The Undergrounds of The Phantom of The Opera Sublimation and The Gothic in Leroux S Novel and Its Progeny PDF

The Undergrounds of
The Phantom qfthe Opera

The Undergrounds of
The Phantom ofthe Opera
SUBLIMATION AND THE GOTHIC
IN LEROUX's NOVEL AND ITS PROGENY
JERROLD E. HOGLE
pal grave
*
THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Copyright© Jerrold E. Hogle, 2002.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published 2002 by PALGRAVE'"

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Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS.
Companies and representatives throughout the world.
PALGRAVE is the new global publishing imprint of St. Martin's Press LLC Scholarly
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ISBN 978-1-349-63410-1 ISBN 978-1-137-11288-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-11288-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hogle, Jerrold E.
The undergrounds of The phantom of the opera : sublimation and the Gothic in
Leroux's novel and its progeny/ by Jerrold E. Hogle.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
r. Leroux, Gaston, 1868-1927 Fan tome de !'Opera. 2. Phantom of the Opera
(Motion picture : 1925) 3- Phantom of the Opera (Motion picture : 1943)
4. Phantom of the Opera (Musical) I. Title
P~623.E6 F235 2002

843'.912-dc21
200!050000
Design by Letra Libre, Inc.
First edition: May 2002

!0987654 2
Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

For
Karen and Joanne
and
in memoriam
Jane and Howard Hogle
CONTENTS
List cifIllustrations lX
Prefoce Xl
A Note on Translations XV
FIRST PART
THE NOVEL: LEROUX's DISTINCTIVE CHOICES
AND THEIR WIDER CONTEXTS
One The Original Fantome's Mysteries: An Introduction 3

Two The Psychoanalytic Veneer in the Novel: Le Fantome's
"Unconscious Depths" and their Social Foundations 41
Three Leroux's Sublimations of Cultural Politics:
From Degeneration and the Suppression of Carnival
to the Abjection of Mixed "Otherness"
Four The Ghost of the Counterfeit:
Leroux's Fantome and the Cultural Work of the Gothic 103
SECOND PART
THE MAJOR ADAPTATIONS:
NEO-GOTHIC SUBLIMATIONS OF
CHANGING CULTURAL FEARS
Five Universal's Silent Film: The Recast Scapegoat, the Qlest

for the Widest Audience, and the Management of Labor 135
Six The 1943 Remake: Recombining Film Styles,
Struggling with Psychoanalysis, and Sanitizing World War I I 153
Seven The Culture of Adolescence: The Lloyd Webber Musical
and the Adaptations that Paved the Way, 1962-1986 173
Eight Different Phantoms for Different Problems:
Some Adaptations Since the Musical 205
Epilogue The Phantom's Lasting Significance:
An Assessment of Its Cultural Functions 233
Notes 241
Works Cited 245
Index 255
List of Illustrations
Figure I.I Lon Chaney in the masked ball scene of the 1925
Phantom ofthe Opera (Copyright© 2002 by Universal Studios.
Courtesy of Universal Studio Publishing Rights, a Division
of Universal Studios Licensing, Inc. All rights reserved.
Also courtesy Ron Chaney Lon Chaney™ likeness as the
Phantom of the Opera is a trademark and copyright of
Chaney Entertainment, Inc. Copyright© 2002.
All rights reserved). 5
Figure !.2 Claude Rains, 1943 I Herbert Lorn, 1962 I
Michael Crawford, 1986 (Courtesy of the Kobal Collection,
the kind permission of the Really Useful Group Limited,
and Michael Crawford through Knight Ayton Management). 6
Figure !.3 From a Danse Macabre in the Cloister
of the Innocents in Paris, 1485 (Warthin, 12). 7
Figure I.4 James Ensor's Skeleton Painter, 1896. (Copyright
© James Ensor I Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY). 8
Figure 1.5 The Paris Opera, ca. 1900
(By permission of Roger Viollet I Getty Images). 19
Figure 1.6 George du Maurier illustration for his own Trilby, 1894. 23
Figure 2.1 Edvard Munch's The Scream, 1893
(© 2001 The Munch Museum I
The Munch- Ellingsen Group I Artists Rights Society). 48
Figure 3-I Illustration from Coombs' Popular Phrenology, r865 (Levine, 222). 70
Figure 3.2 "The Sponge," drawn by H. G. Ibels, 1899
(By permission of Roger Viollet I Getty Images). 89
Figure 5.1 Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin in the 1925 Universal
Phantom (Copyright© 2002 by Universal Studios.
Courtesy of University Studio Publishing Rights,
a Division of University Studio Licensing, Inc.
All rights reserved. Also courtesy Ron Chaney
Lon ChaneyTM likeness as the Phantom of the
Opera is a trademark and copyright of Chaney
Entertainment, Inc. Copyright© 2002. All rights reserved). 139
Figure 5.2 Lon Chaney on Universal's 1924-25 underground set
for its Phantom ofthe Opera (Copyright© 2002 by
X THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Universal Studios. Courtesy of University Studio

Publishing Rights, a Division of University Studio
Licensing, Inc. All rights reserved. Also courtesy
Ron Chaney. Lon Chaney™ likeness as the Phantom
of the Opera is a trademark and copyright of Chaney
Entertainment, Inc. Copyright© 2002. All rights reserved). 142
Figure 5.3 1893 poster by Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec
(Copyright Giraudon /Arts Resource, New York). 145
Figure 6.1 Claude Rains unmasked in Universal's 1943
Phantom ofthe Opera (Courtesy of the Kobal Collection). 158
Figure 71 Michael Crawford in makeup, unmasked, in the 1986
Lloyd Webber Phantom (Reproduced with the kind
permission of the Really Useful Group Limited and
Michael Crawford through Knight Ayton Management). 175
Figure 72 Herbert Lorn as the unmasked Professor Petrie
in the 1962 Hammer Studios Phantom
(Courtesy of the Kobal Collection). 184
Figure 73 William Finley as Winslow Leach in
Phantom ofthe Paradise, 1974 ("PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE"
© 1974, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
All rights reserved). 189
Figure 74 Maximilian Schell and Jane Seymour in the 1983
Phantom on CBS-TV (Courtesy of the Kobal Collection). 196
Figure 8.r The faces of Michael Jackson over time
(Courtesy of Photofest). 221
Preface
The phenomenally successful Andrew Lloyd Webber stage-musical version of The

Phantom if the Opera has recently celebrated over a decade and a half of continuous
performances in major urban centers of the Western world. It is thus the best-
known instigator of the basic and unsettling questions that this book now tries to
answer. Why has this story become an ongoing popular myth, at least among mostly
Anglo- European and middle-class urban audiences? Why, in fact, has the tale kept
coming back in adaptations for almost one hundred years after the original novel, Le
Fantilme de !'Opera, was written by Gaston Leroux, a flamboyant Parisian journalist and
writer of"high pulp" detective and adventure fiction? What is it about the novel-
what lies at the heart of its historical and symbolic foundations-that compels so
many returns to it, from the silent film of 1925 starring Lon Chaney to the very re-
cent prose "sequel" to the Lloyd Webber musical, The Phantom ifManhattan by the spy
novelist Frederick Forsyth? What does the story do for us in Western culture that
makes us keep wanting to remake and revise it? Why has it acquired a status roughly
equal to that of other much-adapted "Gothic monster" tales such as Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein (initially published in 1818), Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (first sold in January 1886), or Bram Stoker's Dracula (now just over a century
old, having first appeared in 1897)?
These questions are even more pressing for us when we consider how much this
story has been transformed in its many versions over the years, even while it retains
certain basic ingredients. Among the recurring elements, for example, is the fright-
ening face of the ghostlike title character, who usually wears masks for much of the
story until an abrupt unmasking reveals his supremely ugly and horrifying visage.
The nature of that face, its kind of "deformity," shifts (as we will see) from version
to version, and there is no obvious explanation for those decisions unless each one
and its cultural circumstances are more carefully analyzed than they have been up to
now. Consequently, this study strives to account for the many changes in The Phan-
toms ifthe Opera just as much as it tries to uncover the basic story's fundamental roots
and overarching drives. Given that so many alterations have been made so often, it
appears as if the cultural needs and motives that brought the original work about,
since they are bound to change substantially over time, almost demand that trans-
formations occur. By making such adjustments, it would seem, the story can help
Western humanity respond to emerging challenges that come to confront the earlier
desires and the problems these leave us to solve in our cultural imagination. What
accounts for the continuities and the discontinuities in the history of this shifting but
ongoing phenomenon? What "cultural work" -what symbolic shaping of the way we
think in the West-does The Phantom ifthe Opera keep doing for us in its original form
and in the wide variations on it?
xii THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF TT-TE OPERA
This book tries to address all these questions. Surprisingly; given the cultural
prominence of The Phantom, there has been no thorough effort to answer them. Some
helpful studies do exist-some of the novel (including an annotated edition), some
of certain films or the musical, some on bits and pieces of the larger contexts in
which different versions arose. But none proposes to explain fully where The Phantom
comes from (its diverse "sources"); what cultural needs and agendas it originally ad-
dressed; why the novel is therefore rendered as it is; the deepest social and literary
foundations of both the novel and its adaptations; the historical, generic, and cul-
tural reasons for the many changes in the versions after the novel; and the ongoing
Western cultural purposes served by the survival and the transformations of the
story; I approach these issues here in three stages. My first four chapters study Ler-
oux's book by probing its complex psychological, social, ideological, and literary
foundations. The next four then offer historical and cultural analyses of the major
films, stage versions, and rewritings of The Phantom and show how these both con-
tinue and alter the book's capacity to perform certain "sublimations" for the West-
ern middle class. In a closing epilogue, I finally assess the nature and basis of these
sublimations and what they try to accomplish for the Western audiences so strongly
affected by them for so long.
My general argument is that The Phantom of the Opera, building on certain tech-
niques of symbolic "othering" most visible in Anglo- European-American "Gothic"
writing since the eighteenth century, allows Western middle-class audiences to
"cast over there" and yet to half-recognize a series of very particular "under-
grounds." These turn out to be deep-seated anomalies in Western European life-
crossings of boundaries between class, racial, gender, and other distinctions-that
are quite basic to, but commonly shunted off as "other" than, the social and indi-
vidual construction of a rising middle-class "identity." Fundamentally the Phantom
story, in setting what seems most "high culture" against what can be viewed as "low"
beneath it, displays the extremes and especially the "otherings" that occur in this
bourgeois self-fashioning. The different versions take the symbolic courses they do,
often after some noticeable struggles, because they face different threats to this
process of identity-construction, or different longings arising from it, at different
points in Western cultural history. In addition, some of the culturally based sym-
bolic schemes that were fundamental to the genesis of The Phantom, such as the dis-
courses connected with psychoanalysis, are used as covers-or, more precisely,
sublimations--concealing and revealing complex social anxieties and. the most
"outcast" levels of cultural and natural being. The even greater sublimation of those
levels in nearly every adaptation continues and modifies this process. The Phantom of
the Opera-the novel and adaptations-turns out to be an unusually revealing exam-
ple of how modern, Western, middle-class, urban culture constitutes "identity" by
trying to set it off symbolically from its very mixed foundations.
Certainly I could not have completed this study without the help of many people
and the resources that several of them have made available to me. For specific sug-
gestions and very timely support, I am grateful to several colleagues at the University
of Arizona, most notably Susan Hardy Aiken, Barbara Babcock, Adele Barker, J.
Douglas Canfield, Mary Beth Callie, George Davis, Joan Dayan, William Epstein,
Rick Emrich, Sara Heitshu, Donald Kirihara, Mary Beth Haralovich, Eileen Meehan,
linda Pierce, Elizabeth Townsend, and Susan White. I deeply appreciate the support
of University of Arizona President Peter Likins; former Provost Paul Sypherd and
PREFACE Xlll
Vice- Provost Elizabeth Ervin; the Provost's "money guru" Ed Frisch; my English De-
partment Head larry Evers; College of Humanities Dean Charles Tatum; lynn Fleis-
chman in the College of Humanities office; and the Humanities Research Initiative
Committee, the last several of whom facilitated grant and sabbatical leave support
from the college and the university that greatly helped my research and writing at cru-
cial times. I am even more grateful for the devoted and thorough work of my excel-
lent research assistants-Ari Anand, Ron Gard, and Jay Salisbury-and our great
staff supporters in the University of Arizona Faculty Center: Donna Leavell, Pam
Bridgmon, Kristan Castillo, and Kathy Fitzgerald. I am also indebted to several fine
scholars outside my university: Elisabeth Bronfen, Frances Dann, Judith Halberstam,
Terry Hale, leslie Heywood, Robert Miles, Allan Lloyd Smith, Victor Sage, Anne
Williams, and the ever-supportive William Veeder, many of whom are now key
members of the International Gothic Association, which first heard some of these
ideas at its 1995 Conference in Stirling, Scotland, well organized by Glennis Byron
and David Punter. Some later discoveries were presented at the 1999 Conference of
the European Studies Research Institute at the University of Salford in England, and
I am thankful to Avril Horner, the conference organizer, for this opportunity and to
her and the University of Manchester Press for permission to reuse material here
from the resulting essay that has recently appeared in European Gothic, one of the vol-
umes that emanated from that conference. Special additional thanks must go to Toni
Palmer, British actress and widow of director Ken Hill, who generously provided me
essential material and information on his 1970s-'8os production of Phantom for the
East End london stage. She and I are both grateful to Rachel Daniels and london
Management for their further assistance.
Thanks, too, to the Main Research and Interlibrary loan divisions of the Uni-
versity of Arizona library; as well as to the helpful staff members of the Palais Gar-
nier and of the Salle des imprimes, the Salle des periodiques, and the Bibliotheque de !'Opera, all
at the Paris locations of the Bibliotheque nationale de France in the summer of 1996. I am
equally grateful to the excellent staffs of the Film Collection in the Doheny Library
at the University of Southern California; the Film and Television Archive at the
University of California, los Angeles; and the Margaret Herrick library at the Cen-
ter for Advanced Film Study owned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci-
ences in Beverly Hills. Particularly useful information on Phantom movies, with some
personal time, has been graciously provided to me by Burbank film archivist Scott
MacQ!een. For permission to include revised material here, I thank the editors of
the South Atlantic QE:arterly, in which short portions of what follows first appeared, and
Thomas Pfau and Rhonda Ray Kercsmar, who co-edited that special issue of SAQ_
and invited my contribution. Thanks must also be warmly extended to all those at
the Palgrave division of St. Martin's Press who helped me through the production
process: Kristi long, Meg Weaver, Sarah Schur, Annjeanette Kern, Roee Raz, and
Sonia Wilson. Above all, though, this work and my fulfilling life as it is would not be
possible without the special support of my parents, the late Howard and Jane Hogle;
my wondrous daughters, Karen and Joanne; and my beautiful spouse, Pamela Wesp
Hogle, who has rescued me again and again from the depths of Operatic solitude. It
is grand for a would-be Orpheus who frequents such "undergrounds" to be able to
turn to a caring and steadfast Eurydice who never disappears.
A Note on Translations
My references to the original novel are to the French text in Leroux 1959, and the
translations from that work are my own. Indeed, all translations from the French are
mine unless I indicate otherwise. I have, however, consulted and sometimes adopted
the Lowell Bair translation (Leroux 1990) or parts of the Leonard Wolf- Elizabeth
Atkins version (Wolf 1996) of Le Fantome. Whenever the original Leroux book is dis-
cussed, I refer to it by its French title to distinguish it from all the adaptations. But
I refer to all other Leroux novels by their titles in English. Sources of translated
words, meanwhile, when I need to explain them, are those revealed in the O:ifOrd Eng-
lish Dictionary of 197I.
fiRST PART
The Novel
LEROUX'S DISTINCTIVE CHOICES
AND THEIR WIDER CONTEXTS
CHAPTER ONE
The Original Fantome' s Mysteries

