‘I’m still defeated by the conundrum of God. But I have the devil clear.’
‘And what’s he?’
‘Not seeing whole.’
John Fowles, Daniel Martin
One of the parallels between a story and a piece of music is that each is based on a sequence of mental images which we unconsciously anticipate will come eventually to a point of perfect resolution. A movement in a Beethoven symphony develops through a succession of irresolutions each of which is then partly resolved. Only at the end does the pattern come to a full close, resolving all that has gone before.
For several months in 1984, millions of television viewers in Britain were held in suspense by a serialisation of Paul Scott’s Raj quartet of novels The Jewel in the Crown. For weeks the story presented them with a complex drama of life in British India during the Second World War, introducing a large cast of characters whose lives were interwoven, full of mysterious and half-explained incidents. But as the plot developed, the one thing which eventually held interest more than any other was the central web of relationships between three characters – the attractive heroine, Sarah Layton, and two young men. The first of these, Merrick, a powerful, resentful, bullying police officer who had set his mind on marrying Sarah was the chief dark figure of the story. The other was a handsome and strong but sensitive and reserved army officer, Guy Perron. The question to which viewers wanted an answer was: which of the two would win the heroine? Would the Dark Rival get his way? Or would the light hero and heroine somehow manage to recognise their love and get together? Only in the closing scenes of the three-month long serialisation was the answer finally given, as Sarah and Guy at last came out into the open and declared their love. At this moment the whole of this enormously intricate drama, which had involved so many deaths and sub-plots, was resolved, in a way which seemed at last to make sense of almost everything that had previously happened in the story.
Again and again we have circled round the importance to stories of the elusive idea of being able to ‘see whole’ which runs through storytelling at so many levels and in so many ways. In that central struggle between darkness and light, for instance, we have seen how it is an absolutely consistent feature of all the monsters, villains, tragic heroes and other figures who embody the dark power that they are in some crucial respect limited in their awareness. They have a blind spot; they are obsessive; they live in a fantasy world of wishful thinking; and this distortion of their vision is inextricably linked to their egocentricity. What stories show us is how it is in the very nature of egotism that it can only see the world in a subjective, restricted fashion. Wherever it holds sway it casts around it a shadow which also tends to obscure the vision of everyone else who is in that shadow.
Equally we have seen how it is an inseparable part of ‘coming to the light’ that this should bring a clearer vision. When, at the end of a story, characters are lifted out of the shadows, this is because they have been lifted out of all that obscures their vision. ‘Seeing whole’ does not mean they see and know everything. What it does mean is that they can see everyone and everything objectively, for what they really are. They have been liberated from the distortions of ego-consciousness, onto a different level which gives them a clearer understanding.
On another level, this transition between a long period of constricted vision and finally coming to a new centre of perspective which gives an uninterrupted view in all directions relates directly to one of the most fundamental satisfactions we ourselves get from following a story. Few things hold our interest in a story more compulsively than the desire to arrive at that point at the end where everything will finally be explained. Gradually we have been drawn deeper and deeper into a tangled knot of obscurity and uncertainty, setting up a tension in our minds which cries out for resolution. We long to know how it is all going to turn out; whether the hero and the heroine will finally be united; what unexpected twist at the end will suddenly make everything ‘come out right’. In the earlier stages of a story all sorts of details may have been introduced which at the time seem puzzling, their significance not clear at the time. But if the story is properly constructed, by the time it reaches its conclusion the point and purpose of each will have been revealed. As in a piece of music, we have finally been lifted clear from the tangle of irresolution to the point where the pattern is complete; where we can see how everything in the end played its part in the whole. And no type of story illustrates this more subtly than Comedy, where the transition from baffling obscurity to a final phase of illumination when all is made clear is built into the very structure of the plot.
Three things mark out Comedy from other types of story. The first is that, more insistently than any other type of plot, Comedy is concerned not just with the individual fate of its central figure but with the network of relationships between a group of people. Initially we see these relationships all knotted up because something fundamental has gone wrong; at the end we see the ‘unknotting’ where everyone has at last been brought into the right relationship with everyone else.
