‘It was on rotting prison straw that I felt the first stirrings of good in myself. Gradually it became clear to me that the line separating good from evil runs not between states, not between classes and not between parties: it runs through the heart of each and everyone of us, and through all human hearts. This line is not stationary. It shifts and moves with the passage of the years. Even in hearts enveloped in evil, it maintains a small bridgehead of good.’
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Early in our lives we come across a type of story not quite like any other. In the form in which we first encounter it, in the stories of childhood, it usually centres round the familiar fairytale cast of young heroes and heroines, princes and princesses, who have fallen foul of dark enchanters, wicked witches or evil stepmothers. But this is not a conventional Rags to Riches or Overcoming the Monster story. It contains a crucial ingredient which marks it out from either.
In the folk tale Sleeping Beauty, a king and queen have a baby daughter. They invite seven fairies to the little Princess’s christening, and six in turn bestow great blessings on her – beauty, grace, goodness of heart, and so on. But before the last can speak an old malevolent fairy bursts in, furious at not having been invited, and lays a deadly curse on the child: that she shall prick her finger and die before she grows up. The seventh good fairy can only commute this to a sentence of a hundred years of sleep, with the promise that eventually the Princess will be liberated.
The second stage shows the little girl growing up, endowed with all the ‘light’ gifts laid on her at her christening – while her parents do all they can to protect her by ordering that every needle in the kingdom shall be destroyed. But eventually the day arrives when the heroine is about to enter on her adult state. She wanders into a remote and overlooked corner of her father’s castle, where she discovers a mysterious old woman at a spinning wheel. Blind to the danger she is running, she asks to try the wheel. The dark prophecy is borne out, the heroine pricks her finger and swoons into unconsciousness. The rest of the castle’s inhabitants follow suit, and a hedge of impenetrable thorns springs up to seal them off from the outside world. We are thus presented with one of the most haunting images in storytelling of the state of living death: the flow of life frozen in suspension.
The third stage does not unfold until decades later. Many would-be heroes have tried to penetrate to the enchanted castle without success. Only when the right moment and the perfect hero arrives can the liberation take place. At last a prince from another land chances to pass the castle, makes his way effortlessly through the hedge of thorns, finds the Princess in her remote prison and wakes her with a kiss. The whole community of the castle – from servants, guards and animals up to the king and queen – stirs back into life. The Prince and the Princess he has ‘won back from the dead’ are married.
Sleeping Beauty is based on the type of plot we may call ‘Rebirth’. A hero or heroine falls under a dark spell which eventually traps them in some wintry state, akin to living death: physical or spiritual imprisonment, sleep, sickness or some other form of enchantment. For a long time they languish in this frozen condition. Then a miraculous act of redemption takes place, focused on a particular figure who helps to liberate the hero or heroine from imprisonment. From the depths of darkness they are brought up into glorious light.
Another familiar version of this theme is Snow White. Again a king and queen have a baby daughter. Again, shortly after her birth, a terrible shadow falls over her when the little Princess’s loving mother dies, and is replaced by the vain and heartless stepmother, the chief dark figure of the story. Her overriding obsession is to get rid of Snow White, as the challenge to her own supremacy as the chief feminine figure in the kingdom, and she orders that Snow White should be taken out into the forest and killed. Only in the nick of time is the heroine given a partial reprieve, when the huntsman who has been ordered to kill her merely abandons her.
The second stage begins when she finds her way to the mysterious cottage inhabited by the seven dwarfs, who spend their days digging out treasure from caves deep in the mountains, and here Snow White settles down happily to a new life as ‘little mother’ to the dwarfs. But eventually the dark shadow from the outer world again falls over her, when the wicked stepmother discovers Snow White’s remote place of concealment and comes three times in disguise to offer her poisoned gifts. Each time in trusting ignorance Snow White succumbs to the temptation (like Sleeping Beauty, her naivety and limited awareness make her an unwitting party to her downfall), and each time she sinks into the state of living death. On the first two occasions the dwarfs are able to bring her back to life, but on the third - when Snow White chokes on the poisoned apple – their powers are no longer sufficient to save her. They assume she is dead, and place her on a mountaintop in a glass coffin.
Just as in Sleeping Beauty, the third and final stage of the story takes place only when many years have elapsed, when a prince arrives from a far-off land, sees the heroine in her state of suspended animation and falls in love with her. He orders that she should be taken down the mountain. As she is carried down, the apple is dislodged. Snow White awakens from her living death, falls in love with the perfect hero who has released her and they are married.
In each of these stories we see the heroine first falling under the shadow of the dark power when she is very young. For a while it still seems to be comfortably remote, although we are aware of it unresolved and menacing in the background. Then there is a mounting sense of threat as the dark power approaches, until finally it emerges in full force, freezing the heroine in its deadly grip. Only after a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed, does the reversal take place; when the heroine is miraculously redeemed from her imprisonment by the life-giving power of love.
Such is one version of the plot of Rebirth. But at much the same time that we first encounter these two fairy tales, we may come across another two familiar stories which present the theme of Rebirth in another way. We still see the heroine as the central figure. Everything still hinges on a final liberation by the power of love from a state of living death. But here it is the hero who is the central imprisoned figure of the story, trapped by dark enchantment, and it is the heroine who eventually liberates him. As the story unfolds, however, she herself also falls into a state of imprisonment, trapped by the hero when he is under the dark spell – so that we finally see each being liberated from the grip of the dark power by the other.
In The Frog Prince, a young Princess is out playing one day with her most precious possession, a golden ball, when it rolls away and sinks into a deep pool. She is in great distress, not knowing how to get it back, when a frog hops up and offers to recover it – on condition that she will take him home and allow him to share her food and her bed. She lightly gives her promise, the ball is recovered and the Princess goes happily off home, forgetting all about her promise to the frog. Eventually there is a knock at the palace door, the Princess opens it and is horrified to see the frog, come to claim his part of the bargain. In terror, the Princess slams the door, but when her father the king hears what has happened he sternly insists that she must fulfil her promise. With a sense of loathing she allows the repulsive little creature to eat from her plate, and even to share her bed – and when he disappears the next morning, she hopes she has seen the last of him. But her nightmare is not over. The frog returns, to share her bed for three nights; and only on the third morning does she wake up to find that he has turned into his true self as a handsome Prince. He explains that he had been placed under an evil spell by an enchantress, and turned into a frog; with the condition that he could only be released if he could persuade a Princess to let him share her bed for three nights. The Princess looks at the Prince she has unwittingly redeemed with almost disbelieving joy and love, and he takes her home to be married.
A second familiar folk tale which expresses this same basic outline with rather greater subtlety is Beauty and the Beast; and here it is more explicitly emphasised that the heroine actually has to show love for the hero before he can be released from his outwardly repulsive and dark state (although in The Frog Prince the Princess’s sharing of her bed is obviously symbolically related).
