The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [479]
The Gothic Revival expressed a sentimental desire to recreate the symbolism of the Self. It was accompanied, of course, by that widespread revival of religious observance which became one of the defining characteristics of nineteenth-century Europe. This in turn was coupled with the emergence of that `Victorian' or 'bourgeois' morality, which rested on strict codes of sexual and social behaviour, with `respectability' as one of its highest values. Yet in all this too there was a strong element of mawkish sentimentality, to cover up the repression of everything from sexuality to the awareness of death. To a great degree, the ruling consciousness of the age was adopting the values of the Self as a persona, an outward mask.
For all its Gothic spires, stained glass windows and loving recreations of mediaeval Christian imagery, the Victorian age, with its grim factories belching out stinking smoke over foetid slums to create wealth for the respectable new-rich bourgeoisie, was scarcely a rebirth of the Middle Ages. It is curious how the evolving spiritual consciousness of the previous three centuries had echoed the pattern of that passage from Lao Tsu at the head of this chapter. If the crumbling apart of the religious world-image of mediaeval Christendom had been the moment when `the way was lost', then the stern moralists of the sixteenth and seventeenth century Reformation had replaced it with `virtue. This in turn had been replaced in the religion of the rational, de-spiritualised eighteenth century by `benevolence'. Now, in the sentimental nineteenth century, this had given way to `rectitude. And if this was what seemed to rule `above the line, nowhere was its shadow more clearly reflected than in some of the ways in which the nineteenth century told stories.
As always, there is no clearer key to what storytelling can tell us about the inner life of the age which produced it than the way in which it presents the anima, personifying the feminine value and ultimately the `soul'. The literary form which came closest to conveying the values of the Self in the nineteenth century was the novel; but even in the greatest novels of the time, such as those of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, let alone those of Dickens or George Eliot, we can often discern more than a hint of sentimentality. When Tolstoy tried at the end of Anna Karenina to describe the religious awakening of his hero Levin, in contrast to the damnation and destruction of the story's heroine, it was Dostoyevsky who found Levin's newfound faith so unconvincing that he described as likely to `rip apart on the first nail it encountered'. Yet carrying scarcely more conviction is the religious conversion inspired in Raskolnikov by the little prostitute Sonia at the end of Crime and Punishment. Dostoyevsky hardly develops his redeeming figure into more than a rather thin and pallid ghost of the anima, and it is telling that, when he comes to showing how she transformed his hero's life, he leaves off by suggesting that this is really the subject for another story.
As the archetypes became projected outwards onto the material world, it is noticeable how often storytellers, to convey the numinosity of their anima-heroines, made them into heiresses. In earlier times, the numinosity of the heroine would often have been conveyed, as in myths and folk tales, simply by making her a `Princess'. But now, as in Stendhal or Balzac, Nicholas Nickleby or Jane Eyre,