The second unique feature of Comedy is the extent to which, except on those rare occasions where a dark figure remains unreconciled, it shows us all the characters in the story being brought at the end into the light. In this sense Comedy is the most idealised of the plots (although in this it overlaps with Rebirth) because it ends on a vision of a world entirely at one, from which no one is excluded.
The third distinguishing mark of Comedy is the emphasis it places on the fact that the fundamental reason why everyone is at odds through most of the story is that there is something very important that they do not know or cannot see; just as the miraculous coming together at the end results from the fact that something very important has been discovered. As Aristotle puts it, ‘recognition is the change from ignorance to knowledge’. And this recognition is precisely what allows everyone to come into a new and quite different set of relationships to one another. Because everyone can at last see clearly and whole, because they have at last discovered who they and each other really are, and who belongs with whom, they can also feel properly. Everyone has at last ‘seen the light’ and thus been liberated to be their true, deeper selves; and for this reason everyone ends up happily integrated with everyone else in an image of complete individual and collective wholeness.
In other words, like an old ‘Before and After’ advertisement, Comedy shows us the contrast between two fundamental states of human nature. We are introduced to a little world – a household, a group of families, a city, a kingdom – which has fallen under the shadow of the dark power. The darkness may emanate primarily from the blind and heartless egotism of one dominant figure. But the result is that everyone is affected: everyone is stumbling about in a fog of frustration and confusion, divided off and obscured from one another, cut off from the flow of life. The fact that people cannot see clearly or whole and the fact that they cannot relate harmoniously to one another are seen as inextricably bound together as symptoms of the same fundamental condition.
But somewhere below the surface, hidden from the community’s prevailing state of consciousness, events are constellating towards the moment when the revealing truth can suddenly emerge from the shadows. The distorting pressure of egocentricity is removed, the darkness is dispelled, everyone can ‘see the light’; and every piece of the jigsaw falls naturally into place. The picture of unity is complete. The current of life can flow unimpeded.
As we have seen, most comedies fall into two groups: those where the chief dark figure of the story stands opposed to the hero and heroine, and to the flow of life in general; and those where the chief dark figure is the hero himself (much less often the heroine).
Of stories in the first category, again the great majority are those where the dark figure is a Dark Father or Tyrant: some powerful older man, usually the head of a household, who is in the grip of some blinding, deadening obsession which casts a shadow over everyone around him, and usually in particular over the young lovers whose union he is opposing. We have seen this familiar figure running all through the history of Comedy, from Aristophanes’s Procleon to George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon, from the ‘unrelenting fathers’ of New Comedy to those of Molière, from King Leontes and Count Almaviva to the worlds of Wodehouse and the Marx Brothers.
Only rarely in Comedy do we see the Dark Mother-figure, but where we do she usually plays much the same tyrannical role as the Dark Father, invariably in the name of upholding the ‘masculine’ proprieties and the social order: e.g., Lady Bracknell, Gwendolen’s ‘unrelenting mother’ in The Importance of Being Earnest, or Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Darcy’s imperious, snobbish aunt who tries to prevent him marrying Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice.
A rather more frequent figure, particularly in later Comedy, is the Dark Rival for the heroine’s hand; e.g., Blifil in Tom Jones, Joseph Surface in The School for Scandal, Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger, Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier (although as an older man and a friend of the heroine’s father, he is also linked to the Dark Father).
We similarly see examples of the Dark Other Half. An obvious instance is Tom Jones’s would-be seducer Lady Bellaston, a mature, beguiling Temptress (although, as an older married woman, she again shows links to the ‘Dark Mother’). The novels of Jane Austen contain several examples, such as George Wickham, Henry Crawford, William Elliot: all false, unscrupulous triflers with the heroine’s affections. Another striking pair of examples appear in War and Peace: Anatole Kuragin, the adventurer who tries to abduct Natasha, and his sister Helene, the imposing, heartless Temptress who marries, then abandons the rich and awkward (and motherless) Pierre. A more modern instance is the intolerable Lina Lamont in Singin’ In The Rain.