AN INTRODUCTION
The original foundations of The Phantom of the Opera have become more mysterious
with time. Nearly all the famous adaptations of the novel, Gaston Leroux's Le Fantome
de l'Opera (1910), have skewed or altered key aspects of it to the point of obscuring
them altogether. Understanding the cultural roots and primary functions of this
story-the main objective in this study-means, first of all, bringing these elements
and their foundations to light. The Phantom, I would argue, has survived as it has partly
because its deepest "undergrounds" contain conflicts among class-based attitudes
and ideologies that are vitally important to the self-fashioning of the urban middle
class in the modern Western world. These conflicts and the struggles within them
are especially visible in the most important early features of Leroux's book, which
the adaptations vaguely echo even while working to bury those original "horrors"
from sight. I therefore want to begin with these partially forgotten aspects of Le Fan-
tome de l'Opera. By isolating these elements in Leroux's original, I hope to expose the
cultural quandaries that are most basic to this story from its very beginning and
thereby raise the unresolved questions that the rest of this study needs to address.
To be sure, most of the later versions of The Phantom, starting with the 1925 silent
film, have retained certain axiomatic elements from the original plot, settings, and
characters. Almost every redaction follows Leroux in focusing on a ghostlike denizen
who has resided secretly by the underground lake in the depths of the Paris Opera
house from the time it was built in the r86os and '70s (though the dates do shift from
version to version). This "phantom" is frequently masked when he is seen in the shad-
ows behind or below the Opera stage, mostly by dancers and stagehands. One of
those masks is on when he first beholds the principal object of his attentions above
ground: the young soprano from the country, Christine Daae, who has recently joined
the Opera company In most versions, as in the original, this phantom has already be-
come Christine's hidden voice teacher before the main action unfolds. He speaks and
sings to her unseen behind the walls and the mirror in her backstage dressing room.
The novel and some of the best-known versions have her regard him at first as her
"Angel of Music" (Leroux 1959, II4-I5), a visitation once promised to her by her de-
ceased father (102-105). In this guise he now enables her to sing with greater power
and beauty-while he also keeps demanding "Christine, you must love me" in fervent
commands that can be heard by anyone close enough to her dressing-room door
4 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
(49-50). In the silent film and the Lloyd Webber musical as well as the novel, this
exchange is overheard first by the patron of the Opera most enamored of Christine,
the Vicomte Raoul de Chigny, a childhood friend and sweetheart who is enraptured
to find her again. This above-ground lover, of course, is instantly jealous and anxious
to solve the mystery of the "Angel of Music." He is naturally most alarmed (in nearly
all versions) when the phantom finally lures Christine through secret passageways
down to his underground lair, usually once before and once after a crowded and glit-
tering masked ball held in the Opera's splendid foyer and centered around its grand
staircase.
It is nearly always in his subterranean world that Christine finally unmasks the
phantom, much to his dismay Now she faces the full horror of what he has sought
to hide: both the monstrously repulsive face covered up by his masks and his secret
life of strange musical compositions and architectural designs played out in the fan-
ciful rooms he has built by the lake to keep himself hidden from the world while he
hones his prodigious talents. Aided by others, as he is in the book, Raoul (or some
version of him) usually tries to penetrate the many barriers or snares that the phan-
tom has constructed to keep people from reaching his deepest domain. Full of dan-
gers though it is, this quest to "save" Christine is almost always successful, reuniting
her with Raoul (or his equivalent) and dooming the phantom to some form of de-
struction, sometimes self-motivated and sometimes inflicted on him by others. This
rooting out of the "Opera ghost"-usually the phantom's name among the Opera's
management, performers, and staff-also seems to solve the many problems he has
presented to the Opera and its managers in every version including the noveL The
most threatening and frequently used of these is his severing of the main Opera
chandelier so that it falls into the audience during a performance, usually (as in the
book) when he is trying to force the reigning prima donna off the stage so that his
"student," Christine, may sing a principal role in a major opera. Versions of The Phan,
tom tifthe Opera that avoid these elements are very rare indeed, unless they merely use
bits and pieces of it to tell a substantially different story (as in The Phantom, a 1996
film with Billy Zane).
Beyond these common traits, however, many important features of Leroux's book
are greatly distorted or omitted by its adaptations, and I now want to examine these
original features in some detaiL In doing so, I hope both to define their distinctive-
ness and to trace the specific cultural contexts they bring to the story, contexts that
turn out to be quite basic to the genesis and cultural functions of Le Fantome de ['Opera.
THE "GHOST" OF DEATH AND BIRTH AS DEATH
To begin with, the unmasked face of"Erik," the original phantom in the novel, is ac-
tually that of an almost naked skulL His visage is, quite simply; a death's head over-
laid with very thin, yellow, parchment! ike skin, since Erik's flesh has never thickened
as most epidermis does. It is also made even more horrific by his unusually red and
recessed eyes, reminiscent ofBram Stoker's Dracula, which often leave their sockets
looking like a skull's empty holes when the phantom decides not to make them glow
(Leroux 1959, 253-55). By the end of the book, we discover that he was born that
way, the end-result of a striking gestation in which the mother of his life gave birth
to a figure of death (Leroux 1959, 21, 256, 494). Consequently; when he appears at
THE ORIGINAL FANTOMES MYSTERIES 5
Figure I.I: Lon Chaney in the masked ball scene of the 1925 Phantom of the Opera
the masked ball descending the grand staircase dressed as the skeletal title figure
from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842) -a spectacular mo-
ment repeated in some major adaptations (see Wolf 1996, 137n., and my figure u)-
he is really the only character at this point in the novel whose face is unmasked, the
skull of this "Red Death" being his actual face (Leroux 1959, 187-88, 253). Leroux's
phantom is emphatically not what he usually becomes in most other incarnations: 1
the wearer of a death's-head mask, or a more general gray-white mask, over a face
that is merely deformed (see figure 1.2), as though Leroux had made no advance be-
yond what is indeed a major influence on Le Fant6me, the disfigured ~asimodo en-
amored of the singing gypsy Esmeralda in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831).
The phantom's face for Leroux, in fact, alludes to a long-standing and particularly
French tradition in Catholic religious art and allegories that still survived in 1910, if
only as an anachronism. Just as "Red Death" does in Poe's tale, Erik reenacts the skele-
tons cavorting ominously in carnivalesque revels that were pictured in the "danses
macabres that were still being painted in France through the eighteenth century, which
emphasized the inevitable and egalitarian nature of death," whether among common-
ers or the upper classes (Kselman, 44; see figure 1.3). This motif of skeletal emblems
hinting at death's arrival at the festivities of the living had survived beyond the danses
per se to reappear in nineteenth-century French paintings of middle-class households,
as when bony Death appears within a bourgeois family while one of its members is re-
ceiving religious absolution (see Kselman, 92). It is this tradition Leroux invokes when
Figure !.2: Claude Rains, 1943 I Herbert Lorn, 1962 I Michael Crawford, 1986
he has his phantom infect others with thoughts and qualities of death as soon as heap-
pears unmasked, even in the shadows. This context is reactivated, for example, when
Erik's death's head appears at the gala dinner for the new Opera managers early in the
novel, at which point "this sight immediately provoked the soul to the most funereal
thoughts" (Leroux 1959, 57). The same tradition is also recalled when Raoul first tells
Christine that he has heard the voice of an "other" ("!'autre") behind her dressing-
room door (Leroux 1959, ro9), whereupon "a cadaverous pallor spread itself over
Christine's face [and] her eyes developed circles around them" (II o) as though her re-
action to someone else's half-knowledge of Erik were the repetition in her own fea-
tures of the phantom's deathly visage.
These echoes of the danse macabre, though, change the emphasis of the tradition as
much as they continue its elements. Yes, Erik's face does vaguely carry the traditional
Christian overtones of death being the wages of sin, a passageway to Hell unless pre-
cautions are taken, and what waits for us in the depths of all households, palaces, fes-
tivals, or additional constructs of civilization designed to keep death "other" than
and "outside" of us for as long as possible. But in the scenes from the novel I have
just cited, the principal threat of death-and hence of the original phantom of the
Opera-is its bleeding over into the living world or body while each of those still
lives, its crossing of the boundaries fashioned to keep death distant from life "above
ground." What shocks the original Christine most when she unmasks the phantom
is "the mask of Death suddenly coming to life" and not being another mask to peel
off, all on a highly animate body "made entirely of death" even as it survives (Leroux
1959, 253-56). At this point Erik recalls a very late nineteenth-century transforma-
tion of the danse macabre in Europe in which portraits of living middle-class individu-
als are shown as containing a skeleton within them as both their true foundation and
their immanent destiny (see figure 1.4 and Navarette, rr-28). This threat of perme-
able boundaries (the first of several in Leroux's phantom, as we will see) becomes
even greater in the novel when we finally hear that Erik was really born this way; car-
rying death with him on his crossing into life. In contrast to nearly all the later ver-
sions, which either mute or eliminate this dimension/ Leroux's "Opera ghost"
suggests the "other" of human life always subliminally present in life that can bring
to the surface the eventuality of death at any time as though it were coterminous
7
Figure 1.3: From a Danse Macabre in the Cloister of the Innocents in Paris. 1485
with its opposite from the very beginning of a person's existence. Whatever else is
projected into and symbolized by the original phantom, it coexists with and is man-
ifested by the most feared "betwixt and between" state that Western humanity can
imagine: the inseparability of life from death and death from life.
THE DEEP REALM OF TilE MOTHER
Erik's home by the subterranean lake in the novel. meanwhile. is not the quasi-
medieval, redecorated dungeon of the silent film or the Lloyd Webber musical. For
Leroux it is far more specific to the phantom and his familial and social history. Built
by Erik below the fifth cellar while the Opera was being constructed above it under
the supervision of Charles Garnier (the actual architect). the phantom's lair has sev-
eral rooms but is designed primarily around "Ia precision des details bourgeois"
(Leroux 1959. 471) of a "petit chambrc." This cozy bedroom. the one given to the
captured Christine (Leroux 1959. 245). is filled with the kind of petit-bourgeois fur-
niture common in suburban France during the reign of Louis Philippe (1830--48).
These heirlooms. it turns out. arc left over from Erik's childhood home and are. in
his eyes. "all that remains for me of my poor. miserable mother" (Leroux 1959. 471).
His bringing Christine there in the novel is thus part of his attempt to recreate a pri-
mal bedroom scene between himself and his mother using a soprano-surrogate of
her placed where she once was in a replica of her boudoir. very likely the site of his
own conception and birth.
Moreover. this recreation of his mother's "chambre Louis- Philippe" is augmented
by a small hanging sack with two keys inside. which Erik describes to Christine as
Figure 1.4: James Ensor's Skeleton Painter, 1896.
"the little pouch of life and death" (Leroux 1959, 416), making it seem very like a
male scrotum in the maternal bedroom the more he talks about it. The keys in this
pouch have been fashioned by Erik to unlock two figures that he has also made from
Japanese bronze and placed side-by-side in little ebony coffers on the mantelpiece
of the bedroom (Leroux 1959, 458). One of these figures is a "grasshopper" and the
other a "scorpion," both of which have very phallic shapes and thus carry overtones
of sexual intercourse, in part because the scorpion represents both "the sexual func-
tion" and "the threat of death" in the traditional zodiac ( Cirlot, 280-81). Late in the
novel Leroux's Erik asks his Christine to choose a key from the pouch and thereby
select a bronze figure to turn by inserting that key into it. One choice will ignite
powder kegs stored nearby that will blow up the Paris Opera completely (the con-
sequence of her refusing to marry him) and the other will release lake water that will
flood the powder and render it harmless (a sign that she has consented to Erik's pro-
posal) (Leroux 1959, 458-59). The original phantom asks the original Christine, in
other words, to finger the symbolic testicle of her choice and then to manipulate a
form of the phallus manually in an act of insertion, if not penetration. This sequence
of acts will produce either a fiery explosion or (yes) a "rocket of water" (Leroux
1959, 464) at the deepest levels of an Opera that would like to pretend it is not
rooted in such orgasmic potentials.
THE ORIGINAL FANTOM1:0 S MYSTERIES 9
This almost too obvious "Freudian" schema is perhaps not surprising in a novel
first published just a decade after The Interpretation tifDreams (1900). As I will discuss
in my second chapter, Leroux either knew this work through reviews or was imbued
with popularizations of it rooted in a French psychoanalysis that had already influ-
enced Freud (see Hale 1998a, 247-49). Hence one of the original phantom's de-
sires, much deeper than the mere seduction of Christine, is for him to return to the
mother via a substitute for her, both as a lover and as an infant in her petit-bourgeois
bed. As Freud suggests in his Oedipal vision of the male psyche, this desire carries a
threat of castration by the father, and that threat seems evident in Le Fantome in the
way symbolic male sex organs are scattered over parts of the maternal bedroom, even
as Erik himself as a phallic figure has been made more skeletal and haggard than full-
bodied and fleshly. But Leroux's phantom ultimately works toward a moment where
his phallus and testicles are put back together by the very hands of the mother-
substitute whom he now seeks to secure in marriage and a kind of wedding night too.
By forcing this scenario using such symbols, Erik envisions the phallus being re-
placed in the mother's body and even being sought and grasped by her-making her
now the phallic mother, as in Freud's 1909 study of "little Hans" (Freud 1955, esp.
101-41)-all of which would validate Erik's longing to have her draw his sex organs
toward her with her hands, then insert his phallus into her, and finally behold it reat-
tached to her by his potent agency at last. Le Fantome's original "underground" is,
among other things, the site of a Freudian preconscious (below the level of con-
sciousness and suggestive of an even deeper unconscious) where the desire for the
son to penetrate the mother with the phallus and find it in her possession is both
dreamily played out and disguised behind symbols that sublimate those longings.
THE RESTORATION OF THE MATERNAL FLUID
The "climax" of Erik's sexual pursuit in the novel, as in some later versions, leads him
finally to release Christine from captivity; to spare Raoul's life, and to begin his self-
willed drift toward his actual death. In Leroux's text, however, this sequence begins
when Christine proffers, not real intercourse (as she does in Susan Kay's Phantom, a
1991 re-novelization [Kay; 495-96]) nor even her mouth touching his (which she
famously offers in the Lloyd Webber musical of 1986 [Perry; 166]), but her forehead
for Erik to kiss in the Louis- Philippe room of his mother. There she weeps copiously
with him, holding him close with his head just a little below hers. Consequently, as
he later tells his former friend "the Persian" (also spared after this moment), Erik
"felt her tears flow onto my forehead! On mine! On mine! ... they trickled all over
under my mask, these tears! they trickled to mix themselves with my tears in my
eyes! they flowed even into my mouth .... I tore off my mask so as not to lose even
one of these tears ... And she did not flee! ... And she did not diel" (Leroux 1959,
480). No adaptation has duplicated this extraordinary mingling of bodies and fluids
at the deepest spatial, as well as psychological, level in the novel.
The original phantom's longings are most fulfilled and his demanding rage most
dissipated in his mother's bedroom, it turns out, by a kind of pieta posture in which
Erik virtually feeds at the breast below the maternal head. Once he has assumed that
position, he takes off his last mask to let his face be washed over by a maternal liq-
uid that could only have flowed so entirely over his incomplete skull on one other
occasion: at the moment of his birth, which now seems somewhat restored. After all,
his face, with the bony core so visible beneath very thin skin, resembles the emerg-
ing head of a newborn infant almost as much as the visage of yellowed old age and
death. The original phantom of the Opera is a post mortem and a postpartum being
all at once. He reaches the goal he most prefers by approximating a return to the
birth canal, as well as to the breast, many years after being ejected from the womb
partly dead and partly alive. Within this Freudian register of the novel, Leroux's
phantom finally oscillates undecidably between adulthood and infancy, between ob-
ject-love and mother-love, as much as he wavers in his face and acts between eros and
thanatos, the drive toward reproductive self-fulfillment in a sexual union with a
mother-substitute and the drive to reach the death of a preexistent state by at least
seeming to return to the interior of the maternal body and the flow of all its fluids.
THE @ASI INCEST OF MOTHER-SON AND FATHER-DAUGHTER
Alongside these other Freudian suggestions, Leroux's novel intimates a drive toward
incest, at times a truly necrophilia! incest, particularly when deathly Erik and a ma-
ternal Christine, young enough to be his daughter, are together in that subterranean
bedroom filled with scrotumlike "sacks," phallic symbols, and his deceased mother's
furniture. On the one hand, as we have seen, this "incest" nearly occurs between a
version of mother and son. Leroux's phantom finds a hitherto unknown happiness,
first on hearing Christine's singing voice and then in the tearful embrace in which
she finally enfolds him. He clearly sees her as a mother-substitute, mainly because,
as he adds in his account to the Persian, "my poor, miserable mother never desired
that I embrace her" the way Christine finally holds him close (Leroux 1959, 480).
On the other hand, Christine's basic attraction to the phantom before, and even
after, she sees his face stems from the promise of her much-beloved, but now dead,
violinist father: that he will send that ''Angel of Music," manifestly a surrogate for
himsel£ to be her solace and mentor from Heaven after his own demise (Leroux
1959, 101-102). She finds confirmation of that promise in the soaring high male
voice-or in the playing of the violin and other instruments-offered by the invisi-
ble Erik from behind the mirror of her dressing room. She also imagines a similar
prospect as she hears the pieces he later performs for her or sings with her, using the
organ (this time the musical one) in his underground home. Despite his skeletal ug-
liness, his music seductively intoxicates her ("I am as if drunk," she recalls) with a
sublime raising of mundane sound, and even death itsel£ toward the heavenly level
where she believes her father now lies (Leroux 1959, 259).
It is more the pull, via voice and music, of the imagined and exalted father (and
the death's head that betokens his current state), rather than anything peculiar to
Erik alone, that draws the original Christine toward the phantom in any erotic way
Her longing for him, if any; is a desire for her dead father just as strong-and for-
bidden-as Erik's desire for his mother. Partly to convey that suggestion, then, as
James Twitchell has argued (279-87), all notable versions of The Phantom, especially
the novel, rework the predominantly French tale of"Beauty and the Beast," itself an
allegory about forbidden incest. 3 Within that tradition Leroux's tale is partly a warn-
ing to the young, embodied by Christine, to turn from the necrophilia! seduction of
the already dead or dying father-figure (the beast or phantom) toward "proper" ex-
THE ORIGINAL FANTOMES MYSTERIES II
ogamous love (the un-beastly prince, now the Vicomte Raoul). "Beauty and the
Beast," after all, like Le Fantome, is one variation on the even older Greek mythic
scheme of Death and the Maiden (as Clement notes about this novel on 23-24), in
which the young virgin about to choose a sexual partner is first ensnared and
tempted by a fatherly seducer whose partly paternal qualities signal that he is Death
(the wrong choice) and should finally be rejected by the Maiden, if possible, in favor
of a socially fruitful marriage (see Dowden).
Very few versions of The Phantom, as a consequence, are as direct as Leroux's book
on the overwhelming attraction of incest with the dead that used to be emphasized
by Death and the Maiden stories. Fairly early in the novel, Christine flees Paris and
the pressures imposed on her by both Raoul and her "Angel of Music" by traveling
to the rural village of Perros-Guirrec, the comforting location of her father's
gravesite. The mystified Raoul follows her at a close distance to see where she is
going and to find out why Erik also follows, it turns out, and hauntingly plays "The
Death of Lazarus," one of old Daae's favorites, on the violin while blending his
death's head into a pile of skulls stacked against the outside wall of the Perros church
adjoining the cemetery to which Christine has come (Leroux 1959). As the phantom
plays this tune the way old Daae once did, making it seem as if it were emanating
from the dead man's corpse, the eavesdropping Raoul feels both eerie and shocked
as he watches the kneeling Christine beside her father's grave arch her body heaven-
ward in a physical "extase" as though she were responding erotically (as well as reli-
giously) to what she hears, as though her father has "risen" like Lazarus but in a very
sexual way (Leroux 1959, 121). It seems as if"Daae has been interred with his violin"
and Christine's "ecstasy'' has come from making a kind of love with his buried body
and its most seductive instrument (Leroux 1959, 122). Erik's oscillation between eros
and thanatos here extends to Christine and even to Raoul as they are all swept up in
a quasi-incestuous necrophiliac fantasy inspired by conflicting drives symbolized
most by the hidden phantom and his ghostly music.
THE CARNIVALESQYE
Old Daae and Erik are equated in yet another realm in the course of Leroux's Fantome.
Christine's father, a beloved country fiddler, was known for "going from fair to fair"
to play Scandinavian tunes and accompany festive dances (Leroux 1959, 97). This
pattern almost exactly resembles the early career of the phantom himself, who "had
to traverse Europe from fair to fair" when he was exhibited as a young carnival freak
labeled the "living dead" (Leroux 1959, 494; see also Wolf 1996, 326 n. 9). Prior to his
time in Paris, Erik has returned to the carnival circuit-as old Daae "retourna dans les
campagnes" after an interval too (Leroux 1959, 97)-in a dazzling combination of
otherworldly singing, feats oflegerdemain, magic tricks, and "le ventrilique" (Leroux
1959, 494). Erik brings all these carnival skills, along with the daughter of old Daae,
forward within the Paris Opera. He even invades that "high culture" world with such
"low" ventriloquist's tricks as making the reigning diva of Paris, La Carlotta, seem to
croak like a frog during a performance of Gounod's Faust (Leroux 1959, 151-55). 4 The
phantom thereby links the haut bourgeois and nouvelle aristocrat class-levels cele-
brated and served by the Paris Opera to the mostly rural, lower-class, even cross-class
play of the carnivalesque. This social substratum, he reveals, is what the Opera wants
!2 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
to distance from itself and suppress; yet it is also what grounds the Opera, quite lit-
erally, at its deepest levels-the undergrounds where Erik has lived, as one of the
Opera's builders, and into which he has brought so much carnival from the start that
it has always been foundational to what now rises above it.
The original phantom as trickster, along with the background that Leroux pro-
vides for Christine's father, threatens the Paris Opera with the exposure of its hid-
den connections to carnival. Since Carlotta can be an urban Grand Opera diva only
by playing out visual illusions and throwing her voice in ways that allow her, mo-
mentarily, to "be" the country girl Marguerite in Faust, Leroux's phantom shows that
there are very small steps from these "tricks of the opera trade" to Erik throwing a
frog's "couac" apparently into Carlotta's mouth, a gross rural joke in an opulent city
setting, and then to the replacement of Carlotta by Christine, the daughter of an
itinerant country carnival performer like the phantom himself No other version of
Le Fantome makes these connections to such a degree and so reveals the scandals, the
transgressions and actual fluidity of class boundaries, embodied by Erik and Chris-
tine as his protegee.
THE BLURRING OF DISTINCTIONS
The phantom's threat to already tenuous hierarchies of high classjlow class,

city/country, Grand Opera/carnival, or music master/trickster points to only some
of the many assumed social boundaries that he and Christine (and their extensions
in others) challenge and violate throughout Leroux's novel. There is, of course, the
intermingling in Erik's body of life and death or of the recognizably human, on the
one hand, and suggestions of both the superhuman and the subhuman, on the other.
But the Leroux original goes much further in using its phantom to incarnate con-
tradictions. The novel, I want to show, allows its most central characters to disrupt
or dissolve numerous attempted cultural distinctions: female versus male, adult ver-
sus child (including old versus young), human versus animal, Occidental versus
"Oriental," and the racial color of white versus black, yellow, or "other." Although
these areas, like the opposed elements in them, are frequently commingled in the
narrative, instances of the blurrings and tensions in each realm as Leroux sees them
can be isolated at particular moments in his text:
In-distinctions of Gender
As two new managers assume control of the Paris Opera at the start of the novel (or
so they suppose), they soon hear that a mysterious "Opera ghost" has ordered that
Box Five on the First Tier in the main theater, an elegant, red-curtained cubicle
quite close to the stage, be reserved exclusively for him at all performances and that
it be managed by the petit bourgeois Madame Giry, a First Tier usher and a local
concierge as well as the mother of young Meg Giry in the corps de ballet. When they
question her about this odd arrangement, Giry indignantly recalls for the new man-
agers the day when the former directors ordered that this loge be perpetually as-
signed to the phantom, and she particularly remembers Erik's message to her that
evening requesting a footstool in the box from that time on. At this point one new
manager, Moncharmin, asks Giry if the "ghost" is a woman (Leroux 1959, 88), allud-
THE ORIGINAL FANTOME'S MYSTERIES I3
ing to the custom that only women, among box-holding operagoers, use stools for
their feet under their bouffant gowns. Giry hastens to answer that she knows the
phantom is a man by his glorious masculine voice, but the novel leaves Mon-
charmin's question permanently unresolved. For one thing, in keeping with her
other non sequiturs in this scene, Giry offers a biological determinant (the sex of a
voice) in answer to a gendering of furniture that is actually cultural, conventional,
class-based, and dress-based. For another, the phantom's voice, with its abnormally
wide range, later proves able to alter its perceived sex. Embarking in a boat across the
subterranean lake on his first approach to Erik's lair, the Persian is initially tempted
toward the water, toward the apparent "source of [a] sweet and captivating har-
mony": the singing of"la Sirene." Significantly, all the nouns in this passage are gen-
dered feminine in French, yet this womanish "charme" turns out to be the voice of
Erik, submerged and singing as a perverted lady of the lake through the Excalibur
of a reed (Leroux 1959, 384-85).
This intense confusion of genders is echoed throughout the novel, so much so
that they became hard to separate even in the other main characters who seem most
distinct from the death-bound Erik. Christine's initial role in the Opera's full pro-
duction of Gounod's Faust-and only in Leroux's version and two recent adaptations
(Sandefur's and Kay's)-is that of Siebel, the young man of the village in love with
Faust's Marguerite (Cross, 228-34). like several other young male figures (or "pants
roles") in opera, this character (found nowhere in Goethe's Faust of r8o8. Gounod's
main source) is frequently sung by a soprano or contralto in a male costume and is
sung that way here, with the phantom as already herjhis underground voice teacher.
Leroux's narrator dwells on how "charmante" Christine is in this role and how much
"fraiche jeunesee" and "grace melancolique" she shows, particularly "en travesti" ("in
being disguised" or, more literally, "in transvestism" or "in a state of travesty" [the
carnivalesque again]; Leroux 1959, 146). Meanwhile, Leroux's first description of the
young Raoul, a portrait composed partly with the eye ofhis much older brother, the
Comte Philippe, emphasizes the youth's "purely feminine education" at the hands of
two sisters and an aunt and "the coloring of a girl" in his face that seems to go with
that upbringing (Leroux 1959, 41). Those features are repeatedly foregrounded in
the novel, even though this "fragile'' stripling has been training at sea in the naval tra-
dition of the Chagny male ancestors, is slated for an Arctic voyage on an all-male
vessel, and is supposedly being initiated into the male-oriented "joys" of Paris by a
knowing elder brother, a man of the world, who is "du <<dernier bien>>" (literally
"of the 'latest good'") with La Sorelli, the lead dancer of the Opera corps de ballet
(Leroux 1959, 40-41).
To be sure, this sort of ambisexuality can be seen as but a phase oflate childhood
just prior to an adult life that supposedly solidifies a person's "true" sex. The phan-
tom trains Christine to sing Siebel, much in the usual way of opera companies with
ingenues, only as a step on the way to her more mature performance of the purely
feminine Marguerite. In turn, Philippe (with much of high-class Paris) assumes that
Raoul will put his "girlhood" away as soon as the younger man is a full-fledged naval
explorer-and no longer a virgin. Still, these prospects are not achieved, and they re-
main in question by the time the novel concludes. Christine comes to seem the sub-
missive femme vivant under threats from Erik in the penultimate chapters only because
she deceives him into thinking that her conventional role-playing is real. The ap-
parently "knowing" Philippe, when he goes underground to rescue Raoul (in his
view) from marrying a lower-class singer, finds his own death instead at the hands
of the ambisexual Sirene, who pulls the Comte into the waters of gender indistinc-
tion. At this very point, Raoul himself is hastening down to Erik's lair by playing the
younger, fair-skinned, "feminine" role with his more experienced and aggressive
guide, the dark-skinned Persian. Raoul even jumps into an "embrace" (entreinte) with
the Persian in a brief homoerotic moment when the Vicomte "lets himself fall" to
the level of the phantom's house (Leroux 1959, 379). The lower they go in Leroux's
underground, the more all the characters find themselves violating nearly all of the
standard conventions of sexual differentiation (along with some other distinctions)
in Western Europe.
The possibility of greatly blurred gender boundaries, after all, was a major issue
in West European culture at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century
"By the 1890s," still known today as the .fin de siecle more than any other end of a cen-
tury, "the system of patriarchy was under attack," especially in England and France,
the latter of which had even restored a woman's right to divorce in 1884, giving en-
couragement to a growing feminist movement in Paris; the attack was leveled
strongly by "women, but also by an avant-garde of male artists, sexual radicals, and
intellectuals, who challenged [patriarchy's] class structures and roles, its system of
inheritance and primogeniture, its compulsory heterosexuality and marriage, and its
cultural authority" (Showalter, 7, n). One result, alarming to many, was the ideolog-
ical prospect that "sexuality and sex roles might no longer be contained within the
neat and permanent borderlines of gender categories" (Showalter, 9). Havelock Ellis
even wrote in The Psychology cjSex (1895) that biological sex is potentially "mutable,
with the possibility of one sex being changed into the other sex ... (and] many
stages between a complete male and a complete female" (Ellis, 215). In France a vivid
consequence was an overt "fear of women's sexual and economic liberation" that
"found positive expression in the affirmation of virile values, physical, cultural, and
moral" (Perrot, 57-59). In England Bram Stoker, so soon to be influential on Ler-
oux through Dracula, flatly articulated a vertical hierarchy that placed clearly differ-
entiated sexes at the top in Western culture and blendings of gendered qualities (the
"cells" of each sex) at the bottom in this reworked Great Chain of Being. Within this
scheme, Stoker wrote, the "most masculine man draws the most feminine woman,
and vice versa; and so on down the scale till close to the borderline in the great mass
of persons, who, having only developed a few qualities of sex, are content to mate
with anyone" (quoted in Farson, 215, and Showalter, 8). It is hardly surprising, then,
that Dracula itself, as several critics have seen, is focused on a vampiric monster who
both blends different sexes in his own form and causes women and men to break the
boundaries of their gender roles once he infects them enough to draw them "down
to his level" (see Craft). Leroux's Erik, in harboring increased gender confUsion the
closer his pursuers come to his underground world, extends this cultural fear and
quandary even fUrther, partly by drawing forth the gender-blending above his deeper
realm that is apparent very early in the two most "normal" lovers in the novel.
The Pull of Childhood

