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By Root 5637 0

particular aspect of the hero or heroine's personality. We have already become aware that there is one part of them, one desire, one appetite, which is nagging at them to the point where the urge to gratify it is building up into an overwhelming obsession. This may be an appetite for power, as in the case of Macbeth or Marlowe's Dr Faustus, who dreams of winning `power, honour and omnipotence' such as no man has ever enjoyed before. It maybe a hunger for sex ual excitement or romantic passion, as with Humbert Humbert, or those two wives frustrated by their tedious, inadequate husbands, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary. It maybe a longing for sensation rather vaguer and harder to define, as in the examples of Dorian Gray or Bonnie and Clyde, committing bank robberies for `kicks, where elements of sexual desire and the desire for power over others are mixed together.

But in every instance we are aware that what their obsession is drawing them into is something which violates and defies some prohibition or law or convention or duty or commitment or standard of normality. They are being tempted into stepping outside the bounds which circumscribe them.' Icarus wishes to defy the balance of the natural laws which govern his flight. Doctor Faustus wishes to step outside the bounds of conventional knowledge. Dr Jekyll and Dorian Gray wish to step outside the bounds of morality. Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary wish to step outside the bounds of their marriages. In every case, the tragic hero or heroine has come to sense the circumstances in which we originally discover them - Macbeth, Bonnie and Clyde, Humbert Humbert, Don Jose - as in some way irksome, restricting, tedious, inadequate.

And it is this sense of constriction from which the Temptation - whether it originates within themselves or is personified in the figure of a Tempter or Temptress who lures them on - seems to offer the promise of almost unimaginably exhilarating release.

This leads on to a second difference between the pattern of Tragedy and that of other kinds of story. When the hero of a Quest or an Overcoming the Monster story receives the `Call, not only are we in no doubt that they should answer it: we know that they will have to commit themselves to their adventure totally, body, mind, heart and soul; and they usually leave no one else in any doubt as to their intentions. We are given the impression of someone completely and openly dedicated to the course he is embarking on.

When the heroes or heroines of Tragedy are faced with the Temptation it is a different matter. In many instances we see them struggling or wavering before they succumb, a sign that they are initially by no means single-minded about giving way. Faustus wrestles with himself before signing his pact with the Devil, as he hears the arguments of the `Evil Angel' urging him on and the `Good Angel' trying to call him back. Macbeth falters at the sight of the dagger in his hand, until Lady Macbeth as his `evil angel' pushes him onward. Brutus wavers through the course of the stormy, ill-omened night before Caesar's murder, until the `evil angel' Cassius finally persuades him. Don Jose is torn between his `good angel' Micaela, and his `evil angel' Carmen.

In each instance it is as if part of them is reluctant to commit the irrevocable act which another part of them has come to desire: as if, right from the start, the tragic hero or heroine is a'divided self', one part of their personality striving against another.

A second way in which many heroes or heroines of Tragedy may be seen as `divided' is in the need to keep their `dark' impulses and actions hidden from the world behind a 'light' or respectable front. The main reason why Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has become one of the most celebrated stories of the English-speaking world is precisely because it crystallises this familiar motif so vividly, by making the central characteristic of the story the splitting of the hero into two quite distinct personalities, the respectable, law-abiding Jekyll and his secret `shadow-self, the deformed and totally