With a handful of such exceptions, the dark figures in Comedy tend overwhelmingly to be male. They represent the hard, unfeeling, negative side of masculinity in such a way as to place the heroine, representing true feeling and the promise of life, firmly at the opposite pole and in the shadows. For life to triumph, it is the true value of the ‘feminine’ which has to be recognised and lifted up into the light, as was so often symbolised in the New Comedy of the Ancient World when the disregarded and scorned heroine of lowly status was finally discovered to be of high birth and therefore of great value after all. And ultimately this can only happen when the overshadowing dark figure – such as an unrelenting father – is either liberated from his egocentric prison by discovering a new centre of awareness and feeling within himself; or is exposed in his true colours and pushed off the stage.
In the type of Comedy where the hero himself is the chief dark figure, the same rules apply. Right back to Menander, we see the hero who has wronged the heroine and become divided from her by some misjudgement. Through an egocentric limitation on his awareness, he has failed in some way to recognise the truth of the situation. He reacts in a hard, unfeeling manner, rejecting the ‘feminine’ – often in the name of ‘masculine’ propriety and upholding the moral order. And eventually he gets caught out. Either, like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, he discovers that he has wronged the heroine by assuming that she has committed a crime when in fact she was innocent. Or, like Angelo in Measure for Measure, he is also exposed as a self-righteous hypocrite for having committed the same crime of which he has accused someone else.
Ultimately he can only be extricated from the trap he has made for himself by discovering that deeper centre of his personality which both brings him back in touch with true feeling and widens his perception so that he can see the world straight and whole again. And here we again see how the ‘feminine value’ which must be brought into play to redeem the situation represents both these things, inextricably intertwined; both true feeling for others and the wider awareness which permits true understanding, an appreciation of the totality of the situation and how everything is properly connected; whereas the ‘dark masculine’ represents precisely the opposite, a lack of true feeling and an inability to see things whole.
When we look at the handful of comedies which show the heroine herself as the chief dark figure, we see how the very reason she has become dark is that she is not in touch with the true feminine within herself, as we see in Katherina, the ill-tempered, aggressive virago in The Taming of the Shrew, or the bossy, interfering Emma Woodhouse, or the rich, spoiled Tracy Lord in High Society. Each has become imprisoned in a variation on essentially the same hard, egocentric state. They are neither alive to true feeling nor properly aware of the true situation around them (let alone how they look to everyone else). They are each in a state of self-deception. They need to be tamed, teased or thawed out into the soft, warm, alive state of femininity which is their true deeper self, buried under their tough, brittle exterior. Only at this point, when they become truly feminine, seeing the world straight (as with the heroine of Crocodile Dundee) can each recognise at last who is her true ‘other half’.
Of course there are also those comedies, such as Guys and Dolls or Four Weddings and a Funeral, where there is no obviously dominant dark figure at all. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream the darkness which engulfs all the characters is simply that of total confusion, based on the fact that no one can see things straight, although even here it is only the men who get confused. The two heroines remain models of firm, unswerving love. The true feminine is always a beacon of constancy.1
What we thus see emerging is a fundamental polarity which is crucial to the structure of storytelling. At one pole is the power of darkness, centred on the ego, limited consciousness and an inability to see whole, making for confusion, division and ultimately death. At the other is the power of the feminine, centred on selfless feeling and the ability to see whole, making for connection, the healing of division and life. At the deepest level, it is around this opposition that the whole of the eternal conflict presented by stories revolves: and it is this which, in a sense, makes the light heroine the ultimate touchstone of storytelling. For it is she who above all and most directly embodies the feminine value. It is she who most often and most obviously has to be brought forth from the shadows in order for the complete happy ending to a story to be achieved. And this applies not just to those stories where a strong hero has to rescue a defenceless heroine, but just as much to those where an ‘active’ heroine has to emerge from the shadows to rescue a helpless hero, as in the myth of Theseus, Jane Eyre, High Noon, The Merchant of Venice, Fidelio.
But, as we have already explored in the previous chapter, in order for any story to reach that point where the heroine can emerge or be liberated from the shadows to produce the happy ending, there is another vital ingredient which is required to make the equation complete. And we see this brilliantly, if negatively illumined by the plot of Tragedy.