On another level, to be sure, the childlike or adolescent qualities of Leroux's Chris-
tine and Raoul pose no real threat to conventional order as long as such tendencies
are viewed as above ground, "normal" for young people, and transitional to more
THE ORIGINAL FANTO!vfE's MYSTERIES IS
"mature" behaviors. When those qualities become connected in the novel with the
childishness of the phantom, however, the possibility of antisocial and deep-seated
regression toward infancy in the Paris Opera suggests another strong challenge
posed by Leroux's subterranean world to "standard" adult existence. Throughout the
book, Erik's threatening notes to the Opera managers, composed out of scratchings
in red ink or blood, are described as "bizarre and annoying" mainly because they
show what very few adaptations mention: the "writing of a child who has not
stopped making down-strokes and not yet learned to join his letters" (Leroux 1959,
62-63). There is evidence, it seems, of what remains a "child-brain" in the phantom,
much like the one that still exists in another "living dead," again the title figure in
Stoker's Dracula (Stoker 1993, 439). While such "backwardness" seems wildly at odds
with Erik's advanced knowledge of music and architecture, it squares with the Per-
sian's, and later Christine's, blunt awareness that the phantom is "un vrai monstre"
who can gleefully invent such devices asIa Sirene because he is "a veritable child, pre-
sumptuous and vain," who loves to astonish the world with his "ingeniosite" without
enough of an adult moral sense to impede his penchant for self-serving pranks and
cruelty (Leroux 1959, 387).
Granted, such an apparently unique mindset appears at first to consign Erik to a
criminal status far removed from the Opera proper-until Leroux's readers note
that the "vrai monstre" has built all the walls and gangways of the Opera, with all
their hidden passages, as one of contractors for Charles Garnier (Leroux 1959,
404-405). Moreover, the behavior of some central figures in the Opera above
ground, especially Carlotta, Mme. Giry, Meg Giry (the French giries refers to child-
ish whining; Wolfi996, 72), and the sometimes frantic new managers can also be as
infantile as they find the phantom to be. After all, vain attempts to show off their
"ingeniosite" are the constant pursuit of the Opera's performers, functionaries, and
directors as Leroux depicts them. The ultimate threat of the possible regression to
childhood, as with the carnivalesque, in Le Fantome de /'Opera lies not in its distance
from, but its constantly surfacing and underlying presence in, the adult world that
claims to rise completely above it.
As it happens-and as James Kincaid has recalled especially well-it was only in
the latter decades of the nineteenth century in Europe that "the child" became a
distinct category of study, a scientifically specified "difference formed by a culture
and inscribed into the categories of the perceivable" (Kincaid, 65), even though this
cultural construct had been gradually forming since the eighteenth century. By the
1890s the "collective illusion that the child is a biological category" had achieved its
uses for social engineering by casting the child, not as an earlier state with which an
adult is continuous," but as "difference or otherness itself" (Kincaid, 63-65). This
process, Kincaid shows in a series of late Victorian treatises and fictions, made the
child as an object of discourse a "perceptual frame" now "available ... for fitting in
just about anything" that adults wanted to have "marked off as separate and dis-
tinct" from themselves (Kincaid, 62). As a consequence, the child as a category be-
came a vessel that contained an inconsistent array of attributes by 1900, ranging
from "the innocent child" unable to feel and thus fend off corrupting influences to
"the noxious or savage child" who is antisocial at birth like (as Herbert Spencer put
it in 1861) "the barbarous race from which he is descended," within the evolution-
ist idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny (Kincaid, 72--74). Like different
kinds of "othered" beings, it turns out, the child by Leroux's time had become a
mixed "repository of cultural needs and fears not adequately disposed of elsewhere"
(Kincaid, 78). Freud therefore had a well-established category of the infantile be-
fore him to which he could consign those drives socially forbidden to middle-class
adults and thereby see them as "repressed" into a distinctively childish "uncon-
scious." The trouble, certainly in Leroux's Fantome, is that this attempted disconti-
nuity always threatens supposedly adult culture with the return of the repressed,
with a continuity between the childish and the "mature," which daily life at the
Opera, like the categorization of "the child," has long been working to deny. Even
as the original Erik seems a symbolic repository for locating a blurring of genders
both feared and sought by 1910, he is also an example of how the child has been po-
sitioned in Leroux's day as an additional Other used by adults to distance them-
selves from much that they would claim not to be but still fear that they are.
The Human Animal and the Possibility of Devolution to "the Monkey"

The original Fantome, though, is even more insistent on blurring the supposed dis-
tinctions between the human and animal kingdoms. The most obvious example oc-
curs when Carlotta is made to croak like a frog on the stage of the Opera (with a
"couac") to the consternation of Parisian high society. But Leroux surpasses this vi-
olation by making his phantom quite plainly troglodytic, a figure regressing toward
the earlier primates, at a point where Erik is also most underground, most like a
child, most heartlessly symbolic of death, and most involved in the confusion of gen-
der. Just after he pulls the Persian into, then rescues him from, the waters of the sub-
terranean lake during one of his androgynous periods as Ia Sirene, Erik taunts his
victim/friend with infantile, sarcastic claims that the Opera chandelier had fallen by
itself after Carlotta's "terrible couac." Then, with the "air" of a "fatal rocher" ("skull
rock" or "rock of death"), "he stood upright at the back ofhis boat and swung about
with the balance of a monkey" before disappearing into the darkness of the lake
(Leroux 1959, 389). It would seem that Leroux is already thinking ahead to the fig-
ure of the man-monkey-the betwixt-and-between creature to which he applies the
neologism "anthropopitheque" (anthropos, man, plus pithekos, ape or monkey; Leroux
1970b, 105n.)-who becomes the title character and loves another "Christine" in his
novel Balaoo (1911-12; see Wolf 1996, 16-17).
Some later versions of the phantom do have him swinging from theater ropes, but
never in a particularly monkeylike manner nor with Leroux's emphasis on the "bal-
ance" of a monkey. The novel is far closer than its adaptations to the Western cul-
tural turning point, announced most forcefully by Charles Darwin, where "the
return of the repressed" came to include a backsliding toward "the primitive animal
within us." From the 1870s on, a belief grew, based in part on Darwin's notion of"re-
version" (Darwin 1968, 195-204), that human evolution from a simian state could
be inverted and that a person could devolve both toward a personal childhood and to-
ward the condition of the monkeys that still beckoned at the early stages of the
human race's development. Such assumptions had become so widespread, especially
in England and France, that by 1910 even mystery and Gothic fictions were playing
with the ideological possibility of human regression as a "monstrous" devolution of
the race (Tropp, 90-109; Hurley). Given such favorites of Leroux's as Poe's "Mur-
ders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), where the apparent acts of a murderer turn out to
be committed by an "ourang-outang," and Stevenson's Strange Case q{Dr.jekyll and Mr.
Hyde (the original r886 title), where the most regressive levels that Jekyll seeks to
throw off in "Hyde" are explicitly called "troglodytic" (Stevenson, 40), Le Fant6me de
!'Opera almost had to link the return of the uncivilized child to the resurgence of the
monkey in the underground self
But the greater shock of Leroux's phantom is the character's connection of the
monkey, not just with the regression to childhood and its possible relation to crimi-
nality, but with all that is related to those drives in the Sirene episode: the dissolution
of the culture's gender distinctions, the trickster's blurring of the boundaries be-
tween truth and falsehood in both his actions and representations, the skull's an-
nouncement of life always turning to death even in the waters of rescue and rebirth,
and the ventriloquy of changing, throwing, and concealing one's own voice, which
challenges the very notion of having "one's own voice" by parodying or pretending
to be the voices of others (see O'Donnell). Leroux is continuing a long, Western,
mythic-symbolic tradition of the monkey as half-man, lesser man, fallen man, a form
of the devil-a transgressive figure on the border between, or margins of, the human
and the animal or, more widely, the "self" and the "other." That tradition has
iconographically joined the monkey to such "lesser," deviant, borderline, and cultur-
ally marginalized figures as women, androgynes, cats, monsters from the deep, ma-
gicians, tricksters, figures for death, and false images or their makers, even to the
point where medieval philologists have "linked the [suspect] principle of similitude
with the adjective simian" (Aiken, 139). As H. W Janson, Philippe Verdier, and Susan
Hardy Aiken have shown, images of these forms of the "other," with the monkey es-
pecially prominent, appear in the marginalia of the illuminations in medieval man-
uscripts. There monkeys abound, "parodying every conceivable human activity," as
figures among other deviations in an "eccentric world, at times like an underworld,"
which plays out in "semi-abstract and semi-monstrous patterns" a "surreptitious
criticism of the 'establishment' in contemporary society" (Janson, 55; Verdier,
!22-23).
The underworld of Leroux's Fant6me-with his artist-parodist-trickster "aping"
the monkey as well as forms of the feminine, the monstrous, the dying, and the
pagan or counter-religious-thus takes "below ground" and out of daily sight what
such illuminations of illuminations place in the margins of medieval texts. Leroux's
Erik and his subterranean realm, far more than any later versions of both, become
the partly hidden agent and location (the bottom "margins") out of which emerge a
series of"antihegemonic impulses" and disruptions of standard constructs and dis-
courses (Aiken, 141). Granted, like and within the tradition of simian symbolism, Le
Fant6me's monkey-inhabited underground provides a locus for a scapegoat, a sup-
posed cause for such above-ground evils as falling chandeliers. Nevertheless, this
locus and that figure also keep working, using the figure's deft "balance," to under-
mine the symbolic orders and institutions that try to contain these "lower levels" and
have even helped to create them. To some extent, the same implications arise above
ground when Erik appears at night on the balcony of Raoul's room as a sort of cat,
or as just the eat's glowing eyes, with a eat's monkeylike ability to climb walls and
buildings (Leroux 1959, 271-73). Though the monkey, as almost human, is a more
subversive and thus a more underground and marginalized figure in Western
iconography, the cat, with its own tradition of being the Devil's familiar, adds pow-
erfully to the suggestion that the death's-head figure who can seem to become a
monkey or a cat is a fearsome assault on all the conventional means of constructing
r8 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
and securing a clear human identity as separate from all other animal realms in the
Western world.
The Occidental Oriental

Certainly one symbolic order that Leroux's Paris Opera tries to appropriate and
contain, as though that world were conquered and subsumed, is "the Oriental." For
most of the nineteenth century, as Edward Said has reminded us, "Paris was the cap-
ital of the Orientalistworld" in Western Europe (Said 1978, 51), the most active cen-
ter for articulating and displaying a highly fictional, synoptic, racist, and Eurocentric
construction of "the Orient" as supposedly the great Other against which Western
life and customs could be defined by contrast. Appropriations from this Other were
thus quite pervasive in Paris and the Opera during Leroux's life (Kahane, 9-73; Lin-
denberger 1998,169-75, 181-90) and even appear in the architecture of the Palais
Garnier itself We see it partly in the many arches with balconies soaring above the
grand staircase, all likened by Claude Debussy to the features of a Turkish bath
(Mayer, 61; Perry, 21), and partly in the quasi- Islamic curved style of the large dome
that forms the main body of Garnier's roof (see figure 1.5)-topped incongruously
with a bronze figure of Apollo with his lyre (Leroux 1959, 221-22) and surrounded,
indeed imperialistically absorbed, by neo-classic, neo- Gothic, and neo-baroque stat-
ues and molding.
In a particular Leroux character, meanwhile, the "Oriental" is of course embod-
ied by the "Persian," for most of his observers a mysterious but only mildly threat-
ening denizen of the backstage and underground levels of the Opera. The full range
of the "Orient" for turn-of-the-century Western Europeans extended from Africa
and Asia Minor to most of southern Asia as far north as the city of Astrakhan in
southernmost Russia. Consequently, all of that is visible in the first extensive de-
scription of the Persian, largely through the eyes of Raoul: "a person with the skin-
color of ebony [suggestive of Africa], with eyes of jade [Turkish/Indian] and the
head-dress of an astrakhan cap [from southern Russia]" (Leroux 1959, 299). As with
the grand staircase and the dome, this composite figure is almost entirely con-
scripted-and thus colonized-for Leroux within a Western order of propriety and
power structures. Since the Persian was formerly a kind of chief of police, or
"daroga," in the province of Mazanderan (in what is now northern Iran on the south
coast of the Caspian Sea), he is readily drawn into serving the forces of surveillance
and authority in Paris. He uses his knowledge of Erik and the underground to lead
Raoul to the phantom's lair, to recount that pursuit of a criminal in his own written
statement (Leroux 1959, 383-467), to tell the narrator nearly the whole of Erik's
early history (1959, 494-97), and to make moral judgments against Erik's behavior
(as he does on 387, cited above).
Though there are moments when this Parisian Persian tries to declare his cultural
difference-as when he indicates his readiness for any eventuality because" I am, like
every good Oriental, something of a fatalist" (Leroux, 1959, 400)-his otherness
turns out to be little different than Gaston Leroux's famous device of 1904, during
his posting to north Africa as a foreign correspondent for Le Matin, when he dis-
guised himself as an Arab in order to cover the local consequences of the sultan of
Morocco's brief attempt to break from French colonial rule (Costaz, 47-49;
Olivier- Martin, 162; Perry, 25). The "Oriental's" exotic features, in Le Fantilme as in
Figure 1.5: The Paris Opera, ca. 1900
Morocco, are adopted primarily as a means for French insiders to penetrate under-
ground secrets so as to achieve the ends of French domination. These hegemonic
aims are accomplished even when the phantom builds hidden passages and trap
doors into the Paris Opera. With these he believes he is adapting the secret halls and
vantage points that he once constructed for the Shah-in-Shah when the latter or-
dered the building of a new palace in Mazanderan specifically designed for the un-
detectable surveillance of inhabitants and guests (Leroux 1959, 495-96). Such an
architectural vision "from the East" (clearly a means of pointing to a scapegoat race),
however, actually repeats a much earlier European panopticon: Leibniz's plan for an
"Academy of Pleasures," grandly uniting all the arts as the Paris Opera and its Na-
tional Academy of Music propose to do, where "houses or rooms will be built so the
master of the house will be able to see and hear everything that is said and done,
without his being noticed, by means of mirrors and pipes" (Leibniz as translated and
quoted in Clement, 7).
At the same time, though, such underground secrets for Leroux reveal a carniva-
lesque phantom (once a Persian agent) who plays with several different "Oriental"
constructs outside and against the control of all Parisian authorities, who cannot
easily contain him in one nationality Somewhat like the capacity of the official
Opera to keep bringing such varied "Orientals" to the stage as the heroes of
Massenet's Roi de Lahore or Verdi's Otello (both mentioned in Leroux's novel), Erik's
ability to shift "Orientally" thus allows him to surface in widely different forms on
different stage-levels of the Opera. First he is the specter. encountered backstage by

scene-shifters, whose thin flesh is stretched across the bones "like the hide of a drum,
not exactly white, but villainously yellow" (Leroux 1959, 21); later he is touted by the
Persian to Raoul, below the stage, as the most skillful master in Europe of"the Pun-
jab lasso," a murderous trick from India in which a thrown rope turns into a noose
that snaps a victim's neck while strangling him (1959, 402-403; see also Wolf 1996,
26on.); and, in a most pivotal scene, the phantom appears to Christine in his un-
derground organ-chamber as an Othello singing to her as Desdemona, a moment so
important to Leroux that he violates chronology by alluding to a Verdi opera that
debuted in 1887 (Wolf 1996, 179n.), several years after the novel's setting in the early
188os (Leroux 1959, 10). At this moment Erik seems a "Moor of Venice" so attrac-
tively rendered by both his fatherly tenor voice and "the black mask" he now chooses
to wear that Christine longs to see the source of the voice behind the cover and
snatches off the mask, only to encounter the possibility of miscegenation with the
yellow-skinned skull, an even more horrifically Oriental prospect (Leroux 1959,
252-53). In the world of Leroux's Fantome, this uncontrolled explosion of imported
Eastern "others" in one Western figure appears as an ultimate ugliness that ought to
be suppressed and destroyed. The Persian, with almost the same potential in the
range of his Oriental dimensions, must not speak the truth of all this directly and
must act to eliminate Erik's possibilities physically; else he will certainly be taken in
Paris as "a madman" himself (Leroux 1959, 401). In the end, even his final posture
of a cooperative foreign policeman is not safe enough. By the time this character
reappears in the final cut of the first adaptation, the Laemmle-Chaney Phantom qfthe
Opera, he has become the French detective Ledoux, curiously topped with an as-
trakhan cap, and the Persian does not appear again as such in any subsequent ren-
dering prior to the 1976-84 Phantom of the Opera for the British stage written and
directed by Ken Hill (see Hill, 45, 52, 64, 73-80, 84-99,104-107).
The Races of"the Other" and the "Foreigner Among Us"

