The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [208]
`Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh.'
Genesis 2.24
At the beginning of David Copperfield we see the little hero, as a young child, losing both his parents, so that, like the heroes of so many folk tales and myths, he becomes an orphan. He then falls under the shadow of that fearsome couple Mr and Miss Murdstone, who take on the roles in his life of Dark Father and Dark Mother. He embarks on the long, painful process of growing up, falling under the shadow of a succession of other dark figures on the way, until we see him at last ready to come together with his `true angel' Agnes, at which point the whole immense story is resolved. The novel thus begins overshadowed by the towering image of a dark couple. It ends with hero and heroine finally stepping out of the shadows as a fully-realised light couple.
When, as a young boy, Nicholas Nickleby loses his father, he immediately falls under the shadow of the Dark Father, his uncle Ralph. All the dark figures he subsequently encounters are different expressions of his uncle's brooding presence over his life - until finally the Dark Father's power is overthrown. Having liberated his beloved Madeleine from his uncle's thrall, the hero can at last step out into the light, as a shining example of upright manliness in all the ways the evil, twisted Sir Ralph was not.
At the beginning of Great Expectations we see the little orphan Pip falling under the shadow of two seemingly dark and terrifying older figures, the convict Magwitch and the embittered old recluse Miss Havisham, with her bewitching little protegee Estella in her shadow. Finally, many years later, when Magwitch and Miss Havisham have both died violent deaths, we see the mature Pip coming together with the mature, still beautiful Estella in the garden of Miss Havisham's ruined house, and `I saw no shadow of another parting from her'.
When the novel emerged to play such a dominant role in the popular storytelling of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the elements it inherited from the tradition of the folk tale was the idea of tracing the story of the orphaned hero or heroine's life from early childhood all the way up to its eventual `happy ending' in adult years. Dickens was particularly drawn to this type of tale. And whenever a story does begin with the hero or heroine's childhood in this way, there is likely to be a strong Rags to Riches element in the way it unfolds, whichever type of plot may be primarily shaping the way the story is presented. This is because, in the language of storytelling, the process of growing up from childhood to adulthood naturally expresses itself in Rags to Riches terms. The shadows in which we first meet the disregarded little hero or heroine - usually those cast by dark parent-figures - correspond to the as-yet unrealised value of what they have it in them eventually to become; when they have at last realised that potential, as independent adults, the shadows finally drop away and they emerge fully into the light.
More often in stories, however, we do not begin with the hero or heroine in childhood. When we first meet them they are already adults, or on the verge of becoming so. What they are not, yet, is wholly mature, settled, happy or complete. No situation is more familiar at the start of a story than that its central figure is a young man or woman who is in the process of stepping out onto the stage of the adult world, but has not yet reached an established state; and who, above all, is still single. Just as in the versions which begin in childhood, therefore, the real question underlying the story is whether, by the end, we can see them having `found themselves, which usually means happily united to the right `other half' and having found a new, secure centre to their lives. There we can leave them, knowing that in some centrally important sense the pattern of their lives has been resolved. As always, the question is