For obvious reasons, Tragedy occupies a unique place among the basic plots, because in a sense it turns the essential pattern of the other main types of story upside down. All these other types of story have their ‘dark’ versions, which we shall return to. But Tragedy is the only basic plot which is primarily concerned with showing what happens when the hero or heroine cannot muster the positive qualities necessary to wrest the life-giving feminine value from the shadows, but become so identified with the dark power that they cannot escape from it. It thus shows the process of transformation taking place in, as it were, a negative form: the hero or heroine are led ever further downwards and into the dark imprisonment, rather than upwards and away from it. And one of the corollaries of this is that we see the landscape familiar from other types of story appearing strangely inverted.
As the light part of the tragic hero or heroine falls further and further under the shadow of the darkness which has taken root in them, and they slip into ever greater egocentricity and lack of feeling for others, we see how their judgement, their ability to see the world straight and whole, becomes increasingly clouded. In fact their vision becomes so distorted that they actually come to see everything at the reverse of its true value. The light values increasingly become a threat to them; light characters come to seem only as obstacles to their egocentric desires. As Macbeth’s Witches have it, ‘fair is foul and foul is fair’; or as Albany puts it in King Lear, ‘wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile’. And one of the ways in which we see this inversion most strikingly exemplified is in the nature of the figures around the hero or the heroine whom they are most likely to see as hindrances in their path.
In an earlier chapter we saw how there were certain figures who were most likely to become the victims of the tragic hero on his downward course. In fact we can now see how these correspond to the characters who, in other types of story, are most likely to appear as dark figures: except that here, where the hero himself is dark, they appear as light. For instance, the first of the two male figures most likely to become the tragic hero’s victims we saw as ‘the Good Old Man’, a king or father-figure, like Duncan in Macbeth or the Commendatore in Don Giovanni. He is the light version of the Tyrant or Dark Father-figure. Similarly, the tragic hero may turn on someone who comes to assume particular importance to him as his Rival, like Banquo – the hero’s honourable counterpart or light alter ego, who comes to haunt him as a reproach to his crimes.
But it is when we come to the feminine figures whom the hero is most likely to kill or injure that we see the tragic inversion in its most revealing light. Nothing can more tellingly betray the horror of the dark state a tragic hero is getting into than the moment when he kills or rejects the ‘Innocent Young Girl’, his ‘good angel’. When Othello kills Desdemona, when Lear sends Cordelia into exile, when Don José turns his back on Micaela, when Dorian Gray’s rejection of Sibyl Vane brings about her suicide, when Stavrogin’s violation of little Matryosha leads to her hanging herself, their ultimate fate is sealed. In violating or rejecting the feminine outside themselves, they have become catastrophically closed off to the feminine value within themselves, that which alone could allow them properly to feel and to see the world whole.
On the other hand, where the hero in other types of story must reject that other great female figure, the ‘Dark Other Half’, the Temptress, the tragic hero does the opposite. This is precisely where the seeds of so many tragedies are sown, as the hero succumbs to the bewitching embraces of the ‘dark feminine’: as Antony is bewitched by Cleopatra, Don José is bewitched by Carmen, Macbeth is bewitched by Lady Macbeth, Jules and Jim are bewitched by Catherine, Clyde is bewitched by Bonnie. It is the ‘dark angel’ who wins in the battle for the tragic hero’s allegiance. And the result is not just that we see the hero losing touch with the true feminine value within himself. He is no longer a fully masculine figure either. As we see in all these examples, he has become literally un-manned. And so we see it confirmed, by this somewhat roundabout, negative route, how in order for the hero to succeed he must not only be in touch with the true feminine value within himself: he must also be truly a man, strong, alert, fully sovereign over himself and his actions. It is a definition of the hero of Tragedy that he always in some essential way shows himself to be weak. He gives way, he surrenders the masculine part of himself to some unreal fantasy. He is thus deficient both on the feminine side of himself and on the masculine. And one of the supreme rules of the way that stories work is that ultimately these two must go inextricably together. It is impossible fully to develop and make positive the one, without fully developing the other. Where one is deficient, so are they both.