The fear of a drifting geographical foreignness, we find, is culturally inseparable
from the horror of racial impurity in Leroux's Fantome. The most extreme scandal,
of course, is that of racial differences within the self, as Leroux surely knew because
of his own attempts at different-race disguises. The fact that Leroux's Erik can
seem or be compellingly black or cadaverously yellow, in contrast to the white Eu-
ropeans all around him (whom he can also work to resemble), makes him far more
a threat to implicit standards of racial order than the briefly disguised Leroux ever
was or the co-opted Persian turns out to be in the novel. In addition, the original
phantom appears able to move all over the spectrum, from being a deeply pig-
mented "person of color" to seeming a figure with almost no pigment, the "other
side" of white. When Raoul wonders how Erik can make his recessed eyes shine in
darkness like stars or the eyes of a cat, he aligns the phantom with "certain albinos
who, having appeared to have the eyes of a rabbit during the day; had the eyes of a
cat at night" (Leroux 1959, 295). Here there is not only one more color, whiter than
white, suggested as a potential race for the phantom to be; there is also the poten-
tial within that racial position (as in Stoker's Dracula) for the occupant, in effect, to
shift species. Finally there is no position he can occupy in the range of racial iden-
tities, not even the yellowish off-white of death, in which Leroux's phantom of the
Opera is not already "1'autre" ("the other"), to use the term that Raoul de Chigny
suggests for him early in the book.
Even Christine's attempt to ground Erik in a north European ancestry like her
own serves only to widen the racial problem he embodies, particularly for the Paris
of Ia belle epoque that the Opera represents both monumentally and nationalistically:
During her first captivity in his subterranean lair, Leroux has her ask him "if that
name of Erik did not point to a scandinavian origin." This question is posed during
a meal where the main dish is "poulet" (French for "chicken," but also for "love let-
ter") that has been "moistened with a little Tokay wine which he had brought him-
self ... from the cellars of Koenigsburg" (Leroux 1959, 248). The phantom's
reply-that he has no name and no country and has taken the name Erik "par hasard"
(both "by chance" and "at some risk")-returns him to a frightening racial and na-
tional indeterminacy and, along with his choice of wine imported from a foreign un-
derground, raises the specter of the Germanic or Nordic as another threatening
"otherness" within and beneath the surface of ParisS It is almost a reflex for Leroux,
in fact, to combine in his quasi- German Erik what few of his adapters do: a trick-
ster's facility with legerdemain, a prodigious capacity for disguise, a "superhuman"
ability to appear and disappear using secret passages, an egotistical obsession with
one's own genius, an inclination to vengeful murder, and a lascivious desire for
mother-figures. These qualities had been incarnated together already in Leroux's
extremely German villain-the confidence man "Ballmeyer" -in the author's two
most famous crime novels prior toLe Fantome: The Mystery <ifthe Yellow Room (1907) and
The Peifume <if the Lady in Black (the sequel of 1908). Both are centered on a young
Parisian reporter-detective, Joseph Rouletabille, who discovers Ballmeyer to be his
brilliant but perverted father and Ballmeyer's "Yellow Room" victim (Mathilde
Stangerson) to be his dimly remembered mother (the lady in Black).
An ideological casting of Germans and Germanic, including Scandinavian, an-
cestry under the light of suspicion was de rigueur in turn-of-the-century urban France
and for a fairly mainstream journalist-novelist of the Parisian middle class. Both
look back in anger to the siege of Paris imposed by German and other troops during
the Franco- Prussian War of 1870, the time when the "ugly" phantom supposedly
sneaked in to help construct the Opera's "foundations" (1959, 497). Both also look
ahead to the waxing and waning tensions and fears of Germanic collaborators, spies,
invaders, or infiltrators (Huebner, 17-18) that would climax in World War I, with
France and Germany on opposite sides. Certainly for Leroux to choose the Paris
Opera as Le Fantome's principal setting is for him to select an institution at the time
of the novel's events that was a staunch bastion of anti-German protectionism.
Though one of Leroux's new Opera managers in the novel, M. Richard, is "perhaps
the sole person who has any comprehension of" Wagner in Paris around 1880 (Ler-
oux 1959, 68), that detail is one among the several in the book that make him a
comic figure at that time. No German compositions are performed at the Paris
Opera of the 188os, inside or outside Le Fantome. The composers represented at Ler-
oux's gala for the new managers are all nationalized Frenchmen (whatever the roots
of their names)-Gounod, Reyer, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Guiraud, Delibes-even
though some of their arias are performed by singers of Germanic descent: Mlles.
Krauss, Bloch, and Christine Daae (Leroux 1959, 36) 6 In fact, Wagner had never
been performed at the Opera Garnier by the time Leroux's story takes place. Inter-
est in his German operas, or at least portions of them, did increase in several French
musical circles after 1875 (Grout, 2: 428-34, Harding, 102-103; Huebner, 13-16).
But full stagings of his works by the National Academy of Music faced resistance
much longer, particularly since the Opera was very much controlled by the nation-
alistic attitudes of the abonnes (or "subscribers"), "the elite of politics, finance, indus-
try; and the liberal professions-the grande bourgeosie- [who] overlapped substantially
with the aristocracy; old and new," and thought of their extended group as "a socially
well-grounded microcosm of France as a nation" as they occupied the boxes and best
orchestra seats at the Opera (Huebner, 8-9). Wagner's Lohengrin made its Paris
Opera debut only in 1891, and that event was nearly halted by a demonstration out-
side in the streets, rife with stink bombs and catcalls, in which some abonnes joined
the crowd along with many nationalists from other Parisian classes (Mayer, 63;
Huebner, 19-20). As the 1890s progressed, Wagner was staged more often as a
somewhat moderated Third Republic leadership came to equate "progress" and the
assimilation of other cultures "with national pride" (Huebner, 20), yet once the cen-
tury turned, anti-German attitudes regained their strength throughout French
music and Paris generally; a "survey of critics and composers undertaken by [the
journal] Murcure de France in 1903 reveal[ed] considerable ambivalence about Wag-
ner's influence" and thereby joined "a readjustment in critical values" that found
most German composers "inimical to the national spirit" again (Huebner, 478-79)
right at the time that the author of La Fantome was beginning to write prose fiction.
Consequently, in using the Gounod's Faust as typical Opera fare in this novel, Ler-
oux is not only employing the work that was sung most frequently at the Paris Opera
between 1875 and 1910 (Mayer, 65). He is also drawing on the opera then regarded
as "the epitome of Frenchness" and as "evidence of [real] patriotic mettle" (Hueb-
ner, 16), partly because of its thorough recasting of classic German material.
Gounod's Faust is composed in a non-chromatic, melodic, periodic, and thus non-
Wagnerian, style (Grout I: 340-41), and it ends with an emphatically Germanic
overreacher being pulled down to Hell by Mephistopheles, in a precise opposite of
Goethe's revisionist ending, while the "Marguerite" (not Gretchen) whom Faust has
violated is called toward Heaven as she expires beatifically (Cross, 234-35). For a
subterranean and masked "Erik" to invade a performance of such an established
French masterpiece with an animalistic "couac" and the substitution of a "Christine
Daae" for a "Carlotta" as "Marguerite" is thus for a Faust-like and Mephisto-like Ger-
manic monster to emerge from the hellish depths he deserves to occupy and to vio-
late centralized, institutionalized, nationalized symbols of the latest French republic,
its dominant classes, and their ways of subsuming and subjecting the Germanic or
Nordic. It seems almost inevitable, from this point of view, that Leroux's Erik is
fiendishly attempting to revolutionize music from his underworld lair by conceiving
his deliberately aberrant opera, Don juan triomphant, at least partly after a model com-
posed by an Austrian-German: the Don Giovanni of Mozart (cited by Erik on Leroux
1959, 250).
Still, Leroux's connection of Erik's status to Germanophobic racism does not
stop at just national differences. In so sharply presenting his phantom as an ob-
sessed, vindictive, apparently demonic, yet highly skilled music master teaching a
young woman with uncertain potential to sing like a diva, Leroux in 1910 is evok-
ing the highly recognizable figure of Svengali (see figure 1.6), the Austrian Jew
(often called "the German") who mesmerizes the title character into public vocal
brilliance in George Du Maurier's novel Trilby (1894), the English literary sensation
Figure r.6: George du Maurier illustration for his own Trilby, 1894
by a French expatriate that was set mostly in Paris and became widely adapted for
the stage soon after its publication (Kelly, 87, II9-23). Though there are many dif-
ferences between Leroux's "Opera ghost" and Du Maurier's blatantly repulsive Jew,
there are several exact parallels in addition to some common Paris locations and the
master-student relationship. Several of Erik's gambits, especially with the Opera

management, recall how Svengali keeps asking himself "whom he might cheat, be-
tray, exploit, borrow money from, make brutal fun of" (Du Maurier, 45). The phan-
tom's apparently Germanic threat to French cultural icons is reminiscent of
Svengali extolling "our" Heinrich Heine over the French poet Musset (Du Maurier,
104-05), particularly since Svengali makes a point of Heine now living in Paris and
marrying a French grisette. Christine's turning "cadaverous" and skull-like at the
very mention of Erik echoes Svengali's turning of Trilby's face into a "stupid empty
skull" with his eyes and words (Du Maurier, 105). Erik's half-pleading, half-angry
parading of Oriental allusions before Christine, right down to the making of the
scorpion and grasshopper from the "bronze of Japan" (Leroux 1959, 458), even re-
plays the sending of Svengali's photograph to Trilby on her death bed "out of some
remote province in eastern Russia-out of the mysterious East! The poisonous
East" (the words of the omniscient narrator in Du Maurier, 337). For Leroux's Erik
to be linked to all this, though no specifically Jewish elements are attached to him
(a matter I will discuss more in chapter three), is for the original phantom at least
to echo an anti-Semitic creation of that era which first out-Shylocks Shakespeare's
Shylock and out- Fagins Dickens's Fagin and then proves able to instigate death out
of an anti- French, intensely Germanic, and broadly "Eastern" foreignness.
Leroux's underground Erik, more than any later version of the phantom, is mani-
festly, thoroughly, and supremely "the foreigner." Figured as a woman in a male body,
a child among adults, a death at birth, a skeleton among the living, a monkey-man, a
human cat, a carnival freak at the Opera, a country upstart in the big city, a voice
thrown into other people or objects, a black or yellow "Oriental," an albino, a Scan-
dinavian, or a German (and implicitly Jewish) "Easterner," the original phantom is
one of the most multidimensional versions in popular and Gothic fiction of the fig-
ure that Julia Kristeva describes in Strangers to Ourselves: "the foreigner perceived as in-
vader [whoJ reveals a buried passion within those who are entrenched: the passion to
kill the other, who had first been feared or despised, then promoted from the ranks
of dregs to the status of powerful persecutor, against whom a 'we' solidifies in order
to take revenge" (Kristeva 1991, 20). At the same time, there is a problem with this
one-sided view (which Kristeva critiques as such) being applied to Leroux's Fantome de
l'Opera. His Erik as foreigner is native to France, despite the range of his "Eastern"
travels, and is ensconced inside and beneath what he helped to build, the very foun-
dations of his country's most centralized and official cultural institution. He is the
"foreign" repository of cultural anomalies within or underlying the sanctioned French
"we" who try to solidify "ourselves" against all the forms of otherness he represents.
Indeed, Erik's blurrings of standard differentiations spread, sometimes partially and
sometimes extensively; into nearly every other Leroux character, especially Christine,
Raoul, and the Persian. The last of these even serves as the human conduit, wearing
an astrakhan cap atop Parisian evening clothes, between the "low" underground of
Erik's continual otherness or foreignness and the ground-level effort to secure stable
Western identities inside monumental constructs of"high" culture. Leroux's Fantome
may participate in a long history of Western cultural differentiation, "othering," and
scapegoating; nevertheless, like its sometimes cross-dressing author and unlike most
of its adaptations, this novel also explores the presence "within us" of the teeming in-
teraction of differences that Western culture strives to efface in ideologically and
symbolically constructing the "natures" of its "own" members.
THE ORIGINAL FANTOME's MYSTERIES 25
THE FRENCH POLITICS IN LEROUX's PHANTOM
The adaptations also avoid a very different register of"underground" history in the
original book: the remnants of the Paris Commune explicitly mentioned as still vis-
ible underneath the Opera. Leroux's and Erik's use of this major social uprising,
which really did engulf the Garnier Opera house, is complex, contradictory, and sur-
prisingly basic to the original novel. The hidden passage behind Christine's mirrors
by which Erik reaches her dressing room and down which Raoul and the Persian
journey to find her in the phantom's deep chambers is the main transit-route in the
novel between the "upper" and "lower" levels and was originally found by Leroux's
phantom to be fully constructed already It was a leftover from the Commune's brief
occupation of the Opera, which began shortly after mid- March and lasted until the
end of May, 1871 (Roger Williams, 5-7; Perry, 12-13): "This passageway had been
made at the time of the Commune of Paris to allow jailers to route their prisoners
directly to the cells that had been constructed in the cellars, for the [Commune gov-
ernment's] officers had occupied the building immediately after the 18th of March
and had made, on the top, a point of departure for the Mongolfier balloons to carry
their incendiary proclamations to their departments and, in the depths, a State
prison" (Leroux 1959, 354). Erik terms this conduit "my way of the Communards"
(Leroux 1959, 393). Yet this entire allusion reveals a most paradoxical relationship
between Leroux's phantom and the vestiges of what was, for the Commune, a cen-
ter of military and political operations. On the one hand, Erik has taken possession
of a road constructed by others for different purposes. The construction occurred
when he was secretly building other parts of the foundation during the 1870-71 sus-
pension of official work on the Opera because of the Prussian War, the Siege of
Paris, and the short period of the Commune's defiance of both the French National
Assembly and the foreign invaders (Leroux 1959, 404-405; Roger Williams, 4-7).
On the other hand, by the time of Leroux's story, Erik has taken over the disused
Commune passages and all the cells (or heights) to which they lead partly in order
to construct, as the Commune did, a peculiar version of an anti-state "State prison"
(complete with torture chamber) and an unsanctioned storehouse of destructive
weaponry, as in the many powder kegs in what may be a former Commune cellar, all
now waiting to be ignited by a turn of the bronze grasshopper (Leroux 1959, 460).
Erik as freelance entrepreneur, in other words, appropriates the physical network
the Commune has left and uses it for his own profit, casting off the political agenda
and social values of the Commune itself He plays up his frightening mobility through
the network to extort a tribute of 20,000 francs a month from the Opera managers
(his capital) to support the expansion of a highly acquisitive, upper-middle-class, al-
beit underground, lifestyle (Leroux 1959, 63, 493-94). Concurrently, though, Erik, as
"foreigner within" and certainly as outcast and downcast from middle- and upper-
class norms, becomes an 188os revisitation, using Commune materials, of the Com-
mune's capacity to take prisoners, send messages, and make war with munitions, all in
the interest of gaining the outcast and downcast what they lack most: sanctioned con-
trol over the order of the State (or at least the state Opera) in ways that might allow
them to fulfill their most basic needs and desires. Leroux's, and only Leroux's, under-
ground phantom, then, mixes the capitalistic exploiter of Commune leftovers (a fig-
ure who ought to be distanced from the aims of the Commune) with the partial
reincarnation of the Commune's rebellious attack on the ruling classes (a figure who
can be identified with the threat of the Commune, as Erik clearly is in the novel).
This oxymoronic use of recent French history; as it happens, recalls a very similar
paradox that arises in the Commune's actual occupation of an Opera already occu-
pied. During the siege of Paris by the Prussians in late 1870, the unfinished Opera
had been commandeered first by the republican Government of National Defense
(Roger Williams, 2-3; Perry; 12-13). It used the vast structure for an arsenal and a
warehouse for food and liquor needed by a besieged populace (as noted in Le Fan-
tome's "Avant-propos," Leroux 1959, 15); hence the possibility for the Persian that the
phantom's kegs of powder may really be casks of wine (Leroux 1959, 449). The
Communard takeover in March 1871 replaced this pattern of use by turning the
Opera into an "incendiary" combination of"observation post, communications cen-
tre, powder store and military prison" (Perry; 13), all of which Leroux's phantom uses
and redirects while also reactivating the older storage of food and spirits. The Com-
mune occupation has meant, among other things, that there are layers of Opera
usage that Erik can combine. One layer is designed to preserve an existing though
tenuous order from invasion, and the other is fashioned to explode and overthrow
that order, albeit with the construction of a new "State prison" and command cen-
ter that may have replaced one sort of militaristic hierarchy with another (in the
view of Leroux's narrator, 1959, 345).
The drives in the historical sedimentations with which Leroux's phantom works
urge Erik to build in both highly regressive and very disruptive directions. More pre-
cisely, by 188o-81, they push him toward reenactments of the Commune a decade
earlier and thoroughgoing departures from it, some regressive and some progressive,
using its vestiges. Erik, in other words, is again on a border he is helping to dissolve,
pulled between attitudes and postures, this time between historical, political, and
ideological positions that were actively engaged in struggles with each other during
Leroux's lifetime. The resulting class and architectural tug of war in himself is a
major reason why the Erik of the original novel makes the oddly combined efforts
that he does: to draw the foundations of the Opera all the way back to the first life
he knew (the provincially bourgeois "chambre Louis- Philippe" of the 1830s); tore-
activate the challenge of the Commune passageways and dungeons to the reigning
forms of authority in Paris; and yet to drive the Opera toward an even more entre-
preneurial capitalism (the new, virtually fascistic control of the largest single credi-
tor and quasi mortgage-holder, Erik himself), as opposed to the dictates of the haut
bourgeois subscribers who frequently dominated the Opera in the 1870s and '8os.
THE BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN STYLE OF THE NOVEL
Perhaps the most problematic tangle in Leroux's Fantome, however, is the seeming-but
only seeming-disparity between the "realist" methods of the novel's verbal construc-
tion and the "unreal" nature of the underground levels that these methods describe.
The narrative's principal rhetorical mode, as one would expect from Leroux the news-
paperman, is that of reportage, which presupposes certain assumptions as accepted by
the writer and reader. The tasks of such a text, supposedly, are to point out an objec-
tive reality external to individual thought, to present that reality from as many quoted
eyewitness accounts as possible, to "pin that reality down" with dates, times, and em-
pirically knowable details, to sanction this entire effort with appeals to and support
from "officials," and to make hidden activities come out from behind their pretenses
or covers so that "deep truths" can be seen and known by the public eye.
Consequently; Leroux's Fantilme begins by stating that its main subject, the "Opera
ghost," truly "existed," quite apart from any "imagination of the artists" or "supersti-
tion of the directors" (Leroux 1959, 9). The book then offers evidence for that asser-
tion from the memoirs of the director Moncharmin, the spoken and written
statements of the Persian, the recollections of the examining magistrate in the case of
Philippe's death, the letters of Christine (all cited in Leroux 1959, n-13), and even
the official transcript of Raoul's testimony to a commissioner of police on what he
saw in the Perros churchyard (Leroux 1959, n9-24), a fictional revival of one of Ler-
oux's earliest jobs as a reporter of police proceedings (Lamy; 28). The novel's physi-
cal and historical setting are specified too, as we have seen, in terms of the real
Opera's features and several historical events (including the Commune) that truly
occurred at the times Leroux cites. Accounts and support statements from Opera di-
rectors, city magistrates, police commissioners, and generals, or by people who have
testified to such figures, "authenticate" the story "officially" by taking up more than
half of the words in the novel. The effect of a naive first reading, Leroux seems to
hope, is that of feeling "taken backstage" to behold many once-hidden facts: secrets
of what goes on behind closed doors (such as those of the Opera directors' office),
causes of hard-to-explain accidents (including the fall of the Opera chandelier, which
actually happened in 1896; Perry; 21), and revelations about the cellars of the Opera
and its denizens, or about the lives of the rich and famous, that this "report" is the
first to "bring into the open." Up to a point, this novel is attempting "that blend of
truth and invention now calledfoction" by "interspers[ing] the fiction with genuinely
true interludes that the reader can either recall or check out" (Forsyth, xx-xxi).
Even so, the relationship between this style and its "subject matter" in Le Fantilme is
not the one that is usually supposed: realism versus "the fantastic." In the first place,
the above-mentioned devices in this novel provide evidence for the more recent ar-
guments of Tzvetan Todorov, Roger Caillois, and Rosemary Jackson by asserting a
necessary alliance, as they do, between the fantastic and the styles of empirical real-
ism. For Leroux the former mode, as in his sense of the phantom's face, always de-
pends on being perceived as largely inside or only slightly outside the frame of the
historically and conventionally "real.''7 As Daniel Compere has shown, moreover, the
words of the reporter need not necessarily be "realistically passive" in pointing to
their object. Reportage in Leroux's writing, typical for the highly politicized newspapers
of his time, nearly always involves sensationalistic and heightened, even fantastically
hyperbolic, intensifications of what it presents (Compere, 38-42), and this "truth-
telling" precisely by exaggeration appears even in his many articles for the prominent
Paris daily Le Matin. His still-famous reports from the retrial of Alfred Dreyfus in
1899 refer to the original indictment and conviction of 1894 and all the succeeding
events, including the many accounts of them, as "these unbelievable, fantastic, mad-
dening, monstrous or stupid, bloody or ridiculous stories that have constituted the
History of France over the last five years" (Le Matin, August 19, 1899, 1) 8 Then, too,
as Leroux suggests by making events virtually identical to "stories" in this account, he
knows how much the mode of discourse chosen (especially the anti-Semitic one
covertly employed to accuse the Jewish Dreyfus) is able to predetermine the nature
of the "object" discussed, so much so that the proposed "reality" (Dreyfus as guilty of
espionage, say) turns out to be an effect of description at least as often as it seems to

be language's independent cause. Such is the expressed hope of Leroux's entire Fan-
tome as he crafts it. It starts with the assertion of Erik's existence and then claims to
establish it by having several cited "recits" by different narrators affirm the figure's re-
ality from different points of view. The "fantastic" cannot be too simply distinct from
a "realist" mode of description if that mode is rhetorically dedicated to making the
fantastic seem real, even for a short time.
THE ROOTS OF THE NOVEL IN "GOTHIC" FICTION

