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By Root 5648 0

power of the feminine, centred on selfless feeling and the ability to see whole, making for connection, the healing of division and life. At the deepest level, it is around this opposition that the whole of the eternal conflict presented by stories revolves: and it is this which, in a sense, makes the light heroine the ultimate touchstone of storytelling. For it is she who above all and most directly embodies the feminine value. It is she who most often and most obviously has to be brought forth from the shadows in order for the complete happy ending to a story to be achieved. And this applies not just to those stories where a strong hero has to rescue a defenceless heroine, but just as much to those where an `active' heroine has to emerge from the shadows to rescue a helpless hero, as in the myth of Theseus, Jane Eyre, High Noon, The Merchant of Venice, Fidelio.

But, as we have already explored in the previous chapter, in order for any story to reach that point where the heroine can emerge or be liberated from the shadows to produce the happy ending, there is another vital ingredient which is required to make the equation complete. And we see this brilliantly, if negatively illumined by the plot of Tragedy.

The Dark Inversion

For obvious reasons, Tragedy occupies a unique place among the basic plots, because in a sense it turns the essential pattern of the other main types of story upside down. All these other types of story have their `dark' versions, which we shall return to. But Tragedy is the only basic plot which is primarily concerned with showing what happens when the hero or heroine cannot muster the positive qualities necessary to wrest the life-giving feminine value from the shadows, but become so identified with the dark power that they cannot escape from it. It thus shows the process of transformation taking place in, as it were, a negative form: the hero or heroine are led ever further downwards and into the dark imprisonment, rather than upwards and away from it. And one of the corollaries of this is that we see the landscape familiar from other types of story appearing strangely inverted.

As the light part of the tragic hero or heroine falls further and further under the shadow of the darkness which has taken root in them, and they slip into ever greater egocentricity and lack of feeling for others, we see how their judgement, their ability to see the world straight and whole, becomes increasingly clouded. In fact their vision becomes so distorted that they actually come to see everything at the reverse of its true value. The light values increasingly become a threat to them; light characters come to seem only as obstacles to their egocentric desires. As Macbeth's Witches have it, `fair is foul and foul is fair'; or as Albany puts it in King Lear, `wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile'. And one of the ways in which we see this inversion most strikingly exemplified is in the nature of the figures around the hero or the heroine whom they are most likely to see as hindrances in their path.

In an earlier chapter we saw how there were certain figures who were most likely to become the victims of the tragic hero on his downward course. In fact we can now see how these correspond to the characters who, in other types of story, are most likely to appear as dark figures: except that here, where the hero himself is dark, they appear as light. For instance, the first of the two male figures most likely to become the tragic hero's victims we saw as `the Good Old Man, a king or father-figure, like Duncan in Macbeth or the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. He is the light version of the Tyrant or Dark Father-figure. Similarly, the tragic hero may turn on someone who comes to assume particular importance to him as his Rival, like Banquo - the hero's honourable counterpart or light alter ego, who comes to haunt him as a reproach to his crimes.

But it is when we come to the feminine figures whom the hero is most likely to kill or injure that we see the tragic inversion in its most revealing light. Nothing can more