The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [190]
When these are brought into balance and harmony with the masculine, then what a transformation we see. When power is brought into conjunction with true sympathetic feeling for others; when the sense of order is brought into harmony with the capacity to see whole: then both are miraculously made life-giving. The strength of power becomes a force making for life, not death, serving the whole rather than the ego of he or she who possesses it. The patterns of the sense of order and structure are imbued with life because they are no longer just dead mental constructs spun out of the limited consciousness of the human ego, but connect up with a living totality. We thus see how each of the four elements - strength, order, feeling and intuitive understanding, or body and mind, heart and soul - is ultimately essential to all the others to make a living whole. And nowhere do we see the balances of this delicate equation expressed more subtly than in the workings of the plot of Rebirth.
The four-sided totality
One of the first things we subconsciously pick up from those first Rebirth stories we meet in childhood, centred on a heroine, is that her femininity alone is not enough to save her from imprisonment. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White have neither the strength nor the judgement to withstand the spell cast over them by the `dark feminine'. As they fall into their frozen sleep it seems they have lost everything. What is needed to return them to life is the strength of the masculine value, personified in the handsome prince who eventually releases them from their imprisonment.
Conversely, in The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast, when the immature young heroine first encounters the masculine value, it seems to her menacing, unattractive and deformed. Only when the heroine has developed her femininity to the point where she can show love to this representative of the masculine in its `inferior' guise as a frog or a monster does it emerge in its proper fullydeveloped form as a handsome prince. Indeed at the end of these stories we see the feminine and the masculine liberating each other simultaneously. And such is the essence of Rebirth: that it shows us how it is impossible to develop one side of the human personality fully, masculine or feminine, unless this is also given positive counter-balance by the other. Initially a Rebirth story shows us someone who is imprisoned in such a way that it completely represses one side of his or her overall personality, while leaving the remaining, superior side stunted or deformed. Usually it is the feminine which is repressed, while the masculine is in some way deformed. But the hero or heroine then encounters some redeeming figure whose nature is such as to awaken the repressed, inferior side: with the result that the superior, deformed side can also at last assume its proper shape.
We learn of Scrooge, for instance, how as an originally sensitive and sociable young man his growing obsession with money had caused him to lose the girl who was going to marry him. He has lost touch with the softening feminine and thus passed into the deforming grip of the `dark masculine', becoming heartless and tyrannical, obsessed with the power of riches and the endless calculation in his ledgers of how much he had lent and was owed. He comes to the crisis when he is confronted in a dream by the three spirits, like messengers from his unconscious, who by presenting him with the shocking objective truth of his state begin to give him back the capacity to see himself and others whole. Simultaneously his long dead capacity for sympathetic feeling is aroused by the plight of Tiny Tim, the little crippled, dying boy who represents the child he never had, stunted hope for the regeneration of life. Finally, having thus been brought back in touch with his inner feminine, Scrooge goes through the transformation which also