the metaphor for repressed sexuality. That this sexuality has infantile characteristics (e.g. her confusion in addressing Wilhelm, as “Vater,” “Geliebter,” “Beschützer” in her song, 145) finds its explanation in her developmental history, as we will see below.

Mignon's life history retrospectively explains the developmental disturbances and abnormalities we have observed. According to her uncle, most of them existed from infancy. “Ihr [Speratas] Kind wuchs heran und zeigte bald eine sonderbare Natur. Es konnte sehr früh laufen und sich mit aller Geschicklichkeit bewegen, es sang bald sehr artig und lernte die Zither gleichsam von sich selbst. Nur mit Worten konnte es sich nicht ausdrücken, und es schien das Hindernis mehr in seiner Denkungsart als in den Sprachwerkzeugen zu liegen” (586-87). The narrative locates the abnormality not in a physical deficiency but in a mental condition, not in heredity but in the mother/child relationship. The first mention of the mother/infant relation points out that “Sperata war als Mutter in dem kleinen Geschöpf ganz glücklich” (586). As the modifier ganz (quite, almost) indicates, Sperata is far from happy. In fact, the absence of her beloved causes her so much uneasiness that the priest who attends her admonishes her to be calm—“für sich und das Kind zu sorgen und wegen der Zukunft Gott zu vertrauen” (586)—which indicates that she was not calm. The very next sentences show how the attending priest poisons the mother/child relationship by stimulating the mother's ambivalence toward the infant, in which maternal enjoyment struggles with “Abscheu” and death wishes “daβ dieses Kind nicht da sein sollte” (587). The word “Abscheu” used for the mother's feeling toward her infant impressively renders the very physical quality of Sperata's rejection.

Soon thereafter the just-weaned two-year-old¹² is separated from her mother. Her relatives cast Mignon out as well and she is given to “guten Leuten” (587), to the kindness of strangers, a fate typical for children of incest until the late eighteenth century.¹³ The neglect the child experiences in their hands is evidenced by the fact that Mignon, who can neither speak her mother tongue nor identify herself (“zu jung …, um Namen … angeben zu können,” 522), is allowed to associate with tightrope walkers, to climb, roam freely (“weit; sie verirrte sich, sie blieb aus,” 587), and not to return home for days without anyone being much concerned. Given such negligent caretaking of a small (4- to 8-year-old?) female child, it is not surprising that Mignon, on returning from her exploits, does not seek out her caretakers or relatives but rather the “mitleidigen” (519) marble statues in a neighboring villa which express the compassion her relatives lack:

Es glänzt der Saal, es schimmert das Gemach,
Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind getan? (145)

We can summarize as follows: Mignon spent her first two years under the cloud of her mother's distress and unease at having been abandoned, only to experience, after weaning, first maternal ambivalence of love and revulsion and then total rejection by mother and relatives. The neglect by her appointed caretakers for a number of years (from two to six or eight years of age) excludes her not only from human warmth and community (note how beautifully Mignon's turning to marble statues for a welcoming response renders this idea) but also from age-appropriate communication and learning. She is left to grow up as a “wild child.”¹⁴ The physical and verbal abuse she experiences at the hands of the tightrope walkers from age eight to twelve is only the culmination of the preceding rejection, abandonment, and neglect.

To appreciate what this early experience means, let us look at object relations theory. According to this theory, the totally dependent infant forms its initial relationship to other persons and the world from the mother/infant bond. At the earliest stage, the infant feels at one with the mother, bound to her in a symbiosis. If the mother feels secure in herself and is supported by her husband and family, she will communicate this security and comfort to her infant by her very body language. Even the best of mothers cannot be present for the child and fulfill all its wishes all of the time. Frustrations of the infant's basic needs for contact, touching, food, and comfort are not only inevitable, a certain number of such frustrations are necessary for the infant's growth and differentiation from the mother. However, the “good enough” mother¹⁵ is sufficiently in touch with her infant's needs and maturational level that she can gauge how much separation and frustration the infant can tolerate at any given time. As mother and infant differentiate from one another, a minimally frustrated child will internalize an image of a good mother that will allow the child to bear further separation and to attain satisfaction of its needs when the mother is present. This process of forming a good, reliable and realistic mother image is the basis of a secure sense of self. That is to say, the infant comes to know she is worthwhile (has her needs met appropriately) and that she can obtain care for herself (she can initiate action that will lead to need-satisfaction).

