The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [244]
In Bonnie and Clyde, the hero is a weak, sexually impotent young man lured by the heroine, a combination of Temptress and infantile anima, into his life of stealing, murder and guns as a substitute for his unrealised masculinity. The central episode of the story is when they capture a policeman, representing masculine authority, and dance round taunting him (like Faustus playing tricks on the `Holy Father'). As frustration turns to nightmare, there is a brief, sicklysentimental episode when they go for a picnic with Bonnie's mother - again the fantasy Mother-figure who will overlook all their naughty crimes and with whom they can dream of escaping back to the happy, irresponsible innocence of childhood where everything will be all right. But now the stern masculine world is closing in, as the police net tightens around them, representing the values of the Father against which they have been frozen in rebellion. Eventually they are betrayed by the Father-figure in their midst, the father of their accomplice C. W. Moss with whom they have taken refuge, and the police shoot them down.
The heroes of Jules etJim are two feckless, charming, weak young men who cannot grow up, and who fall prey to the bewitching Temptress Catherine. Led on by her in the Dream Stage they like to imagine themselves as children, playing `at the white house in the country, with the Dark Mother in Catherine concealed behind the facade of an `elusive anima' who is always dancing on before them, always just out of reach. But slowly their world darkens - not least through the violent irruption of dark masculine values in the First World War - and they are gradually sucked down into nightmare, uncomprehending, never becoming manly or responsible or understanding anything. Jim makes a last pitiful attempt to break loose and to live a normal, grown-up life, with a wife and child - but the poison has entered too deep. Finally the dark anima drags him down into the whirlpool of destruction, leaving Jules all alone, staring still uncomprehendingly at their ashes.
In those two remarkably similar stories Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, we see the same tragic pattern from the heroine's point of view. Each of these heroines is initially married to a man who is neither fully a man nor alive to the inner feminine. In each case, in the upper or outer world, the heroine is thus joined to an inadequate animus-figure, with the corollary that her own inner feminine is not brought alive and begins to turn dark. In each case the heroine then falls secretly for a fantasy animus-figure who seems to represent everything their husbands are not (the Dream Stage). Vronksy is seemingly both strong and sensitive. Emma's fantasy-animus divides into, firstly, the masculine but insensitive Rodolphe, then the unmasculine but sensitive Leon. In each case, under the spell of the fantasy-animus, the heroine first loses contact with the respectable upper world, representing the outward masculine value of social order (Frustration Stage) and then is drawn down into the inferior realm where she begins to lose her reason, her mental order (Nightmare Stage). Increasingly each is haunted by the nightmare vision of a horrible little deformed male creature - the peasant and the beggar - representing the true state of her inner animus. In each case as the heroine, having irrevocably lost touch with her own inner feminine, horribly destroys herself, the deformed animus - symbolising her `fatal flaw- looms up over her final conscious moments before she plunges into unconsciousness forever.
We next looked at two stories, Antony and Cleopatra and Don Giovanni, which in terms of the tragic `fantasy cycle' begin in the Frustration Stage, when the hero's problem is at last completely obvious. In each of these stories, the root of the hero's problem is the same - his inability to relate