AND THE LiNKS BETWEEN OPERA AND GOTHIC
Still, to place the original Fantome within the generic realm of the "actual fantastic" is
too imprecise in the face of its particular ingredients. Many of these, I would argue,
including the oscillation between the "real" and the "supernatural," make the book
quite specifically a Gothic novel-not just a narrative using aspects of that very hy-
brid genre, but a book rooted thoroughly in a tradition of "the Gothic" extending
back into the eighteenth century: 9 The very construction of Leroux's version as a
journalistic presentation of different documents, some of them discourses about
other discourses, hearkens back to the style of the best-known turn-of-the-century
Gothic novel, Stoker's Dracula, which calls itself "a mass of typewriting ... note-
books ... and ... memorand[a]" by several eyewitnesses, who also tell stories con-
veyed to them by others (Stoker, 486). Moreover, the style of Dracula, while making
use as Leroux does of modern technologies of communication (see Wicke), looks
back itself to the penchant for stories within stories and leftover documents-as in
Frankenstein, Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher," and Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde, among
other examples-that has always been part of Gothic fiction as early as Horace Wal-
pole's The Castle ojOtranto, the first prose narrative to subtitle itself A Gothic Story (in
the 1765 edition; see Walpole, viii, 15). Especially in its initial form, even Walpole's
tale is presented as the English translation of an early Renaissance Italian volume
that itself refers to a "written" document from the time of the Crusades (Walpole,
3). That document, in turn, is supposedly filled with even more past events and
"writing" (Walpole, 77-79, !09-IIO), and this whole succession of accounts may
have some "truth" to it at bottom (what Leroux claims for his Opera ghost) because
the "scene is undoubtedly laid in some real castle" (Walpole, 5-6), much as Leroux's
is set in the real and palatial Paris Opera.
In fact, there are many elements from Walpole's Castle that Leroux's Fantome
brings forward into a Parisian setting. Like Christine, for example, the heroine of
Otranto, Isabella, also from a rural province, is sexually pursued by the castle's dis-
sembling would-be owner (Manfred), and that pursuit draws her into the "subter-
raneous regions" and "labyrinth of darkness" in the "lower part of the castle"
(Walpole, 25). There she and others eventually face an effigy of the dead whose con-
cealed history, like the phantom's, has been manifested repeatedly in violent disrup-
tions of the world above ground (Walpole, 16, 91). Among the haunting forms taken
by these invasions is a "rising" phantom of a dead hermit with "the fleshless jaws and
empty sockets of a skeleton" similar to Erik's (Walpole, 102). The history that this
specter dimly recalls even completes its long-hidden trajectory in a denouement not
unlike the one in Le Fantome. First there is the revelation of some primal transgres-
THE ORIGINAL FANTOME'S MYSTERIES 29
sions and an obscure birth in the past, and then comes Isabella's eventual marriage
to Theodore (a Raoul of sorts), the young and true aristocrat who finally comes into
his own (Walpole, 108-no) as opposed to the "beastly" Manfred whose pursuits of
Isabella, like Erik's of Christine, have manifested "incestuous" and other forbidden
inclinations (Walpole, 48). On top of all this, the "actual fantastic" so rightly associ-
ated with Le Fantome gets its license, at least in part, from Walpole's famous Preface
to his Second Edition of The Castle, which claims that the "Gothic Story'' sets out to
"blend ... two kinds of romance," one controlled by the "rules of probability" in
"common life" and the other carried away by "imagination and improbability" (Wal-
pole, 7-8). With his frantic Opera managers and hysterical Opera dancers, Leroux
even echoes the comic relief in the erratic behavior of the less enlightened seers of
ghosts in Walpole's "Gothic" (see Walpole, 8, 30-33, 98-wo). Moreover, in the bla-
tant theatricality on and off the stage throughout Le Fantome, Leroux is replaying, in
addition to devices from Paris's Theatre du Grand Guignol (Gordon, 14-23), the very
stagy posturing, dialogue, and progressions that pervade The Castle ifOtranto, which is
divided into five chapters like a five-act play and unabashedly admits Walpole's
debts to Shakespeare and other earlier dramatists (Walpole, 8-12).
Since it therefore looks back all the way to Walpole and not just to Poe, Le Fantome
de I'Opera satisfies even the most rigorous definitions of "Gothic" fiction and drama.
It certainly fulfills every one of the stipulations that Chris Baldick has specified in
his recent effort to distinguish the "Gothic tale" from all other forms of ghost story
or nostalgic fantasy Leroux's Fantome is, first, organized around a deep enclosed
"space," here the cryptlike underground of a large and seemingly "archaic building";
in these depths reside "archaic superstitions and barbarous energies," socially for-
bidden beliefs, secrets, and drives from out of the past, which "threaten to stifle the
hopes of the present ([including] the liberty of the hero or heroine) within the
dead-end of physical incarceration" (Baldick, xiii, xv, xix). Inside this antiquated
(and in that sense "Gothic") depth, as Baldick says, "a fearful sense of inheritance in
time," in this case the history of a ghostlike monster mysteriously like Christine's fa-
ther, combines with "a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, [whereupon]
these two dimensions reinforc[e] one another to produce an impression of sicken-
ing descent into disintegration" for several of the characters and the reader as well
(Baldick, xix). The descent, moreover, in Le Fantome as in the Gothic generally, moves
toward "a lost whole which the reader's imagination is then invited to reconstruct"
with the help of flashbacks (such as the Persian's) about the earliest days of Erik and
others (Baldick, xvii). That reconstruction can lead us "in our post- Freudian cul-
ture," which the Gothic itself has helped us produce, "towards the crypts and cellars
of repressed desire" (Baldick, xx) that for Leroux encompass everything from
mother-seeking, gender-blending, and regressing toward childhood to pursuing un-
conventional sexual longings and wishing to return to a primal death-state preced-
ing birth. But within those kinds of "crypts" in Le Fantome and throughout the history
of Gothic fiction, these seemingly personal depths also point to what Baldick sees as
an extensive "historical resonance," such as the one that I have started to show in
Leroux's novel. This resonance manifests itself most in the characters' and reader's
"fear of historical reversion" (Baldick, xx). In Le Fantome's case, this is a fear of all that
its underground contains, an inclination both toward and away from a cultural order
mixed with disorder, "which threatens still to fix its dead hand upon us" (Baldick,
xxi) in the way marginalized aspects of society and multiple crossings of standard
cultural boundaries threaten to rise from the deepest levels of the Paris Opera as
though they were more past than present. Leroux in Le Fantome de I'Opera, drawing on
what is clearly a wide knowledge of English and American as well as French terror
fiction (along with numerous other discourses), carries through all of this "technol-
ogy" or "textual machine" of the "Gothic," as Judith Halberstam has termed its sym-
bolic patterns (33), even to the point of using the cross-generic nature of that form
to incorporate and deploy many other forms of representation at the same time.
Indeed, Le Fantome de l'Opera brings out, far more than most Gothic fictions, the
original and long-standing connection of the Gothic mode to theatrical opera. Anne
Williams has recently shown how crucial stage opera was to the genesis of The Castle
of Otranto and thus the entire development of the "Gothic Story." There are almost
"6oo references to opera" in Horace Walpole's extensive correspondence, a clear in-
dication that "he went to the opera all the time" and drew much of his sense of the-
ater in his tale from that extravagant experience (Anne Williams 2000, 2). The
kinds of operas Walpole witnessed most were versions of the opera seria form, several
of them first presented in England by Handel, in which the emphasis was on "self-
conscious artifice" and "vocal display" in set-piece arias on conflicting emotions,
rather than on verisimilitude of plot (Anne Williams 2000, 7). Such operas were
openly based, notably, on "pasticcio, a cutting and pasting of materials from old operas
to create" newer variations on a stage tradition dedicated to idealizing a distant past
(7). In addition, these eighteenth-century operas persistently dissolved the "cultural
binary of male versus female" both in presenting male characters sung by women or
vice versa and in employing the castrato, "the paradoxical male soprano" by then long
established as both "monstrous" and divine in the standard-setting operas of Italy
(8). Walpole's Castle, also set in Italy, blatantly replays all these tendencies in its ex-
treme theatricality, particularly in its antiquated spectacle, its "marvelous machin-
ery," its aria-like monologues, its many grand gestures or postures, its use of disguises
even across genders, its threats of deviant sexuality, and its "patchwork of materials
from diverse sources" (9). In reiterating all these features and using them again quite
deliberately in the setting of an actual Opera house, the Leroux Fantome, among other
things, is a return of the operatic that was basic to, though it was sometimes forgot-
ten by, the history of Gothic fiction since the 1760s.
As a result, the original novel emphasizes, more than many of its adaptations, the
peculiar common grounds shared by opera and the Gothic. Both are symbolic are-
nas, it turns out, where class-conscious Western audiences enact their processes of
self-construction by simultaneously viewing and concealing their supposedly "un-
acceptable" longings and foundations. Le Fantome, I would even argue, highlights the
areas shared by opera and Gothic that Sam Abel has found most paradoxical in
Opera in the Flesh (1996), a book about the causes of the conflicted, "irrational, and
intensely physical passion" that many operagoers, especially gay ones, feel during
performances-a study most intriguing to Gothicists increasingly conscious of the
basis of eighteenth-century Gothic writing in upper-class homosexuality (see Hag-
gerty 1986 and Sedgwick, 83-96). First of all, Leroux's book plays up, as Gothic and
opera usually have, the "elitism" that sees such genres as "exclusive territory" (the
attitude of Walpole and certainly Ann Radcliffe among Gothic novelists) yet nev-
ertheless joins itself to a drive for "popularity," a "catering to 'low' tastes for grand
spectacle, sensual display, exciting action, and passionate eroticism," provided the
"lower classes" are "forc[ed] out" in the process of presentation (Abel, II, 27). This
tug of war in Le Fantome, opera, or the Gothic in general sets a kind of stage well
suited for "a simultaneous embodiment and violation of societal gender norms," in
which a figure such as Erik, like Dracula or Beaumarchais's Cherubino in Mozart's
Marriage cfFigaro, "becomes subversive by presenting [and blurring] these norms so
blatantly that their constructedness becomes obvious" (Abel, r8). Such a fore-
grounding of cultural artifice enables Leroux, as much as a Walpole, Stoker, Mozart,
or Verdi, to use many sensuous "tools" of"seduction" (as Erik does) to pull West-
ern audiences toward the depths of an "unbounded eroticism" freed from the usual
daily confines while also claiming the "purity" of an "elegant frame" that can finally
keep distant what it also makes attractive (Abel, 26, 181, 46). By recombining and
insisting on the Gothic and opera together, then, Leroux's novel lets its middle- to
high-class audience approach and feel the eroticism of"the lurid, dark underside of
society" now both celebrated and disguised (Abel, n8), a prospect attractive espe-
cially to Gothicists and opera buffs who are sometimes thought so sexually "de-
viant" that they feel pressure to "keep it in the closet." But Le Fantome also echoes the
traditions of opera and Gothic assiduously by "pretending to absolute moral purity"
as they do "behind [its and their] conventional exterior of social respectability" So
much containment has always seemed necessary in operas and Gothic fictions to
"keep [their] sexual [and other] transgressions endlessly fascinating" while also
much less threatening (Abel, II3).
This regrounding of Le Fantome in both the Gothic and opera is epitomized most
forcefully in the near-resemblance of Leroux's Erik to the castrato of seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century opera seria. Though Leroux's phantom is never established as
flat-out castrated, he does have the vocal range, and especially the very high, gen-
der-blurring voice, for which castrati were surgically altered and systematically
trained. The phallic symbols most related to Erik, moreover, are the ones figura-
tively cut into pieces and scattered around the petit chambre underground as bronze
switches and bags of keys. However much Leroux's phantom seems to "lust" for
Christine, he can never even begin a phallic advance toward her and is ultimately
more interested in the middle-class normality of possessing a "living wife" or in re-
uniting with a version of his mother in a state resembling his condition at birth. He
is also like the old-time castrati when he plays Ia Sirene and deliberately uses his sex-
ual ambiguity as well as his highest vocal register, "to exercise social and political in-
fluence" as the castrati did (Abel, 131), in his case over the potentially powerful
Persian "daroga" and Comte Philippe de Chigny Perhaps most of all, his special sta-
tus as superhuman and subhuman all at once-an operatic Gothic monster-recalls
the position that castrati claimed for themselves in their heyday: that of the "third
sex" that seemed to replace "natural eroticism" with "an imaginary idealization"
(the way Christine sees Erik for a short time) appropriate to "myth and the world
of ancient civilization favored by absolutist rulers [of the seventeenth century and
thus] peopled by gods and superhumans" (Chanan, 46-47). The other side of this
exalted conception, admittedly, was a continual if suppressed awareness of unnat-
ural and inhuman emasculation, not to mention the questions raised about gender
ambiguity (increasingly the object of satire), all of which eventually led, along with
transformed political and economic circumstances, to the halting of this practice by
the end of the eighteenth century (Abel, 132). The original Erik carries all this sym-
bolic baggage, in addition to a great many other kinds, without clearly being a cas-
trato or an albino or a Jew or most of the other "types" imposed on him by other
characters or by allusions in the narrative. Leroux's phantom as a quintessential

"other" focuses the Gothic and operatic forms reunited in this novel by taking their
heightened interplays between the conventional and the transgressive and encap-
sulating that persistent tension in one spectral yet physical, eroticized yet mon-
strous body, somewhat as the castrato symbolized the ideological quandaries of his
day by being the supreme ambiguous figure on whom those quandaries were cast to
be both partially recognized and symbolically obscured.
LEROUX'S "REALITY'' AS SIGN, COUNTERFEIT, AND SIMULATION
What is more difficult to understand immediately in Leroux's novel, however, both

in its realistic-fantastic style and its thorough reconnection of Gothic and opera, is
how much the signs of those symbolic tendencies are finally directed to points of ref-
erence that are already signs themselves, rather than objects or people entirely out-
side signification. Compere has articulated part of this irony when he has pointed to
Leroux's narrators in several novels constantly quoting the journals, letters, or con-
fessions of characters and concluded that "the writing of reportage therefore becomes
the reportage of writing," or writing about writing, to such an extent that Leroux's
style of reportage in his novels "puts in question writing itself" (Compere, 42, 44).
This view sees how the immediate representational surface or image of writing (the
signifier) in Leroux cannot simply refer, as reportage claims it does, to the "reality" of
a different, non-representational entity (a supposed signified or referent). But I
find that Leroux's Fantome goes even further in this direction. Whether or not the
object of his main narrator's reportage is already mediated through the writing of an-
other character or narrator, what is referred to "at bottom," particularly in the low-
est depths of the novel's underground realm, is virtually always a signifier more than
a signified or referent. In addition, it is a signifier that is always able to misrepresent
its "other," to the same degree that the signifiers of it (words, accounts, facades,
masks, paper money, etc.) can misrepresent their reference points in their own ways.
When Leroux's Christine in her recollection to Raoul, for example, first beholds
Erik's subterranean home and begins to penetrate the mystery of the Opera ghost,
she finds herself in a meticulously furnished imitation drawing room that, in Gothic
and operatic fashion, quickly reveals its theatricality:
In the middle of a salon which seemed to me decorated, adorned, furnished with flow-
ers, with flowers magnificent and stupid because of the silk ribbons which tied them to
the baskets, like those which people sell in the boutiques of the boulevards, with flow-
ers too civilized like those which I have been accustomed to receiving in my dressing
room after each "premiere"; in the middle of this very Parisian perfumery [or embaume·
ment, embalmment] stood the black form of a man in a mask ... (Leroux 1959, 239)
When the phantom finally presents his bodily self to Christine in his "own true set-
ting" here, we find that he has "stupidly" mixed different social spaces, all artificially,
and that what he has mixed is artificial even before it is imported into this stagy "set"
beneath the stage of the Opera. Flower baskets like those sold on Paris boulevards
(nature already made artificial) have been transported into a fifth-cellar room dec-
orated to be like a middle class drawing room (with all its importations of denatured
nature). Yet the baskets are styled less like boulevard bouquets, which rarely use silk
ribbons, and more in the manner of the upper-class (more "civilized") sprays sent to
a diva after a performance in her dressing room, a theatrical setting very different
from the residential salon that this anteroom tries to resemble in the depths of the
earth. Further, this entire refaking of what is already fake-and out of place in this
faked setting-appears to be embalmed, perfumed, and painted in a presentation of
death and funereal display that, like embalmed bodies or cut flowers, mimics the ap-
pearance of being above ground and alive. Everything here, like the masked figure at
the center of the scene, is the signifier of something else (the "other") by being, like
the baskets of flowers with silk ribbons, a concealment, displacement, or distortion,
while the "other" itself (the boulevard flower-basket), at its own level, turns out to
be a signifier for other things in other places too.
One could say, of course, that all these artificial realities in the deep foundations
of Leroux's setting are just the likely constructs of a skull-faced recluse obsessed with
death and fascinated by opera divas and stage settings that stylize (and thus fake)
what they borrow from life outside the theater. Yet this reaction, which might work
well enough for some of the film and stage adaptations, fails to square in Leroux's
novel with Erik's actual objective in designing most of his rooms and drawing Chris-
tine into them: "I want to live as everyone in the world does" (Leroux 1959, 411).
Virtually each device or action that the original phantom contrives is aimed, like the
assumptions in the author's rhetoric of reportage, at drawing Erik closer to "true"
everyday reality, in his case to the "normalcy" of the behaviors and conventions (such
as marriage) of the above-ground world in and beyond the Opera. At the same time,
the more the phantom pursues this objective (his ultimate signified or referent), the
more thoroughly he finds himself forced to produce and process artificial signifiers
of artificial signifiers-and not just because he is a withdrawn shut-in trying to
recreate external conditions within a fabrication of his own. He reveals more than
he knows when he follows his "I want to live" statement (411) with "]'ai invente une
masque qui me fait la figure de n'importe qui." This sentence is usually translated "I
have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody" (as in Leroux 1987, 194) but
is more literally "I have invented a mask that makes me the figure of one who is of
no consequence." The new mask that would make him seem "everyday and real" can
manifest only a "figure" of a general middle-class type, itself the image of a sort of
bourgeois "average person" (always a cultural construct). As the narrator has already
told us early in the novel, such is the way of the world to which Erik hopes to refer,
inside and outside the Opera: "A person will never be Parisian who has not learned
to wear a mask of gaiety over griefs and the "wolf" [a different mask] of sadness,
boredom or indifference over his inward delight .... In Paris, one is always at a
masked ball ... " (Leroux 1959, 54-55). The "signified" desired by Erik's construc-
tion of his most valued mask, the one that would make him "like most people," is al-
ready and always a "reality" of masking in the world of Paris as it is now, whatever
the ironic nostalgia in him or Leroux's narrator for older (or non-Parisian) acts of
reference that point to an "authentic" level.
Every setting in Leroux's above-ground world, it turns out, is as entirely artificial
and already as filled with deceptive figures of other figures as any of Erik's subter-
ranean rooms or furnishings. Even backstage or on its roof, quite apart from its sets,
costumes, or performance areas, the Paris Opera makes Christine feel "as if the real
sky, the real flowers, the real earth had been always forbidden to her and that she had
34 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF TJIE OPERA
been condemned never to breathe any other atmosphere than that of a theater!"
(Leroux 1959, 2II). To walk upon the Opera roo£ too, in what might be a form of
going out into the world, is to stroll "along the streets of zinc [and] on the avenues
oflead" (Leroux 1959, 221) as though rooftops could refer to roadways and the com-
position of roadways could consist of minerals used on ornate roofs. Moreover, the
countryside and churchyard of Perros-Guirec, the settings outside Paris and its
Opera that are given the most space in Leroux's novel, form less a concretized land-
scape or locality than a rural backdrop for the staging of figures. These range from
the mere memories of Christine and Raoul superimposed on the setting to the
phantom's bold deception of Christine when he makes her believe she hears a violin
from her father's grave. As Raoul walks on the hillsides of Perros, the scene appears
to him already refigured, overlaid and inhabited by his childhood fantasies of seeing
the dances of the "korrigans," the sprites of the country legends that he and Chris-
tine knew as children; indeed, this transfiguration of what Raoul now observes is so
extensive that "all his thinking wandered over the deserted and desolate land, all his
memory" (Leroux 1959, n3). What is there becomes no more than an emptiness
("deserted and desolate"), and what is not there ("all his memory") ends up filling
the visible space. The turning of the "real" into the "unreal" then becomes even more
prominent when Raoul beholds that pile of skulls, that artificial use of natural
deaths, which helps to form the base of one wall of the Perros- Guirec church. Here
Erik (as violinist) hides, camouflaged, without his difference being perceptible, to
become the one skeleton's face in the pile that is not dead. Since the "foreigner
within," this undead dead or faking of death, cannot be picked out of this immense
array of death's heads, the question of which among the skulls is "true" and which is
"false" becomes impossible to answer, especially since each "true" bony head, the
remnant of an actual death, is a figure for an other who is no longer-and is there-
fore "falsely" -present. The possible falsity of all the supposed manifestations of
truth, we discover, rises to the surface in every one of Leroux's settings of scenes.
Leroux ultimately offers two precise images of how the uses of signifiers to "bring
the truth to light" in this novel actually refer to other figures that virtually proclaim
their own status as potentially deceptive signifiers. Especially after he becomes an
object of investigation and a complex locus of the "deep truths" sought by reportage,
the original phantom poses a challenge to the claims of authoritative reference by
styling himsel£ along with his own opera-in-progress, as a "triumphant" reincarna-
tion of Don Juan. Yes, this allusion has functions in Leroux's plot aside from what it
suggests about signifiers and signifieds (see Wolf 1996, II9n.). In likening himself to
the Don Juan of Spanish and French drama, Erik becomes a sort of deceased lover
and trickster consigned to a form of Hell who nevertheless, unlike the damned Don
Juan, thinks he has found "triumphant" underground ways of reasserting the
amorous desires and the devices of subterfuge and disguise that dominate his model.
But the primary characteristic of Don Juan in the French tradition-sharply an-
nounced in Moliere's 1665 play and extended in Lorenzo da Ponte's libretto for
Mozart's 1787 opera-is the Don's intention almost never to keep his word, his re-
fusal to fulfill commitments by rendering up the signifieds promised by the signifiers
he utters. 10 As the servant Sganarelle tells his master early in Moliere's Don juan, "you
turn things in such a Manner that one would believe you are right, and yet you are
not" (Mandel, 62). Don Juan himself admits that "Words" seen as truly referential
"are nothing" to him (Mandel, 75). He can contract to pay creditors, holders of his
promises, while planning never to remit what he has promised: "I have the Art of
sending 'em away satisfy'd without giving 'em a Farthing" (Mandel, 87). Echoes of
this posture in Leroux's Erik are unmistakable, especially when he tells the Persian,
as Don Juan would tell a servant, "you know well that I never keep my oaths. Oaths
are made to entrap simpletons" (Leroux 1959, 388), something almost no other ver-
sion of the phantom ever says until 1987 (see Guest). Leroux's Erik thus reenacts
what Shoshana Felman has called the "Don Juan effect": "the illusion of a real or ex-
tralingustic act of commitment created by an utterance that refers only to itself"
(Felman, 31). Within the norms of human and divine meaning enunciated in
Moliere's play or Mozart's opera, this position is absolutely sinful. Yet if the thor-
ough masking, and thus the distancing, of the signified by the signifier is the reign-
ing norm of the above-ground and underground worlds in Leroux's Fantome, a "Don
Juan triumphant" in the depths of Western "high culture" is a potential revelation of
how much the modern Occident is grounded in symbols or symbolizers discon-
nected from any certain "truth" aside from the presentation of their own perfor-
mances and their reference to other performances.
The second Leroux image with such implications is that of the phantom as coun-
terfeiter and his signs-possibly all the signs in the novel-as counterfeit tender.
The new Opera directors, playing detectives or investigative journalists, try to draw
the Opera ghost out into public (or at least their) scrutiny by placing twenty bills of
one thousand francs each, the usual "tribute" he still demands, into an envelope,
which they work hard to seal in front of each other in their office. They then place
the envelope in Box Five and watch, without interruption, for the phantom to come
and claim it. When no one appears, they open the envelope to discover that "the
twenty true bills had been taken and replaced by twenty bills from '[The Bank of]
Saint Farce'!" (Leroux 1959, 303). Through one of the small hidden doors in the of-
fice, as we have noted earlier, before the envelope has been filled and sealed, and only
in Leroux's novel (1959, 493), Erik has taken the original paper notes into his hid-
den domain and replaced them with "Saint Farce" counterfeits that frankly admit
themselves to be counterfeit.
At the same time, in a variation on Poe's "The Purloined Letter," Leroux's phan-
tom has also called into question official assumptions about the permanence and
knowability of signifiers and their referents. He has exploded the directors' most un-
questioned assumptions by showing them that their signifiers are actually counter-
feit from a very early point and that those signs will not necessarily retain their
intended form and meaning once they leave the hands of their current users, even in
an envelope left in a single place with the original signifiers supposedly inside. There
can be no certain attainment or recovery for Leroux of a level deeper than, or be-
yond, counterfeit forms, the "masks" at all levels of Paris. Granted, the phantom does
finally return the "real" franc notes to the directors' office. But that occurs only after
he has decided he does not want them as means of attaining the "reality" of the
everyday world or pursuing any object of desire besides death (Leroux 1959,
493-94), at which point the original signifiers have become meaningless ciphers to
him. It is as if all the world for the original phantom is what opera becomes for
Theodor Adorno in the course of its mainly bourgeois history: "governed by the el-
ement of appearance" to the point where each new production must repeat the im-
ages in old ones just to keep previous "dissimulation" alive and "stylization [alone]
threatens to substitute for [what is already a] crumbled style" (Adorno, 26-27).
Either reference and desire are abandoned altogether in Leroux's Fantome de !'Opera--
and "only death can seduce the seducer" (Felman, 56) -or any use of signifiers to pur-
sue reference or desire has to employ symbols that are potentially or ultimately
counterfeit and must refer to other signifiers that are generally counterfeit too. Cer-
tainly to ask verbal and nonverbal signs to direct their acts of reference "out into the
world" or "down into the depths" in this novel is nearly always to ask them to confront
false or deceptive images as their reference points, very much the opposite of what the
style of reportage hopes to attain and convey Here is the most basic reason, one obvi-
ously bound up with Leroux's use of the Gothic tradition, why the "real" and the "fan-
tastic" cannot be completely different in Le Fantome. Techniques of "representing the
truth" based on reportage run up against the "truth" as a series of simulations, ghostlike
counterfeits of counterfeits, at least partly untrue at all levels. This phantasmal quality
at every level in the "reality" that phantoms and phantasms indicate, we now find, may
be one of the most frightening "undergrounds" in Le Fantome de !'Opera.
All of these basic and complex elements in the original Phantom narrative, then, are the
dark secrets-the mysteries we still have not faced directly-that have "progressed"
from being "undergrounded" but suggested by Gaston Leroux to being largely deleted
or significantly altered in most of the film, stage, and other versions. To be sure, we
should recognize that the novel is not really as threatening to hegemonic culture as
my list of its "undergrounds" might suggest. It was written for unquestioning middle-
class consumption in a combination of well-established genres (journalistic-mystery-
Gothic), the conventions of which it does not really violate. It also finds ways,
especially in its manner of reportage, to settle and seem to contain, while still present-
ing, the threats of disruption in its underground figures and tendencies. Even as it
symbolically renders a series of challenges to conventional middle- and upper-class
order, Leroux's novel is very much about the scapegoating, sending underground,
criminalizing, and neutralizing of those threats, particularly (though not only)
through the villainized figure of the phantom. But all of this means only that we have
one more mystery to solve. However true it may be that the adaptations of Leroux's
version have suppressed or distended a great deal in it for various historical and cul-
tural reasons, as I will show in detail later, it is also true that those efforts continue a
process of casting out and down prompted and begun in the novel itself We cannot
turn to these judgmental choices and the reasons for them in the adaptations, in other
words, until we have first explained the repressions that Leroux's novel has performed
on all that it has returned from repression in the ways we have just seen.
What has to be better understood, I think, and thus what we most need to face
are the social, cultural, and ideological dynamics that are acted out or struggled with
in the novel throughout its "otherings" and what it brings to the surface in them.
The focus in my second through eighth chapters, as a result, will be those cultural
dynamics, and the class-based investments connected with them, as these appear in
the different areas of"underground" struggle that I have just described in Leroux's
book and that disappear or reappear differently in adaptations of it. To explain those
dynamics, what has instigated them, and why they take the symbolic forms they do
in Le Fantome de !'Opera and its offshoots will be to provide answers, I believe, to the
many quandaries that are raised by the underground horrors in Leroux's novel that
I have just recounted.
THE ORIGINAL FANTOME's MYSTERIES 37
A number of questions, surely; are prompted by the episodes in Leroux's Fantome