If the mother is stressed (as Sperata is), if the mother is not secure in herself (as Sperata is not, being herself an abandoned child), her relationship with the infant will inevitably be strained. She will not be able to gauge her infant's needs well and an insecure mother/infant bond will result. The child will respond to this insecure bond by clinging to the mother, angrily demanding the secure need-satisfaction the mother is unable to provide. In such cases, it is hardly surprising that the mother feels the demanding infant as a burden and that she responds with hatred and with guilt for feeling the hatred. Ambivalence and guilt may then lead her in one of two alternate directions¹⁶: either she smothers the child with attention in an attempt to compensate for her hatred and neglect of the child's needs, or she rejects the child altogether and wishes it dead. These death wishes will be unacknowledged or unconscious, especially if the mother feels guilty for having them. This means that the dependent child cannot internalize a realistic image of a good mother. Hence its identity core will be weak and its future relationships to others will be fraught with difficulties. As we have seen, the narrative describes in Sperata's relationship to her infant a sequential reaction from initial ambivalence to complete rejection, with maternal guilt over the rejection playing so large a role that the guilt leads Sperata first to delusion and finally to death.¹⁷

The consequences for Mignon of the disturbance and disruption of object relations are many. Because no contact other than the very earliest symbiotic one with the mother was ever established, Mignon's later intimate love relationships can be expected to be formed only on the symbiotic level. And this is the way Mignon relates to Wilhelm. Mignon's insistence on being dressed exactly like Wilhelm expresses this symbiotic desire. Once she has formed a symbiotic relationship with Wilhelm, she cannot be without him, is extremely sensitive to his moods, needs and comings and goings. Any separation becomes excruciatingly painful to her, whether it be his making love to another woman, his absence, or his loss to her through marriage. Like a hospitalized infant deprived of her mother's care, she literally wastes away even in the most beneficent surroundings at Natalie's.¹⁸ Therefore, when Wilhelm first sees her at Natalie's after their separation, he observes that “sie sah völlig aus wie ein abgeschiedener Geist” (525). The physician sees this wasting away caused by her yearning: “Die sonderbare Natur des guten Kindes … besteht beinahe nur aus einer tiefen Sehnsucht; das Verlangen ihr Vaterland wiederzusehen, und das Verlangen nach Ihnen [Wilhelm] ist … das einzig Irdische an ihr” (522). It is not an archetypal “yearning” but the need for a symbiotic bond which causes her decline. Her heart symptoms (from which she suffers only in relation to Wilhelm), her fading away once separated from him, and her very death occur when the symbiotic tie is threatened or disrupted.

Further, since mother and child communicate in the pre-verbal phase by body language, soundings, gesture, turn-taking games, and establishing common foci of attention that prepare the infant for language, and since these areas were severely stressed in the case of Sperata and her child, Mignon's normal language development was shortchanged.¹⁹ Her difficulties with speaking her mother tongue or later with learning German are not the difficulties of a mentally deficient child or of a foreigner but rather those of a child deprived of early good contact and communication with her mother. She has never been a person to her mother, hence she speaks impersonally and cannot learn to say I. Note that when she speaks to Wilhelm at Natalie's, where she has experienced much maternal care, Goethe has her say to Wilhelm: “Mignon klettert und springt nicht mehr” (528). The change in behavior she comments on has not extended to a change in her language. So little has her identity as a female infant been affirmed that she cannot claim either her body as a female (she turns into an ephemeral angel when relinquishing boy's clothing at the end) or her gender role. A maternally deprived child moreover cannot acquire that trust in other persons, that assurance that others mean well by her, which make socialization possible, that is to say, the egosyntonic adaptation to the social customs, mores, and ways of living of the environment. Mignon's behavior alternates between idiosyncratic gesture (note her greetings by subservient gestures) and mechanical imitation (note the references to “clockwork” in the description of the egg dance initially and her slipping into the role of angel and refusing to relinquish it at the end). And because these deficiencies date back to so early a period in life, they cannot be made good: the “critical period”²⁰ for the development of these capacities is long past when she finally receives some care from such adults as Wilhelm, Therese and Natalie.

