Trauma and Memory in the Wahlverwandtschaften

JILL ANNE KOWALIK Trauma and Memory in the Wahlverwandtschaften Dedicated to Ursula R. Mahlendorf IN this essay I would UKE το discuss Goethe's considerable insight into the dynamic of trauma and memory, and the social-historical critique that his work offers us. I will concentrate on the Wahlverwandtschaften with the hope that my remarks wül shed new Ught on some of the notoriously difficult structural features of this novel.1 Among the most traumatized figures in Goethe's oeuvre, namely Mignon, NataUe, and OttiUe, we find that the most seriously damaged of these three is Mignon, whose early chUdhood of abuse and neglect has been carefuUy analyzed by Ursula R. Mahlendorf in her seminal essay "The Mystery of Mignon: Object Relations, Abandonment, Child Abuse and Narrative Structure," which appeared in the 1994 edition of the Goethe Yearbook? I wiU therefore not recapitulate an argument that has already been made, but I do want to reiterate two points from this important study as a prologue of sorts to my own discussion. Distinguishing between story and plot, Mahlendorf points out: 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, NataUe, 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 formaUy renders and communicates to the reader Mignon's own experience of life, which is as discontinuous as the reader's experience of the narrative.3 Mahlendorf draws our attention here to an authorial strategy that wiU prevail in aU of Goethe's renderings of traumatized figures in his work: the traumatic narrative wUl be fragmented, so that the reader experiences the fragmentation of the victim. The second point concerns the quality of the fragmented narrative: The sexual and pathological core of the Mignon story appears third-hand as a transcript of confidential talks between the Márchese and the Abbé—a manuscript so explosively dangerous that its reading leads to the death of the harpist. . . 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 Goethe Yearbook XII (2004) 130 JUl Anne Kowalik together to present the sexual and pathological Ufe histories to the reader as shameful. .. and in need of narration from a safe distance (they are so dangerous that direct exposure might harm readers as weU as Usteners ). (25) Viewing life narratives of a trauma victim as shameful and dangerous is typicaUy the response of the trauma survivor to her own experience, which is why traumatized women have such difficulty integrating their feelings about the traumatic event into theU overall Ufe experience. Mahlendorfs analysis suggests that, Ui Goethe's view, those who lived with trauma survivors in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany were not able to help the traumatized deal with their emotional reactions to the injury or loss because they shared these same reactions themselves—that is, a certain demonization of trauma. In my own work on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, I have shown how Natalie, who was orphaned at a critical point Ui her psychosexual development , responds to her losses by creating an image of herself as bad and deserving of punishment.4 This is a frequent response of trauma victims Ui order to make senseless injuries seem logicaUy motivated. NataUe's story, that is, her family history and early cMdhood, is presented to us more or less coherently Ui the recoUections of her aunt, the schöne Seele, who does not, however, fuUy grasp the magnitude of what she knows because she herself struggles at the end of her Ufe with the same unresolved oedipal traumas as her niece. Yet the reader is able to recognize NataUe's compensatory reactions to her chUdhood Ui her compulsive care-giving, Ui which she projects her own profound neediness onto the little gkls Ui her charge. The scholarship on the Lehrjahre has, with a few...