The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [480]
Much more significant as a revelation of the psychic state of nineteenth century civilisation, however, was that persistent obsession with the image of the 'persecuted maiden', the trapped, violated or dying heroine who continues to appear in so many guises throughout the age of Romanticism. We see her in the mad scene of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor; in that whole sequence of unhappy and fated Verdi heroines, from the innocent Gilda stabbed by her father in Rigoletto to the consumptive Viola in La Traviata; in Puccini's consumptive Mimi and the piteous Madam Butterfly. In Romantic ballet we see her as the elusive anima, dying broken-hearted in Giselle, and again as the betrayed and doomed Swan Queen Odette in Swan Lake. We see her in countless novels of the time, including several by Dickens, notably in Little Nell, whose heart-tugging death in The Old Curiosity Shop provoked an almost hysterical reaction from Britain's reading public in 1841, and in Sykes's bludgeoning to death of Nancy in Oliver Twist.
In Britain in the 1860s came the vogue for what came to be known at the time as the `sensation novel': highly melodramatic tales which reached an enormous mass audience through their serialisation in newspapers and magazines. What titillated the fantasies of the Victorian public in these tales was their exploitation of such `Self-violating' themes as bigamy and adultery. But a central role in almost all these successors to the Gothic novels of 70 years earlier was played by the maltreated anima. The fashion was set by Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860), which begins with the seemingly supernatural apparition on a road outside London of the young woman who, it turns out, has been incarcerated in a mental asylum to prevent her stumbling on the guilty secret of the evil baronet Sir Percy Glyde. The most famous of all these fantasy concoctions was East Lynne (1861) by Mrs Henry Wood. So relentlessly does she heap suffering and indignity on her heroine that Lady Isabel ends up hideously disfigured by the accident in which her illegitimate daughter has died, desperately seeking employment as a governess in the home of her ex-husband. She does this only to be reunited with her children, but it then leads to her having to watch incognito over her son as he dies of a fatal disease ('dead, and never called me mother'), before she expires herself. 3
At the end of this period a particularly notable example of the suffering anima is Hardy's favourite heroine, Tess. More than anything this story shows us why Hardy's novels provide such a revealing mirror to the underside of an age which, on the surface, imagined itself to be emerging into the light from all the primitive darkness of former times. We see an author whose first stories had shown him still able to cling on sentimentally to the simplicities and certainties of the rooted rustic world in which he grew up. But then, as the socially emancipated Hardy himself became ever more detached from that world, his stories turn ever darker, their heroes and heroines ever more fatally plagued by an inability to find their right `other half', until he ends by showing his tortured anima so distracted that she is driven to that desperate act which can only precipitate her own death on the gallows.
In this sense, as we saw, the progression of Hardy's novels reflected something which was happening much more generally to western civilisation in the nineteenth century. No novel more powerfully conveyed the sense of the `dark inversion' than Moby Dick, with its picture of a crazed hero, surrounded by a cosmopolitan crew from all over the world, symbolising mankind, obsessively seeking to find and destroy the mysterious White