Mignon's communication through music, gesture, vivid visual imagery, and her reliance on body language can be interpreted as communication developed in the symbiotic phase or it can be understood in terms of Julia Kristeva's semiotic, as the direct, body-based communication with the mother in the pre-oedipal period.²¹ Remaining in the maternal semiotic excludes Mignon from the patriarchal world, from the heritage of the father and the world of the symbolic. Is not incest, after all, brother/sister just as much as mother/son incest, a sign of clinging to the mother in the futile hope that one's unfilled physical needs will be satisfied? Does this not result in the child's rejection of and exclusion from the symbolic realm of the father?²² And is not therefore Mignon, the daughter of an abandoned mother and the product of incest, doubly excluded from the realm of the father and the symbolic?

In order to prevent an additional threatening incursion of female sexuality into the male realm—we should remember that Sperata herself was the product of unwanted sexuality²³ and excluded from her natal family—Mignon was tattooed with the sign of “ein Kruzifix, von verschiedenen Buchstaben und Zeichen begleitet” (577). Like Mignon's origins as they are narrated in the plot, the mark is hidden in the narrative. We neither know when it was inscribed nor by whom. To be sure, the inscription leads to the (in her case posthumous) agnitio (recognition),²⁴ a favored plot device in fiction concerning abandoned children. But such recognition is usually brought about by tokens or amulets, signs of parental concern for the child's welfare, or by birth marks or accidental, “natural” scars. It is possible to see the sign she bears as having the protective significance usually attributed to amulets or to symbols of the cross. That, at least, is the Abbé's interpretation. He reports that Mignon derived consolation from the image (“Mit welcher Inbrunst küβte sie in ihren letzten Augenblicken [!] das Bild des Gekreuzigten … auf ihren … Armen,” 577).²⁵ But his interpretation is questionable because Mignon, during her last moments, has no time to kiss the cross, nor is the Abbé present at the occasion. The tattoo “des Gekreuzigten, das auf ihren Armen mit vielen hundert Punkten sehr zierlich abgebildet steht” (577) is a brutal mutilation, a mutilation comparable to the scars on Oedipus's heels, the marks of the exposed, cast off, inevitably doomed child. Both Oedipus and Mignon are children whose infantile sexuality threatens the patriarchy. Mignon's inscription is the sign of her rejection. It seals her permanently into the symbiotic mother/child bond and destines her never to experience a love other than that of the infantile symbiotic relation.

Another consequence of traumatic rejection experienced by Mignon appears in her permanent loss of trust in people and in the splitting of the mother image. The physician reports that, after hearing the acrobats who had abducted her belittling her and joking about their exploit,²⁶ Mignon had had a vision of the “Mutter Gottes” (522), who assured the child that she would sustain her. Mignon had then sworn “bei sich selbst einen heiligen Eid, daβ sie künftig niemand mehr vertrauen, niemand ihre Geschichte erzählen und in der Hoffnung einer unmittelbaren göttlichen Hülfe leben und sterben wolle” (522). The vision (hallucination) is the image of the good mother; it consolidates the split forever. Natalie and the physician reconstruct the contents and the context of the hallucination from isolated remarks of Mignon's, from her songs, and from “kindlichen Unbesonnenheiten, die gerade das verraten, was sie verschweigen wollen” (522). Mignon keeps to her oath of silence and trusts Natalie as little as anyone else. In fact, because her oath and hallucination are likely screen memories of the earlier traumatic loss of trust in the mother repressed in the preverbal phase, the indirect revelations Natalie and the physician observe are the only revelations Mignon can make. The function of the split is the same as it is for other abused and neglected children: to preserve an aspect of the good nurturing mother in order to assure a minimal sense of security for survival's sake.²⁷ The image of the bad mother is likewise repressed and appears acted out in Mignon's self-punishments, particularly in her refusal to accept a bed or even straw, anything soft and comforting, that is maternal, to rest on. The minimal sense of inner security comes at a high price for Mignon because the child remains bound to the mother image repressed in the pre-verbal phase. She is therefore condemned to permanent silence and isolation. The psychodynamics of abuse and neglect at this very early age make the damage irremediable.²⁸ The physical abuse by the master of the acrobatic troupe which we observed at the beginning of the Mignon action subtly prepares the reader to note the other, more hidden signs of violation I have pointed out.

