The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [191]
The story of Peer Gynt is similar. He also loses touch with the feminine as a young man, when he abandons Solveig, and passes into the deforming grip of the `dark masculine'. As a result, he becomes an immensely powerful figure, obsessed with using his power to dominate and reorganise the world. But nothing can ever resolve, or give him the satisfaction he craves. He then begins to find the capacity to see the objective truth of his deformed state through the mysterious figure of the Button Moulder. Finally, in his reunion with Solveig, he discovers not only true feeling but also his inmost identity as a man.
Both Scrooge and Peer Gynt are thus strongly masculine figures, whose masculinity has become dark and deformed because they have lost touch with the inner feminine. They are `active' figures, because to be strong in the masculine qualities is what makes any character in a story `active'.
The case of Silas Marner is different. His problem is not just that he has lost touch with the feminine (at the time when he had been falsely accused of stealing money and lost the girl he loved to a'Dark Rival'). He has also lost the power of his masculinity (symbolised above all by the loss of his own money to another `Dark Rival'). Dried-up, self-pitiful, completely closed in on himself, he thus becomes a passive figure - until the arrival of the redeeming child, Eppie, who not only awakens the lost feminine in him by giving him back the capacity to feel, but also, by calling him into the new role of father-protector, reawakens his masculine strength. He even recovers his money, which for years has lain like so much locked-up dead energy at the bottom of a pond, and can now put it to life-giving use in looking after Eppie.
Raskolnikov, the unhappy young student, is another hero weak on both the masculine and feminine sides of himself. In his disordered fantasies of proving himself to be a man he can only dream of some wild, rebellious action which will demonstrate his Napoleon-like power to transcend the moral order. In reality this turns out to be a hideous caricature of manliness, the heartless killing of two helpless old women. And at this point, if the story were Tragedy, we should see him spiralling down into the grip of darkness until he is destroyed. Instead he begins to pass mysteriously under the spell of two light figures: the magistrate Porfiry, a wise, all-seeing, `father figure', who represents the true masculine authority and firmness which Raskolnikov lacks; and Sonia who, despite her outwardly fallen way of life, represents selfless, sympathetic feeling. Step by step, under their influence, Raskolnikov is drawn into facing up to the reality of his horrible crime, even though it is not until his nightmare shows him the objective truth of his state that he finally develops the capacity to see whole. It is this which brings him in touch with true feeling, in his spiritual union with Sonia, and we are thus led to suppose that at the end of the story he is at last on his way to becoming a whole man.
In The Snow Queen when one splinter of the magician's mirror enters Kay's eye he loses the capacity to see whole (everything is seen distorted and in a mocking, satirical light); when another enters his heart, it cuts him off from feeling (he rejects Gerda). This places him under the spell of the `dark masculine, in terms of his newfound cerebral obsession with rational calculations and mental patterns. But he has no real masculine strength: it is all in the mind, as with Raskolnikov; and this also places him under the spell of the `dark feminine' in the shape of the powerful, heartless Snow Queen. Kay is now completely imprisoned, both dead to the true feminine and stunted in his masculinity. At this point Gerda sets out to find him, representing in herself both the qualities he lacks: the femininity of her feeling and, in her courage and spirit, the masculine strength he needs as well. She is thus