The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [129]
Even more significant than the hero's relations with these male figures are those between him and the chief feminine figures in the story: particularly when we bear in mind how important it is to a fully resolved happy ending that the hero should eventually be brought together with a heroine as his `other half' in perfect, loving union.
The chief feminine figures in Tragedy also tend to polarise into two distinct types:
The Innocent Young Girl
On the one hand, most poignant of all the hero's victims because she is so defenceless against his hard-hearted egotism, there is the innocent young girl. She stands in relation to the hero as `good angel', but is inadequate to sway him. Sooner or later the hero brutally rejects her. And there is no moment in Tragedy more pregnant with the horror of what is happening to the hero on his downward path than when the fate of such a girl is decided: as when little Matryosha, after being raped by Stavrogin, sits in her trance muttering `I have killed God, before committing suicide. Sibyl Vane, rejected by Dorian Gray, does likewise. When little Micaela is finally rejected by Don Jose and creeps away into the shadows, we know he is doomed. The whole tragedy of Othello is contained precisely in the way that he blindly turns on the `good angel' of his life, his `other half' Desdemona, and stabs her to death.
The Temptress
The other type of heroine in Tragedy is quite different, in that she is herself a `dark' figure, leading the hero on. Even so, the Temptress almost invariably ends up dying a violent death, usually at much the same time as the hero. Bonnie, having drawn Clyde into his life of violent crime, is shot down with him in the clos ing moments of the story. Cleopatra, having lured Antony away from his manly 'Roman self' and played a crucial part in dragging him down to military humiliation, commits suicide shortly after he does. The most terrible symptom of the nightmare closing in on Macbeth is the onset of his wife's insanity, leading to her mysterious death shortly before his own.
At least these `dark' heroines remain faithful to the man they have drawn down to destruction. In other versions of the theme the Temptress slips away from the hero in the closing stages, and nothing contributes more to his mounting sense of frustration than the fact that the woman for whom he has staked all proves ultimately elusive. Humbert loses Lolita. Carmen's abandonment of Don Jose drives him to final distraction. Catherine, the `apparition' who bewitches Jules and Jim, ends up by slipping away from one and dragging the other down to his doom. And nowhere is this motif of the `elusive feminine' presented more subtly than in Doctor Faustus where, as the last, supreme demonstration of his devil-given powers, the hero is permitted to conjure up the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, Helen of Troy. Faustus steps forward to seize and kiss her. She turns out to be just another insubstantial vision, and vanishes. At last he knows all is lost.
In every instance the hero finds himself unable to reach the fulfilment he craves, where he can achieve complete and lasting union with his desired `other half'. Either she drags him down to share his destruction, or she skips away from him like a will o' the wisp. The same is true, in reverse, of tragedies centred on a heroine.
Both Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary leave the dull, inadequate security of their