that seem to refer immediately to the theories of Sigmund Freud and other psycho-
analysts working in his tradition. Besides vaguely noting the currency of psychoana-
lytic concepts by 1910, how can we explain the fairly pointed references in the novel,
and even in some adaptations, to death wishes, the incestuous desire for the mother
or father, the "underground" as an "unconscious," the externalizing displacement of
genitals, the return to near-infancy, the reconstruction of the mother's bed and bed-
room, the blurring of sexual boundaries, or the semi-immersion of the phantom in
the mother's body and maternal fluids at the climactic moment of the story? Espe-
cially given the French resistance to Austrian-Germanic ideas at Leroux's time, why
do all of these figurations in the book refer so readily to preconscious processes or
drives somewhat as Freud saw them-or sometimes as they are viewed differently by
Freud's French contemporaries or by later psychoanalysts in ways that explain Ler-
oux's figures even more? How is it that some of the French precursors or revisions
of Freud account for some images in Le Fantome better than Freud does himself?
What, we can more broadly ask, are the cultural or even political imperatives in the
virtually simultaneous rise and development of psychoanalysis and The Phantom cifthe
Opera in Western thinking, especially in Europe around the turn of the nineteenth
into the twentieth century? What ideological and social purposes are served by both
the psychoanalytic scheme and its use in Leroux's Fantomei' These are questions I
want to help answer in chapter two by analyzing and accounting for the obviously
psychoanalytic "undergrounds" in the original novel.
At the same time, we also have to wonder why those "unconscious" dimensions ap-
pear in the original Fantome alongside explicit suggestions of class conflict, gender con-
fusion, homosexuality; French nationalism, white gentile racism, anti-Semitism,
manipulative Orientalism, human devolution, a sliding between rebellious and en-
trepreneurial postures, and the invasion of"high culture" by the carnivalesque. What
are the cultural reasons for the symbolic presence of these supposedly forbidden im-
pulses in the novel and for their being projected onto, then hidden within, a single
underground "ghost" who is not a genuine specter> Why is it that these many dimen-
sions of what we might call, after Fredric Jameson, the political unconscious of The
Phantom cif the Opera are simultaneously cast down (in the subterranean world of the
story) and brought quite forcefully to the surface (in the words of the original narra-
tive presented to the reader)? Why admit so thoroughly what the middle and upper
classes of Western Europe and America, the majority of Leroux's readers, are always
anxious to deny; bury, or forget? How and why is it that the phantom and his under-
ground, as incarnations of so much that has to be devalued or hidden in hegemonic
thinking, can be presented as compelling, pitiful, and somewhat attractive in connection
with being abhorrent and threatening? These questions are the ones I begin to an-
swer in my chapter three, which studies how all the symbolized cultural struggles in
the expressed political unconscious of The Phantom are both included as critical ac-
knowledgments of particular Western conflicts and crafted to subsume, distort, es-
cape, and thereby control those pressing conditions and our fear of facing them.
The most nettlesome quandaries that arise from what I have suggested in this in-
troduction, however, are probably those prompted by my sense of "reality" and its
signs as basically and ultimately "counterfeit" in Leroux's Fantome. If such a world-
view is fundamental to Leroux's text, what relation does this primordial counter-
feiting have to the rest of the novel, its cultural foundations, and the way it is
composed? What cultural circumstances could have led Leroux to indicate this con-
dition of meaning, and how do they relate to his choice of reportage as a writing style
and Gothic fiction as a mode? What is the place of The Phantom in the history of the
Gothic, a multidimensional genre now being studied more and more? What does
this book's basis in phantasmal signification have to do with this story's survival in
so many forms for nearly a century now? How and why do Gothic phantasms of this
sort serve as locations for the displacement of what is both psychologically and cul-
turally repressed? These are the questions I take up in my chapter four, where I dis-
cuss The Phantom as a major re-ghosting of a Gothic tradition, one long related to
opera as we have seen, that is already (like opera for Adorno) the ghost of counter-
feit Western symbols and consequently has long-standing cultural functions to per-
form in its spectral style of writing.
Following that discussion, I will then turn to the meanings and causes of the
changes in Leroux's story in the most notable adaptations from 1925 to the present,
the subject of chapters five through eight in my second part. These widely varied
versions have prompted many questions on their own and continue to do so the
more they have been preserved through the technology of videocassettes and com-
pact disc recordings. The main query, of course, is why each new version changes the
original story as much-or, at some points, as little-as it does. Why, too, does nearly
every set of changes deliberately change some earlier transformations, often show-
ing themselves more reactive to previous adaptations than to the novel? In addition,
now that we are seeing the original book as a symbolic crossroads of specific cultural
historical and ideological tugs of war, how are the changes made in the adaptations
linked to and symbolic of the cultural interests and tensions at the time and in the
place where each new version appeared? Moreover, if the changes from (say) 1925 to
1943, or 1943 to 1986, do indeed stem from culture-based responses to particular
conditions of different eras, how do the adaptations manifest those underlying con-
ditions both in the processes of transformation that led to each new rendition and
in the final released presentations? What is the specific "cultural work" of"othering,"
partial revelation, and concealment that each different version performs as a result
of all this, and why is that cultural work needed or done each time? Then, too, while
we try to explain the different changes, do we not still have to ask about what keeps
being brought back and why, whether from the novel or another adaptation? What
issues continue in play through nearly all revisions as every one of them works on
their audience from somewhere on the boundaries between what is "high" or "low"
culture or what is becoming "standard" and what is "othered"? How much does each
adaptation reveal and how much does each obscure or sanitize the deep cultural per-
sistence of these issues in Western middle-class life throughout the last century?
In what follows, I shall argue that the use and "undergrounding" of unconscious
and cultural struggles in Leroux's novel and its progeny can best be described by the
term "sublimation," in several of its senses. Psychoanalytically, of course, sublimation
refers to the deceptive transfiguration of unconscious impulses as they reappear in
conscious anamorphoses of them and in behavioral disguises for the gaze of other
people; chemically sublimation has long referred to the conversion of solid matter
directly to a gaseous (or "ethereal") state without the material passing through the
intermediate stage ofliquid; and aesthetically, at least since translations of Longinus'
Peri hupsous as On the Sublime, it indicates a troping of an art form's materials or refer-
ence points, in music, building, painting, sculpture, writing, or performing, in which
THE ORIGINAL FANTOMES MYSTERJES 39
the "low," potentially destructive, deathly, and/or "merely natural" are raised "up
from below" (sub-limen, crossing a threshold from beneath) to become "high" and
transcendent, at least in the work of art and perceptions of it.'' Each of these mean-
ings is operative in Le Fantome de !'Opera. Leroux's Christine is willing to refer to Erik
as "the most sublime of men" as well as "the man of ugliness" because the sounds of
his underground music, like her peasant-father's, "rose up from the abyss and gath-
ered all at one stroke into a flight prodigious as well as menacing" (Leroux 1959,
259). "All at one stroke" here we see Christine's displacement of her unconscious de-
sire for her father onto her conscious sense of Erik's and her own transfiguration
through music; her conversion of abysmal and material ugliness into ethereal "flight"
without any passage through the above-ground levels of earth and water; and her
raising of the death-bound, Hell-bound, low-level outcast to the heights of the soar-
ing artist who seems to exude angelic power (along with Satanic "menace").
All these meanings of sublimation come together, I want to show, in the cultural
processes that the Phantom story manifests, particularly in the novel but also in sev-
eral adaptations. Neil Hertz has helpfully defined the "sublime turn" in the West as
what happens when a "movement of [threatened] disintegration" is wrenched into
a "figurative reconstitution" where "an aggressive reassertion of the subject's stabil-
ity [including the stability of a group's subjectivity] is bought at some other sub-
ject's expense" in "strategies designed to consolidate a reassuringly operative notion
of the self" (Hertz, 14, 22 3, 48). The history of The Phantom '![the Opera, like the his-
tory of the several cultural forms it incorporates (opera, the Gothic, reportage), re-
veals this process of conversion and subjugation. It manifests a symbolic technology
of "raising up" that is both "prodigious and menacing," which turns out to be a
wide-ranging cultural engine that pervades the twentieth century in much of the
popular fiction, films, and dramas produced by and for the Euro-American middle
classes. I want to assess this more recent history once I have shown "sublimation"
at work in the psychoanalytic, political, symbolic, and generic "undergrounds" of
Leroux's Fantome and the best-known variations on it. I would argue that The Phan-
tom '![the Opera, from the genesis of the novel to its most recent manifestations, can
open our awareness to a vast array of Western symbolic strategies-strategies of
sublimation and specifically Gothic sublimation-by which we design, with some
regrets, the modern middle-class hierarchies of conscious versus unconscious, high
versus low, good versus evil, identity versus "otherness," male versus female, lovable
versus repulsive, human versus animal, signified versus signifier, and cultural order
versus cultural outcast. I want to show that these constructions as attempted in The
Phantom and most of its offshoots intensify long-standing ways in which we create
our self-concepts in the Western middle class. We use the "othered" term in each
construct as we use the phantom himself: to cast off from ourselves-and thus sub-
limate-the conflicted multiplicities that are really our foundations so we can seem
to have an identity that is ideologically consistent and "naturally" whole.
CHAPTER Two
The Psychoanalytic Veneer in the Novel

