The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [150]
The story ends with everyone back above ground, in the open air and sunshine. The Minister orders the monster Pizarro to be taken away for punishment for all his crimes, and tells Leonore that it is her right alone to cut Florestan from his chains. The opera ends on a blazing choral celebration of Leonore's courage and fidelity, surrounding the central inexpressible joy of herself and Florestan at being again united - but also with a sense that all the other denizens of the prison have been redeemed by the victory of light over darkness which Leonore has brought about.3
The Secret Garden
Our second example is of a story which, although written for children, reflects the more familiar adult version of the theme where the imprisonment is shown as springing from within. In fact Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden does not show us only one central character who is imprisoned. As the action unfolds we recognise no fewer than three main characters who have each become trapped in quite separate imprisonments of their own. The cumulative power of the story lies in the way the gradual liberation of one, the heroine, sets off a kind of chain reaction whereby each in turn is liberated: until by the end everyone involved in the story has been caught up in the general rebirth.
We first meet the story's heroine, Mary Lennox, when she is a little girl living in India with her parents, in the Edwardian heyday of the British Empire. Mary is a sour-tempered, sickly, selfish child who has been given no love by her equally selfish parents. Almost the only people she sees are the Indian servants, whom she treats badly. Then one day her parents and her nurse die in a plague, and Mary is sent half across the world to live in a remote mansion in Yorkshire, Misselthwaite Manor, which belongs to her uncle Archibald Craven.
Here, in this great, mysterious house, with the bleak moors outside, Mary finds herself in a strange, shadowy kingdom which itself seems to have fallen under a dark spell. Gradually she tries to unravel some of the mysteries which shroud the house. Why is her crook-backed uncle Mr Craven always away, so lost in himself and so unhappy? Why is there a special part of the garden locked away behind high walls, where no one is allowed to go? More sinister still, what is that strange crying which Mary thinks she hears in some far-off part of the house at night, when the wind is whistling off the moors?
A clue to these mysteries seems to lie in the terrible event which had fallen on the house 10 years earlier, when Mr Craven's beautiful young wife had fallen to her death from a tree in that `secret garden, which is why it is now locked away and why Mary's uncle seems frozen in perpetual despair. But now even the staff of Misselthwaite Manor seem caught up in the same enchantment - the only one who ever smiles and behaves normally is Martha, the cheerful maid, who lives in a little cottage out on the moors, as one of a family of 12 children.
Although she is still a solitary, sour little girl, almost despite herself Mary begins to feel curiosity about all the unfamiliar things she sees in the gardens round the house, such as the friendly little robin who, like Martha, seems full of life and unaffected by the general air of gloom. Indeed it is the robin and Martha who first introduce Mary to the magical thread which is eventually going to lead her out of the labyrinth of misery which surrounds her. The robin digs up the rusty old key buried in a flowerbed which leads Martha through an ivy-covered door into the secret garden. She finds it wild and overgrown but the most beautiful place she has ever seen. She feels