We begin with the familiar situation of a father and three daughters. As in Cinderella and many other stories, the point is to contrast two of the children, vain, proud and hard-hearted, with the third, Beauty, who is not only outwardly attractive but also good-hearted and loving. The father goes on a journey and loses his way one night in a forest. He is drawn to a mysterious, empty castle, where he finds every kind of comfort and hospitality, although he never sees anyone until he is about to leave – when he is set upon by a terrifying monster, in semi-human shape. The Beast only allows him to leave on condition that he sends back his youngest daughter to live at the castle (or, in some versions, the first person he sees when he arrives home – inevitably the loving Beauty, who rushes to welcome her father). Beauty comes to the castle, full of dread, and although she is splendidly looked after and even comes to like the friendly and kindly Beast, she cannot possibly accept his proposal that she should marry him. She feels terribly trapped; but eventually the Beast allows her to return home for a while to tend her father who has fallen sick, and she breaks her promise to come back. Then, in a dream, she sees the Beast dying of grief. She rushes contritely back to the castle, just in time to find him lying in the darkness in the garden, apparently dead. She is so overcome by the love which has been secretly growing in her that she flings herself down to embrace him. He stirs back to life, and says that he only wanted to see her once more: he can now die happy. She says that he must not die, she cannot live without him. At these words, the dark castle is suddenly filled with light, music plays and she sees standing before her a handsome Prince – who tells her that he had been turned into a monster by a wicked enchantress, and that he could only win his release if a beautiful virgin would freely consent to marry him. Beauty and the Beast have redeemed each other by the power of her love – although obviously he had only been a monster in outward form. Inwardly his true self had been there all along, waiting for the right woman to bring about the moment when all his outward deformations would fall away and he could at last emerge in his perfect, princely state, united with her forever.
In all these examples of the Rebirth story based on folk tales and familiar from childhood, the central imprisoned figures have only become trapped in the state of living death through the agency of some dark figure outside them. But eventually we come across another children’s story which takes the pattern of this plot a stage further. In Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen we see a hero who initially passes under the spell of darkness through the action of an enchanter. But the consequence is that he becomes not just outwardly but inwardly infected by the power of darkness himself. It is this which draws him in turn into the power of another dark figure, the Snow Queen, and it is she who imprisons him in the state of living death.
The story begins with a prologue, which tells how a wicked Magician once constructed a most curious mirror. ‘Everything good and beautiful, when reflected in it, shrank up almost to nothing, whilst those things which were ugly and useless were magnified and made to appear ten times worse than before.’ The Magician’s followers carried the distorting mirror up into the sky, where it fell from their grasp and shattered into millions of tiny fragments. Splinters of the mirror fell to earth all over the world. Some entered people’s eyes, which caused them ‘to view everything the wrong way’. Others entered people’s hearts, which was even worse, for ‘the heart became cold and hard, like a lump of ice’.
The story proper begins when we meet a little boy Kay and a little girl Gerda who live next door to each other in a big city. They play together and love each other. Both are innocent and sweet-natured. But one day, towards the end of summer, Kay feels shooting pains in his eye and heart. They have been entered by splinters of the magic mirror. The pain fades, but Kay’s character begins to change. He begins to see the roses outside their windows as ugly, and tears them down. He scorns Gerda’s tears, and starts to imitate people cruelly behind their backs. He now likes ‘rational’ games, such as looking at snowflakes through a magnifying glass, to delight in their cold, hard, crystalline perfection.
Winter has come and one day Kay takes his little sledge out into the square where he sees a large and handsome sledge passing by, driven by a mysterious figure all dressed in white. He attaches his own sledge behind the larger one, hoping for a ride, and finds himself being whirled along faster and faster through the streets, and eventually out into the snow-covered countryside. By now he is very frightened, but he cannot shake his sledge loose. He tries to say a prayer, but can only remember the multiplication table. At last they stop, miles from home, and the mysterious figure reveals herself as the Snow Queen. Kay sees her as beautiful: ‘a more intelligent, more lovely countenance he could not imagine’. As they resume their journey, now flying over forests, lakes and seas, Kay sits beside her, his head filled with figures and statistics, until he falls asleep.
We then return to little Gerda, who is very unhappy at her friend’s disappearance. The winter goes by, spring comes, still he has not returned. Some say he must be dead, but Gerda cannot believe it and she sets out to look for him. We now pass into the familiar territory of a Quest, as she embarks on her long journey into distant lands, with alternating episodes of ordeal and respite. For a time she passes into the power of an enchantress herself, who like Odysseus’s Calypso tries to lull her into forgetfulness of her Quest. She meets helpers, a raven and a robber-maiden, who eventually sends her on the last part of her journey, on a reindeer. Then at last we see what has happened to Kay. Far to the north, in the land of everlasting cold, he is imprisoned in the vast ice palace of the Snow Queen. He sits most of the time all alone, doing ‘Chinese puzzles’ with splinters of ice. ‘Kay could form the most curious and complete figures – this was the ice puzzle of reason – and in his eyes these figures were of the utmost importance ... but there was one word he could never succeed in forming. It was “Eternity.” ’ The Snow Queen had told him that if ever he can put that word together, he will become his own master and ‘I will give thee the whole world’.
At last Gerda finds Kay, in the ‘great empty hall of ice’. As he sits, ‘cold, silent, motionless’, he does not recognise her. She is so overcome by love and pity that she embraces him with hot tears, which wash the splinter of mirror from his heart. He then weeps too, which floats the splinter from his eye. At last he can feel and see straight again. ‘Gerda, my dear little Gerda’ he exclaims, as if waking from a long sleep, ‘where have you been all this time? And where have I been?’ They are both so filled with joy that even the ice fragments around them dance, and form the word ‘Eternity’ by themselves. Gerda and Kay set out on their long return journey, the world around them becoming ever warmer and more spring-like as they travel south. At last they arrive back in their old familiar streets, and as they come home the only alteration they can find is in themselves, for ‘they saw that they were now fully grown up’. They gaze on each other happily, ‘while all around them glowed warm, glorious Summer’.
From earlier stages of our journey through storytelling we have no difficulty in recognising what is happening to Kay in the course of this story. When the splinters of the mirror enter his eye and his heart, two things happen: he can no longer see straight and whole, and he can no longer feel for others. He becomes blind, heartless and egocentric. He has become ‘dark’ in exactly the same way in which we saw figures being possessed by darkness in earlier types of story, above all in Tragedy. And when Gerda finally finds her way to his lonely prison to liberate him, the transformation which takes place in him is precisely that which we saw in earlier types of story where a dark figure goes through a change of heart and becomes ‘light’. As the splinters are washed from Kay’s eye and heart, he regains both the powers he has lost: to see whole and to feel. He is once again able to love. He is restored to his true self. United with his ‘other half’ Gerda, he is complete. And, as the closing lines of the story make clear, he has ‘fully grown up’.
