The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [246]
The Devils
Finally, in The Devils, we saw a story which embodies all these principles and adds one more, to make our picture of the pattern behind Tragedy complete. Dostoyevsky's novel begins with the image of a Mother and a Father, both archetypally inadequate. Mrs Stavrogin, the rich powerful heiress, appears to be kindly and indulgent, but only so long as she gets her own way with all those who are dependent on her. In her shadow is the weak and pathetic old Mr Verkhovensky, her emasculated protege, obsessively fantasising about his youth as a brave, rebellious liberal when he stood up against the masculine values of power and order represented by the Tsar and his government in St Petersburg. In other words, Mrs Stavrogin is the Dark Mother; Mr Verkhovensky is `the boy hero who cannot grow up' as he decays into late middle age; and the story centres on the consequences for their two sons.
On one hand there is charming, enigmatic Nikolai Stavrogin, spoiled by his dominating mother, bereft of a father. He cannot grow up in one way: he is plagued by strange attacks of rebelliousness against the world of `Father, as when he suddenly and inexplicably bites the ear of the town governor (like Faustus with the Pope). Worse, because he cannot become a true man and is still inwardly locked into his tie to Mother, he cannot properly realise his inner feminine - with the result that he first brutally violates the little infantile anima-figure of Matryosha, in such a way that she commits suicide, then marries the crippled Maria, representing his deformed anima, whose death will eventually precipitate the entire catastrophe in which the story ends.
On the other hand, locked into immaturity in another way, is Peter Verkhovensky. The dominant factor in shaping his personality is that he has not been given a proper model of strong, mature manhood by his weak, egocentric father. He has therefore become imprisoned in a kind of extreme parody of his father's rebellious liberalism - in the fantasy of taking part in some great collective movement which will rise up and violently overthrow the Czar, the government, the entire ruling framework of power and order, all the symbols of the world of `Father'. But young Verkhovensky cannot see himself as the leader of this movement: that would require qualities of manly dominance which he does not possess. He sees himself as the `brains' behind the movement, its organiser. He requires a front-man for his own lack of real masculinity; and this is the role in which he mentally casts the `mother's boy' Stavrogin who, at least in his eyes, has the kind of confidence, charm and charismatic personality required.
There is another respect, however, in which Verkhovensky unconsciously compensates for his own individual lack of manhood. This is the way in which, as he conjures up in his fantasies that whole imaginary army of underdogs who are going to rise up with him to overthrow the world of `Father, he projects his own ego into the collectivised ego of the group, `the movement'.
One of the most important features of the emergence of the Self in stories is the way in which, as the light hero achieves his state of wholeness, we see the entire community redeemed and brought to wholeness around him. Verkhovensky represents here what, in real life, can become the most destructive form of dark inversion of all: where that drive to communal totality itself appears in a dark inferior