399 ELH 84 (2017) 399–422 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press FIGURE AND GROUND IN GOETHE’S WILHELM MEISTERS LEHRJAHRE BY CHRISTOPHER S. WOOD Many passages in J. W. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, especially in its first two books, set forth little theories of art, repre- sentation, or mimesis. My topic here is a proposition about the right relation between a figure and a ground, formulated by the normally unreflective actress Philine. In book 2, chapter 4, Philine asserts that we are inclined to respond to a moving body directly, as an instance of movement as such, before grasping the body in its formal relation to non-movement—before seeing it as a figure against a ground, in other words. Philine is speaking about a dancer, but her doctrine also has implications for literary fiction and especially for the genre, still undertheorized at the time, which hosts her character: the novel. For her thesis can be translated into a thesis about the relation of a literary character to its narrative context. Philine, like her more mysterious colleague Mignon, also an adept dancer, enters the novel in book 2, chapter 4. Philine promises Wilhelm Meister and his new friend, the actor Laertes, an outing and a midday meal at a hunter’s lodge in the forest. When the men arrive to fetch her at her quarters, they learn that she has already departed in a coach with two strangers. Wilhelm, although his acquaintance with Philine is only a day old, is not happy to have been stood up. In her unreliability Philine bursts like an arabesque upon a flat and fixed surface of pragmatism, matter-of-factness, probity, and expecta- tions that effects will follow causes: the background assumptions of the novel’s world. Reliability was the first principle of Wilhelm’s parents’ world, the youthful Goethe’s world. Philine the actress-adventuress is recognizable as a figure against the homogeneous ground of bourgeois and mercantile society, as if such figures were only recognizable against a ground, defined negatively. Philine herself, with her theory of the figure, will protest against this imputation of negativity. Philine is one who punctuates her own ongoing performative life with songs and dances, performances within performances. Philine’s capers and lyric outbursts, her garland-weaving and coquetries, are topoi copied from the unreal, pre-bourgeois textual worlds of pastoral