The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [288]
One obvious consequence when the ego takes over this type of story is that it is no longer seen like this, from the viewpoint of the wider whole. We see the doomed central figure presented, not as the author of his or her own misfortunes, but as a heroic victim, caught up in the toils of a malevolent fate.
One early sign of the approaching age of Romanticism in the eighteenth century was the so-called Sturm and Drang movement of the early 1770s, and in particular the extraordinary reception given to the first novel by the 25-year old Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The young hero paints an idyllic picture of the little town in which he is living, in which one summer day arrives the most wonderful, beautiful girl he has ever seen. Charlotte is a paragon of all the feminine virtues, strong-minded, sensitive, loving, soulful: a perfect personification of the anima, with whom Werther at once falls madly in love. Furthermore, she seems to like him, and their friendship soon becomes very close. But this Dream Stage then gives way to the first hint of a Frustration Stage, when Werther learns that Lotte is engaged to another man. Even when her decent but dull Albert arrives, however, it initially seems the three of them can still get on very happily together. But eventually, despite Lotte's continued apparent pleasure in Werther's company, she and Albert are married. At last her new husband begins to show impatience at Werther's continued presence. The hero feels his `angel' slipping away from him. He begins to fall apart.
`Ill humour and listlessness became more and more deeply rooted in Werther's soul until finally they took possession of his entire personality ... his anxiety destroyed all the remaining forces of his intellect, his liveliness, his wit.'
He is into the Nightmare Stage. At last, on a winter's night, he has a final emotional interview with his beloved. He reads out to her at enormous length his translation of the sentimental songs of Ossian, showers her with passionate kisses and storms off into the night. At midnight, using pistols borrowed from Albert, he shoots himself.
The outward form of this story corresponds exactly to the five-stage pattern of the tragic archetype. But we are not expected to view Werther objectively as a foolish, immature young man, in the grip of an adolescent infatuation he has not the self-awareness or self-control to resist. Since we see much of the story through his own eyes, as its narrator, we are invited to identify with him as a romantic hero, so idealistic that he is prepared to sacrifice life itself for his noble dream of love. Certainly this was how Goethe's story was received when it first appeared, as all over Europe young admirers rushed to copy Werther in donning blue frock coats and yellow waistcoats, or buy perfumes bearing Werther's name. Indeed some were so carried away by the story's self-glorifying sentimentality that it even inspired a rash of sympathetic suicides.
Fifteen years later when Mozart and da Ponte created Don Giovanni (1789), subtitled Il Dissoluto Punito, this also centred on a hero bringing about his own destruction in the pursuit of love, but in a very different way. Giovanni's offence was not besottedly to project his anima onto just one woman, as representing the `eternal feminine'. It was the ruthlessly indiscriminate way he degraded his anima by projecting it onto an endless succession of women. But despite Kenneth Clark's bid to promote him as another precursor to the age of Romanticism, in `his refusal to repent, which made him heroic', we have no sense at the end of Don Giovanni that we are meant to sympathise with him. When he has been carried down by the Commendatore to the flames of hell, the blazing out of Mozart's joyful closing sextet proclaims the delight of those who remain that