Obscure Desire: Goethe and the Imbalanced Pedagogy of What Maisie Knew

Abstract:What is the importance of the children Mignon and Felix, in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, for the themes of sexuality and pedagogy in What Maisie Knew? Grounded in suggestive correspondences between geographically distant, but conceptually allied narratives, James’s novel appears to invert the moral compass of Goethe’s bildungsroman to craft Maisie’s misguidedness and perhaps that of her narrator. While distancing Maisie from the preconceptions of the narrator, I credit, as a foreshadowing of What Maisie Knew, James’s allusion—in his personal review of the Meister narratives—to “pernicious conclusions.” Features of both Mignon and Felix, as transposed by James, resurface in Maisie, while Wilhelm morphs into a predatory Sir Claude.