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By Root 5598 0

But, cut off from his fellow men by his life of abstract speculation and disputation, the desire creeps up on Faustus for limitless power and knowledge, so that `all things that move between the quiet poles shall be at my command'. What he dreams of, in compensation for his weakness, are the two aspects of the masculine value, power and knowledge. But he desires them only to gratify his ego and to assert himself against the world. There is no sign in Faustus of the rooting feminine that might connect him with other people or with the reality of the world outside himself. And where the light feminine is lacking, only the vacuum of the dark feminine remains. Through this void the Tempter Mephistopheles enters to offer him the treacherous bargain, a fantasy of omnipotence and omniscience in return for his soul. No sooner has the battle between the `Good Angel' and the `Evil Angel' for the hero's soul been lost, than it begins to become clear that the powers Faustus has been given are nothing more than empty illusions, such as being allowed to play silly irreverent tricks on the Pope, who as the `Holy Father' is symbolically an aspect of the Self.

Finally Faustus conceives his supreme desire to make love to the most beautiful woman who ever lived, Helen of Troy. She appears and he dreams that she is his immortal `other half; his anima -'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. But when he does kiss her -'her lips suck forth my soul, see where it flies'. The most famous lines of the play, `was this the face that launched a thousand ships, and burn't the topless towers of Ilium, have already warned us that Helen is no light figure but the terrible Temptress, luring men on to war and destruction. And no sooner is their brief, empty love-making over (with a 'wise old man' coming on to pronounce Faustus's doom) than the hero is plunged firmly into the Nightmare Stage, when he realises that all is now irretrievably lost. He is about to pay the price of eternal punishment in hell.

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the fantasy self

The extraordinary fame of the Jekyll and Hyde story rests on the unforgettably vivid way in which it exemplifies another general characteristic of the tragic hero, which is the split between the respectable, seemingly light persona he turns to the outer world and the hidden `lower self' representing the deformed state of humanity when it is centred not on the Self but on the ego. All tragic heroes and heroines display some version of such a split, but in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde it becomes the central theme of the story. The point about Mr Hyde is that we are not told a great deal about his particular sins: he is merely portrayed as a monstrous, totally egocentric creature who knows no bounds, feels no scruples, whose sole motivation is the gratification of the ego in flouting all the values of the Self. Hyde is a personification of the `ego self' or `fantasy self', the essence of the untrammelled ego when it is split off from the Self and turned against the light.

Initially, so long as the respectable Dr Jekyll retains his power to switch back whenever he wishes into his outer or upper world persona, Hyde only emerges in secret, at night, hidden away from the world in the inferior realm. But the more Jekyll gives way to his fantasy self, again like any tragic hero, the more it begins to take over his whole personality, threatening to emerge into the outer world. As Jekyll enters the Frustration Stage, he makes a last desperate bid to escape from his fantasy self by putting the drug under lock and key and trying to remain in his Jekyll-self. But, as when Anna Karenina at a similar stage in the tragic cycle tries to give up Vronsky and return to her husband, the poison has already entered too deeply into Jekyll's system. He eventually weakens, succumbs to the drug for a last irrevocable time and returns to his Hyde-self. `My devil had long been caged, he came out roaring.'

This leads to the central incident of the whole story, first described by a young maid who had been sitting one evening looking out of her window.