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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Dedicated to Ursula R. Mahlendorf
IN THIS ESSAY I WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS Goethe'sconsiderable 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 will shed new light on some of the notoriously difficult structural features of this novel.
Among the most traumatized figures in Goethe's oeuvre, namely Mignon, Natalie, and Ottilie, we find that the most seriously damaged of these three is Mignon, whose early childhood of abuse and neglect has been carefully 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 will 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, Natalie, the physician, the Abbé, and finally her uncle, the Marchese, who in turn tells of her grandfather's, her mother'sand 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.
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