We see this reflected in those two great stories centred on a tragic heroine, Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary. It is obvious that the husbands of both Anna and Emma Bovary are unimaginative, unfeeling men who lack the inner feminine which could form a living bridge to the feminine in their wives. But equally they are not fully men either. The work-obsessed bureaucrat and the failed provincial doctor are dried-up husks of undeveloped masculinity – and it is because they are inadequate on both the masculine and feminine sides that their unhappy, frustrated wives become prey to the ‘Dark Other Half’ who seems to promise all the fierce passion, mingling masculine strength and the feminine softness of love, which they lack in their marriages. But in each case the ‘dark other’ turns out to be an elusive phantom, spun largely out of the heroine’s own fantasies. Finally, irrevocably cut off from the true, life-giving feminine within herself, the heroine is left wild, deranged and hopelessly alone, to throw herself into the oblivion of death.
And what happens in those tragedies of partial redemption, where there is an eventual turn upwards towards the light? We see such varied heroes as King Lear, Tannhäuser and Samson all initially bewitched by the ‘dark feminine’ – by the false Goneril and Reagan, by Venus, by Delilah – to the point where they are left unmanned and weak. But then in King Lear, even though it is too late to call back the monsters unleashed by his initial weakness, we see Lear first getting back in touch with his own inner feminine through his reconciliation with Cordelia; then, in the closing stages of the play, assuming once again some of his old kingly, manly stature. He may no longer be outwardly a king, but he is discovering a new sovereignty over himself. Tannhäuser, through the ordeal of his long, lonely pilgrimage to Rome, has found a new heroic stature. After the emasculation and enervation of his year on the Venusberg, he has become a man, worthy to be united in death with his ‘good angel’ Elizabeth. Samson, after being so hideously unmanned by Delilah, finally recovers his manly strength to such effect that he can die one of the greatest heroes of his nation.
The true hero, if he is to succeed, must be fully a man. The way in which this is represented may seem straightforward enough in those types of story which require the hero to engage in direct physical conflict with the powers of darkness; where in order to overpower or outwit the ‘monster’, or to survive all the tests and ordeals of a Quest, he has to show such obvious manly qualities as outstanding physical and mental strength and stamina. The masculinity of such legendary heroes as Odysseus or Theseus, Gilgamesh or David, King Arthur or Robin Hood, Superman or James Bond, may never seem to be in doubt. As doughty fighters, they show it in their mastery of sword, bow, axe, spear or gun, in their powers of leadership, their courage and combative skill. They seem to be virile figures in every way. But what it is to be fully a man has rather more to it than just these qualities. And we can see this reflected still more clearly in the last of our seven plots, Rebirth.
The essence of the Rebirth story is, firstly, that it shows its central figure imprisoned by the dark power in any of its more familiar guises. We may, for instance, see the hero imprisoned by a Tyrant, like Florestan lying in Pizarro’s dungeons. He may have fallen under a spell cast by a Witch or Temptress – like Kay imprisoned by the Snow Queen, or the prince imprisoned in the outward form of the Beast by an enchantress. We may see the hero trapped in a state of darkness which springs more obviously from within himself, like Scrooge or Raskolnikov. Indeed in Peer Gynt we see a hero who is the victim of all these things: the effect of his being enchanted by the ‘dark king’ and the Temptress from the subterranean troll kingdom being to bring out the dark part of Peer, his egotistical ‘Gyntish self’, which comes for so long to dominate his behaviour and to shape his life.
In each instance, what we see is a hero who is held back by his imprisonment from assuming his proper state as a man. He may be presented as a weak, passive figure, like the reclusive Silas Marner or little Kay in the Snow Queen’s palace. On the other hand, he may be strong and powerful like the rich, tyrannical Scrooge or Peer Gynt, the amoral head of a great business empire. But in either case he is in the grip of a power which in some way stunts him and prevents him from living in easy sovereignty over himself. In terms of proper masculinity he has been reduced to a sad, two-dimensional caricature.