These dynamics of an individual life history must be seen in the larger social and familial context of the novel and its ideological critique of feudalism. Goethe gives considerable attention to the differences in socialization of the children in the feudal family of Mignon and the Marchese, and in Natalie's noble and Wilhelm's bourgeois families. In the case of the Marchese's family, as we know from his narrative, family roles and rules are fixed with no allowance for individual wishes, endowments, and drives. Every member of this feudal, Catholic family is a player in a preordained game. Any deviation from roles or rules dictated by class and church leads into pathology. The grandfather's guilt over his belated passion for his wife without procreative intent forces him to abandon Sperata, Mignon's mother, and to deny her legitimacy.²⁹ And surely her name is ironic, as her life and that of all persons connected with her ends in hopelessness. Sperata's abandonment leads to her meeting with Augustin in adulthood as a stranger and hence, as in the case of Oedipus and Jocasta, to their inadvertent incest. The feudal family's birth order rules assign to Augustin a role not compatible with his introverted temperament and poetic and scholarly inclinations. But exchanging birth order roles with his younger brother and becoming a monk does not result in greater life satisfaction. His sensitivity, passion, and inclination towards fantasy only increase in his monastic existence and lead him to succumb to the charms of the first and only woman he meets, Sperata.

In Natalie's noble family, roles prescribed by birth order also regulate socialization. But even in the first generation, the individual adjusts to changing circumstances. Thus when the Oheim, the first-born and inheritor of title and estate, loses his wife and child, he adopts the three daughters of his less fortunate brother and helps them to achieve those positions in life most suited to their talents and inclinations. But tragedy strikes again in the second generation and requires the Oheim once more to adapt to changing circumstances. After the death of his married niece and her husband, he adopts their four children and assists them in realizing their individual identities. He is capable of responding to family tragedy and human nature with flexibility. His encouragement of self-development, his loving care and model of public spiritedness produce particularly in Natalie and Lothario a new generation that is flexible enough to relinquish feudal rights and enterprising enough to take a leadership role in a new society.

In Wilhelm's development through the medium of art (the exposure to his grandfather's collection) and the theater (the exposure to French classical as well as Shakespearean drama as actor and dramaturg), the reader can observe a growth towards the capacity to take public responsibility. Thus changed from his bourgeois origins, he comes to share the new nobility's goals and way of life.³⁰ It is not for nothing that the union of the nobility and the bourgeoisie as exemplified by Wilhelm's and Natalie's marriage is prefigured by the Oheim's and Marchese's acquisition of Wilhelm's grandfather's art collection. The denouement of the novel favors an alliance between the educated bourgeois and the progressive nobility in a new society which rests on education, Bildung, and on service to the society at large. In this larger frame, Mignon's fate marks the decadence and end of feudal society. It is not by chance that in death she and the Oheim share the Hall of Remembrance as its first two occupants: she the youngest of a moribund order, he the oldest of a rejuvenated one. This much is conscious on Goethe's part.

But is it not strange that this new society has no room for a living Mignon? Is she so disturbing that she must be eradicated? Let us look at this new society once again. There is no doubt that it is patriarchal. Men like the Oheim and the Abbé have assumed not only the roles of educators but even those of mothers.³¹ Lothario, Natalie, the Countess, and Friedrich are raised by their uncle and the Abbé after their mother's early death. In fact, as all of the male characters and all of the admirable women characters (the “schöne Seele,” Therese, Natalie) grow up, the fathers are decisive, positive influences who not only guide their intellectual development but even their preparation for female roles. For instance, Therese's father encourages his daughter's playful activities in “Küche, … Vorratskammer, … Scheunen und Böden” (447) by providing “meinem kindischen Bestreben stufenweise die zweckmäβigsten Beschäftigungen” (447). Her mother neither loves her nor encourages her. On the other hand, mothers in the novel are either dead (those of Felix, Frau Melina, Mignon, Natalie, Lothario, Friedrich, the Countess, Aurelie) or they or rather their surrogates are bad mothers (those of Therese, Lydie, Frau Melina, Felix).³² There is only one good mother/child relationship mentioned in passing in the entire novel, namely that between Margarete, Lothario's former lover and daughter of a tenant farmer, and her children, that is to say a relationship in a social class separated by a wide gulf from the nobility and the bourgeoisie. Lothario's encounter with Margaret and her children leads him to exclaim, “Es ist nichts reizender, als eine Mutter zu sehen mit einem Kinde auf dem Arme, und nichts ehrwürdiger, als eine Mutter unter vielen Kindern” (470). But note that mother and children here are only the objects of his gaze; he does not interact with them and only speaks briefly to the mother; the class barrier between nobility and peasantry remains firmly in place. It therefore appears that the novel generalizes the unsupportive, pathological relationship of Mignon and her mother to all middle-and upper-class mother/child relationships. Only a few, especially insightful, fathers like the Oheim and the Abbé can provide that nurture and guidance needed to build the new society.

