The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [505]
This had profound relevance to another significant development mirrored by storytelling in the closing decades of the twentieth century: the change which was now coming over the relationship between the sexes and the relationship of men and women to the internal balance of their own gender attributes. An inevitable corollary of the difficulty people in the West were now finding in achieving psychological maturity was the tendency for men to become softer and less overtly masculine, while the effect on women was the opposite.
The new assertiveness of women became particularly obvious from the late 1960s onwards, with the rise of the `Women's Lib' movement. Like so many other features of twentieth-century life, this tendency had first begun to appear in the years before the First World War, with the campaign for women's suffrage; and before that in the writings of the early `feminists, such as Mary Woolstonecraft, at the time of that psychic upheaval which had coincided with the French Revolution and the dawn of Romanticism. But much more aggressively than ever before, the new feminists of the 1960s and 1970s could see women only as oppressed victims, in a world dominated by men, treated as mentally and socially inferior, as little more than `sex objects' and slaves. They indiscriminately projected onto the male sex the archetype of the `dark masculine'; seeing men as wholly egocentric, either as bullying Tyrants or as insensitive, immature `little boys, or both.
Even more than in its earlier manifestations, the new feminism was concerned not with promoting the importance of `femininity but the reverse. It despised the `feminine' values of feeling and intuition. Its central drive was to show women as equal to men in masculine terms. Despite their contempt for men and for the 'values of Father', the feminists had become dominated by the animus: that masculine component in a woman's psyche which can give her the strength and rational intelligence which is necessary for psychological balance, but which, if it is allowed to override her femininity, renders her negative, hard and combative.14
In no sense was possession by the negative animus a new phenomenon. More than 2000 years earlier it had been portrayed by Aristophanes in his Thesmophoriazusae, showing the pack of Athenian women driven by their collective negative animus into wishing to kill Euripides for the dismissive way in which he presented women in his plays. It was memorably depicted by Shakespeare in The Taming of the Shrew and had been portrayed in many other stories down the ages, showing a virago having to be `tamed' back into contact with her femininity. What that was new about its late-twentieth-century manifestation was the scale on which it was now becoming adopted by the ruling consciousness of the time. Never before had the idea of women behaving so egocentrically on behalf of their sex become so acceptable.
This new female assertiveness did produce one episode of considerable psychological irony. A particular grievance of the feminists was the extent to which men dominated the world of power and politics. Yet when, in 1979, Britain became the first major country to elect a woman as its prime minister, the feminists were appalled. In all respects but her gender, they saw Margaret Thatcher as representing everything they abhorred.
Mrs Thatcher's significance as a leader was that, at a time when male politicians had been losing their masculinity, she stood for masculine qualities in politics more effectively than any of the men around her (as we have seen from stories, when the hero is weak, it can often fall to the heroine to supply the masculine strength he lacks). With her strength of character and firmness of principle, her opposition