In fact, like the feminine, the masculine in stories has two aspects. The first of these is power or strength. This may be presented primarily as a matter of physical potency and presence, as with those heroes whose special combative power is associated with legendary weapons, like the great sword Excalibur or Robin Hood’s bow. It may be presented as the holding of great position or the possession of great riches. It may be portrayed simply as a strength of will, personality or character which enables its possessor to exercise dominance: either over others, or over himself. And in this respect, which derives ultimately from a physical power, the masculine is something which gives mastery and independence.
The other masculine attribute is a sense of order. This may be presented as a consciousness of social order, of hierarchy, propriety, the need for discipline, for justice under the law. Or it may be seen, rather more subtly, as the whole capacity of the human mind to see the world in terms of orderly, rational patterns: that very thing which lies at the root of all our notions of order, whether social or intellectual: the need to see everyone or everything marshalled in proper place and relationship. In this respect, which derives ultimately from the need of the human mind for framework and comprehensibility, the masculine gives a sense of control through organisation.
Both these things, the physical and the mental, give an essential strength and firmness, a backbone and vigour to human life. Without them it remains weak, ineffectual, amorphous, chaotic, without discipline or direction, and it cannot survive. But in both its aspects the masculine is based on the principle of separation and division: the sense of power which enables one person or part to dominate over another; the sense of order which is rooted in the need to discriminate and to establish differences between one thing and another.
In both these respects the masculine is potentially hard and inflexible. And when we see a character possessed by the ‘dark masculine’, we see him in the grip of either or both of these things, in a way which is egocentric and life-denying. The Tyrant or Dark Father is a bully who uses his power and strength in an aggressive, cruel way to impose his will on others. He may also be doing so to preserve an established structure of authority and hierarchy, like the unrelenting fathers of Comedy who refuse to allow their sons to marry girls of humble origins. They wish to maintain a certain limiting notion of order which does not allow life to flow: like Shylock who remorselessly pursues justice under the law, at any human price; or like Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger who is so obsessed by the traditional rules of singing laid down by the Mastersingers that he cannot see that Walther has created a song of exceptional beauty, simply because his vision is constricted to that which lies within the rules.
In other words, while the masculine stands for the two great principles of power and order, if these are dark and one-sided they can only be turned to deadening and divisive purpose. The power can be used ultimately only to crush and to destroy. The order is a dead structure which becomes suffocating and oppressive and cannot resolve into life.
But equally, when a hero has fallen into the grip of the ‘dark feminine’, like Odysseus languishing on Calypso’s isle, or Tannhäuser enjoying the sensual delights of the Venusberg, or Antony ensnared by ‘the serpent of old Nile’, we see him unable to become masculine enough. For the time being at least, he is not strong, disciplined or masterful enough to be a man. He has become beguiled into losing touch with his masculine power, he has become weak and dependent, no longer sovereign over his own actions. Worse still, his efforts to get in touch with the masculine in himself may become wild, rebellious and unresolved – like the increasingly desperate Don José, lashing out first at his victorious rival Escamillo, then fatally at Carmen herself; or the impotent, sexually frustrated Clyde, under the spell of Bonnie, trying to prove his manliness with the gun. If such a hero does have genuine masculine strength, the results when he falls under the sway of the ‘dark feminine’ may be most catastrophic of all, as when the tough, successful general Macbeth succumbs to the lures of the ‘dark sisters’ and his dominating wife: his strength is turned to dark ends, he kills the very thing he would like to become, the good legitimate king, the honourable bearer of true masculine authority, and becomes in consequence a Tyrant. In weaker men, their masculinity may remain all in the mind, as when little Kay first turns verbally aggressive and cynical and then, under the spell of the Snow Queen, sits all day spinning endless rational mental patterns of words and figures with ice splinters, but can never get them to resolve into the word ‘eternity’.
The only way the hero can achieve a completely triumphant resolution is by fully developing his masculinity in a way which is positive: and this means in perfect balance with his inner feminine. It is this which alone can bring masculine strength fully to life by giving it the vital ingredient of connection, of joining up: through feeling, which gives a link to others and to the world outside the ego; through that intuitive insight which gives proper understanding, by allowing him to perceive the wholeness of things and their mysterious, hidden connections.