Further and most decisively, only those women can belong to this new society whose sexuality is completely denied (Natalie, Therese) or domesticated by pregnancy and marriage (Philine), or subdued by marriage to a particularly cold and intellectual male as with Lydie to Jarno. The other women involved with Wilhelm are stigmatized as either immoral, hysterical, abnormally sexual, or illegitimate, and they all die—Marianne, Aurelie, Mignon.³³ The price of the new society is the almost total eradication of female sexuality. Female sexuality certainly is not sublimated. It rests together with Mignon's angelically dressed and embalmed remains, a “Schein des Lebens” (577), in a theatrical crypt or is forever postponed in Natalie's waiting for the consummation of her marriage. It is here that we find one of the most serious flaws in the utopianism of German Classicism, a blemish that succeeding generations of critical readers sensed but did not understand in the tastelessness with which Mignon's interment is evoked.³⁴

That the novel's ideological point is the victory of a new patriarchy appears in its last and culminating episode, namely the resolution of the harpist's, Mignon's father's story, a play on and an inversion of the Oedipal myth. Note that the allusions to the Oedipal myth run throughout the story of Mignon and the harpist. The Marchese attributes the harpist's madness to a compulsive fear of being murdered by a boy, “denn alle seine Leidenschaften,” after being separated from Sperata, “schienen sich in der einzigen Furcht des Todes aufgelöst zu haben” (590). This fear makes him paranoid about Mignon as long as he is not certain of her sex. It leads him to attack Felix, attempting to knife him (“als wenn er ihn opfern wollte”) and then burn the remains (330-32). Augustin loses this fear when he obtains a vial of opium, i.e. the means of ending his own life. Having power over his own death, he regains power over his life and reason (“Ich danke diesem Besitz die Wiederkehr meiner Vernunft. […] So habe ich … mich durch die Nähe des Todes wieder in das Leben zurückgedrängt,” 596-97). He loses this power when, at the end, he discovers the Abbé's manuscript with his own story and realizes that others know his history and therefore have power over him. Deciding to commit suicide, he takes out the vial but then leaves it unguarded. When he believes that Felix has drunk from the deadly vial, he kills himself with a knife. It is a dramatic irony that indirectly, therefore, his delusion becomes reality: he dies by the instrument he had intended to use on Felix; and a powerless boy takes his life.

Together with the physician who has a fine record of exact observations but astonishingly often draws the wrong conclusions from them, past readers have accepted the harpist's delusion about the murderous boy as the nonsensical idea of a madman. But the delusion betrays his unconscious psychodynamics. The delusion dates in fact from the time when he left Sperata and her unborn child. This murderous boy hence becomes the projection of his guilt feelings towards mother and child for having abandoned them. He never knew the sex of the child; but since he identifies with it, he must believe it is male. His feeling of guilt for having abandoned his son then inspires him to draw a further parallel between himself and Laius, the father of Oedipus: abandoning fathers are killed by their sons. One mythical story of incest leads to another, and the reader might recall what we said about Mignon's pre-oedipal relation to her mother earlier: incest with mother or sister means being excluded from the world of the Father and from his inheritance; it means exclusion from the human community of the patriarchy, from the realm of the symbolic, and from Bildung. It means imprisonment in the semiotic realm of the mother. And the realm of the mother, as the story of Mignon demonstrates, is equivalent to the rule of female sexuality, which is the antithesis of Bildung. The hysterical chaos, its fearful, irrational excess, the lawlessness and speechlessness of the matriarchal sphere lead to insanity, autism and retardation, and back into death. In the Hall of Remembrance death is represented as a goddess, “diese willkürliche und unerbittliche Todesgöttin,” and while all of life is subject to “Gesetz,” death explicitly has “kein Gesetz” (576). Neither the harpist nor Mignon can be tolerated by the new society because of the stage of development that they represent. Both are too much part of the realm of the archaic matriarchal, which becomes all too easily the archaic realm of the goddess of death.

Notes

1. HA 7:91. Henceforth all citations of this volume will be referenced in my text.

2. Helmut Ammerlahn, “Mignons nachgetragene Vorgeschichte und das Inzestmotiv,” Monatshefte 64 (1972).

3. In “Uber Goethes Meister” Friedrich Schlegel calls Mignon, Sperata and Augustin “die heilige Familie der Naturpoesie.”

