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By Root 5258 0

is decked out by the genie of the lamp in all sorts of splendour for his wedding to the Princess, the formerly scorned little urchin win all hearts by his generosity and noble bearing, and astonishes his prospective father-in-law the Sultan by his `eloquence and cultured speech, `his gallantry and wit' .1 Even the hero of Puss in Boots, though it might be thought that he owed his elevation entirely to the ingenuity of his cat, has no sooner been dressed in fine clothes (which `set off his good mien') than he impresses his future father-in-law the king by his `fine qualities'. even though the `well-made and very handsome young man' was originally only the son of a poor miller.2 Likewise, Dick Whittington, who similarly owes everything to his cat, has no sooner become rich and put on his finery than he is revealed to all the world (as the narrator is careful to point out) as `a thoroughly genteel young fellow'.3

Yet obviously these dazzling young heroes and heroines are not exactly the same people that we saw, unhappy, confused and rejected, in the earlier scenes of their stories. What has happened to them is that they have at last revealed or developed what was potentially in them all the time. They have matured. They have grown up. They have fully realised everything that was in them to become. In the best and highest sense, they have become themselves.

An example of a Rags to Riches story which makes this point particularly clearly - because, stripped down to this essence, the story consists of very little else - is Hans Christian Andersen's The Ugly Duckling. Being a duckling, the hero can hardly make the journey from literal rags to literal riches. But he is certainly looked down on by everyone at the beginning, and almost our entire interest in the tale centres round the contrast between that long initial period of misery and confusion when he suffers because he does not know who he really is, and that final moment of joyful self-realisation when he flowers into his true self as a beautiful swan.

In the majority of Rags to Riches tales, however, the joy and perfection of the central figure's final state are also expressed by those two other ingredients which equally have nothing to do with literal riches, but which are so fundamental to the world's storytelling that they are almost synonymous with our notion of a'happy ending'.

The first is that, somewhere along the way, the hero should have met the girl of his dreams, a beautiful maiden or `Princess. The heroine has met her handsome `Prince'. Nothing more profoundly conveys our sense of resolution at the end of a story that they should at last be united, a man and a woman brought together in perfect love.

The second is that the hero, or the newly united pair, should then succeed to some kind of a kingdom, inheritance or domain, over which they can rule. There we can leave them, with the sense that, after a long period when it seems that dark forces and uncertainty ruled the day, everything has at last been brought or restored to where it should be. We may at this point be told that `they lived happily ever after', and we do not necessarily need to know anything more about them: because we have reached that mysterious central goal in storytelling, where everything seems at last to be perfect and complete.

The central crisis

At first sight it might seem that the process whereby the hero or heroine of a Rags to Riches story eventually reaches this goal is fairly simple. But the more systematically we examine such stories, the more we may be struck by the way the hero or heroine's emergence from the shadows is rarely presented as a simple, unbroken climb. In fact there is usually a particular moment in the story when, after an initial improvement in the hero or heroine's fortunes (sometimes so great that it might in itself seem the cue for a happy ending), they suddenly hit a new point of crisis, when all hopes of a happy ending seem to have been snatched away forever.

For a familiar example, let us go back to that classic English version of the Rags to Riches