When these are brought into balance and harmony with the masculine, then what a transformation we see. When power is brought into conjunction with true sympathetic feeling for others; when the sense of order is brought into harmony with the capacity to see whole: then both are miraculously made life-giving. The strength of power becomes a force making for life, not death, serving the whole rather than the ego of he or she who possesses it. The patterns of the sense of order and structure are imbued with life because they are no longer just dead mental constructs spun out of the limited consciousness of the human ego, but connect up with a living totality. We thus see how each of the four elements – strength, order, feeling and intuitive understanding, or body and mind, heart and soul - is ultimately essential to all the others to make a living whole. And nowhere do we see the balances of this delicate equation expressed more subtly than in the workings of the plot of Rebirth.
One of the first things we subconsciously pick up from those first Rebirth stories we meet in childhood, centred on a heroine, is that her femininity alone is not enough to save her from imprisonment. Sleeping Beauty and Snow White have neither the strength nor the judgement to withstand the spell cast over them by the ‘dark feminine’. As they fall into their frozen sleep it seems they have lost everything. What is needed to return them to life is the strength of the masculine value, personified in the handsome prince who eventually releases them from their imprisonment.
Conversely, in The Frog Prince and Beauty and the Beast, when the immature young heroine first encounters the masculine value, it seems to her menacing, unattractive and deformed. Only when the heroine has developed her femininity to the point where she can show love to this representative of the masculine in its ‘inferior’ guise as a frog or a monster does it emerge in its proper fully-developed form as a handsome prince. Indeed at the end of these stories we see the feminine and the masculine liberating each other simultaneously. And such is the essence of Rebirth: that it shows us how it is impossible to develop one side of the human personality fully, masculine or feminine, unless this is also given positive counter-balance by the other. Initially a Rebirth story shows us someone who is imprisoned in such a way that it completely represses one side of his or her overall personality, while leaving the remaining, superior side stunted or deformed. Usually it is the feminine which is repressed, while the masculine is in some way deformed. But the hero or heroine then encounters some redeeming figure whose nature is such as to awaken the repressed, inferior side: with the result that the superior, deformed side can also at last assume its proper shape.
We learn of Scrooge, for instance, how as an originally sensitive and sociable young man his growing obsession with money had caused him to lose the girl who was going to marry him. He has lost touch with the softening feminine and thus passed into the deforming grip of the ‘dark masculine’, becoming heartless and tyrannical, obsessed with the power of riches and the endless calculation in his ledgers of how much he had lent and was owed. He comes to the crisis when he is confronted in a dream by the three spirits, like messengers from his unconscious, who by presenting him with the shocking objective truth of his state begin to give him back the capacity to see himself and others whole. Simultaneously his long dead capacity for sympathetic feeling is aroused by the plight of Tiny Tim, the little crippled, dying boy who represents the child he never had, stunted hope for the regeneration of life. Finally, having thus been brought back in touch with his inner feminine, Scrooge goes through the transformation which also awakens him back to his proper manly state, using his masculine power creatively and protectively to bring life to others.
The story of Peer Gynt is similar. He also loses touch with the feminine as a young man, when he abandons Solveig, and passes into the deforming grip of the ‘dark masculine’. As a result, he becomes an immensely powerful figure, obsessed with using his power to dominate and reorganise the world. But nothing can ever resolve, or give him the satisfaction he craves. He then begins to find the capacity to see the objective truth of his deformed state through the mysterious figure of the Button Moulder. Finally, in his reunion with Solveig, he discovers not only true feeling but also his inmost identity as a man.
Both Scrooge and Peer Gynt are thus strongly masculine figures, whose masculinity has become dark and deformed because they have lost touch with the inner feminine. They are ‘active’ figures, because to be strong in the masculine qualities is what makes any character in a story ‘active’.
