The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [184]
In other words, like an old `Before and After' advertisement, Comedy shows us the contrast between two fundamental states of human nature. We are introduced to a little world - a household, a group of families, a city, a kingdom - which has fallen under the shadow of the dark power. The darkness may emanate primarily from the blind and heartless egotism of one dominant figure. But the result is that everyone is affected: everyone is stumbling about in a fog of frustration and confusion, divided off and obscured from one another, cut off from the flow of life. The fact that people cannot see clearly or whole and the fact that they cannot relate harmoniously to one another are seen as inextricably bound together as symptoms of the same fundamental condition.
But somewhere below the surface, hidden from the community's prevailing state of consciousness, events are constellating towards the moment when the revealing truth can suddenly emerge from the shadows. The distorting pressure of egocentricity is removed, the darkness is dispelled, everyone can `see the light'; and every piece of the jigsaw falls naturally into place. The picture of unity is complete. The current of life can flow unimpeded.
Dark masculine, light feminine
As we have seen, most comedies fall into two groups: those where the chief dark figure of the story stands opposed to the hero and heroine, and to the flow of life in general; and those where the chief dark figure is the hero himself (much less often the heroine).
Of stories in the first category, again the great majority are those where the dark figure is a Dark Father or Tyrant: some powerful older man, usually the head of a household, who is in the grip of some blinding, deadening obsession which casts a shadow over everyone around him, and usually in particular over the young lovers whose union he is opposing. We have seen this familiar figure running all through the history of Comedy, from Aristophanes's Procleon to George Eliot's Mr Casaubon, from the `unrelenting fathers' of New Comedy to those of Moliere, from King Leontes and Count Almaviva to the worlds of Wodehouse and the Marx Brothers.
Only rarely in Comedy do we see the Dark Mother-figure, but where we do she usually plays much the same tyrannical role as the Dark Father, invariably in the name of upholding the `masculine' proprieties and the social order: e.g., Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen's `unrelenting mother' in The Importance of Being Earnest, or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy's imperious, snobbish aunt who tries to prevent him marrying Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.
A rather more frequent figure, particularly in later Comedy, is the Dark Rival for the heroine's hand; e.g., Blifil in Tom Jones, Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal, Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier (although as an older man and a friend of the heroine's father, he is also linked to the Dark Father).
We similarly see examples of the Dark Other Half. An obvious instance is Tom Jones's would-be seducer Lady Bellaston, a mature, beguiling Temptress (although, as an older married woman, she again shows links to the `Dark Mother'). The novels of Jane Austen contain several examples, such as George Wickham, Henry Crawford, William Elliot: all false, unscrupulous triflers with the heroine's affections. Another striking pair of examples appear in War and Peace: Anatole Kuragin, the adventurer who tries to abduct Natasha, and his sister Helene, the imposing, heartless Temptress who marries, then abandons the rich and awkward (and motherless) Pierre. A more modern instance is the intolerable Lina Lamont in Singin' In The Rain.
With a handful of such exceptions, the dark figures in Comedy tend overwhelmingly to be male. They represent the hard, unfeeling, negative side of masculinity