The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [295]
But there are few stories in which the plot is more poignantly centred on the persecution of the loving anima than Puccini's Madame Butterfly (1904). When the American officer Lieutenant Pinkerton arranges to marry the pretty little 15-year old Japanese girl Cio-Cio-San, Butterfly, he is warned he must not treat his new wife too lightly. But he just cynically drinks to the day when he can eventually marry `a real American girl'. After their wedding, Butterfly is cursed and abandoned by her family for marrying a foreigner of another religion. Her beloved husband must now be her entire life, and Act One ends with her submitting joyfully to his embraces.
Act Two opens three years later when she has given birth to a son, but is now waiting anxiously with her faithful maid Suzuki for her husband to return after a long absence. Her only dream is the day when he will come back, and at last his ship is sighted coming into the harbour. She excitedly fills the house with flowers, puts on her wedding dress and prepares to welcome him. All night she waits, but he never arrives; until the following morning when he enters the house, having left the American wife he has married hidden in the garden. Butterfly is resting, after her sleepless night, and he tells Suzuki he has only come to take away his son. When Butterfly awakens and sees the strange woman in the garden, she soon puzzles out what is happening. She tells Pinkerton he may come to fetch his son in half an hour. She takes up the knife with which her father had committed suicide on the orders of the Mikado. Her little boy runs in and she says goodbye to him, binding his eyes and giving him an American flag to hold. She goes behind a screen, the knife clatters to the floor and, as Pinkerton enters, she dies.
The whole unconscious purpose of this story is to exploit the audience's archetypal emotional response to the heart-tugging spectacle of the loving anima being rejected in the most humiliating fashion by the heartless egocentric `dark masculine'. Yet, when this offence against the light has been remorselessly pressed to its dark conclusion, there is no redeeming element. At least Tosca was able to take the Tyrant Scarpia with her before she died. Here light is extinguished and only darkness remains, having seemingly won the day. Seeing the archetypal pattern thus turned inside out, we may sense this is scarcely a complete resolution to the story. But, so slight and uninteresting is the cardboard cut-out figure of Pinkerton, it does not even seem to matter what might happen to him subsequently. The story's only real purpose has been to play the degradation of its central figure for maximum sentimental effect. Once we have seen the image of the faithful, tortured anima committing suicide, the lemon has been squeezed. What remains is really of no interest or significance whatever.
The tragic hero glamorised
Returning in a sense to where this chapter began, a final obvious fashion in which Tragedy can both turn dark and be sentimentalised is where we see its hero, or central figures, acting out the archetypal self-destructive pattern, but in a way which invites us to see them somehow as attractive and glamorous, as they rebel in the name of vitality, excitement and freedom against a stuffy and oppressive social order.
In The Portrait of Dorian Grey, we may objectively be left in no doubt that the hero must in fact be a very dark character indeed, as he embarks on his life of debauchery and nameless wickedness. But at the same time we cannot avoid the