4. Alfredo Dornheim, “Goethes Mignon und Thomas Manns Echo: Zwei Formen des göttlichen Kindes im deutschen Roman,” Euphorion 46 (1952).

5. The reasons for not dismissing her tragedy as mere pathology are manifold, not the least of which are Wilhelm's reaction to Jarno's disparagement of Mignon (193), or Mignon's insightful reply when she declines Wilhelm's wish to have her further her formal education: “Ich bin gebildet genug, … um zu lieben und zu trauern” (488).

6. John Money, “Forensic and Family Psychiatry in Abuse Dwarfism: Munchhausen's Syndrome by Proxy, Atonement, and Addiction to Abuse,” Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy 11,1 (1985): 30-40.

7. The particular features of the language disturbance and the social behavior are very similar to those observed in another “wild child”; cf. Susan Curtiss, Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern Day “Wild Child” (New York: Academic Press, 1977).

8. Similarly Kurt R. Eissler, Goethe: A Psychoanalytic Study (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963) 2:757.

9. The first incident of a clearly sexual nature takes place when Wilhelm has threatened to leave and she seeks refuge in his arms. The description stresses her orgasm-like twitching, convulsions, and final melting in his arms. The second incident is her unsuccessful attempt to sleep with Wilhelm. Cf. also Eissler 2:759ff.

10. Mignon = Freudenknabe; the association with the contemporary Prussian court is surely deliberate. Mignon is not her given name. She does not claim it as hers. “Sie heiβen mich Mignon,” she answers to Wilhelm's inquiry (98). The physician, in reporting on her abduction, contradicts himself by claiming on the one hand that she was too young to know her name and on the other hand that she had sworn not to reveal it (522).

11. In this context, the double repression is important in that the incest results from the grandfather's secrecy and inability to acknowledge his sexuality.

12. The average age of weaning in the eighteenth century was two. Cf. Pediatrics of the Past, ed. John Ruhräh (New York: Hober, 1925); Hovolka and Kronfeld, Vergleichende Volksmedizin (Stuttgart: Strecker und Schröder, 1909) 2:605. It is of course impossible to reconstruct Mignon's age relative to events from the narrative beyond what can be inferred from normal practice.

13. The Marchese denies the abandonment, but the novel describes how the child Mignon acts out the feeling that she is abandoned. Cf. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 24. Boswell's excellent study clearly establishes that Mignon's fate of expulsion from the family has countless historical parallels.

14. Cf. Curtiss (note 7).

15. Cf. Donald Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971) 11.

16. Cf. Margaret Mahler et al., The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975). Based on clinical studies of well-bonded, ambivalently bonded and rejecting mothers, Mahler gives a detailed account of the three paths the mother/infant relationship can take during the initial individuation/separation phases from 0-18 months. Her examples demonstrate the importance of the mother's positive attitude toward the child and how severe developmental disturbances result from very early stress on and disruption of the mother/infant bond.

17. Cf. Sperata's attempts to resurrect the child she believes to be dead. The prominence and length the narrative gives to the maternal resurrection efforts (eight paragraphs) as compared to the length of the childhood story (four paragraphs) indicates the severity of maternal guilt.

18. It was Renee Spitz who recognized the absence of a specific and constant maternal care-giver in institutionalized children as the reason for hospitalism, that is, the wasting away and dying of an infant even with ample nourishment and physical care: The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965.)

19. Cf. Jerome Bruner, “The ontogenesis of speech acts,” Journal of Child Language 2 (1975): 1-19. Bruner demonstrates how important the pre-verbal and early verbal mother/child interaction in turn-taking, segmenting of reality, and language play is to cognitive and language development. Needless to say, for object-relations linguists—as opposed to Lacanians—language development is at first the realm of the mother.

20. John Money in Venuses, Oenuses: Sexology, Sexosophy and Exigency Theory (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1986) 596 substitutes for the nature/nurture argument about gender differences a paradigm shift to a “three term integration of nature/critical period/nurture. … It means that nature and nurture interact at a critical period of development, that the outcome of this interaction is governed by its timing and that the outcome … will henceforth be indelible.” Similar limitations as to gender development apply to language and other aspects of cognitive/emotional development, a problem studied with autistic and so-called wild or wolf children. Cf. Curtiss.