But still the darkness which possesses Kay is personified outwardly, in the two dominant dark figures of the story who are ultimately responsible for placing him under the dark spell and consigning him to the state of living death, the Magician and the Snow Queen. We now move on to three more stories based on the Rebirth plot, written for an adult audience, where the dark power is no longer personified outwardly at all, but is shown as springing only from within the hero. What consigns him to his prison is seen as something which has happened solely within his own personality.
When we first meet the hero of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, he is already in the state of living death. He does not yet recognise it as such, nor do we yet know how he got there – but both things are central to the way the story then unfolds.
It is Christmas Eve. A freezing fog shrouds the City of London but nothing is colder or less full of seasonal goodwill than the heart of the moneylender Scrooge. We see him in three encounters which underline how he has become imprisoned in a grasping, ill-tempered meanness which sets him at odds with all the world. First he contemptuously rejects an invitation to Christmas dinner from his cheerful nephew. Then he rejects the invitation of two gentlemen to contribute to a charity to provide Christmas cheer for the poor. Thirdly, he turns on his clerk Bob Cratchit, refusing him more coal for his fire and all but threatening to dock his wages for the following day’s absence from the office. As Scrooge returns home that evening through the freezing streets, it is emphasised that it has become ‘foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold!’ Arriving at his meagrely furnished lodgings, he sees the door knocker assume the ghostly features – ‘livid ... horrible’ – of his equally miserly former partner Jacob Marley, dead exactly seven years. Marley’s ghost then appears, dragging a huge chain, to warn Scrooge of the punishment which awaits those who live only for themselves, and that he is about to receive visits from three more apparitions.
The first ghost, of Christmas Past, ‘like a child, yet not so like a child as an old man’, leads Scrooge through a series of flashbacks to his early life. He recognises himself as a solitary little boy, then in later years surrounded by loving relatives and cheerful Christmas scenes, up to the point where, as a young man, he was finally abandoned by the pretty young woman he had become engaged to because she felt that she had been replaced in his heart by ‘an Idol’. ‘ “What idol?” ’ the young Scrooge had asked. ‘“A golden one”’ replied the girl, as she left him forever. We are seeing how Scrooge had originally been transformed from a pleasant young man into a cold, solitary monster, obsessed by money.
The second ghost, of Christmas Present, is a jolly giant, exuding plenty and good cheer. He shows Scrooge a series of visions of people enjoying all the sociable delights and generosity of spirit associated with Christmas. These festive groups include Scrooge’s nephew and Bob Cratchit, each surrounded by a happy, laughing family. Nothing moves Scrooge more than the sight of Cratchit’s little crippled son, Tiny Tim. In each case the only shadow over the merriment is cast by a mention of his own name.
The third ghost, of Christmas To Come, ‘a solemn phantom, draped and hooded, coming like mist along the ground’, shows Scrooge a sequence of mysterious, sinister visions in which it seems that someone has died. No one could care less about the passing of the dead man. It seems that he did not have a friend in the world. In a squalid hovel a group of grotesques are dividing his belongings, stolen from around his freshly-cold corpse. Then Scrooge sees the Cratchit family again. Tiny Tim is dead. Finally he is shown a bleak little gravestone recording the name of the man who has died, unmourned and unloved. It is of course his own. Scrooge is so horrified at everything he has seen that he has gradually been going through a transformation. He ends with a promise to the vanishing phantom that, if only he has the chance, he will utterly reform his life.
Scrooge awakes from his nightmare, imagining that he has somehow slept through three nights. He is amazed to discover that it is still only the morning of Christmas Day. He thus has a chance to express his new found self in a tornado of generosity and goodwill to everyone he meets and knows. He arranges for a vast turkey to be sent round to Bob Cratchit, rushes to offer the charitable gentlemen a contribution so generous as to be almost embarrassing and finally breaks in on his astonished nephew and his family to join their celebrations. The following morning he amazes Cratchit by raising his salary, and from that day forth Ebenezer Scrooge becomes like a second father to Tiny Tim, ‘who did NOT die’, and ‘as good a friend, as good a master and as good a man as the old city knew’.1
The action of A Christmas Carol centres almost entirely round the twofold process necessary to bring about Scrooge’s ‘rebirth’. The purpose of the succession of nightmarish apparitions is to open out his awareness, to allow him to see himself as others see him and to see the world from a new centre of perspective; and at the same time, as an inseparable part of this process, to awaken in him the ability to feel for others – just as Kay learned to see and to feel when the splinters of mirror were removed from his eye and his heart. And the central redeeming figure of the story who, more than anyone else, awakens his power to love is Tiny Tim, the son he never had, the Child.
Another nineteenth-century novel which presents the whole pattern of the Rebirth, from the moment when the hero first passes under the deadly spell of darkness through to his final liberation, is Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The opening scenes, in which we meet the hero Rodion Raskolnikov as a poor young student in St Petersburg, are directly akin to the opening of Tragedy. In his hopeless, drifting life in the great city, surrounded by human wreckage like the drunken civil servant Marmeladov, whose daughter Sonia has been driven into prostitution, Raskolnikov becomes obsessed by the fantasy that if only he can commit some vast crime he will somehow have demonstrated his superiority to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary human beings around him. Like Napoleon, he will have shown that he is not to be confined by the humdrum framework of morality appropriate to everyone else (as he says later ‘I wanted to see whether I could step over or not’).
He finds his Focus in the plan to murder an unattractive old woman who acts as the neighbourhood moneylender. For some time we see him going through ‘an agonising inner struggle’, very much a ‘divided self’ as he contemplates the enormity of what part of him desires. On the one hand he has a dream of himself as a young boy, watching with horror as a drunken peasant clubs his horse to death: young Raskolnikov rushes in at the last moment to kiss the dying horse on the lips. On the other, he sees ‘signs’ that he is right to proceed, as when he happens to overhear a student in a restaurant arguing that it would not be immoral to kill some ‘stupid, senseless, worthless, wicked and decrepit old hag, who is of no use to anybody and who actively does harm to everybody’. Even when Raskolnikov is making his final preparations ‘they all possessed one strange characteristic: the more final they became, the more absurd and horrible they at once appeared in his eyes’. But he steels himself. He visits the old woman in her flat and hacks her to death with a hatchet, only to discover to his horror that her friend Lisaveta is also there and, unplanned, he has to kill her too.
Having committed his ‘dark act’ and managed to escape safely, leaving no clues, Raskolnikov does not, however, feel himself to be a great hero, liberated from the morality binding ordinary mortals. He finds himself more and more troubled. He is called to the police station about some quite different matter and hears talk of the murder of the two women. He faints. Everyone is now talking about the murders. Raskolnikov begins to see ‘signs’ that he is suspected, as when an unknown man comes up to him in the street and seems to call him ‘murderer’.
