The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [243]
(3) for Dr Jekyll, through his fantasy self Hyde, it is more generally characterised as an unbounded desire for egocentric gratification at the expense of everything and everyone in the world outside him. This is the dark inversion of the drive to realisation of the Self, which stands for the opposite, a state of conscious loving unity with all the world.
We shall now look again, briefly, at the other stories in Chapter 8, to see how each reflects in its own way these basic rules of the dark inversion.
The Picture of Dorian Gray shows us the split between the outward persona of a beautiful, completely egotistical young man who wishes never to grow older (i.e., never to grow up) and his hidden fantasy self, represented by the portrait. The cue for the weak, vain young hero to succumb to his fantasy is provided by the Tempter Lord Henry and, like his shadowy Mephistopheles, the hero thus becomes an amalgam of dark feminine and dark masculine, the complete opposite of a light, whole man.
As with Hyde, most of Gray's sins as he embarks on a life of sensual debauchery are only hinted at, although all, it is implied, involve a heartless and destructive flouting of loving human relationships. But three episodes in particular are described more explicitly. The first centres on the inadequate anima-figure of Sibyl Vane, the actress with whom Gray becomes infatuated. Gray loves her only as a fantasy figure, for the image she creates on stage in the role of various `active' Shakespearean heroines, Rosalind, Portia, Beatrice; when she tries to show him the reality of herself he coldly rejects her, and she commits suicide. The second step in his downward course brought clearly into view is the attempt by his honourable older friend, Basil Hallward, a light Father-figure, to confront Gray with the horror of what he is becoming. Gray murders him in particularly gruesome and deliberate fashion. The last figure to emerge, on the edge of Gray's consciousness, is the `light Rival', Jim Vane, the brother who truly loved Sibyl (although he has now turned dark and shadowy in his desire for vengeance). Vane is mysteriously shot at a country house, where Gray is basking flirtatiously in the admiration of an older woman, his hostess the Duchess of Monmouth, who alone seems fundamentally unworried by Gray's horrible misdeeds and cruel reputation. He has, in effect, killed off the anima, the Father and the light Alter-Ego: the only relationship he really enjoys, as the little boy hero who does not want to grow up, is with a doting, inwardly heartless, powerful older woman, the Dark Mother. Finally, in the Nightmare Stage of self-pity, Gray turns in rage on the hideously ravaged portrait and stabs it, like Humbert murdering his fantasy self. As with Humbert and Dr Jekyll, the hero's fantasy self is now all that is left of him, and in killing it Gray has killed himself.
The next three examples we looked at were all straightforward stories of weak and inadequate young heroes being destroyed by a Temptress.
In Carmen we initially see the hero as a soldier, happily in love with his innocent Micaela. But behind his soldierly exterior Don Jose is no real man, and she is only an inadequate little anima-figure. It does not take long for the real problem to be exposed when the imposing figure of the Temptress/Dark Mother Carmen sweeps the weak little hero off his feet into blind infatuation. Under her bewitching spell Don Jose is soon cut off from the upper, masculine world, as he becomes a deserter from the army and sinks down into the treacherous, intoxicating inferior realm of taverns, gypsies and bandit gangs. Here there looms up the figure of Escamillo, the toreador, representing the masculinity which Don Jose never had, who supplants him as a Rival in the Temptress/Dark Mother's affections. Having for the last time rejected his infantile anima, Micaela, Don Jose sinks into the final