The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [97]
If Jane Austen was perhaps unconsciously reflecting here one reason why her own personality had made it difficult for her to find the right Mr Knightley, in her last completed novel Persuasion she expressed her melancholy in a more obvious way. Here we again see the constant heroine who quietly observes the antics of others, only this time Anne Elliott feels she is getting too old to hope for marriage: half-resigned to spinsterhood, half looking back with regret to her one real missed chance, when she had foolishly turned down Captain Wentworth at the urging of her tyrannical aunt, playing the role of `unrelenting parent'. Then, almost unbelievably, Captain Wentworth turns up again, still looking for a wife; but Anne now has to watch him wooing others, much younger, more foolish and unsuitable than herself. The tangle becomes still worse when Anne herself is wooed by a man whom she might almost accept, to console her for her disappointment; until he reveals his true nature as a weak, treacherous trifler with ladies' affections (a recurring figure in Austen's novels, the ultimate `dark' opposite to her admirable, strong and constant `light' heroes and heroines). At last both hero and heroine are free to `recognise' what has been subconsciously growing in each of them for a long time: that they still love each other and that nothing can any longer keep them apart. And so, for the last time in her stories (she was already sickening while she was writing Persuasion and died the following year), Jane Austen was able to imagine arriving at the happy ending which was always to elude her in life.
The plot disguised: Middlemarch, War and Peace
By the mid-nineteenth century the Comedy plot had become so well established in its new incarnation that it crops up in novels all over the place (although Balzac's novel-sequence La Comedic Humaine is largely shaped by other plots). In many instances the familiar conventions of stage Comedy continued to appear, such as the last-minute discovery of someone's true identity as part of the 'recognition' (e.g., Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, Trollope's Doctor Thorne). But in some of the most familiar examples Comedy had by now travelled so far from its theatrical origins and become so successfully disguised in its new role that we might not even notice that the same archetypal plot is shaping the story.
We shall look briefly at two of these `disguised Comedies, among the bestknown novels of the age. The first is George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-1872), which of course was written by a woman and centres on a heroine. The opening episodes of this long novel show the high-minded young Dorothea Brooke being drawn into marriage. But it is immediately clear that this is no prelude to a happy ending. Her husband, Dr Casaubon, is a dry-as-dust old clergyman and amateur scholar, old enough to be her father, and this `father-daughter' balance turns out to be the key to the real nature of their unhappy relationship. Even before the marriage Dorothea has already met Casaubon's nephew, the handsome young artist Will Ladislaw, and this establishes the contrast between the tedious old pedant, representing death, and the romantic young painter, representing life. Dorothea's marriage is soon seen to be an empty imprisoning sham, as it becomes clear that the petty, pompous, jealous Casaubon, obsessed with his never-to-bewritten book on myths, is an empty and self-important fraud. But eventually he dies, leaving a will which lays down that Dorothea can only inherit his considerable estate so long as she does not marry Ladislaw. Up to this point, the possibility of such a thing has not entered their heads, but now it begins to prey on each of them separately: although of course it cannot be, because of Casaubon's prohibition. Dorothea's dead husband thus, in effect, assumes from the grave the role of `unrelenting father', standing in the way of the young lovers getting together. Other familiar elements of the