The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [151]
Dickon is delighted to help Mary clear the garden and to plant seeds. Winter is turning to spring, soon there are bulbs pushing up on every side in their secret garden, birds building nests. Mary is now bright-eyed, amazing the servants by her ravenous appetite, for the first time in her life fired by real enthusiasm - and it is this which prepares her for the test which confronts her when she at last, one night, tracks down the source of the mysterious sobbing. Hidden away in a secret room at the heart of the house, she finds a crippled, sickly boy, Colin, Mr Craven's son. After Mary and his father, Colin is the third major prisoner of the story, and in some ways in the worst plight of all. A self-pitiful hypochondriac, who has spent most of his life in bed, fearing that he will shortly die, liable to fly into terrible rages, treating the servants like dirt, he is a little monster. But, buoyed up by her newfound spirit, Mary will have none of this selfish behaviour. She tells him about her secret garden and Dickon, she infects him with some of her own enthusiasm and has to promise to bring Dickon up to Colin's bedroom. From this moment on, the tendency of everything in the story is upward. As spring turns to summer, the secret garden becomes ever more full of life. Colin gets strong enough to make secret visits to the garden in a wheelchair with Dickon and Mary, and even ventures out of his chair to stand and walk: `I shall get well. And I shall live for ever and ever and ever'. He creates for them all a kind of ceremonial in reverence for the `magic, the healing power of life and nature which is bursting out everywhere around them and which he can feel transforming him with every day that passes. Eventually one of the servants is so amazed by these mysterious events that she sends a telegram to Mr Craven, who is on one of his long, miserable wanderings in foreign lands, suggesting that he come home. He returns unannounced to hear laughter from behind the wall, in the garden where nobody is supposed to have entered since his wife's death. As he opens the door, a tall, healthy looking boy rushes past him: Mr Craven stares in astonishment - it is his son, whom he last saw as an incurable invalid. The story ends with father and son walking together, straight, tall and happy, back to the house. The dark spell has at last been lifted. Everyone in the little kingdom of Misselthwaite has been redeemed and is at one - with each other, with nature and with the boundless power of life which, thanks to Dickon, is now pouring indivisibly through them all.
Peer Gynt
For a final example of the Rebirth plot we return to the kind of story where, as in The Snow Queen, the hero falls under an evil spell cast by dark figures outside him, but with the result that he becomes a dark figure himself. He is completely possessed by darkness, both from without and within. In fact Ibsen's semiallegorical Peer Gynt is not only the most complicated example of the Rebirth story we have looked at, but psychologically one of the most ambitiously complex stories ever written.
When we meet the hero, Peer Gynt, he is on the verge of adult life, 20 years old, and an incorrigible liar and romancer (in both senses, a fantasiser and a womaniser). He and his mother go off to a village wedding party, where Peer is jeered at by everyone, like the hero of a Rags to Riches story - although in his case the scorn is justified, because he is a boastful teller of tales. A demure young girl