The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [474]
Firstly, it produced a `dark inversion' of the types of story which archetypally show selfless heroes or heroines coming to a happy ending. We now see a new type of hero appearing in such stories, who is himself egocentric; but in thus defying the values of the Self, he cannot ultimately reach the goal.
Secondly, as stories lost touch with the deeper values of the Self, they became sentimentalised. Even where they try to act out the outward form of an archetypal pattern, because they are no longer concerned with the inner transformation of their central figures they become mere `entertainments. They still manage to play on their audience's archetypally-conditioned emotional responses, but only in an outward, make-believe fashion. Their characters become no more than twodimensional stereotypes.
Such a psychic earthquake could not have come completely out of nowhere. Its premonitory tremors were felt long before the emergence of Romanticism proper. Even today, for instance, it would be very unusual to find a story which featured a wholly dark heroine and heroine coming to a triumphant happy ending. But such a story appeared as early as 1643, in a work written at the end of his life by Claudio Monteverdi, the first composer of full-scale operas. The Coronation of Poppaea begins by showing the emperor Nero enjoying an adulterous affair with a new mistress, Poppaea, who is engaged to marry young Otho. Seeing the supreme prize almost within her grasp, Poppaea is determined that Nero should leave his wife Octavia and make her his empress. When the wise old philosopher Seneca advises against this, Nero orders him to commit suicide. Poppaea rejoices, but Octavia persuades Otho to murder her in revenge for her faithlessness. The murder plot comes unstuck, and Otho is banished. Octavia resigns herself to her fate.The monstrous hero crowns his scheming mistress as empress of Rome, and they sing an ecstatic duet to celebrate the triumph of their love.
At exactly the same period of that turbulent epoch of the mid-seventeenth century, John Milton was working on the first sketches for his dramatic poem, Paradise Lost. So attractive and plausible did he make his story's central character and God's chief antagonist, the fallen angel Satan, that this was later to prompt William Blake to his famous comment that Milton was `of the Devil's party without knowing it.
It was not until a century later, however, that more direct precursors of the great Romantic upheaval began to appear, one of the first being that early novel which caused such a stir across Europe in 1748, Richardson's Clarissa. This account of a dark hero obsessively setting out to deflower a chaste and virtuous heroine, eventually drugging and raping her to succeed in his quest, marked the appearance of that figure who over the following 100 years was to become the supreme expression of the Romantic inversion in Western storytelling: the `persecuted maiden, the violated anima.
In the 1760s Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1765) was the first of those `Gothic novels' which within a few decades would become one of the dominant genres in European storytelling. Complete with all the later familiar stage-machinery of gloomy vaults, ghostly apparitions, sinister forests and bleeding statues, this sensationalist fantasy excited huge fashionable attention by bringing back into storytelling the type of dark supernatural imagery which previously, in the rational `age of the Enlightenment, had virtually dropped out of sight. But it did so in a curiously artificial fashion. What was happening was that the supernatural dimension to human existence which, since the Middle Ages, had been gradually pushed down into the unconscious by the increasingly one-sided consciousness of western civilisation was now re-emerging, but in a sentimentalised, `inferior' form, merely to provide entertainment. Again, at the story's climax, we see the violation of the anima when the Tyrant hero rushes to a graveyard