The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [254]
If the Self is denied, it will always try, in some form or other, to pass back to the ego the message as to where the disorder has arisen and how it can be rectified; as we see demonstrated nowhere more vividly than in stories. And for an illustration of this one needs look no further than to the curious fate of the Rags to Riches story, once this profound shift in the moral and psychological centre of storytelling had begun to take place. In the dawn of the Romantic era, as storytellers began to pass into the grip of the `dark inversion, so they found it increasingly difficult to write stories with happy, all-reconciling endings. But this was not only reflected in stories inspired by the Rags to Riches theme. It began to appear in stories of all kinds.
Frankenstein: The monster as hero
We now look at what happened when the same dark inversion took over the archetypal theme of the Overcoming the Monster plot.
Some years earlier, in the summer of 1816, one of the most remarkable episodes in the history of storytelling had taken place on the shores of Lake Geneva. It resulted from the first meeting between the two most rebellious spirits of English Romanticism: Percy Bysshe Shelley, accompanied by his mistress Mary Godwin and her half-sister Claire, and Lord Byron, accompanied by his young hanger-on Dr William Polidori. Over a wet fortnight at the end of June, this oddly assorted group of young people, already riven by all kinds of psychic stress, talked themselves, with the aid of a German book of horror stories, Fantasmagoria, into a state of collective near-hysteria. It was agreed that each of them should produce a ghost story. Mary Godwin had a hideous dream, coloured by some of the topics they had all been discussing, like the bringing of corpses back to life. And she finally produced, from the inspiration of her nightmare, a book not only more widely known today than any single work by either of the two famous poets themselves, but in psychological terms one of the most significant of all the products of the European Romantic movement.
The story of Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus tells how its hero had been born into a respectable, happy family in Geneva. The main figures in his life had been his kindly father; his loving mother; his little brother William; his close boyhood friend Clerval; and his cousin Elizabeth, beautiful and adored; `a creature who seemed to shed radiance from her looks, and whose form and motion were lighter than the chamois of the hills'; and whom, as they grew up, it was assumed Frankenstein would one day marry. Here we see the hero happily surrounded with light (albeit entirely two-dimensional) characters: Father, Mother, Child, faithful Alter-Ego, and finally, the anima.
The action of the tale begins when Frankenstein is about to go out into the world, as a young student at the University of Ingoldstadt. On the eve of his departure, as an omen, his mother and Elizabeth, the two representatives of the feminine in his life, both fall desperately ill. His mother dies, but Elizabeth eventually recovers. At the university he falls under the spell of various occult treatises, and becomes possessed by a Faust-like longing to `penetrate the secrets of nature'. `The raising of ghosts or devils was a promise liberally afforded by my favourite authors, the fulfilment of which I most eagerly sought'. Having found his `Focus, the hero shuts himself away for months during a glorious summer, to work on his shadowy task: `who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil, as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay. At last, from the remains of corpses stolen from charnel houses in the hours of darkness,