LE FANTOMES "UNCONSCIOUS DEPTHS"
AND THEIR SOCIAL fOUNDATIONS
THE FREUDIAN DREAM-LEVEL AND ITS ACTUAL SOURCES
The almost too blatant uses of psychoanalytic motifs in Leroux's Fantome all appear
in a context that now seems to us extensively "Freudian" within the novel and in
Leroux's writing prior to 1910. The "underground" figures, actions, and transforma-
tions in the book, for example, are made to seem the parts of a subliminal dream (see
Wolf 1996, 5-6) quite often like the ones detailed in Freud's Interpretation q{Dreams.
That is especially true during the novel's first full descent into the depths beneath
the Paris Opera: Christine's flashback account to Raoul of her initial journey with
Erik down to his lair and its maternal bedroom. Christine speaks of this entire rec-
ollection as a "nightmare," however much she insists that it is not an actual dream
(Leroux 1959, 232, 234). She even remembers being drawn deeper into it by
"music ... that led [my soul] to the threshold of a dream" and, when pressed by her
listener with questions, she refuses to give complete answers: "Why ask me," she
cries, "about things that I hide at the base of my consciousness as one hides sin?"
(Leroux 1959, 245, 261). She thereby establishes her journey as a descent into ein an-
derer Schauplatz (a "stage other" than the conscious one), one of Freud's primary
phrases for the unconscious (here the "base of my consciousness"). She also presents
her tale as a memory being recounted to an interlocutor in words full of resistance
to their true meanings, just as dreams are always narrated by half-resistant patients
in Freud's case-histories of their often guilt-ridden responses to his pressing queries.
Moreover, as Freud would have it in the Interpretation, Christine's "nightmare" is a
disguised "wish-fulfillment" in spite, or really because, of its frightening surface con-
tent. Raoul is mostly correct in his jealous response to her account: "Your fear, your
terror, all of it, are ultimately of love and of the most delicious kind' The kind one
does not admit even to oneself!" (Leroux 1959, 243). Christine does descend (or
regress) toward what Freud saw as the unconscious and incestuous wish of most fe-
male patients, a "primal scene" with the father in the maternal chamber. At the same
time, this dream-quest, like many described by Freud, acts out these Oedipal drives
under the cover of images that censor and interdict the infantile longings in both
Erik and Christine. The father-figure is approached here first under the guise of the
"Angel of Music" that he once mythically sanctioned to be his surrogate. Then, when
that veil is drawn aside in the unmasking of Erik, this "angel" turns into a death's
head and implicitly utters several internalized prohibitions at once: the dictum that
seeking the father means seeking the death he incarnates (what is already dead or
dying instead of what is young and fertile); the social injunction against incest
(under the old Christian adage that "the wages of [such] sin are death"); the horror
in Western culture of potential intercourse with the mother or the father; and the
half-conscious realization that a desire for self-transcendence through the paternal
or maternal other is actually a desire for death, a return to the nonexistence (there-
merging of self and other) from which any distinct existence is born, at least for the
Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). Christine's "dream" narrative conse-
quently defines the unmasked object of longing as "the very image of the Hideous"
(Leroux 1959, 254), the one most condemned by an internalized social code pre-
cisely because the figure's deepest foundations are the ones most primordially de-
sired. It appears as if Leroux has quite directly echoed Freud's vision of
"dream-work" in action. For both of them the "transferred dream-wish" combines
with a "distortion by censorship" to produce a tortured "discharge of unconscious ex-
itation" through a symbolic half-fulfillment and half-repression oflongings left over
from childhood (Freud 1965, 615, 618). The most primal tendencies harkening back
to early sexuality and parent-child contact do appear, yet they also seem cast down
and out of adult "respectability" so that the latter can pretend it has no connection
to such "depths." Even the dissolution of clear sex distinctions as characters come
closer to Erik's "level" parallels Freud's sense by 1905 of a polymorphous and "dis-
unified sexual instinct" in infants that has no clearly gendered object other than the
mother's initially ungendered body (Freud 1953, 232-33). At the same time, the in-
stances of sexual indistinction in Leroux's dream "underground," ranging from the
embrace of Raoul and the Persian to Erik's multigendered singing as la Sirene, im-
plicitly condemn these possibilities of indiscriminate desire and gender-crossing,
just as Freud believes an internal censor should.
Indeed, if we look further into Leroux's own writing leading up to Le Fantome, we
should not be surprised to see this internal combination of censorship and desire. In
The Peifume ofthe Lady in Black, which is set up to suggest all this by The Mystery ofthe Yel-
low Room (Leroux 1908, 306-307), the reporter-detective Rouletabille is mentally
wafted by Mathilde Stangerson's perfume, in an almost Proustian way; back to the
embraces he received occasionally in his childhood from the "dark shadow" of a per-
fumed woman dressed entirely in black, who originally claimed to be a close friend
of his supposedly dead mother (Leroux 1909, 41). Now that he knows that Mathilde,
once the Lady in Black, is his real mother and the evil Ballmeyer (for all his assumed
French and English names) is his father, Rouletabille yearns to make his mother-
seeking dreams come true in present reality: "his instinct drew him so strongly ...
that he could scarcely resist his longing to throw himself into her arms" (Leroux
1909, 57). Yet he obsessively fears that Mathilde is so likely to be horrified at the en-
counter, to think of him as the repulsive "heir of the crimes" of the father, that here-
peatedly censors his "overwhelming impulse" as he feels it (Leroux 1909, 57, 198).
He thus allows the Laius-like patriarch, just as Freudian dreamers often do, to con-
tinue looming as a "horrible" visage (a very phallic one repeatedly viewed as "stand-
ing erect" in an obscenely "open display of himself") between the Oedipal Joseph
and the Jocasta- Mathilde he desires (Leroux 1909, 95). He still craves her reem-
THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL VENEER IN THE NOVEL 43
brace, but he denies it to himself until late in the novel as he strives instead to out-
wit, "kill," and thus take the power of the phallus from the foreigner-criminal-father
whom he seeks to neutralize and displace once and for all.
Still, we cannot simply say that Gaston Leroux is influenced by Freud and
Freudian schema in The Perfome of the Lady in Black or Le Fantome de /'Opera. There is re-
ally very little mention of Freud in any of Leroux's writings, despite the proximity in
time of both men (see again Hale 1998a, 247-49), and we must remember that
specifically Freudian theory was far more resisted than accepted, though it was cer-
tainly discussed and promulgated, in turn-of-the-century Paris. Sherry Turkle has
aptly recalled "France's violent and sustained rejection" of Austrian-German psy-
choanalysis at just this time, and she rightly notes that Freud himself admitted, in his
"History of the Psychoanalytic Movement" (1914), that "in Paris ... the conviction
still seems to reign ... that everything good in psychoanalysis is a repetition of
[Pierre] Janet's views with insignificant modifications, and that everything else in it
is bad" (trans. in Turkle, 4-5). There was, we should recall, that deep hostility to
Germanic-Austrian "invasions," which included medical as well as musical ones, in
the Paris of 1900-1910. Moreover, Freud's own statement reflects the widely held
view in Paris at the time that French dynamic psychiatry, including that of Jean-
Martin Charcot at the Salpetriere (himself somewhat suspect by his death in 1893)
and the more accepted version of Janet (1859-1947), was really the source of, not
just a variation on, Freud's Vienna School theories (Turkle, 35-36). After all, Freud
took training from Charcot at the Salpetriere in 1885-86 and was profoundly influ-
enced by Janet, particularly after both attended and probably met at the Interna-
tional Congress on Hypnotism in Paris during the Universal Exhibition of 1889
(Ellenberger, 753, 340, 759-61). More to the point, Freud is indebted to Charcot's
sense of unconscious sexual drives underlying hysteria and Janet's assertion of a
"psychological automatism" that repeats itself in symptomatic disguises "resulting
from the banishment of a thought from personal consciousness" (Ellenberger, 753
and 358-61; the words just quoted are translated directly from Janet). It might be
argued, then, that Leroux is really extending the French underpinnings of Freudian
dream-work rather than transfiguring Freud's own pronouncements directly French
reviews of Freud at this time were very few, and those French-language ones that did
appear presented The Interpretation in terms genuinely hard to distinguish from the
dynamics of at least some French psychiatry, 1
Yet even this shifting of Leroux's sources from Freud himself to his immediate
precursors in France will finally be inaccurate too if we fail to note a far more ex-
tensive context building toward what Charcot, Janet, Freud, and Leroux all suggest
about the underground-unconscious and the sources of its drives. Henri Ellen-
berger and Sander Gilman have quite thoroughly proven that Freud's "originality
was to synthesize [numerous existing] ideas and concepts, the majority of which lay
scattered or partly organized," some of them in contemporary writings but most of
them in European texts extending back nearly a century and sometimes beyond
(Ellenberger, 508). Among Leroux's sources for his "psychology," then, we must in-
clude the earlier and much broader cultural schemes upon which both Leroux and
Freud and even Charcot and Janet were building as they responded to what faced
them. The ingredients of Le Fantome's dreamlike "underground" and of Freud's
"dream-work" before and after The Interpretation come from a much wider set of ide-
ological and cultural developments over several decades, and it is the relationship
of Leroux's writing to these that we must understand if we are to grasp the roots of
his "psychology"
If we look back in Frenchfontastique andfrenetique writing, for example, we come
upon several aspects of Le Fantome's "dream" level in a novella of 1821 that would be-
come quite influential as the century progressed: Smarra, or The Demons of the Night by
Charles Nodier, who composed this tale almost immediately after helping to trans-
late John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) into a French play of 1820 (Kessler, xiv; Stu-
art, 41). Throughout Smarra, the principal narrator, Lorenzo, in the process of
entering into sex and marriage with Lisidis, dreams himself into the consciousness
of Lucius from Apuleius' The Golden Ass (ca. 180 A.D.). The Lorenzo- Lucius persona,
in turn, listens for most of the tale as the ghost of Lucius's old friend Palemon recalls
his own seduction and entrapment by the sorceress Meroe and her phallic incubus-
familiar, the vampiric and infantile Smarra, in a "sepulchral vault" beneath her huge
marble palace (Kessler, 19). This descent into quasi dreams within a dream, all on a
journey into underground realms of "misty phantoms" and "hideous remains" (16,
21), draws Lorenzo, as Leroux and his phantom draw Christine and Raoul, into the
mainly unrecognized desires and prohibitions that most underlie the frame narra-
tor's sexual drives and anxieties. One object of his longings is revealed quite early
when Lorenzo as Lucius approaches his vision of a singing maiden, "a woman's heart
just opening to passion": "This melody is as pure as the sweetest thought of a glad-
dened soul, as the first kiss of love before love is understood, as the caressing glance
of a mother at a child in the cradle, the child whose death she had envisioned in a
dream" (Kessler, 5). As in Leroux's Fantome, the desire for the singing voice and for
following or drawing it into primordial undergrounds turns out to be a quest to re-
cover the earliest loving contact between the parent and the infant. In addition, the
infant is viewed by a nearly forgotten mother as in danger of dying before or soon
after birth (like Erik) in a dream that occurred even earlier than the dream-contact
between questor and mother.
Concurrently; though, this attempted wish-fulfillment, in Smarra as in Le Fantome,
confronts the features of death before reaching the infant-mother reunion.
Lorenzo- Lucius is faced with Pal em on initially as one among many "living ghosts,"
all of whose "skin," as with Erik's, "is like blanched parchment stretched taut over
bones" on faces where no "glimmer of soul emanates from the sockets of their eyes"
(Kessler, 7). In addition, the phantom of Palemon appears primarily to interdict the
broadly sexual and mother-oriented quest of the whole tale by opening up the
"death" behind the love-object into the vast and horrific sepulcher of the "demons of
the night" surrounding and centered on the visibly incestuous Meroe and Smarra.
Intense sexual desire, as in a Freudian dream and Le Fantome, here confronts the at-
traction of its object alongside a host of internal condemnations and apprehensions.
These interact to surround and veil the desired object within the fear (surely
Lorenzo's) that the male self may be lost altogether in sexual intercourse, as men
turn out to be when they are seduced by Ia Sirene in Le Fantome. This possible dissolu-
tion, according to Smarra, can take several different forms at once: reinfantilization,
returning to birth only to find death, losing vital fluids to a vampiric partner, incest,
or the separation of the phallus from the self to assume, as Smarra does, a series of
perverse positions and different shapes on and around the body of a devouring,
rather than nurturing, magna mater. There could hardly be a more anxious and barely
sublimated struggle between desire and prohibition. Considerably less "safely" than
Le Fantilme, Smarra, almost ninety years before Leroux's novel and eighty years before
The Interpretation q{Dreams, plays out a French symbolism of dreams designed for mid-
dle-class readers that contains a great many of the highly sexualized and repressive
ingredients of Leroux's-and even Freud's-"nightmare" level.
Leroux's Fantilme, in addition, quite precisely echoes the equally pre- Freudian
schemes in some major French "realist" fiction from as early as the r82os. Since Ler-
oux flatly states in an interview that he voraciously read "all the books" of Honore
de Balzac (Leroux 1984, 997), it should not be surprising for us to find that Le Fan-
tome is full of direct echoes from Balzac's novella Sarrasine (1830). The title character
of this tale is a young sculptor, whose first mistress is "one of the luminaries of the
Opera" (Barthes, 236), and his story is recounted in flashback by the very similar
male narrator to a woman he has escorted to a resplendent ball. He tells the tale to
answer her questions about a "mysterious personage," a quite skeletal being "dressed
in black," who is first drawn to the ball by the "enchanting [singing] voice" of the
host's daughter (Barthes, 225). Especially as an old man, this figure is uncannily like
Leroux's Erik. He is "not a vampire, a ghoul, or an artificial man," though he suggests
all of these Gothic monsters much as Erik does (225); he/it is a living "cadaverous
skull," with "eyes" entirely "lost in yellowish sockets" amid the "thin, yellow skin of
his face" (229-30). He/it even seems "to have come out from underground, im-
pelled by some piece of stage machinery" (228). Sometimes he/it can "appear child-
ish" like Leroux's phantom (228), while at other times the same figure can "smell like
a graveyard" just as Erik can (Leroux 1959, 234), so much so that an observer, as in
Le Fantilme, might well "believe that death itself has come looking for me" (Sarrasine in
Barthes, 230-31).
Moreover, Sarrasine helps produce the connection in Le Fantilme between the blend-
ing of death into life and the blurring of sexes and genders. Balzac's skeletal figure in
black turns out, in the narrator's story about Sarrasine and the history of the host
family, to have once been the castrated singer "La Zambinella" -one reason that Ler-
oux's Erik vaguely suggests a castrato--who aroused a passionate "delirium" in the naive
sculptor when the latter first heard his/her "angelic voice" in a theater (Barthes, 238,
249). Sarrasine was so enraptured back then that "he sent his valet to rent a box next
to the stage for the entire season" (240) -anticipating the exact location of the phan-
tom's Box Five at the Paris Opera-and he long resisted facing the actual deceptions
and contradictions, the castration-based sources of the host family's fortune, in a
love-object so deliberately fashioned by and for "theatrical effect" (241). In this
process, Sarrasine is made to occupy precarious positions, to the point of being cut up
and killed by phallic "stiletto thrusts" (252), between traditionally masculine and
feminine postures. It is as though the transsexual, castrated status of Zambinella
could leak out into the lives and even bodies of those who come closest to her/him.
Hence the interplay between the "masculine" unvoiced "s" and the "feminine" voiced
(and cutting or castrating) "z" in Sarrasine's name, as Roland Barthes has emphasized
in SjZ, his very thorough study of Balzac's tale (see 106-107). Leroux's Erik, in turn,
combines aspects of Sarrasine and Zambinella, the latter as both the "old man" and
the younger deceptive Sirene, and so embodies many layers of the sexual ambiguity, as
well as the drift towards death, that both characters come to suggest. At the same
time, with Christine continuing some features from Zambinella (including lower-
class origins) and Raoul being a combination of some tendencies in Sarrasine and his
narrator, Le Fantilme de !'Opera makes the slippage of ambisexuality from the phantom
to them, with the threat of its spreading beyond them, an inevitable byproduct of
adopting and continuing a symbolic pattern prominent in French writing and mid-
dle-class reading at least since the time of Balzac.
What accounts, then, for the development and persistence of this symbolic
scheme, particularly as its force is only enhanced by the consolidation of its elements
in Freud and the thinly disguised use of it in Le Fantome de l'Operai' For answers we
might offer the "lasting influence of French neo- Gothic Romanticism" or its revival
in what is sometimes called the "Romanticism of fin de siecle decadence," and we
would not be entirely wrong. But those answers still beg the question: what explains
the rise and coalescence of this symbolic and ideological way of configuring the
deepest levels of human psychology, and what does Leroux's Fantome reveal about its
milieu and its readers by being such a pointed reenactment of that ideology in sev-
eral quasi- Freudian images with their own long histories? It is not enough to affirm
(though I agree), with Joan Kessler, that there was an unusually strong cultural ten-
dency specifically in nineteenth-century France-an established "tradition" by the
time of Le Fantome, which it continues while using less of the apparently supernat-
ural-within which "the fantastic" or "frenetic" tale served as "a vehicle for probing
the dark side of the human mind" and all "those aspects of human existence that are
perpetually both revealed and concealed" (Kessler, xi, 1). Granted, there is an un-
usual amount of pre- Freudian symbolism in French neo- Gothic literature prior to
Leroux, some of it influential on Freud himself as well as Le Fantome de /'Opera. Even
so, we have yet to understand why that particular use of "the fantastic" arose when
and as did and why it produces the sort of "deep internal" topography for which it is
so noted and with which Leroux plays as though it were almost standard by 1910
even in a Paris resistant to Freud. We now need to look more closely at both Ler-
oux's Fantome and the wider context of its quasi-psychoanalytic schemes. By doing so,
we will come to see the roots of both psychoanalysis and The Phantom if the Opera in a
specific cultural agenda: a campaign of class-based and highly social interests, subli-
mated in both discourses and half-consciously developed across many earlier writ-
ings, that comes to momentary culminations in Freudian psychology, the French
responses to it, and Leroux's best-known fictions, Le Fantome most of all.
THE APPLICATION OF RECENT "FRENCH FREUDS":

THEIR REVELATIONS AND ]NADEQYACIES
To account fully enough for this novel and the "cultural work" being carried out in
it, however, we cannot simply proceed to describe that agenda. We have to realize
that symptoms and extensions of Le Fantome's cultural roots are still very much with
us, which means that a great deal of the resulting agenda continues to operate in how
we live, think, and express ourselves. One way for us to face this fact is to see how
suggestively Leroux's original Fantome has been or can be interpreted by some post-
I960s recastings of Freudian psychoanalysis offered by French or French-based the-
orists of the last half-century, As Turkle has shown especially well, the quasi-general
"strike" throughout Paris in May-June 1968, which was explicitly articulated as res-
urrecting the Paris Commune of 1871 (Turkle, 69), marks a turning point, though
there had already been changes in clinics and universities, at which the older French
resistance to Freud becomes decisively reversed. Since then (and somewhat before),
there have been numerous, multifaceted, and largely positive reinterpretations of his
work in France and nearby countries. These have been put forward frequently for
purposes of political resistance that sometimes even now link psychoanalysis to
forms of Marxism and social existentialism once thought to be quite alien to
Freudian theory prior to the neo- Freudianism of Jacques Lacan that began to de-
clare itself just before World War I I. Ironically, as a result, the seemingly Freudian
dimensions of Le Fantome de l'Opera or works related to it, arising though they some-
times did from an atmosphere of opposition to Freud, have recently prompted ar-
resting interpretations by intensely post- Freudian thinkers based in French theory
I now want to turn to the most significant of these approaches, particularly since I
find that they help to reveal the social aims behind psychoanalytic interpretation, if
only by sublimating those in Freudian ways.
Since the work of Lacan has had the most sweeping effects on French Freudian the-
ory, it is no wonder that the most notable French-based reading directly focused on
Leroux's Fantome is an aggressive extension of Lacanian reconceptions of Freud: Slavoj
Zizek's "Grimaces of the Real, or When the Phallus Appears" (1991). Zizek uses Lacan
quite forcefully to help him interpret the original Erik's eyeholes, the phantom's rela-
tive lack of a nose (so suggestive of castration and a longing for the phallus-in-the-
mother), the "preontological state" of the Opera ghost's "skinned" face (with its
overtones ofliving death), and the "impossible," almost "bodiless," nature of Erik's six-
octave voice in a nearly naked skull (Zizek 1991, 45-48), a combination reminiscent
for Zizek of Edvard Munch's 1893 painting The Scream (see figure 2.1). In this reading
all these features in Leroux's great "horror," by now "mass culture's central apparition"
(Zizek 1991, 45), point, as similar "monsters" in other fictions do, toward the disrup-
tion of everyday awareness by "intrusions" of what Lacan has called "the Real" and
Zizek calls das Ding (a version of what Kant has referred to as the inaccessible Ding an
sich). This fundamental "otherness" outside all perception and symbol-making is visi-
ble to consciousness only in distortions of its deathlike "nonmeaning" or in "gaping
holes" that puncture "phenomenal reality" (Zizek 1991, 64-66).
Its "always elsewhere" condition can be located, if at all, in the dimly remembered
borderland between life and death bound up with the most basic of bodily relations,
the primordial "enjoyment" between the infant and the mother (Zizek 1991, 54). At
that "unfathomable," amorphous, pre-Oedipal level, the phallus, for Lacan the indi-
cator oflack and desire after the weaning of the child from the mother, is "originally"
(it now seems) both a possession of the mother and a part of the self all at once.
Consequently, this "identification with nonidentity" at the dawn oflife (Zizek 1991, s8), a
stage at which life and death or self and other are as inseparable as mother and child,
comes to be what we must all repress and see as a primal horror, even as we still long
for it. Leroux's anamorphic phantom for Zizek, then, symbolically recalls the "oth-
ered" existence of this nonidentical location of the phallus in the mother before the
current state of it for Lacan as the supreme "castrated" signifier torn from what it
signifies.
In doing so, Leroux's "living dead" figure also reannounces (by negating) what
post- Enlightenment bourgeois humanity, in Zizek's view, has been most striving for
since the eighteenth century: the disengagement of itself in its ideology from the il-
logical and disgustingly physical welter of"the Real." Especially as he aspires to high
bourgeois status and identity while carrying with him many qualities that such a pos-
ture works to deny, the phantom of Leroux's Opera suggests for Zizek the always
Figure 2.!: Edvard Munch's The Scream, r893
possible reinvasion of the bourgeois subject by the very "Real," amorphous, and
mixed conditions that this kind of subject tries to transcend in his or her displays of
economic power (the Paris Opera among them). Indeed, Zizek sees one dimension
in Erik's suggestions of the Real as his "stand[ing] in for the class struggle," the one
the bourgeois elite claims to be completely beyond, by symbolizing a feared '"point
of passage' at which the subversive power of the new (the working class [suggested
by the phantom as artisan]) interacts with the return of the old (aristocratic deca-
dence [as in the phantom's mode of dress])" (Zizek 1991, 62). At the same time,
even this social dynamic is for Zizek but a symptom, as is the original Erik, of what
das Ding is more fundamentally for lacan: the "black hole" of the vast and very phys-
ical "surplus that escapes the vicious circle" of symbolic relationships (Zizek 1991,
66), the suppressed realm at the root of the personal and the social that challenges
the priority and permanence claimed by most reigning systems of meaning and pol-
itics. By these lights the Munch "scream" in the phantom's almost superhuman voice
utters the bourgeois subject's terror at the ongoing presence of the Real or "Thing
in itself' the same terror that recalls and desires, while it also keeps fearing, the cry
of"the mother's resistance to cutting the umbilical cord that links her with her son"
(Zizek 1991, 67, 51).
This interpretation is so commanding, provided one accepts its overriding as-
sumptions, that it is easy for it to color similar French- Freudian analyses of related
phenomena, even if they do not treat Leroux's novel specifically Zizek's suggestions
about the significance of voice in Le Fantome are therefore, in my view, quite close to
the reading of the audience attraction to Western opera in general offered by Michel
Poizot in The Angel's Cry (1986; English translation 1992). It feels almost inevitable
within French post- Freudian theory, in fact, that I should apply what Poizot says
about the effect of the sung "cry" in opera to the suggestions about the opera
medium and the high-pitched voices (Christine's soprano and Erik's tenor) in Ler-
oux's Fantome. For Poizot the operatic aria arouses "the shiver of pleasure" and "shiver
of horror" in its devotees because it carries its hearers, though never completely, to-
wards a "cry" of "pure voice" beyond coherent language and even musical structure.
This cry to him reminds us of the most primordial "vocal object," a purified and lin-
gering version of the cry of both the parent and the infant at the moments of birth,
separation, breast-feeding, and possibly conception (Poizot, 40, 35, 66, 10o-ror).
Leroux's Erik suggests a similar vision by being drawn to the high voice and mater-
nal womanhood of Christine as a sort of pathway to the ultimate "lost object," the
mother, and to "the first object of jouissance," the pleasure-giving contact with and
within the mother's body Both "objects" are now recalled best in the sheer, pre-
verbal "materiality" of the voice of the ultimate Other (the Angel's cry) vaguely ac-
cessible in the singing of the phantom's protege as he trains her voice to reach that
level (Poizot, 102-103).
Christine, on her side, has much the same reaction, though her desire is for her
father, when she is initially attracted to the phantom as the disembodied "Voice" be-
hind her dressing-room wall and in the depths of her mirror. This Voice for her is
"as beautiful as the voice of an angel," yet its being perhaps the Angel of Music
promised by her father is an appealing but only partial "explanation" for its seduc-
tiveness (Leroux 1959, 225). The "Voice" also, as Poizot would emphasize and as
Christine puts it, by "developing [the] chest sounds in [her] soprano voice," has
"awakened [in her] an ardent, voracious, sublime life," almost in an act of impregna-
tion, to a point at which she feels so "in unison with its magnificent, soaring sounds"
that the "soul of the Voice lived in my mouth and breathed harmony there" (Leroux
1959, 227). It is as i£ by a quasi-phallic but vocal reentry of the father into her, Chris-
tine were transfigured from her now-ungrounded separateness of being to the con-
dition of approaching what Lacan would call the "Imaginary,'' 2 a fabricated
wholeness of being staring back at her from a mirror, yet also, she believes, residing
and voicing itself entirely within her.
The voice of the ultimate outside Other, once apparently lost to her, now appears
in her thinking to be back "inside" as the very motivating force that supposedly al-
lows her to sing with sublimity and even to breathe. Lacan, of course, points out that
the Imaginary is an illusion of self-other unity (Lacan 1977, 137-39). The need for a
mirror to reflect the image and hence the dependence of the self on the Other (the
Other of the means to articulation: the language and music put "in [her] mouth" by
another, as Christine says) actually turn this imagined self-completion into an alien-
ation of the self from itsel£ an image outside it, as in the reflection of Christine in
her glass with the "Voice" more behind it than inside her. The desired unity and self-
transcendence cannot be described, it turns out, except as the entrance of an alien
order-in this case of a Voice of the Father-into the speaker. Nevertheless, Poizot's
reading of voice in opera lends a powerful additional meaning to Raoul's fear that
the Voice draws Christine toward "the most delicious" and the most unadmitted
kind of love. By this account, the Voice, insofar as it seems to rise toward the "pure
voice" of the most primordial and pre- Oedipal memory, promises its younger votary
the most complete reunion of self and other that a human being might know
As Poizot notes himsel£ however, the "cry" that recalls the primordial "vocal ob-
ject" always manifests itself through "the skeletal remains of [the latter's] phonic
materiality" (Poizot, 102), and no work of fiction presents that irony more clearly
than Le Fantome de ['Opera. On the one hand, this paradox means for Christine and
Erik that the supposed reappearance of the "first phonic materiality" occurs in a sign
of it that "kills" its actual presence. The sign establishes the Voice behind voices as
always holding out the desired "vocal object" as irrevocably "lost" (Poizot, 103). On
the other hand, for Erik or Christine to "identify with the lost vocal object" means,
especially in their final embrace of quiet weeping, that each strives somewhat to "be-
come less onesel£ to become supreme purification, to be silence; in other words, to
die" (Poizot, 104). Both Le Fantome and Poizot seem to support the modification of
the Freudian "death wish" articulated by Georges Bataille and anticipated in Sarra-
sine's passion for "Zambinella." In that conception, which Erik embodies and Chris-
tine and Raoul feel within themselves, "eroticism" is a drive to break beyond "our
discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals" to the point at
which we reach the dissolution of the individual, "the power to look death in the face
and to perceive in death the pathway to an unknowable and incomprehensible con-
tinuity" between all that is self and all that is other (Bataille, 18, 24).
To be sure, Erik as skeletal in Leroux's novel is close to that condition that Bataille
sees as past the eroticism of death, the "incorruptible" state of "clean," naked bones
(Bataille, 67). But as a skull covered by thin, yellowing, and thus decaying skin, as
well as quasi-infantile qualities of birth as death (or the beginning of death), Erik re-
mains the unclean threat of death and the destruction of the flesh from the begin-
ning of life. He is thus erotically compelling as, while he drives toward, the
deterioration of the separate body He consequently holds out a promise to restore
the body to an ecstatic continuity, possibly with the Voice behind all voices. Of
course there are the personal, cultural, and symbolic efforts we make to "bury" this
half-attractive death to preserve both selfhood and a stratified society of individu-
als. These efforts compose much of what happens in Le Fantome and are certainly
bound up with opera's and narrative's uses oflanguage, plot, and sound-variations to
create meanings and institutions that seem to keep death "underground" or even to
survive it. Yet at those moments when the deathly quality of Erik, or of Christine as
THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL VENEER IN THE NOVEL sr
the dead mother, is joined to the "sublime" voice that erotically calls the self away
from earthly life, Leroux's novel seems to place the death-drive toward lost conti-
nuity fully in the deepest unconscious of what we call love.
For Julia Kristeva, though, another post- Lacanian theorist, a figure such as Ler-
oux's phantom has to embody the very opposite of continuity to be a key to the un-
conscious. In all the ways we noted in the Introduction, Erik's multileveled
"foreignness," while he is also a native of France, must encompass many features that
make him seem a foreign "invader" according to Kristeva's definition of the
"stranger." Otherwise he can be neither the scapegoat that he, like many foreigners,
is made to be in Paris nor the symbolic indicator of the foreignness-within-ourselves
that Kristeva finds us projecting onto such figures and thus reflecting back toward
our own beings. For her Freud's announcement of the unconscious manifested in
symptoms that displace its drives is an important declaration "that we are [all] for-
eigners to ourselves" within each of our conditions, quite apart from ethnic, racial,
and national differences (Kristeva 1991, 170). Hence, Kristeva goes on to say, there
is an "uncanny" quality (familiar and unfamiliar) in every "fascinated rejection" of a
foreigner/phantom, and that quality. as we have seen, rears its head during many
scenes in Le Fantome. That is because the foreign other, especially Leroux's, so "takes
up again our infantile desires and fears of the other-the other of death, the other
of woman, the other of uncontrollable drive" -that we must work very hard to avoid
seeing how much "the foreigner is within us" precisely in the need we feel to place
him or her outside our supposed identities (Kristeva 1991, 191).
Meanwhile, what makes a figure such as Leroux's Erik so especially "foreign" and
primal by these lights is even better explained in Kristeva's more revisionist psycho-
analytic study, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1978, translated 1982). 3 Here
Kristeva, as though she were looking directly at the original phantom, sees the con-
ditions of being outside the mother and yet striving to get back inside her, being alive
and yet continually a sign of death (both infantile and corpselike), and being partly
male and partly female all as ingredients of what she calls "the abject," literally the
"thrown over there" or the "thrown down and under" (feet plus ab). These states of
betweenness all hearken back to the anomalous, pre-Oedipal moment of"immemo-
rial violence" when the infant is partly inside and partly outside the mother's body-
of mixed sexes, then, if the child is male-and is thus emerging from death (prenatal
nonexistence) and starting to live toward death (the endpoint of the "want" that be-
gins at birth) at the same time (Kristeva 1982, 10, 5). This liminal situation is the
radical heterogeneity, the contradictoriness of the self at the very start of its being,
from which a person is never entirely removed, since there are visceral recollections
of it in everyone's somatic memory or body language. Yet one must inevitably work
to "feel separated" from this early mixture of states "in order to be" a coherent,
bounded individual (Kristeva 1982, 10).
That separation can seem to occur only if the individual preconsciously produces
"the abject" by the process of "abjection." He or she "throws off" the original in-
sidejoutside, male/female, living/dying multiplicity and simultaneously "throws [it]
down and under." She or he then casts it all over into a symbol, an "other," a "hor-
ror" (a "phantom") that can quickly be subjected to, and read as "repugnant" within,
the public symbolic order apparently governed by the cultural Law of the Father
rather than the body of the mother (Kristeva 1982, 13). When the later, more devel-
oped subject confronts its primal non-identities in a "monstrous" or "foreign" figure
of the abject, it consequently beholds and is haunted by its own primal contradic-
tions (infantile/adult, living/dead, malejfemale, etc.). Faced with that morass, albeit
in disguise, the subject is either able or unable-sometimes both-to fashion an
"identity'' in relation to this supposedly "ugly," "buried," and "alien" other by decep-
tively positioning "over there" that apparent locus of"what I am not" so as to estab-
lish the seemingly distinct self as "what I am."
Leroux's phantom, by this standard, is clearly a monster of"the abject" produced in-
dividually and culturally by half-conscious acts of"throwing over there" and "throwing
down and under." Indeed, only a few other horrific "creatures" in fiction before Le Fan-
tome, including Smarra, "La Zambinella," Frankenstein's monster, Dr. Jekyll's Mr. Hyde,
and Stoker's Dracula,4 embody as many "abjected" contradictions as all these cast off
into the original cast-down Erik: living/dead, male/female, inside/outside the mother,
childjadult, lover/father, phallic/castrated, operaticjcarnivalesque, Occidental/
Oriental, whitej"colored," French/Germanic, gentile/implicitly Jewish, and highly
evolved/apishly devolved. Leroux's phantom, therefore, can be read not just as a tradi-
tionally Freudian "return of the repressed" in his visibly infantile drives (and thus not
only as "uncanny" in the simplest Freudian way), but as a rising of the even more pre-
Oedipally "abject" from the depths into which all versions of it have been "thrown
down."
Erik is a "ghostly" appearance in the high bourgeois and aristocratic worlds of the
many anomalies its members have "thrown away" from the most basic levels of their be-
ings so as to fashion their apparent personal and class identities. To the characters who
sometimes take on aspects of him by contagion, he is thus both a resurgence of"where
they came from" or "where they are going" (quite literally) and an invasion of their sup-
posedly exclusive spaces by the "impossible" multiplicities they have most wanted to ex-
clude from their lives in order to seem the "selves" they claim to be. The notion of
abjection, I would even say, helps draw together all the French-based neo- Freudian
readings that I have just recounted. If Leroux's phantom of the Opera is an incursion
of "the Real" into constructions of the bourgeois sel£ the locus of an avenue to the
prime "vocal object," and an enactment of the erotic drive both towards and away from
death-all bound up with the lost body of the mother-then these are all versions or
portions of"the abject" with which Erik haunts, since the abject helps us "throw off" all
the anomalous conditions from which the "self" strives to emerge as a coherent entity,
Nonetheless, there remain problems for our understanding of Le Fantome if we are
inclined to limit our sense of the abject to the primary contents granted to it by the
schemes of Lacan, Zizek, Poizot, Bataille, and even Kristeva. As it happens, most of
these theorists themselves cannot confidently limit their ranges of reference to the
visceral memories of the individual body. They must confront the political and so-
cial behind the psychological. For Zizek, as abstract and Lacanian as he is in his "Gri-
maces" essay, there cannot be a sharp distinction between the "Real" as a primal
welter of physical multiplicities impinging on individuals and the sociopolitical con-
dition of being caught between class postures. Indeed, in his better-known book, The
Sublime Object ofIdeology (1989), Zizek is far more explicitly Marxist, so much so as to
connect the excessive distance of the bourgeois sign from the Real with the "contra-
diction" in capitalism "between the [actually] social mode of production and the
[supposedly] individual, private mode of appropriation" (Zizek 1989, 52).
Poizot, in turn, is well aware, having read Catherine Clement, that the "sexual in-
determinacy" of the "lost vocal object" is finally counteracted by its being actually ren-
dered in Western operas by the "high voice." That level is culturally understood to
cover a range only between the "juvenile" and the "female" (Poizot, 122), by which
standard the phantom is a freak for ranging across these two registers and an adult
male one besides. "Operatic romanticism," too, as we certainly see in Le Fantome, most
commonly "establishes Woman" as the "avatar of the Angel" in ways that Poizot doc-
uments. Any resulting composition, La Fantome for example, indicates the vocal ob-
ject's "lost" quality; Poizot admits, by placing the "high voice" in "women driven to
death and sacrifice" as Christine almost is (32-33). There is no way even for Poizot
to separate private longings from public sexual politics and forced gender distinc-
tions. Nor can Kristeva, from her perspective, separate the "foreigner," one version
of "the abject," from the social conditions of foreigners in France as they reveal the
political agendas of middle- and upper-class natives. The French construction of a
"compact social texture" that makes foreigners into potential monsters, as is done
with Erik, is for her the fabrication of an order of"values" that allows the classes con-
trolling "high" ideology to be "sheltered from [the] great invasions [they associate
with] the intermixing of populations" (Kristeva 1991, 38).
Why, then, for all these theorists-and for any strictly psychoanalytic reading of Le
Fantome-are these social and historical conditions more symptoms than they are
causes or concurrent aspects of the deep psychological and bodily conditions to
which the underground "horror" seems to return us? We now need to confront this
question by examining how the social really precedes the psychoanalytic. It is not
enough to answer simply that "these theorists are Freudians" and that they are thus
bound to rearticulate psychoanalytic schemes in Leroux's novel and works similar to
it. Le Fantome itself, while it contains those schemes, does not make them more foun-
dational than social or historical conditions, as we have just seen and as Zizek,
Poizot, and Kristeva half-admit themselves. Better answers, I now want to argue,
might be based on the premise that "psychoanalysis can be a screen onto which a cul-
ture projects its preoccupations and values" (Turkle, 48) even to the point of subli-
mating some of the roots of those values using the cover provided by psychoanalytic
or pre-psychoanalytic discourse. To be sure, I do not claim that psychoanalytic read-
ings of Leroux's Fantome are invalid; rather, I affirm they are valid up to a point, for
several good reasons: the novel contains symbolic schemes that parallel several of
Freud's dream-based notions from the same era; these schemes have some of their
roots, if not in Freud, at least in popularizations of French psychiatry connected with
Charcot and Janet; this entire context of writing and thought developed in part out
of psychological symbolism in French (and other) "fantastic" and "semi-realistic"
fiction written all across the nineteenth century; and we clearly can find enough
continuity between Leroux's ingredients and more recent "French Freudianism" to
see some applicability of lacan, Bataille, and Kristeva to the original Fan tome de /'Opera
and perhaps to adaptations of it. After all, the newer "French Freud" builds upon the
strain in turn-of-the-century French psychiatry that, even when it paralleled Freud,
concentrated more on "physical causes" or the "localization of brain functions"
where possible and considered psychology as basically "somatic," concerned with the
transformation and visceral memory of the body and its elements (Turkle, 33), much
as Lacan, Zizek, Poizot, and Kristeva do within their more recent linguistic and po-
litical orientations. Even so, the sociocultural agenda behind and within this entire
history, of which we have seen suggestions in Le Fantome and some recent "French
Freudians," needs far more examination than it has received, whether we focus on
pre-psychoanalytic writing, the era of Freud or Leroux themselves, or the French

