The Mystery of Mignon: Object Relations, Abandonment, Child Abuse and Narrative Structure

URSULA MAHLENDORF The Mystery of Mignon: Object Relations, Abandonment, Child Abuse and Narrative Structure 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 "Geschöpf1 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, as metaphor of natural poetry {Naturpoesie)? or as figure of the divine child, 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 24 Ursula Mahlendorf 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 Márchese, 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 secondor 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...