An increasingly important part is now played in Raskolnikov’s life and thoughts by Sonia Marmeladov, the meek young prostitute who, although she has become degraded to support her drunken father, consumptive mother and the rest of the family, is deeply religious. Indeed the inner structure of Raskolnikov’s torment may now be charted through his alternating interviews with two figures, Sonia and a strangely authoritative, almost fatherly examining magistrate, Porfiry. In his first private conversation with Sonia, Raskolnikov for some reason asks her to read him the story of how Lazarus was brought back from the dead. He is then summoned by Porfiry for a routine interview, as one of the old moneylender’s list of clients. The shrewd magistrate tells him that people who have committed such crimes will always eventually give themselves up, like moths coming to a candle. At his second meeting with Sonia, Raskolnikov confesses his crime. Pitying his terrible distress, she says she will never leave him. He then returns to Porfiry who says he knows that Raskolnikov has committed the crime and that he will eventually ‘decide to accept suffering’ by coming clean about it.
As the nightmare of other people’s disordered lives closes in on him from all sides – the drunken Marmeladov has been run over and killed in the street, his wife is evicted from her rooms, goes mad and also dies, the admirer of Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya shoots himself – Raskolnikov can at last take no more. He goes into the police station, gives himself up and is sentenced to seven years hard labour in a Siberian prison camp.
Even now, as he begins his sentence, Raskolnikov still has not faced up inwardly to the full extent of his guilt. But he is accompanied to Siberia by the faithful Sonia, who lives outside the camp, and becomes an almost saintly figure, a ‘little mother’, to his fellow prisoners. Finally Raskolnikov has a nightmare of the whole world being swept by a terrible disease, which gives all who are infected by it the conviction that they alone are right. Everyone is set against everyone else, until all are destroyed. It is the horrific vision of a world in which everyone has become like himself. Raskolnikov is moved to the core of his being, and when he next meets Sonia throws himself down to kiss her feet. She knows at last that he is beginning to come to himself and loves her. Later he picks up her little New Testament, from which she had read him the story of Lazarus, the man returned from the dead, and one thought flashes through his mind, ‘is it possible that her convictions can be mine too, now?’:
‘But that is the beginning of a new story, the story of the gradual rebirth of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his gradual passing from one world to another, of his acquaintance with a new and hitherto unknown reality ...’
In A Christmas Carol the central redeeming figure, Tiny Tim, was a child. In Crime and Punishment it is a young girl, Sonia. In a third nineteenth-century novel, George Eliot’s Silas Marner, it is a combination of both.
The central figure Silas Marner is a weaver who, for 15 years, has lived all alone in a solitary cottage near the country village of Raveloe. He had grown up far away in a great manufacturing town, where as a young man he had been a member of an obscure religious sect, engaged to another, a girl called Sarah. But one day, almost as if he had passed under an evil spell, Marner had found himself falsely accused of stealing some money by a third member of the sect, who also had designs on Sarah. All Marner’s protestations of innocence had been in vain, he had been framed and found guilty, and his treacherous accuser, the real thief, had completely won the day and the hand of Sarah. Marner had fled the scene, to end up in his lonely cottage.
Initially Marner and his new neighbours had got on reasonably well, but then they had begun to shun him, looking on the solitary weaver with fear and suspicion. He had turned in on himself, throwing himself wholly into his monotonous work, and gradually his life had become taken over by an obsession, his love of the gold he received for his weaving, which he hoarded away in his cottage and counted every night.
After many years of this embittered, miserly existence, Marner’s life suddenly becomes intertwined in dramatic fashion with that of another family in the parish. Squire Cass of Raveloe has two sons. The elder, Godfrey, is a weak man, enamoured of the eligible Nancy Lammeter, but unable to propose because he has already been secretly and foolishly married to a girl of humble origin in a nearby town. He has also fallen into the blackmailing clutches of his younger brother, Duncan, an unscrupulous ne’er do well. Led by a series of typically reckless and selfish errors into desperation for money, Duncan finds himself one foggy night outside Marner’s cottage. The door is open, the ‘old miser’ has gone out. Duncan cannot resist the temptation to steal his hoard of gold, and then disappears.
Silas returns and discovers his loss and it is as if he has been robbed of his life. As the first shock of what has happened fades, his neighbours begin to look more indulgently on him, as a poor hopeless creature, slightly crazed. He sinks into self-pitiful brooding. The Christmas season comes, everybody else is busy celebrating, it begins to snow and Marner’s despair reaches its lowest point.
On New Year’s Eve, a strange pathetic figure picks her way through the darkness and driving snow past Marner’s cottage. It is Godfrey Cass’s rejected wife, clutching their baby daughter, with which she plans to confront her husband and his family in the middle of their festivities. Weak and deranged by opium, she sinks down into the freezing snow to die. The little girl wanders off towards the light from the cottage door, finds it open and sinks down asleep in front of Marner’s fire.
When he returns to the room it is some time before he notices the child, and when he does, it is her golden curls shining in the firelight which catch his attention. As if in a hallucination, he imagines that it is his lost gold which has been returned to him. But he then discovers that it is a little girl and the sight of the innocently sleeping child stirs in him feelings he has not known in all the years since he came to Raveloe, ‘old quiverings of tenderness, old impressions of awe at the presentiment of some Power presiding over his life’.
Eventually the child’s mother is found dead, and to everyone’s astonishment Marner insists on keeping the little girl who had arrived so miraculously in his life. He has christened her Eppie, and we soon see what a transformation her coming has produced in him. ‘Unlike the gold which needed nothing and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude ... Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine and living sounds and living movements.’
As the years go by and Eppie’s life unfolds, Marner’s ‘soul, long stupefied in its cold, narrow prison, was unfolding too and trembling gradually into full consciousness’. He becomes open, friendly and liked by all: ‘the little child had come to link him once more with the whole world’. After 16 years, when Eppie has become an attractive young woman, a pond near their cottage is drained and Duncan Cass’s skeleton is found, with the bags containing Marner’s lost gold: all is explained, and all is restored to him. Eppie agrees to marry a suitable young man of the village, but only on condition that they can both remain living with her beloved ‘father’, in the cottage which since her arrival has become surrounded by a beautiful garden. The story ends with Eppie exclaiming to Silas Marner ‘I think nobody could be happier than we are’.
Each of these nineteenth-century novels describes its hero going through what is essentially the same kind of inward drama. In each we see:
(1) a hero who, as a young man, falls under the shadow of the dark power;
(2) as the poison gets to work, it takes some time to get the upper hand and to show its full destructive effect;
(3) eventually the darkness emerges in full force, plunging the hero into a state of total isolation;
(4) this culminates in a nightmare crisis which is the prelude to the final reversal;
(5) the hero ‘wakes from his sleep’, and is liberated through the power of love.
