Files and filing cabinets represent the enriching details a curious person can collect throughout life, and more importantly the wisdom they can accumulate in the process. Claudia and Jamie encounter Mrs. Frankweiler’s files and filing cabinets at the end of the novel, when they visit her office in search of answers about the Angel statue. Mrs. Frankweiler explains that her overflowing, mysteriously organized filing cabinets are a collection of “secrets,” and that the value of such secrets is not the fame or wealth they could potentially bring the holder, but the fact that they make a person different “on the inside where it counts.” This is why Mrs. Frankweiler doesn’t share or sell information from her files to just anyone—keeping secrets is more precious to her than the money or status she could get otherwise. After the kids successfully search her files and discover the sketch that proves Michelangelo sculpted Angel, they, too, share in one of Mrs. Frankweiler’s “secrets” and the sense of difference that the secrets bestow.
Seeing her crazy filing system, Jamie observes that if secrets make a person different on the inside, then Mrs. Frankweiler must have the most “mixed-up” insides anyone has ever seen. He means this as a compliment, and indeed, Mrs. Frankweiler’s sense of humor, generosity, and perceptiveness about people suggest that her accumulated secrets have helped make her a delightfully rich and layered person. By implication, a person can collect secrets for their own gain—but in so doing, they miss the secrets’ true value. By navigating her filing system and finding their own cherished treasure within, the story suggests, the kids might become happily “mixed-up” people in Mrs. Frankweiler’s style.
The novel itself comprises items from Mrs. Frankweiler’s mixed-up files—the account of Claudia and Jamie’s adventure that Mrs. Frankweiler writes for Saxonberg, as well as various attached items, like the Metropolitan Museum’s letter to the Kincaids and Sheldon’s report about the kids’ behavior during their chauffeured trip home. So, the novel’s very structure invites readers into Mrs. Frankweiler’s “mixed-up files,” encouraging readers to become good collectors of secrets not just within the story, but in their own lives, too.
Files and Filing Cabinets Quotes in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
You never knew that I could write this well, did you? Of course, you don’t actually know yet, but you soon will. I’ve spent a lot of time on this file. I listened. I investigated, and I fitted all the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle. It leaves no doubts. Well, Saxonberg, read and discover.
Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
They walked behind Parks through my living room, drawing room, and library. Rooms so filled with antique furniture, Oriental rugs, and heavy chandeliers that you complain that they are also filled with antique air. Well, when a house is as old as mine, you can expect everything in it to be thickened by time. Even the air. My office surprised them after all this. It surprises everyone. (You once told me, Saxonberg, that my office looks more like a laboratory than an office. That’s why I call what I do there research.) I suppose it does look like a lab furnished as it is with steel, Formica, vinyl and lit by fluorescence. You must admit though that there’s one feature of the room that looks like an office. That’s the rows and rows of filing cabinets that line the walls.
The other side of the paper needed no translation. For there, in the midst of sketches of hands and torsos was a sketch of someone they knew: Angel. There were the first lines of a thought that was to become a museum mystery 470 years later. There on that piece of old paper was the idea just as it had come from Michelangelo’s head to his hand, and he had jotted it down.
Claudia looked at the sketch until its image became blurred. She was crying.
“I’m a collector of all kinds of things besides art,” I said pointing to my files.
“If all those files are secrets, and if secrets make you different on the inside, then your insides, Mrs. Frankweiler, must be the most mixed-up, the most different insides I’ve ever seen.”
Files and Filing Cabinets Symbol Timeline in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
