The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [245]
In Antony, the successful general, we return to the image of a hero who, in masculine terms, seems fully developed. But as a tough soldier, living one-sidedly by masculine values, he has never fully realised or integrated his inner feminine; and by the law which dictates that we eventually fall foul of the dark version of that which has not been realised, Antony has been pulled over by his meeting with Cleopatra onto the opposite, undeveloped side of his psyche. We meet Antony when the two poles pulling him apart are at last fully and painfully evident. He is torn between his masculine `Roman self' and the soft, emasculating embraces of the Temptress, the Dark Queen surrounded by her women and eunuchs, ruling maternally over the `inferior realm' of Egypt. In the upper Roman world, as the play begins, the hero's `other half' is Octavia, his intended wife, the sister of his rival Octavius. But she is an inadequate anima because she is not feminine enough to draw Antony to her. This is not a marriage based on love but on the need to cement the social and political order (i.e., based on a masculine value). With her stern devotion to the male Roman virtues, Octavia is herself over-masculine - which is why Antony is drawn back to the soft, indulgent mother-world of Cleopatra. But once the die is cast, once he has irrevocably abandoned the inadequate Octavia and the masculine strength of Rome, we see Antony slipping more and more into the treacherous toils of the dark feminine, losing his soldierly masculine judgement and discipline, his capacity for firm leadership, his manly sovereignty both over himself and others, until finally he and the Dark Mother who has unmanned him are both destroyed.
Antony's problem is that, because he cannot fully realise his anima, he is drawn obsessively back to the Dark Mother. The story of Don Giovanni or Don Juan presents the most familiar paradigm in our culture of the hero who attempts to solve the same basic problem in the opposite way. Don Giovanni's compulsion is to find endless fantasy anima-figures who exist only in his own mind, because as soon as he has conquered them sexually and his ego is gratified, he sees the reality (like Dorian Gray confronted by the off-stage reality of Sibyl Vane) and his fantasy evaporates. As in Antony and Cleopatra, the story of Don Giovanni begins at the moment when the hero has been through the long Dream Stage of his adventures, when he seemed to be getting away with it, and when he is at last unexpectedly brought up against the heart of his problem, in a way which will decide once and for all whether he can turn back towards the light or is headed irrevocably for destruction.
The opera's opening scene shows Don Giovanni confronted by two figures, Father and Daughter: the honourable father-figure of the Commendatore, representing positive masculine authority; and Donna Anna, the pure and innocent anima. In each case his response is fatally negative. First he attempts to seize and possess the protesting anima by force. Then, when the father intervenes to protect her, the hero kills him. From then on we know that Don Giovanni is doomed. By the law of the `unrealised value, he has killed off both the aspects of himself which he will never now realise. He will never become a mature, fully-developed man; he will never develop his inner feminine. He is a fatally immature man who can never grow up - and the rest of the story shows the inevitable disintegration that is the consequence.
By the Rule of Three he encounters three women in the story. Donna Anna, a straightforward, light anima-figure, he attempts to violate. Secondly he meets Donna Elvira, his rejected anima, who has turned in consequence into the dark feminine, the virago who is pursuing him across the world bent on vengeance. Thirdly there is the regression to fantasy-innocence, as he tries to seduce the pretty peasant girl Zerlina, a fetching little infantile anima. But increasingly the stern masculine world against