In fact this form of the Rebirth story finally brings us back to the point where we left off at the end of our exploration of Tragedy. As in a tragedy, we are looking from the inside at what happens to someone when he becomes possessed by the dark part of himself. We see him passing into the grip of an egocentric obsession, which renders him both unable to feel for others outside himself and also blind to the reality of what is happening to him. As he sinks ever further into the darkness, however, he does not, like the tragic hero, just plunge on to final destruction. What marks out the Rebirth plot is the way we see the central figure eventually frozen in his dark and lonely state with seemingly no hope of escape. And it is here, as light stealing in on the darkness, that the vision appears which inspires the stirring back to life, centred on a particular redeeming figure: invariably, where the story has a hero, a Young Woman or a Child.
Again, as in The Snow Queen, what we thus see happening to the hero is that familiar process which we have already seen in other types of story where the hero makes a switch from darkness to light. He is being put in touch with some deeper part of his personality which he has not previously been aware of. Firstly, this opens his eyes, enabling him to see the world from a wholly new, non-selfish perspective; it allows him for the first time to see everything straight and whole. Secondly, it enables him for the first time really to feel selflessly. As he finally moves securely to this new centre of his personality, love wells up in him like an unstoppable force, giving him a sense of extraordinary liberation, of being linked ‘with the whole world’ – and he experiences this as at last coming to his true, inmost self.
We can now sum up this type of story in all the main forms which it can take. Behind them all is the same basic sequence:
(1) a young hero or heroine falls under the shadow of the dark power;
(2) for a while, all may seem to go reasonably well, the threat may even seem to have receded;
(3) but eventually it approaches again in full force, until the hero or heroine is seen imprisoned in the state of living death;
(4) this continues for a long time, when it seems that the dark power has completely triumphed;
(5) but finally comes the miraculous redemption: either, where the imprisoned figure is a heroine, by the hero; or, where it is the hero, by a Young Woman or a Child.
The power of this type of story to move us lies in the contrast between the condition of the hero or heroine when we see them frozen in their isolated, imprisoned state and the moment when the liberation begins, as we see them being released from the dark power’s icy grip. Again and again we see the same range of imagery being used to conjure up the former state, when the dark power is dominant:
coldness, hardness, immobility, constriction, sleep, darkness, sickness, decay, isolation, torment, despair, lack of love.
Finally, prevailing against that state as spring follows winter, we see the exactly corresponding imagery of
warmth, softness, movement, liberation, awakening, light, health, growth, joining together, happiness, hope, love.
On every count it marks the move from one universal pole of existence to the other, from death to life: hence the reason why we see this mighty transformation as ‘rebirth’. But we can see this basic underlying drama presented in three different ways.
Initially, corresponding to the kinds of story we come across early in life, we may see the innocent but undeveloped young hero or heroine falling under the shadow of the dark power as it is personified in a mysterious, malevolent figure outside them. Nevertheless it is their own immature state and limited awareness which renders them unable to withstand the dark power, drawing them inexorably into its grip; and only after a long time are they ready to be released.
Eventually, corresponding to the kinds of story we are more familiar with in adult life, we may see the dark power represented much more directly as something springing entirely from within the hero or heroine’s own personality: they have been unable to withstand the evil spell cast over them by the dark part of themselves.
In the middle, as a bridge between the two, we may see the kind of story where both these things happen: where the dark power is initially personified in magical figures outside the hero, who place him under a spell: but where its effect is to turn him into a dark figure himself.
Before we conclude this exploration of the Rebirth story we shall look at one more example of each of these basic forms which the plot can assume.
The first example shows how it need not be only in fairy tales, or in stories written primarily for children, that we may see a hero who is trapped in a state of living death by a dark figure outside him. The profoundly moving story of Beethoven’s opera Fidelio provides us with another instance of an imprisoned hero being released by a heroine, seen from the heroine’s point of view. But we are not here looking, as in Beauty and the Beast, at a naive, relatively passive young heroine who achieves the hero’s liberation unwittingly. Here, as in the adult version of Gerda in The Snow Queen, we see a heroine who is not just good hearted; she is the most ‘active’ figure in the story, determined, courageous and fully aware of what she is doing, as she sets out to rescue her hero from a physical and spiritual imprisonment which has reduced him to helpless impotence and despair.
The hero of the opera, Florestan, has been seized by an evil tyrant Pizarro, whose crimes he had been about to expose to the world, and thrown into the deepest, most secret dungeon of the fearsome prison of which Pizarro is governor. It is even generally assumed that the disappeared Florestan must be already dead (as in The Snow Queen it was assumed that Kay must have died when he disappeared), but Leonore his wife – like Gerda – refuses to believe it and determines to rescue him. First she disguises herself as a young man, like the ‘active’ heroines who play a chief liberating role in Shakespearean comedy, Portia, Viola or Rosalind, and talks herself into the post of assistant to the chief gaoler of Pizarro’s prison, Rocco. After a comparatively cosy domestic opening, as if the opera were Comedy (with Rocco’s daughter expressing her love for the ‘young man’), we then meet the grim tyrant Pizarro himself, who learns that the mysterious ‘Minister’ is on his way to the prison to enquire into accusations that Pizarro has been exercising his authority unjustly. Realising that he dare not allow the Minister to discover Florestan, Pizarro makes preparations to kill his victim, ordering Rocco to dig the grave and arranging for a trumpet to sound to warn him of the Minister’s approach. The first act ends with all the other prisoners allowed briefly up into the fresh air and sunlight, which they compare to emergence from the grave, before they are plunged down into the darkness again.
It is only at the beginning of Act Two that we are at last, amid the atmosphere of steadily gathering threat, allowed to see the hero himself – as we penetrate far beneath the earth to the squalid dungeon where Florestan is confined in perpetual darkness, in heavy chains. He is in the depths of despair, thinking he is about to die: but briefly imagines that he feels a ‘gentle, soft stirring breeze’ and sees his ‘tomb illumined’ by the vision of ‘an angel, so like my wife Leonore, who leads me to freedom in the Heavenly Kingdom’. As he sinks down again, exhausted, Rocco and Leonore descend into the darkness to dig his grave. Even before she recognises the shadowy prisoner, Leonore is overcome with pity for his dreadful plight. When she sees who it actually is, she faints with shock, but recovers and manages to give him a crust of bread. Then the fearsome Pizarro enters to murder Florestan. He is about to stab his prisoner when Leonore rushes forward from the shadows to throw herself in front of her husband. Pizarro is about to leap forward to stab them both, when she pulls out a pistol – and just then the distant trumpet sounds. In the nick of time the Minister has arrived. Florestan is saved.
