‘The heavens themselves, the planets and this centre,
Observe degree, priority and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office and custom, in all line of order;
And therefore is the glorious planet Sol
In noble eminence enthron’d and sphered
Amidst the other; whose medicinable eye
Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,
And posts, like the commandment of a king,
Sans check, to good and bad. But when the planets
In evil mixture to disorder wander,
What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate
The unity and married calm of states
Quite from their fixtures.’
Ulysses in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, i.iii
‘All happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The famous dictum with which Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina might well be adapted to apply to stories. ‘All stories which come to a happy ending are alike....’ And certainly, as we shall see when we come to look at what happens when stories fail to reach a proper happy ending, there is a sense in which each does so in its own way and for its own individual reasons. But what is remarkable when we consider the vast range of stories which do come to a complete happy ending is how much they have in common. We can now, in this chapter, sum up what that is.
If we consider any of the examples we have looked at which do reach such a positive resolution – from Cinderella to the Odyssey, from The Marriage of Figaro to Crocodile Dundee – we can see how what has been going on in each of them is fundamentally the same. In order to reach a full happy ending, the story must culminate in an act of liberation from the dark power which produces a final image of integration with life. This great prize can only be wrested from the darkness when the hero or heroine, or both together, have been transformed in such a way that they are potentially whole. This means that, between them, they must represent a balance of certain specific qualities: those qualities we can identify as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’.
In fact what we have seen emerging in the last chapter is how stories present us with an ideal picture of human nature. What we see endlessly recurring is that same equation: how, to reach the fully happy ending, hero and heroine must represent the perfect coming together of those four values: strength, order, feeling and understanding. But, in the end, all these values represent simply two halves, masculine and feminine, which make up a whole. So long as either of these elements is lacking, the power of darkness and imperfection will still in some degree hold sway. For the characters in a story to emerge fully into the light, we must ultimately see both elements being brought together in perfect balance.
The process whereby this is achieved invariably requires a specific sequence of steps. First we see the hero or heroine in that incomplete, unresolved state which characterises the beginning of a story. Then something has to emerge which opens them out to the possibility that eventually they may achieve the distant state of wholeness. Thirdly, and this may comprise almost all the action of the story, they have to be shown as developing, or in some way being brought to the point where they are finally ready to realise that state. Only then, as in the opening of some complicated lock which requires all the tumblers to be aligned in exactly the right way before it will open, can we see the fourth, concluding step: the moment of final transformation and liberation from the dark power which releases the life-giving treasure and brings the story to its triumphant resolution.
So fundamental is this pattern that it shapes even some of the simplest stories in the world. In the little Russian folk tale, The Turnip, a man plants a seed which grows into an enormous turnip. When it is fully grown (or ‘whole’), he tries to pull it out of the ground and cannot. We have the image of some great prize which cannot yet be secured because the hero is not yet adequate to the task. The man calls his wife, but even their combined strength is not enough. To help in the task, he then summons in turn a boy, a girl, a succession of animals, each adding to all the rest. The image is of the hero’s original inadequate powers being gradually built up, until at last the smallest animal of all – a mouse (in some versions a beetle) – provides the final extra ounce of strength necessary to do the trick. The prize can finally be wrested from the earth, and they can all sit round together having a joyful feast. Indeed the turnip proves so large that it will continue to provide them all with food for a long time to come.
Two principles have been required to release the life-giving treasure. Obviously it needed the building up of a sufficiency of strength. But this could not have been achieved unless the hero had been able to join up with the other characters around him, in a state of mutual sympathy and co-operation. Only when the chain is absolutely complete (as is underlined by the way each link added to it is smaller and smaller) can the treasure be won.
In other words, the first essential principle is the masculine one of power and control. The second, allowing the state of potential wholeness to be reached, is the feminine one of connection and joining together. Such are the two elemental principles around which stories are constructed. If the hero of a story is destined fully to succeed, he must be shown to be fully masculine. He cannot be weak and ineffectual. But his masculine power must not be hard and inflexible. He must not be egocentrically closed off within himself. He must be open, in ways which connect him positively with others, with all that is beyond him, with the flow of life. Only when this potential state of balance has been achieved is the hero ready for the moment of liberation when the life-giving treasure is released.
In some stories we may see this process of coming to wholeness symbolised almost entirely in terms of what is happening to the hero himself. Even so, when we look carefully, we see how both the necessary elements are involved. The Ugly Duckling begins in a completely undeveloped, immature state. He then sees the swans, like a distant vision of some unattainable perfection and wholeness. He then goes through a long period of further testing and inward growth, until he is ready for his climactic transformation: and we then see his final, fully-developed state made up of two elements. On the one hand, he has reached a state of sovereign maturity as a ‘kingly’ swan, expressing the strength and autonomy of his fully-developed masculinity. On the other, he is also a beautiful, graceful creature, expressing within himself the instinctive perfection of nature in which the two parts of the equation, both strength and its life-giving balance, are never separated. He has reached a state of completeness which means that he is at last entirely at one with himself, with his fellow swans and with the world.
