The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [149]
Eventually, corresponding to the kinds of story we are more familiar with in adult life, we may see the dark power represented much more directly as something springing entirely from within the hero or heroine's own personality: they have been unable to withstand the evil spell cast over them by the dark part of themselves.
In the middle, as a bridge between the two, we may see the kind of story where both these things happen: where the dark power is initially personified in magical figures outside the hero, who place him under a spell: but where its effect is to turn him into a dark figure himself.
Before we conclude this exploration of the Rebirth story we shall look at one more example of each of these basic forms which the plot can assume.
Fidelio
The first example shows how it need not be only in fairy tales, or in stories written primarily for children, that we may see a hero who is trapped in a state of living death by a dark figure outside him. The profoundly moving story of Beethoven's opera Fidelio provides us with another instance of an imprisoned hero being released by a heroine, seen from the heroine's point of view. But we are not here looking, as in Beauty and the Beast, at a naive, relatively passive young heroine who achieves the hero's liberation unwittingly. Here, as in the adult version of Gerda in The Snow Queen, we see a heroine who is not just good hearted; she is the most `active' figure in the story, determined, courageous and fully aware of what she is doing, as she sets out to rescue her hero from a physical and spiritual imprisonment which has reduced him to helpless impotence and despair.
The hero of the opera, Florestan, has been seized by an evil tyrant Pizarro, whose crimes he had been about to expose to the world, and thrown into the deepest, most secret dungeon of the fearsome prison of which Pizarro is governor. It is even generally assumed that the disappeared Florestan must be already dead (as in The Snow Queen it was assumed that Kay must have died when he disappeared), but Leonore his wife - like Gerda - refuses to believe it and determines to rescue him. First she disguises herself as a young man, like the `active' heroines who play a chief liberating role in Shakespearean comedy, Portia, Viola or Rosalind, and talks herself into the post of assistant to the chief gaoler of Pizarro's prison, Rocco. After a comparatively cosy domestic opening, as if the opera were Comedy (with Rocco's daughter expressing her love for the `young man'), we then meet the grim tyrant Pizarro himself, who learns that the mysterious `Minister' is on his way to the prison to enquire into accusations that Pizarro has been exercising his authority unjustly. Realising that he dare not allow the Minister to discover Florestan, Pizarro makes preparations to kill his victim, ordering Rocco to dig the grave and arranging for a trumpet to sound to warn him of the Minister's approach. The first act ends with all the other prisoners allowed briefly up into the fresh air and sunlight, which they compare to emergence from the grave, before they are plunged down into the darkness again.
It is only at the beginning of Act Two that we are at last, amid the atmosphere of steadily gathering threat, allowed to see the hero himself - as we penetrate far beneath the earth to the squalid dungeon where Florestan is confined in perpetual darkness, in heavy chains. He is in the depths of despair, thinking he is about to die: but briefly imagines that he feels a `gentle, soft stirring breeze' and sees his `tomb illumined' by the vision of `an angel, so like my wife Leonore, who leads me to freedom in the Heavenly Kingdom'. As he sinks down again, exhausted, Rocco and Leonore descend into the darkness to dig his grave. Even before she recognises the shadowy prisoner, Leonore is overcome with pity for his dreadful plight. When she sees who it actually is, she faints with shock,