The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [61]
It is generally through stories of this second type that most of us first become acquainted with the Voyage and Return theme because, from C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz, it provides the basis for some of our best-loved stories of childhood.
Two classic instances are Lewis Carroll's Alice stories, Through The Looking Glass and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Bored and drowsy on a hot summer's day, a little Victorian girl suddenly finds herself transported underground into a totally strange `wonderland'. Several times she finds herself altering in size. She meets a bewildering succession of animals and other creations, behaving like human beings but talking to her in riddles. Everything in this surreal dreamworld is like a parody or distortion of something familiar. But just as this dream seems finally to be turning into a death-threatening nightmare, with the Queen of Hearts in the courtroom scene angrily shouting `off with her head' and all the cards rising up into the air and `flying down upon her, Alice is jerked back to the reality of her familiar world by waking up, as if from a dream.
Almost identical in outline is the plot of that perennially popular Hollywood fairy tale, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Young Dorothy, who is staying with her uncle and aunt on their farm in Kansas, is upset when her dog Toto is taken off by Miss Gulch for chasing the rich, bad-tempered old spinster's cat. Toto manages to run back home but, terrified she will lose him again, Dorothy takes him off into the countryside, dreaming of escape into some far-off land `over the rainbow'. On their way home, they are suddenly swept into the sky by a swirling tornado and find themselves falling abruptly down into the magical technicolor land of Oz, like Alice falling down her hole into Wonderland. Here Dorothy is greeted by a bewildering succession of characters, including the little Munchkins and the Good Witch Glinda, but provokes the deadly hostility of the Wicked Witch, the equivalent of Alice's Queen of Hearts (and a reincarnation of Miss Gulch). Dorothy escapes down the Yellow Brick Road to seek the help of the mysterious Wizard of Oz in getting home, On the way she is joined by three allies, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, but eventually the Wicked Witch traps them all in her castle. Just when the nightmare is at its height, Dorothy in desperation throws a bucket of magic water over the witch, causing her to vanish. After their `thrilling escape', they return to the Wizard, who turns out to be a fraud. But the Good Witch uses her magic to enable Dorothy to return home to Kansas, where she wakes up in bed as if emerging from a dream.
Another familiar childhood example of such a journey into an imaginary world is Barrie's Peter Pan (1904), the story of how the children of the Darling family fly off from their familiar nursery in the middle of the night, led by the little boy who cannot grow up, to the Never Never Land, a strange childhood dream realm inhabited by fairies, Red Indians, talking birds and pirates. Again the mood of their adventure is initially one of exhilaration. But increasingly it is shadowed by their awareness of the menacing presence of the pirate chief Captain Hook, a typical `monster' figure, with his hook in place of a hand. Eventually the story works up to a nightmare climax, when Hook and his men take the children prisoner on board their ship and threaten to kill them. There is a final `thrilling escape' when Peter Pan arrives in the nick of time and forces the monstrous Hook to jump overboard into the jaws of the crocodile; and the children return safely home to their nursery at home with their parents.
Some of the very earliest stories a child can grasp are simple versions of the Voyage and Return plot (long, for instance, before they can really appreciate the relative complexities of the Rags to Riches story, with its `Princes, `Princesses' and `transformation scenes').
The Tale