But in most stories this final image of wholeness is centred on the union of the hero with the heroine. And here, as we have seen, the action of the story is eventually reduced, as it nears its ending, to what is essentially a three-cornered struggle. Earlier we looked at this in terms of the dark power, on one hand, standing for the `dark masculine’; the heroine, on the other, standing for the `light feminine’; and the hero, coming between them, representing the balance between the two. We can just as well see it another way, with the hero on one side and the heroine on the other, representing the treasure, life, all that he needs to be complete: while the dark power stands between them, representing all that has to be overcome and transcended in order for that final state of wholeness to be achieved.
Whichever way we look at it, the only thing which matters is whether the right balance of qualities can be brought to bear to achieve the goal. And as the story nears its climax, this three-cornered struggle usually presents itself in one of three ways.
The most basic form of this three-sided conflict is the type of story where we see the passive heroine somehow helpless in the clutches of the dark power – the Princess imprisoned by the monster – and where the hero has finally to prove himself by engaging in a battle to release her. Such a heroine may seem weak and helpless, but at this moment it is precisely her vulnerability which points up the essence of what is happening. In complete antithesis to the hard, aggressive, ‘dark masculine’ power which is threatening her, she stands for the soft, yielding, flowing, loving feminine: precisely the value which the threatening figure so completely lacks. Certainly to set her free the hero has to demonstrate his own masculine power. But just as important to us as we watch the unfolding of the action is the fact that he is seen as not just a tough, masculine figure: unlike his heartless opponent he is also irradiated with protective and sympathetic feeling, and it is this which allows us to see him as a light figure, worthy of his prize. His strengths are redeemed and made positive because they are being used in a cause which is not egocentric. Because he is open to the feminine value within him, he is able to join up with and liberate the feminine outside him. Because he represents not egotism and one-sidedness but a state of balance, he can see clearly what he has to do, and is thus able to rise above the limitations of the dark power and to be united with his ‘other half’. And finally, to signify the state of inner and outer sovereignty he has achieved, we see him – like Aladdin, Perseus or Odysseus – succeeding to rule over the kingdom.
A second version of the story is that where the figure most obviously threatened by the dark power is the hero himself, and where the heroine plays a much more active role in liberating him. Here we see more explicitly how it is the life-giving power of the feminine which itself helps to draw the hero up to his final state of wholeness. When young Theseus arrives in Crete to face the final test of his burgeoning maturity, he is presented by the Tyrant Minos with two ordeals which show each of the aspects of the ‘dark masculine’ in its most deadly, negative guise. On the one hand, he has to face the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, representing physical strength and power at its most heartless: on the other, he has to face the Labyrinth, with its maze of tunnels and dead ends, representing the ordering faculty of the human mind when it is cut off from life and the ability to see whole. What Theseus requires to rise above this double-test is the quality to turn each of these things into its positive, and it is this which he finds in his secure link to the feminine, in his loving bond with Ariadne. It is she who brings his strength to life by giving him the sword to slay the Minotaur; and she who gives him the vital thread which will liberate him from the deadly, suffocating Labyrinth, by enabling him to ‘see whole’ and thus connecting him back to life, light and the fresh air of the real world. Thus rooted in his link to the loving feminine, Theseus is finally able to rise to his full stature – fitting him on his return home to succeed to the kingdom.
We may see either of these types of story from the point of view of the heroine herself, in stories where she, rather than the hero, is the central figure. In such fairy tales as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty or Snow White, we see a beautiful, gentle, entirely feminine heroine who is passively languishing in the shadows of the imprisonment where she has been placed by the ‘dark feminine’, a wicked stepmother, witch or bad fairy. What is required in each case to bring about her liberation is a handsome loving hero who can introduce into the equation precisely the element which is lacking, and which is necessary to override the negative, unbalanced, unloving power of the ‘dark feminine’ – namely masculine strength which is superior because it is balanced and open to the true feminine.
In stories where the heroine is ‘active’, such as Jane Eyre, The Snow Queen or Fidelio, and where it is the hero who has most obviously fallen into the state of imprisonment, it is the balanced heroine herself who introduces the element of strength which is necessary to release him and to restore him to his proper masculine state – even though she has only been brought up to her own full strength and stature by the inspiration of her love for the hero.