The story ends with everyone back above ground, in the open air and sunshine. The Minister orders the monster Pizarro to be taken away for punishment for all his crimes, and tells Leonore that it is her right alone to cut Florestan from his chains. The opera ends on a blazing choral celebration of Leonore’s courage and fidelity, surrounding the central inexpressible joy of herself and Florestan at being again united – but also with a sense that all the other denizens of the prison have been redeemed by the victory of light over darkness which Leonore has brought about.2
Our second example is of a story which, although written for children, reflects the more familiar adult version of the theme where the imprisonment is shown as springing from within. In fact Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden does not show us only one central character who is imprisoned. As the action unfolds we recognise no fewer than three main characters who have each become trapped in quite separate imprisonments of their own. The cumulative power of the story lies in the way the gradual liberation of one, the heroine, sets off a kind of chain reaction whereby each in turn is liberated: until by the end everyone involved in the story has been caught up in the general rebirth.
We first meet the story’s heroine, Mary Lennox, when she is a little girl living in India with her parents, in the Edwardian heyday of the British Empire. Mary is a sour-tempered, sickly, selfish child who has been given no love by her equally selfish parents. Almost the only people she sees are the Indian servants, whom she treats badly. Then one day her parents and her nurse die in a plague, and Mary is sent half across the world to live in a remote mansion in Yorkshire, Misselthwaite Manor, which belongs to her uncle Archibald Craven.
Here, in this great, mysterious house, with the bleak moors outside, Mary finds herself in a strange, shadowy kingdom which itself seems to have fallen under a dark spell. Gradually she tries to unravel some of the mysteries which shroud the house. Why is her crook-backed uncle Mr Craven always away, so lost in himself and so unhappy? Why is there a special part of the garden locked away behind high walls, where no one is allowed to go? More sinister still, what is that strange crying which Mary thinks she hears in some far-off part of the house at night, when the wind is whistling off the moors?
A clue to these mysteries seems to lie in the terrible event which had fallen on the house 10 years earlier, when Mr Craven’s beautiful young wife had fallen to her death from a tree in that ‘secret garden’, which is why it is now locked away and why Mary’s uncle seems frozen in perpetual despair. But now even the staff of Misselthwaite Manor seem caught up in the same enchantment – the only one who ever smiles and behaves normally is Martha, the cheerful maid, who lives in a little cottage out on the moors, as one of a family of 12 children.
Although she is still a solitary, sour little girl, almost despite herself Mary begins to feel curiosity about all the unfamiliar things she sees in the gardens round the house, such as the friendly little robin who, like Martha, seems full of life and unaffected by the general air of gloom. Indeed it is the robin and Martha who first introduce Mary to the magical thread which is eventually going to lead her out of the labyrinth of misery which surrounds her. The robin digs up the rusty old key buried in a flowerbed which leads Martha through an ivy-covered door into the secret garden. She finds it wild and overgrown but the most beautiful place she has ever seen. She feels the urge to grow things there, but does not know how to begin. Martha suggests that the best person to help would be her young brother, Dickon – and from the moment Mary sets eyes on the boy, it is clear that he stands for everything the gloomy house of death and its abandoned, neglected secret garden is not. Cheerful, direct, without a hint of selfishness or guile, he is like the spirit of nature itself, constantly surrounded by birds and animals as he roams the moors, charming foxes and squirrels and jackdaws with his pipe – and he can ‘make flowers grow out of a brick wall’.
Dickon is delighted to help Mary clear the garden and to plant seeds. Winter is turning to spring, soon there are bulbs pushing up on every side in their secret garden, birds building nests. Mary is now bright-eyed, amazing the servants by her ravenous appetite, for the first time in her life fired by real enthusiasm – and it is this which prepares her for the test which confronts her when she at last, one night, tracks down the source of the mysterious sobbing. Hidden away in a secret room at the heart of the house, she finds a crippled, sickly boy, Colin, Mr Craven’s son. After Mary and his father, Colin is the third major prisoner of the story, and in some ways in the worst plight of all. A self-pitiful hypochondriac, who has spent most of his life in bed, fearing that he will shortly die, liable to fly into terrible rages, treating the servants like dirt, he is a little monster. But, buoyed up by her newfound spirit, Mary will have none of this selfish behaviour. She tells him about her secret garden and Dickon, she infects him with some of her own enthusiasm and has to promise to bring Dickon up to Colin’s bedroom. From this moment on, the tendency of everything in the story is upward. As spring turns to summer, the secret garden becomes ever more full of life. Colin gets strong enough to make secret visits to the garden in a wheelchair with Dickon and Mary, and even ventures out of his chair to stand and walk: ‘I shall get well. And I shall live for ever and ever and ever’. He creates for them all a kind of ceremonial in reverence for the ‘magic’, the healing power of life and nature which is bursting out everywhere around them and which he can feel transforming him with every day that passes. Eventually one of the servants is so amazed by these mysterious events that she sends a telegram to Mr Craven, who is on one of his long, miserable wanderings in foreign lands, suggesting that he come home. He returns unannounced to hear laughter from behind the wall, in the garden where nobody is supposed to have entered since his wife’s death. As he opens the door, a tall, healthy looking boy rushes past him: Mr Craven stares in astonishment – it is his son, whom he last saw as an incurable invalid. The story ends with father and son walking together, straight, tall and happy, back to the house. The dark spell has at last been lifted. Everyone in the little kingdom of Misselthwaite has been redeemed and is at one – with each other, with nature and with the boundless power of life which, thanks to Dickon, is now pouring indivisibly through them all.
For a final example of the Rebirth plot we return to the kind of story where, as in The Snow Queen, the hero falls under an evil spell cast by dark figures outside him, but with the result that he becomes a dark figure himself. He is completely possessed by darkness, both from without and within. In fact Ibsen’s semi-allegorical Peer Gynt is not only the most complicated example of the Rebirth story we have looked at, but psychologically one of the most ambitiously complex stories ever written.
When we meet the hero, Peer Gynt, he is on the verge of adult life, 20 years old, and an incorrigible liar and romancer (in both senses, a fantasiser and a woman-iser). He and his mother go off to a village wedding party, where Peer is jeered at by everyone, like the hero of a Rags to Riches story – although in his case the scorn is justified, because he is a boastful teller of tales. A demure young girl Solveig enters with her family, and Peer is at once smitten: ‘How lovely! I’ve never seen anyone like her, with her eyes on the ground ... and the way she... carried her prayer book wrapped in a kerchief’. But the incorrigible Peer still cannot resist trying to take the protesting bride off onto the mountainside and here, while she escapes from him, he meets a beautiful and mysterious Woman in Green. She takes him off into the subterranean palace of her father, ‘the Hall of the Mountain King’. Peer has in fact descended into the kingdom of the trolls, where he is told that ‘among us ... black looks like white and ugly like fair’ (an echo of the magician’s mirror in The Snow Queen, or the ‘dark sisters’ in Macbeth – ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’). The Troll King and his court try to turn Peer into a troll. One old courtier tells him ‘Outside among men, where the skies are bright, there’s a saying “Man, to thyself be true”. But here among the trolls the saying runs “Troll, to thyself be – enough”.’ This is to be the theme of the whole story.
