The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [211]
In such a situation, where the hero is not adequate to the challenge, the heroine herself must in some way remain in thrall to the dark masculine, and everything remains unresolved.
Once we come to recognise this central dynamic to the archetypal process which lies behind so much of storytelling, it is remarkable how many of the situations we see in stories it helps to show in a new light. To illustrate this this chapter ends by looking again at four examples of Comedy, each of which concentrates attention on some less familiar aspect of this four-cornered network of relationships.
The first two, Tom Jones and Der Rosenkavalier, focus in different ways on the problem of the hero in escaping the pull of `Mother: The others, Die Meistersinger and Middlemarch, centre on the problem for the heroine in finding her own strength to win independence from the pull of `Father'.
Tom Jones
In Tom Jones we see a hero whose chief problem, as a little foundling who has arrived in the world without any prospects of a proper, secure station in life, is to develop his masculine identity. From the beginning the kind-hearted, honest Tom shows a promising connection to the feminine, the centre of his inner identity, as is indicated by the fact that the heroine, Sophia Western, loves him rather than his Dark Rival, Blifil. But because he is outwardly only a poor orphan, the dominant power in their little world - the older generation, centred on Squire Western, the heroine's Dark Father - cannot conceive of allowing their match.
Tom's real task is to build up a secure sense of his own manliness, to give him strength of character, self-discipline and a defined position in the world. Thus most of the ordeals he faces, exposing his lack of self-control, centre round a series of encounters with Temptress or Dark Mother figures. These come to a head when he is briefly under the impression that he has actually made love to his own mother: a perfect instance of the sort of superficially inexplicable incident in stories, like Figaro's involvement with Marcellina, which only makes sense in terms of its deeper archetypal symbolism. But interspersed with these episodes, each of which threatens to destroy Tom and tear him apart from Sophia forever, he eventually, in the shadowy world of London, begins to prove himself as strong, resourceful and independent, capable of courageously intervening to sort out other people's problems. It is here in the `inferior realm' that we see Tom developing towards maturity, as no longer just a bewildered, amiable young man weakly at the mercy of temptation and circumstance. This is why, when the moment of general `recognition' arrives, we find it entirely satisfying to discover that Tom was the older (and superior) brother to the treacherous, unmanly Blifil all along. Tom has at last established his proper manly identity in the world, and the older generation, led by Squire Western, are at last only too happy to recognise him as worthy to be united to Sophia.
Der Rosenkavalier
In Tom Jones the focus is on the hero's own efforts to break loose from the disintegrating pull of the dark feminine. In Der Rosenkavalier we see the same part of the overall drama focused quite differently: this time on the `Mother-figure' who by voluntarily relinquishing her hold on the hero helps to push him forward into his proper state of manhood. We begin with a young, immature hero whose lack of masculinity is emphasised by the fact that he is having an affair with a powerful, older, woman (not to mention the fact that he is played by an actress). Octavian falls in love with the young heroine, only to find the way barred by a forbidding `dark masculine' alliance between his older rival, the Baron Ochs, and Sophie's nouveau riche father, who wishes to force her into marriage with Ochs