The third variation arises when we come to those stories where the hero is himself the chief dark figure of the tale. Here the three-cornered battle has to be fought out essentially within his own divided personality. The hero may have most obviously fallen into the grip of the ‘dark masculine’, in which case he is strong, domineering and ruthless; he may have become possessed by the ‘dark feminine’, in which case he is most obviously weak and passive; or he may be in the grip of both, so that he behaves erratically, using his masculinity in a weak, treacherous way. In any respect, the one thing that is certain is that he is unable to make contact with the true feminine: he behaves egocentrically because has not got the capacity to feel for others or to see whole. And it is precisely through each of these deficiencies that, by the inexorable logic of storytelling, he gets caught up in the tragic downward spiral towards catastrophe. His inability to feel for others leads him to become progressively isolated and estranged from those around him, so that they (or those who survive) gradually constellate in opposition to him. His inability to see whole means that becomes enmeshed in that increasingly tortuous labyrinth of misjudgements which characterises any dark hero, as he is carried ever further from reality into the fantasy world of wishful thinking.
This is the real reason why any story in which the hero is dark shows him moving through mounting frustration into a state of nightmare. As his egocentricity drives him increasingly into outward and inward isolation, the reality of the world he has defied closes in on him until he is trapped. He faces the final crisis. And at such a moment his only hope of not plunging on to final disaster is that the terrifying pressure of his plight may at last force him out of the limited state of consciousness which has brought him to such a pass, and into contact with that deeper centre of his personality which can enable him to see the objective truth of his situation and to be brought back into living contact with others. If he can do this, like Leontes or Count Almaviva or Raskolnikov or Peer Gynt, we see that extraordinary moment of inward and outward transformation which marks the coming to wholeness. Liberated from the grip of the dark power within himself, he discovers that the heart of his identity, the inner self which has been liberated, is inextricably identified with the loving feminine, both within and outside him. At this moment his masculinity is no longer dark. And this is precisely the moment when his other half emerges from the shadows to join him up with all the world.
More rarely, we see the same kind of story where it is the heroine who is dark and has become hard, self-centred and domineering, like Shakespeare’s Shrew, Emma Wodehouse, Tracy Lord or Mary Craven in The Secret Garden. Their personalities are strong, but they are heartless and blind, cut off from their inner feminine. What each of these heroines requires is a hero who is a perfect balance of masculine strength with a loving heart and the capacity to see whole (in particular to perceive the heroine’s own repressed inner femininity). This is precisely what Petruchio, Mr Knightley, Dexter Haven and young Dickon represent. The result is that the heroine is liberated from the ‘dark masculine’ which has possessed her and isolated her from the world; her true feminine self emerges from the shadows to bring her alive and make her whole; and for the first time she is happily at one with all around her and with life.
So we come to the central goal around which – whether or not it can be reached – all storytelling ultimately revolves.
The supreme moment of liberation in a story may well come at precisely that point where the hero and heroine are finally brought physically and spiritually together, melting into each other in an act of overwhelming love. We see such a moment when, after all his journeyings, all his ordeals, culminating in the great battle with the suitors, Odysseus can at last clasp his loving Penelope to him with no longer a trace of shadow between them:
‘Penelope’s surrender melted Odysseus’s heart, and he wept as he held his dear wife in his arms, so loyal and so true.’
We see such a moment when the frozen statue of Hermione thaws into life and she steps down from her pedestal to embrace her contrite Leontes. We see such a moment when the Prince, having penetrated the hedge of thorns and found his way to the little hidden room at the heart of the castle, finally wakens the Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. But no sooner has the Prince done this than an extraordinary sequence of other events begins to unfold around them. All over the castle, every man, woman, child and animal that has also been frozen in sleep begins to stir. From the King and Queen downwards, the whole household awakens joyfully back to life.
Up to this point we have been looking almost entirely at what happens to the central characters in a story. We have concentrated on that great central theme of storytelling, as it may be seen from different angles: the working of the hero or heroine of the story towards some ultimate goal of wholeness and personal fulfilment. But a last enormously important element must now be brought in to complete the picture: and that is the wider context in which this individual drama of salvation is being worked out. For the outcome of the personal drama of the hero and heroine often has repercussions which affect many more people than just themselves.
In fact we are almost never presented in a story with a picture of the hero or the heroine in isolation. We usually meet them in the context of a group or community of others – a family, a household, a town, a city, a country, a kingdom. This is the ‘little world’ conjured up by the story, and it is almost invariably a world in which, in some way, ‘the time is out of joint’, something has gone badly amiss. The ruling order no longer exercises benign, harmonious or unchallenged sway. It may be that the king or the head of the household, the centre of authority, has become a Tyrant. It may be that he is weak, or has fallen sick, or is absent – or that his authority has been usurped by a Dark Rival. It may be that some monster or other force of darkness from outside the kingdom has intruded to threaten its security. The result is that things are in disarray, life is no longer flowing peacefully and happily. Whether we are looking at Odysseus’s Ithaca or Phaoroah’s Egypt, Beowulf’s Heorot or Shylock’s Venice, King Arthur’s Britain or Robin Hood’s England, the household of Cinderella or that of Count Almaviva, Robinson Crusoe’s island or Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, the Russia of War and Peace or the France of The Three Musketeers, the little ‘kingdom’ of Ebenezer Scrooge or that of Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger, the little community of Amity in Jaws or the entire galaxy in Star Wars, it is the same story. A state of conflict and confusion has arisen, division and disaffection rule. And this is because the little world presented by the story has fallen in some way under the shadow of the dark power.