21. Cf. Sigrid Weigel, Die Stimme der Medusa: Schreibweisen in der Gegenwartsliteratur von Frauen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989) 204ff., whose description of Kristeva's semiotic is useful for interpreting the incest problem. Kristeva's distinction between the semiotic (pre-, early verbal and non-verbal communication) and the symbolic (later, post-oedipal?) language as a system of the patriarchy corresponds roughly to the distinction made by Curtiss between right- and left-hemisphere-based communication.

22. In object relations, bonding theory, and clinical experience, e.g. Winnicott, Mahler, or John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 3 vols. it is not too much mother love that holds back the child's development but rather ambivalent and insufficient love. What is described in the Sperata/Mignon relationship is a pathological version of the semiotic or the mother/infant bond.

23. On the abandonment of children of “ill-timed passions,” cf. Boswell (note 13) 338, who gives Bertold von Regensburg among others as a possible source for the practice.

24. Cf. Boswell 122. Recognition and recovery of abandoned children in literature was usually, of course, brought about by means of a token, a sign, a “natural” means such as a scar or a mole. In Mignon's case, the artificial, cultural signature is striking.

25. As a protective sign it is like a “linking object,” which, like a security blanket, according to Winnicott, Playing and Reality, maintains a link with the absent mother.

26. The reference to joking (“scherzten … über ihren guten Fang,” 522) here is significant. It points to the fact that Mignon feels shame at having been abandoned. Self-blame is characteristic of abandoned and abused children. As a defense mechanism, self-blame preserves an aspect of the parent as “good,” that is, reasonable in rejecting the child.

27. Cf. Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

28. Goethe's description of the abused child, the individual and family psychodynamics, and their consequences are amazingly perceptive and clinically accurate. It does not really matter on whose image Goethe's observations are based. Most likely it is the singer Elisabeth Schmeling, abused by her alcoholic father, cf. Wolf, Mignon (München: Beck, 1909), whom Goethe knew from childhood on. Given the amount of abuse of children in the eighteenth century, it was not hard to observe such dynamics. Unlike his critics and later literary scholars, however, his emotional equilibrium was not so shaken by child abuse that he needed to repress or deny it.

29. Boswell 338 comments on the fear of “dire consequences of ill-timed passions” of married couples in thirteenth-century writing, for instance in the sermons of Bertold von Regensburg.

30. Cf. Dieter Borchmeyer, Höfische Gesellschaft und Französische Revolution bei Goethe (Kronberg/Ts.: Athenäum, 1977). Borchmeyer traces Goethe's views concerning the decadence of the feudal system and the rapprochement between bourgeois and aristocratic life style and way of thinking in the course of the Lehrjahre in Wilhelm's transformation from Bürger into Citoyen, from a man confined in the private sphere into a man shouldering public responsibility. Goethe's contemporaries saw the marriages at the end as misalliances and regarded them, at best, as utopian. But Borchmeyer sees the secret societies of the eighteenth century, of which the Turmgesellschaft is one, as locales where the educated bourgeois and the nobility-cum-bourgeois could approach each other.

31. The case is similar to that which Gail K. Hart establishes in “A Family without Women: The Triumph of the Sentimental Father in Lessing's Sara Sampson and Klinger's Sturm und Drang,” Lessing Yearbook XXII (1990): 113-32.

32. Felix is raised by the deceitful procuress, old Barbara, during his first three years and then by the passionately irrational Aurelie. Therese/Lydie's and Frau Melina's mothers are substitute mothers, or rather mothers who turn out to be stepmothers. Both harm or attempt to harm their daughters. Wilhelm's mother appears to be the exception until her role in his life is looked at more closely. Though she claims to be the source of his love for the theater by having provided the puppet theater (12), the actual giver and instructor is the lieutenant, a friend of his father's. She permits the boy's interest because his talent is flattering to her. She is given to blaming (12, 14), must be deceived (20) and placated (12-14). She has no role in teaching him anything, and simply disappears from the narrative without a trace.

33. Cf. Sabine Gross, “Scripting the Female Body: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister,” paper presented at the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, Lexington, Ky., April 1990. On the fate of women in eighteenth-century domestic drama, cf. Gail K. Hart, “Voyeuristic Star-Gazing: Authority, Instinct and the Women's World of Goethe's Stella,” Monatshefte 82, 4 (1990): 405-20.

34. Monika Fick, Das Scheitern des Genius: Mignon und die Symbolik der Liebesgeschichten in “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahren” (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1987) 239 gives a detailed summary of these opinions (“Unsagbarer Kitsch”).