Taking the view that ‘one should fit in with the local ways’, Peer agrees to undergo various rites which will turn him into a troll, but he finally baulks at an operation which will remove his clear sight forever. The younger trolls set on him, rather like the moment in Alice in Wonderland when Alice is set on by the playing cards, and he is only saved in the nick of time by the sound of distant church bells which scatter the trolls in disorder. Peer suddenly finds himself alone on the mountainside, and there follows a curious scene in which Peer has an exchange in the darkness with a mysterious voice. ‘Who are you?’ asks Peer. ‘Myself’ answers the voice, ‘can you say as much?’ It is the shapeless Great Boyg, which tells Peer he has a long journey to go, and that he will have to ‘go round about’. Peer returns to the world of men.
We next see him having built a hut in the forest and persuaded the lovely Solveig to abandon everything to come to live with him. All seems well: Peer says ‘My royal princess! I have found her and won her’. But then an aged troll woman enters, the Woman in Green grown old, leading Peer’s son, and she tells him that he will not he left alone to enjoy his love with Solveig. ‘When you sit with that woman by the fire, when you’re loving and want to embrace, I shall sit beside you and ask for my share.’ When Peer angrily shouts at her ‘you nightmare from hell’, she replies that he has only been trapped by his own ‘thoughts and desires’. He realises that his royal palace has crashed to the ground. A wall has grown up round Solveig, his ‘purest treasure’, and there is now no way which passes straight to her. As the Boyg foretold, he will have to ‘go round about’. If only he could truly repent, everything might be all right, but there is no one in ‘this savage forest’ to teach him how. He will have to leave Solveig. She promises that, however long it takes, she will wait for him. He goes off down the forest path, leaving her at the door of the hut, and, after the death of his mother, sets off ‘for the sea coast’.
When we next see Peer it is many years later. He has become middle-aged and enormously rich. He is sitting with four guests in Morocco and, in the expansively self-indulgent manner of a millionaire, asks them ‘What ought a man to be? Well, my short answer is Himself ... a thing he cannot be when burdened with other people’s woes’. He elaborates that the ‘self’ is a mass of ‘fancies, cravings and desires’, in short ‘what stirs inside my breast and makes me live my life as Me’. We learn that Gynt has made his millions in a fairly disreputable fashion, trading in slaves, arms, Bibles, anything that would make a profit, and has become totally self-righteous (indeed shortly afterwards, after his guests have disagreed with him, he is delighted to see their yacht sunk, by a thunderbolt). But he is still inwardly troubled by what it really means to ‘be one’s self’. In the desert he observes some lizards: ‘they bask in the sun and scuttle about with no worries at all. How well they obey the Creator’s behest, each fulfilling his own special immutable role. They are themselves through thick and thin: as they were at his first order, Be!’ It is not long, however, before Gynt is dreaming of how he might flood the desert to produce a great new country, Gyntiana, which would bring him immortality (‘a holy war against Death: that grisly miser shall be forced to free the gold that he has hoarded’). In fact the next role he tries, in his search for self-fulfilment, is that of Prophet, in the course of which he has an affair with the dancer Anitra. She leaves him, and he decides to say ‘farewell to the pleasures of love’ and to pursue instead ‘the riddle of truth’. As one new interest leads hectically on to the next, he is finally taken on a visit to a lunatic asylum by his learned friend Begriffenfeldt, who observes that the inmates are all living for themselves. ‘No one here sheds tears for another’s sorrows, no one considers any one else’s ideas’, everyone here is ‘enclosed in a barrel of self’. The effect on Gynt of seeing a world in which everyone is in a kind of caricature of his own egocentric condition is like that of Raskolnikov’s nightmare at the end of Crime and Punishment. Surrounded by the gibbering lunatics in this ‘Empire of Self’, Gynt finally sinks down insensible.
The final act begins with Gynt sailing back to Norway, determined to settle quietly on a farm, but still he cannot resist dreaming of building it up until ‘it is like a castle’. The ship is wrecked, Gynt is rescued, and wanders up into the mountains. He is now plunged in deep reflection, but can find nothing in himself to hang on to. Suddenly he is passing a hut, which he vaguely seems to remember, and hears a voice singing within. It is Solveig, singing of how she is still patiently waiting. He goes pale: ‘there is one who remembered and one who forgot, one who squandered and one who saved’. But there is no turning back. He realises that it was here, all those years before, that his ‘empire was lost’.
He is now mocked by phantoms of his unfulfilled life: ‘we are thoughts, you should have formed us’, ‘we are songs, you should have sung us’, ‘we are deeds, you should have performed us’, ‘we are tears that were never shed, otherwise we might have melted the ice spears which wound you’. From far off Gynt hears the voice of his dead mother, ‘The Devil has deluded you...’.
Then the strange figure of the Button Moulder enters, who says that he has been sent by his ‘Master’ to melt Gynt down. Gynt retorts that he will allow no such thing, it would be the end of his selfhood, an ‘affront to my innermost soul’. The Button Moulder tells him that he had no need to take on so badly – ‘up to now you never have been yourself ‘. Gynt asks for the chance to find witnesses to prove that he has been himself.
The first person he runs into is the Mountain King, who tells him that, on that day in the mountains all those years before, Peer had in fact become a troll, without knowing it. ‘The motto I gave you – “to thyself be enough” – enabled you to go through the world as a man of some substance’. Peer begins to realise with horror that he has lived as a troll, all along. The Button Moulder returns, asking for his witnesses, and Gynt, now in desperation playing for time, asks him whether he can first define what it means ‘to be one’s Self’. ‘Being one’s Self’ comes the reply, ‘means slaying one’s self – but that answer’s probably wasted on you’. Gynt then has a nightmarish vision of the Devil, and emerges in a mood of horrified remorse: ‘Do not be angry, O lovely earth, if to no purpose I trampled on your grass... how lavish is Nature, how mean is the spirit’. He sees a group of churchgoers singing a Whitsuntide hymn and shrinks away, imagining that he must be damned forever. It is very early in the morning, the world is still dark, and he sees a light shining in a hut up the mountainside. A woman is singing, and she comes out on her way to church: it is Solveig, now aged and nearly blind. She is full of joy at meeting Peer again, but he is now in total despair and tells her that there is a riddle; unless she alone can answer it, he is doomed to go down forever ‘to the shadow land’. The riddle she must answer is ‘where has Peer been since last we met?’ She answers, smiling, ‘oh, your riddle is easy ... he has been in my faith, my hope and my love’. In other words, his true and inmost self had been with her all along, while he had lived in the world as a false self which was not himself at all. ‘Oh purest of women’ exclaims Peer. They joyfully embrace, and the sun comes up filling the world with light.
