The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [43]
Let us now compare this fully-developed version of the Rags to Riches plot with our second, outwardly very different example, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847).
The story begins with the heroine as an unruly and miserable little orphan living with her mother's sister, Aunt Reed. Nothing can be done to control Jane when she is in one of her rages and one day the fearsome pillar of evangelical rectitude Mr Brocklehurst appears, making a show of only wanting to serve Jane's best interests, to take her off to the orphanage at Lowood. Her introduction to this strange new world is a terrifying ordeal, but when Jane has come through it she eventually settles down to several years of steady progress, blossoming into a serious-minded and accomplished girl in her late teens. This corresponds to the first phase of Aladdin's story, as it shows Jane being transformed from an unruly child into a serious young woman on the verge of adult life.
The second part of her story shows her going out into the wider world in a new way, when she takes up her first employment at the great house of Thornfield, as governess to the daughter of the rich and mysterious Mr Rochester. She conceives a deep but seemingly hopeless love for Rochester. She can hardly dare think she would ever be fortunate enough to marry him. Indeed for a long time it seems certain that he will marry someone else, a well-born, arrogant neighbour Blanche Ingram. But eventually, to Jane's astonishment, Rochester declares his love for his `plain little governess, and asks her to marry him. It might seem an unthinkable happy ending was imminent, except that there are now abundant ominous signs that, behind the scenes, all is not well. The truth is that, even as preparations are going ahead for the wedding and Rochester is buying fine clothes to deck out his bride, she is inwardly not yet ready for this over-hasty transformation in her life and status. She is still an immature, undeveloped girl, who knows little of the dark side of life and the world: and then, even as she approaches the altar to be married, the central crisis of the story erupts.
A voice calls out from the back of the church that the wedding cannot take place because Rochester is already married. It turns out that for years he has been concealing his crazed first wife in an upstairs room at Thornfield Hall. Just as with Aladdin, at the moment when the Sorcerer snatches his Princess, palace and lamp away to Africa, Jane's seemingly glorious new world is in ruins. In despair she runs away from Thornfield, to wander distractedly over the bleak, inhospitable moors. After three days, cold, weak and starving, she falls down on a cottage doorstep to die - when, in the nick of time, she is rescued, by the seemingly kindly clergyman St John Rivers. Under the care of Rivers's sisters, Jane gradually recovers her strength: and we then see, as in Aladdin, a very significant new phase in her story. We see Jane setting up house on her own, opening a successful little school, and for the first time in her life learning to stand on her own feet, developing an inner strength and independence of spirit she has never known before: until, as a mark of her newly-won autonomy, she learns that she has mysteriously inherited a modest fortune, making her outwardly as well as inwardly independent.
But even now, like Aladdin when through his own efforts he has been able to recover