The case of Silas Marner is different. His problem is not just that he has lost touch with the feminine (at the time when he had been falsely accused of stealing money and lost the girl he loved to a ‘Dark Rival’). He has also lost the power of his masculinity (symbolised above all by the loss of his own money to another ‘Dark Rival’). Dried-up, self-pitiful, completely closed in on himself, he thus becomes a passive figure – until the arrival of the redeeming child, Eppie, who not only awakens the lost feminine in him by giving him back the capacity to feel, but also, by calling him into the new role of father-protector, reawakens his masculine strength. He even recovers his money, which for years has lain like so much locked-up dead energy at the bottom of a pond, and can now put it to life-giving use in looking after Eppie.
Raskolnikov, the unhappy young student, is another hero weak on both the masculine and feminine sides of himself. In his disordered fantasies of proving himself to be a man he can only dream of some wild, rebellious action which will demonstrate his Napoleon-like power to transcend the moral order. In reality this turns out to be a hideous caricature of manliness, the heartless killing of two helpless old women. And at this point, if the story were Tragedy, we should see him spiralling down into the grip of darkness until he is destroyed. Instead he begins to pass mysteriously under the spell of two light figures: the magistrate Porfiry, a wise, all-seeing, ‘father figure’, who represents the true masculine authority and firmness which Raskolnikov lacks; and Sonia who, despite her outwardly fallen way of life, represents selfless, sympathetic feeling. Step by step, under their influence, Raskolnikov is drawn into facing up to the reality of his horrible crime, even though it is not until his nightmare shows him the objective truth of his state that he finally develops the capacity to see whole. It is this which brings him in touch with true feeling, in his spiritual union with Sonia, and we are thus led to suppose that at the end of the story he is at last on his way to becoming a whole man.
In The Snow Queen when one splinter of the magician’s mirror enters Kay’s eye he loses the capacity to see whole (everything is seen distorted and in a mocking, satirical light); when another enters his heart, it cuts him off from feeling (he rejects Gerda). This places him under the spell of the ‘dark masculine’, in terms of his newfound cerebral obsession with rational calculations and mental patterns. But he has no real masculine strength: it is all in the mind, as with Raskolnikov; and this also places him under the spell of the ‘dark feminine’ in the shape of the powerful, heartless Snow Queen. Kay is now completely imprisoned, both dead to the true feminine and stunted in his masculinity. At this point Gerda sets out to find him, representing in herself both the qualities he lacks: the femininity of her feeling and, in her courage and spirit, the masculine strength he needs as well. She is thus an ‘active’ heroine. And at the point of Kay’s transformation, when she has liberated him, he recovers not only contact with the repressed feminine in himself, his ability to feel and to see whole, but also his independence and manly strength. Thus we learn at the end, when both have returned home, that the two former children have at last ‘grown up’.
Finally, in Fidelo, we see the unusual case of a hero who, because of his special circumstances, has become stunted in his masculinity while remaining strong in his inner feminine. Florestan’s imprisonment at the hands of the Tyrant reduces him outwardly to a weak, passive dependence. But he retains his secure link to the feminine in his unshakeable love for Leonore, and it is precisely this situation which her own balance of qualities is best equipped to redeem. Leonore is not only fully developed in her own femininity. She is also, in her fearless courage, irradiated with ‘masculine’ strength, as is conveyed by her donning a man’s disguise. In this respect she brings to Florestan in his dungeon the very strength and spirit he has lost. She is able to defy and to outwit the Tyrant, and thus to make the equation complete whereby Florestan can be freed again to become a proper man. Like Ariadne, or Portia, or Jane Eyre, she is the ‘active’ heroine who is so often needed when the hero himself is for some reason rendered in masculine terms weak and lacking in power. The ‘active’ heroine is always a strong, independent figure, alive to the positive inner masculine qualities in herself, which is why she so often disguises herself as a man, or is associated with manly weapons (Ariadne bringing the sword to Theseus) or ‘masculine’ skills (Portia showing her mastery of the law). She is needed to redress the balance of the overall equation, where the hero has been reduced to impotence, by helping to pull him out of his imprisonment and restoring him to masculine strength. Because for any true, triumphant union to take place between the hero and heroine of a story, a complete balance of all four masculine and feminine qualities has somehow to be available between them: to bring about the final flowering which can enable both, in each other, to become whole.
We can now see the nature of the equation which lies at the heart of stories coming clearly into view.