Against this background of general disharmony we see the hero or the heroine of the story moving, consciously or unconsciously, towards their own moment of personal resolution. And almost every story we have looked at has centred round one of two general situations.
Firstly there is the type of story which shows us an essentially light hero or heroine who spends most of the story under the shadow of the dark power as it emanates from some source outside them. They are struggling, developing and working towards that eventual climactic moment when the scales can be finally tipped, the dark power can be overthrown and they can at last emerge from the shadows into the light.
The other type of story is that which shows the hero or the heroine as themselves the chief dark figure, casting a shadow over others. In this case also, the light, redeeming element eventually emerges from the shadows to overthrow the darkness and to end the story on a final image of wholeness.
In other words, from whichever perspective we view the drama, the essence of what is happening in the story remains the same. We see a world polarised between a dominant ‘upper realm’ in which for most of the story the dark power has the upper hand – with its egocentricity, heartlessness and limited consciousness; and an inferior ‘shadow realm’ which contains the potential for wholeness. Eventually, when all has been properly constellated, the scales tip and the centre of light in the story emerges from the shadows to redeem the corrupted upper world, to end division and to bring everything at last into a state of perfect balance and harmony. And this means not just for the hero and heroine themselves, but for everyone else around them in the world of the story who has been thrown into shadow (so long as they have survived).
We are thus left with two overriding images of the general state of things which stories can describe. The first shows human affairs under the shadow of the dark power, in a state of irresolution, uncertainty and incompleteness; and such a state may be characterised by four things:
(1) the aggressive and oppressive use of power;
(2) disorder and things not being as they should be;
(3) things being obscured or hidden, so that no one can see clearly or whole;
(4) a lack of proper feeling, love or mutual affection.
And when human affairs fall into such a state of sickness they have a tendency not just to remain static but to sink further into chaos and negativity until either they reach a catastrophe, or something happens to break the dark spell and to reverse the tendency upwards.
If this happens we may then see the other general state, that vision which is held out to us at the end of so many stories where the shadows are dispelled and where everything has suddenly and miraculously come out right. This means that:
(1) power is at last being exercised wisely and justly, under proper authority;
(2) a true harmonious state of order has emerged out of chaos;
(3) things obscured, hidden or not recognised have come to light;
(4) human beings are joined together in a joyful community of reconciliation, friendship and love.
In other words, what we see emerging at the end of such a story is a transformation from darkness to light, from negative to positive, on all four of the counts which go to make up a state of perfect balance: power, order, awareness and feeling. And in terms of the wider community, the ‘world’ of the story, this means that:
(1) either the existing ruler has once again been enabled to exercise his power properly; or a new ruler has emerged to do so in his place – as when the hero ‘succeeds to the kingdom’;
(2) the framework of order which had either become oppressive or had dis-integrated has again knit together in a living, all-embracing way, so that all members of the community are in proper relationship with one another; families are reunited; everything out of place or lost has been restored to where it should be;
(3) everyone can at last see clearly and whole because nothing important any longer remains hidden; people have discovered everything they need to know, including their own true identities;
(4) the egotism and division which lay at the root of everyone’s problem has at last been transcended, in a spirit of universal harmony and love.
If a story can reach the point where all these things have happened together (and they are so interdependent that they can only happen more or less together), we are given a momentary glimpse of a community of human beings entirely at one, liberated from every trace of shadow. And at the heart of this transition from incompleteness to wholeness has lain the transformation of just one individual, the central figure of the story. It has been around his or her working towards a state of individual balance and self-realisation that everything else has centred: so that nothing more completely symbolises the extraordinary thing that has happened to the wider world than the bringing together of a man and a woman to make a new and perfect whole, the microcosm of some infinite state of union, shining with life, light and hope for the future.
Such is the most completely positive ending that stories can aspire to. What does it mean that the human imagination has down the ages so consistently shaped stories in this way? To begin to answer this we must look again at those great shadowy presences who appear between the hero or heroine and their goal in so many stories, and who somehow have to be transcended if the goal is to be reached. We are now in a position to examine what these figures – the Dark Father, the Dark Mother, the Dark Rivals, the Dark Other Half – really stand for; how they fit together; and how they actually relate to the hero or the heroine’s transformation during the story. In fact we can now see the real function and purpose which the dark figures serve in storytelling.