Frankenstein Meets Faust

Who is the O.G.? (No, not Ice-T.) It’s the mysterious Opera Ghost in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera. You have undoubtedly run across this tale at some point. With over a dozen movie versions and one of the most successful Broadway spectacles of all time, it is safe to say this story has become part of the culture.

Reading the book is a bit jarring. At one level, the story is roughly the same as the Broadway or movie versions. Opera House in Paris is haunted by a guy named Eric, who has a disfigured face, hides in the cellars, moves about through endless secret passages, trains Christine to be a great singer by coaching her through the walls of her dressing room; Christine falls in love with Raoul; Eric doesn’t like that, kidnaps her, and takes her to his lair from which she is rescued. Stated baldly, the story is a penny dreadful tale meant to be sold in a cheap paperback edition. Sure enough Gaston Leroux specialized in that sort of tale in the early 20^th century;he wrote a lot of mystery tales, but Phantom is the only one which still sees the light of day.

Since the plot is exactly what you expect, why is it jarring to read the novel? To start: there is nothing romantic or dashing about the Phantom. He is a very creepy guy, stalking a young woman before hauling her off to his even creepier underground lair complete with a torture chamber. The torture chamber itself becomes the focus of an interminable section toward the end of the book. (Suffice it to say that the torture chamber is absurd.) The Phantom has absolutely no redeeming features; he is truly a mean and nasty piece of work. A comic book villain.

On the other side of Christine is the rather uninspiring Raoul. It is hard to find anything that Christine sees in the guy. So, you are left with Christine trapped between a creepy stalker and a thoroughly dull love interest. Then add in the mysterious Persian, who is so incomprehensible as a character, he gets left out of the musical. The chief purpose of the Persian, who knows Eric’s backstory, seems to be to allow the narrator to pretend this is a true story; without the Persian, the narrator would have no way to know Eric’s origin story. Despite being a cartoon villain, Eric’s origin story is unworthy of its own tale.

The Phantom of the Opera is really nothing more than a zillion other schlocky mystery/suspense novels. Truly nothing here that rises above a decent way to spend an evening when you want some formulaic entertainment. So, how did it become so famous?

After reading it, I wrote one of my former students who is obsessed with Broadway musicals in general and Phantom in particular. She cleared up my confusion.

First, she noted that in the various incarnations of the story, the director gets to make a choice about the nature of Eric. He isn’t always a cruel cartoon villain. He can also be a victim or a mysterious romantic figure. As Eric takes on assorted personas, the story subtly shifts; the more romantic Eric is, the less creepy he becomes and the more Christine can fall in love with him. Similarly, if you play up his victimhood, then you can arouse sympathy for him. Morph Eric and you can turn this into a story with a bit more depth than exists in the novel.

Second, my former student pointed out that The Phantom is an incarnation of an even earlier morphable literary figure: Frankenstein’s monster. Here we have a person who is rejected by the world and resorts to a life of violence. Do the sufferings of the monster or the phantom justify the later violence? Do we pity the monster or the phantom? Are either of them really capable of love?

The Phantom of the Opera is thus the equivalent of a myth, and that is what explains its staying power. The importance of myth to this story is related to another curious feature of the book. The novel, published in 1910, assumes the reader is acquainted the opera in general and Faust in particular. There are a lot of references to Faust, and Leroux spends no time at all explaining them to the reader. Once I realized this, I was stunned. Imagine a word in which a book with no real literary pretensions assumes the Reader is acquainted with the details of an opera (trivia question: who wrote the famous Faust opera?) and the story on which the opera was based (second trivia question: who wrote Faust?). Once upon a time, the readers of the equivalent of the thriller of the moment could be assumed to know such things. Now? Obviously not. Yet, understanding the nature of Christine requires knowing that she is singing the part of Marguerite in Faust at the insistence of the Phantom. That is rather chilling, but totally lost if the reader knows nothing about Faust and Marguerite. (Answers: Gounod and Goethe.)

If you are so inclined, you can now give The Phantom of the Opera literary street cred by saying it is Frankenstein meets Faust. That is actually not a bad description, but it does make you think the novel has more depth than it actually has.