The long, tortuous story of Peer Gynt’s eventual Rebirth from his lesser, egocentric troll-self into a deeper ‘true Self’, centred in the love of his faithful Solveig, is an apt point at which to end this introductory exploration of the main patterns underlying storytelling, because in a way it brings our journey full circle.
There are clear parallels between Peer Gynt and all the other types of story we have looked at. In that it centres on the hero’s prolonged struggle with a monstrous figure who is the personification of egotism, it is like an Overcoming the Monster story, except for the obvious point that the only monster Peer has to overcome lies in himself.
Like a Rags to Riches story, it is based on a prolonged process of personal transformation. Like Peer Gynt, a Rags to Riches hero begins by seeming nothing very remarkable: indeed he often seems to the world contemptible. He then glimpses some glorious and elevated condition which he longs to attain more than anything in the world and which even seems to come within his grasp: as when Peer Gynt settles down in the forest with his ‘princess’. But suddenly this vision of possibility is snatched away, just as Gynt sees his ‘royal palace’ crashing to the ground when he loses his ‘purest treasure’ Solveig. After this ‘central crisis’ the hero of the Rags to Riches story then has to undergo a further long period of testing, before he is finally ready to achieve the sense of self-fulfilment he has longed for. After a last great ordeal he finally discovers the deeper self that has lain buried within him; and this is marked by his being brought together in lasting union with the ‘other half’ who makes him complete.
Again we see how Peer’s adventures are shaped by the pattern of a Quest. From the moment of his encounter with the Great Boyg, we see him embarking on a long search for that elusive prize of his ‘true self’. Like the Quest hero he has to go through the worst series of ordeals on the edge of his goal. And his final reunion with Solveig may remind us of the moment when the most famous of all Quest heroes, Odysseus, is at last reunited with the loving woman who for so long has waited in obscurity for his return, the faithful Penelope. Like Odysseus, Peer has ‘come home’.
But still there is missing that centrally important element which we did not come across fully in stories until we reached the plot of Voyage and Return. It was here we first began to see that fundamental shift in the emphasis of the plot which makes the hero himself the chief dark figure of the story. It was in the profounder versions of the Voyage and Return story such as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Golden Ass that we first saw a hero, essentially self-centred and limited in his awareness, being recklessly drawn into a series of adventures which ultimately threaten him with destruction. Only as death stares him in the face does he go through that change of heart which liberates him from his limited, egocentric state of awareness and from the strange threatening world in which it has trapped him.
Peer Gynt certainly provides us with more than just echoes of such a Voyage and Return story. The hero begins in a state of limited self-awareness, which leads him to be plunged recklessly into the ‘abnormal world’ of the trolls. From here he makes a ‘thrilling escape’, in the nick of time, as he thinks, from being turned into a troll himself. In fact, as he only learns later, the trolls’ dark magic has already done its work; with the result that he has to make the second, much longer Voyage and Return which begins when he abandons Solveig for far-off lands. Here, in this distant ‘other world’, the initial Dream Stage of his selfish, hard-hearted rise to great wealth turns first to frustration, then to the nightmare of his visit to the lunatic asylum. But even the second ‘thrilling escape’ of the shipwreck which lands him back in Norway only leads him to the final nightmare of his confrontations with the Button Moulder and the Devil, which force him at last to recognise what a monster he has become. He thinks there is no longer any part of him which remains uncorrupted, that he is now nothing but his hideous troll-self, a wrinkled and deflated balloon of egotism, deserving nothing but death. Only now does the reunion with Solveig finally teach him that all along there has been another quite different part of himself, identified with her as she remained in remote obscurity. He has come at last to that much deeper level of awareness which, as his ‘other half’ emerges from her long eclipse, shows him discovering his true self.
The next plot we came to, Comedy, gave even greater prominence to the hero who becomes the chief ‘dark’ figure of his own story; and who must be brought to ‘recognition’ of things hidden before he can achieve the happy ending. In this light, the story of Peer Gynt is entirely familiar. As in so many comedies, we see a hero and heroine who meet in the opening scenes and fall in love; but are then torn apart by a terrible misunderstanding, rooted in the hero’s egotism. The heroine passes into eclipse, obscured in the shadows cast by his selfishness. Confusion continues to worsen until the impasse is finally resolved in the only way it can be: by the ‘recognition’ which brings the hero to see the nature of his error and the true, superior value of the heroine, thus bringing him to himself.
The essence of Tragedy, of course, is that it focuses on the process whereby the hero is transformed into the chief dark figure of the story more starkly than any other kind of plot. Indeed, as we saw, Tragedy can provide us with a kind of mirror image of an Overcoming the Monster story, seen from the point of view of the hero who has been transformed into the monster. Certainly the opening scenes of Peer Gynt present us with a situation similar to the opening of a tragedy. The hero is clearly a ‘divided self’, part drawn upwards by his ‘good angel’ Solveig, part drawn downwards by the troll Temptress and the tyrant Mountain King. The ‘dark’ side of Peer wins, he abandons his ‘good angel’ and is transformed into a monster of hard-hearted egotism. We only infer the long Dream Stage of his tragic course from the fact that he has risen to a position of enormous wealth and power. In fact, after a long gap in the story of his life, we pick it up again at the point where he is entering the Frustration Stage, as he begins to feel a sense of inadequacy and meaninglessness in his self-centred existence. He thrashes around more and more wildly for new realms to conquer, new roles to play: all of which ends in nightmare, despair and the threat of imminent destruction.
But then, because his story is not Tragedy, and because his ‘good angel’ is not one of the inadequate little rejected ‘Innocent Young Girls’ of so many tragedies but a strong, mature and wise woman in her own right, Gynt is enabled at the last minute to rediscover his ‘light self’ buried for so long beneath the outward monstrous shell of his egotism. He can move in the nick of time from the false centre of himself to his true centre. Like Raskolnikov redeemed by the love of Sonia, or Kay by Gerda, or the Beast by Beauty, he has been liberated to become himself. As he and Solveig embrace he is at last united with his missing ‘other half’ to make him whole.
Up to now we have been looking at the main plots underlying stories as much as possible in separate compartments. It is certainly true that, on one level, most stories are primarily shaped by one type of plot more than another; that each type of story serves its own special purpose and carries its own message. But the time has come to move on to a rather deeper level, where we look not so much at the peculiarities of each of the basic plot forms but at what they have in common. Here we see how they are all looking from different points of perspective at the same great basic drama.