Freudian revival. We therefore need to turn to what socially drove and drives all
these forms of psychoanalysis. In particular, we now need to analyze what Le Fantome
shows us about those foundations as it indirectly conveys its own explanations for
why Leroux and his culture use this kind of psychological symbolism.
HowLE FANTOME REVEALS THE

CULTURAL PROJECT BEHIND PSYCHOANALYSIS
The underground "dream" level in Leroux's novel has all of the overtones it does, and
thus provokes the psychoanalytic readings we have noted, partly because the phan-
tom has deliberately constructed his domain with the aim of achieving quite definite
social and ideological ends. The imitation high-bourgeois "drawing room" through
which Erik introduces Christine to his subterranean home and the more homespun
and provincial, but still bourgeois, bedroom with louis Philippe furniture both es-
tablish the desires they seem to recall (for a return to the mother and the phallus in
the mother) as the results of a fabrication produced to approximate a middle-class
vision of family life. That ideological scheme-a construct that would, if he could
fully enact it, make the phantom seem a conventional "anyone" to the point of
"hav[ing] a wife like everyone else and go[ing] out walking with her on Sundays"
(Leroux 1959, 4II)-is pursued by Erik throughout the succession oflocales that he
has feverishly built below ground.
His constructions even reveal the historical stages and ascending levels of social
position through which he has fashioned his condition as a "rising" one. First there
is the replica of the maternal bedroom, which roots him in an origin more provin-
cial than Paris but still respectably bourgeois, the kind of beginning from which the
urban middle class likes to see itself as having risen. Such a background from the
1830s is preserved as such partly because it is ideologically proper for the child of a
mason who had became an "entrepreneur" among builders and had therefore come
close to the status of a "contractor." Such is the very role, one level up from his fa-
ther's, in which Erik casts himself when he comes to Paris around 1870 and makes a
"bid" to Garnier "like an ordinary contractor who built ordinary houses with ordi-
nary bricks" (Leroux 1959, 494, 497). Erik has taken his social origins, reconstituted
them, and then transplanted them, scaling them up as far as he can, to suggest both
his rural beginnings and how far he has come in winning the Paris Opera contract.
He therefore places the redone bedroom of his mother next to a far more upscale
Parisian drawing room of the Third Republic. This salon is so much more pretentious
than his original home that, especially when it is filled with flower baskets for a diva,
it looks like the "drawing rooms" that Paris aristocrats of the 1870s often made out
of their "boxes at the Opera," in which "one was almost sure to meet or see men of
the world" (Leroux 1959, 279).
Leroux's Erik designs symbolic indicators of bourgeois family desires as a Janet or
Freud might describe them because he is already striving to produce the physical
conditions and the historical progression of the rising bourgeois family for himself
Erik's "capture" of a conventional "living wife," trained by him to attain the level of
the Opera and brought to his home through a fashionable drawing room, is the log-
ical culmination of a quest across class-positions-from the semi-rural bourgeoisie
of the r830s toward the very urban high bourgeoisie of r88o-that targets middle-
class marriage, Sunday walks with a wife around Paris, and close affiliation with the
Opera, all as key goals within the ideological thrust of this whole social journey In
this case, the effort is unusually artificial and always distant from its actual reference
points. But these ironies are what makes it such a concentrated and indicative re-
creation of the cultural process of bourgeois self-production that really did coincide
with, and help to generate, the ideological features that came to be combined in psy-
choanalytic theory (as argued especially well in Marcus, 250-64). Since such a
crafted setting enacts the striving for a bourgeois family condition, it produces the
specific sexual feelings between and across the generations, as well as the more "pri-
vate" and more "public" spaces of the house, that grew out of that "rising" of people
up the bourgeois levels in much of nineteenth-century Europe.
Leroux's novel therefore suggests that particular social circumstances, especially
when they are deliberately sought, are motivators of the psychological conditions
that arise in such settings. There would not be any strong sense in Le Fantome that
Erik's quest is partly toward a return to the mother if there were not first his con-
struction of underground rooms and his concern in them with recreating his initial
circumstances while surrounding these with social ascensions from that earlier time
and place. Even Erik's losses of a "normal" bourgeois family life initially, "when my
father, himself, never saw me, and my weeping mother ... gave me my first mask"
(Leroux 1959, 256)-and hence his attempt to create the middle-class ideal he never
experienced as a child-are very important to the suggestions the novel makes about
the social as basic to the psychological. It is in striving artificially to attain an ideo-
logical formation of the family that he wanted and never enjoyed that Leroux's
phantom produces ein anderer Schauplatz that resembles the middle-class unconscious
and the workings of dreams described and treated by Charcot, Janet, Freud, and, I
would argue, Lacan, Zizek, Poizot, and Kristeva.
The orientations of desire that appear in Le Fantome's "dream" level, after all, are
exposed by the novel as ones generated by the family structure and social standards
for which Erik aims. His first tete-a-tete with Christine in his home begins with his
recasting himself into the posture of suitor, as has often been the case in middle-class
courtship. But this posture has been anticipated by the phantom first appealing to
his love-object (and substitute mother) specifically from within the pose of a half-
hidden father-substitute. The master-ephebe pattern that places the female under
male power and continuing paternal power, even when the man is seeking a version
of the mother, is thus established as a structure underlying the man-woman rela-
tionship in the world of this book before there is any illusion of conventional
courtship. Here is one reason why Christine faces so quickly the father-inflected and
death-oriented "horror" in her "attraction" to Erik. For her to "pull off his mask" is,
among other things, for her to confront a cultural "Hideousness," a potential for in-
cest and a wish to "die" back into the father, as what really underlies the way women
are guided towards being attracted to men outside the family in a social arena dom-
inated by the bourgeois family structure.
Her own father's position as an object of her love, we should recall, is deeply af-
fected in Leroux's novel by old Daae's social transition from being a land-based
peasant to becoming a city dweller seeking a higher-class status once his wife has
died (Leroux 1959, 97). After a period of great oscillation between social ranks fol-
lowing the sale of his farm, he and Christine are "adopted" by Professor and Mme.
Valerius, themselves class-climbing transplants from Scandinavia to Paris. It is in

their respectably middle-class urban house, with Mme. Valerius playing the moth-
erly role, that father Daae "lived in a kind of dream that he kept alive with his vio-
lin" in a bourgeois separation of the mind from the Real, especially from the rural
thing-in-itself for which he still longs (Leroux 1959, 97-98). There he also "spent
hours at a time in his room with Christine [semi-incestuously], playing his violin and
singing" (1959, 98), giving her a taste of the father-daughter proximity permitted by
their passage from farming to middle-class urban leisure. At the time of religious
"village festivals" and carnivalesque "dances," Daae returns briefly with Christine to
his old position as a wandering country fiddler, and then they "sleep" for a few nights
in barns "lying on the straw the one against the other, as in the times when they were
so poor in Sweden" (1959, 98). But now they do so with no Mme. Daae present to
come between them and with only nostalgia for a rural life viewed from their more
recent middle-class standing, the one in which their physical closeness has become
more disengaged from anything else save music. The attraction of the father-figure
that is used by the phantom to draw Christine towards him, a connection that most
male suitors use at least somewhat in the "higher" social strata of Europe, is clearly
based on a family situation that becomes more potentially incestuous the more mid-
dle-class and Parisian it is able to be.
That is even true especially when there is a continual longing in Daae and his
daughter for what retrospectively seems a better rural past for both of them. As it
happens, this desire for the country from the citified perspective (a very old posture
in literature) is the "natural" feeling that French social theorists and pre- Freudian
psychiatrists of Leroux's own day commonly referred to, with some approval, as
stemming from the "conflict between modern industrial society" and the nostalgi-
cally constructed "harmony and security oflife in the rural provinces" (Turkle, 34) s
The temptation toward incest in the Daae- Christine relation, in other words, is
based on an ideology and structural pattern connected with the urban bourgeois
family oflate nineteenth-century Paris. This scheme includes, as part of its ideology,
a nostalgia for rural life, for father and daughter being "replanted" in an Edenic
country setting in which their closeness might seem more permissible "back there"
than it is in the city where they live now.
On top of all this, too, the codes of the father-centered middle-class family per-
vading Le Fantome, as though they formed a theatrical script, dictate precise options
of behavior to characters in the text as soon as certain other behaviors have been en-
acted by other characters. The would-be upper-middle-class Erik opens his urban
high-bourgeois salon and then his mock-suburban petit bourgeois bedroom to Chris-
tine, for example, by inevitably adding the imported contents of a wine cellar to his
and Christine's nicely fashionable dinner in his imitation home of a social climber
(Leroux 1959, 248). Erik's aspirations make that addition and his need to borrow it
necessary, since a wine cellar is one household feature that strongly helps establish
the haute bourgeoisie as gaining on the aristocracy But when Christine indicates any
resistance to the phantom's intentions, he becomes a violently dictatorial and fright-
ening patriarch for much of the novel, again as his chosen ideology dictates. He first
threatens to keep her immured below ground after she removes the mask of his an-
gelic role-playing (1959, 256). He later warns her that her excessive "feminine cu-
riosity" when she seizes his pouch with the two keys inside ("Give me my bag!" he
cries) could lead him to replay "the story of Bluebeard," the perpetual older bride-
groom known both for being ugly and for killing successive wives and storing their
bodies in a hidden room in one of his mansions (Leroux 1959, 422; see also Wolf
1996, 284n.). There is clearly a prescribed scheme of immediate reactions, ones like
those frequently (and violently) repeated by Bluebeard, that are automatically in-
cumbent upon Erik as "master of the house" in response to any excess of feminine
desire asserted within his "property"
Bluebeard, we now realize, who is best known in France through the tale about
him published by Charles Perrault in 1697, symbolizes how much absolute patriar-
chal power in the ideology of the home has been carried over in Europe from the
waning aristocratic lord to the rising bourgeois father6 Barbe-Bleau, his name in
French, has "fine houses, both in town and country," but no definite roots in estates
with tenants (see Perrault as trans. in Anne Williams 1995, 41); still he remains an
all-powerful father-figure within all his homes even if the vague source of his wealth
is no longer traditionally aristocratic. Psychoanalysts may say that this figure suggests
the allure and threat, including the forbidden status, of the fully engorged and thus
partly blue phallus of the Father (with its "beard" of pubic hair), at least from the
point of view of children or virginal young women. That sort of power is indeed
what Leroux's phantom would like to exercise, particularly if he can regain total con-
trol over that small sack with the two keys inside. Even so, precisely because he can-
not innately become such a phallic threat the way the original Bluebeard seems to,
Leroux's Erik makes clear that his threatening posture is just that: a performative
pose that follows almost mechanically from the system of beliefs that Erik is deter-
mined to play out. It is only in that system that every male spouse at the deepest
foundations of family life is, like Bluebeard, an extension of the Father able to dom-
inate, excoriate, and potentially even kill any woman who crosses his will in the
house he owns.
Before there can be either the attraction towards or the revulsion from phallic
power and the nightmares combining both, there has to be the order and ideology
of the family based on the Law of the Father, even if Western society does put some
curbs on its going as far as Bluebeard takes it. Leroux's Erik exposes that fact by an-
nouncing his Bluebeard-like tendencies precisely when the woman he would make
his "living wife" to suit his social, as well as mother-seeking, aspirations lays hold of
his scrotum/sack without his permission and attempts to transfer its power to her-
self and a forbidden lover, someone other than the Father (in this case Raoul). What
seems a dream but is specifically defined by Christine as not a dream in the under-
grounds of the Opera emerges in this novel as the forced performance of a middle-
class family ideology, artificially reenacted, that shows how struggles over possessing
or not possessing the phallus are generated by the imposition of a patriarchal system
on the relationships of love.
What is true of Perrault's Bluebeard, it turns out, is true about the "under-
ground" in Leroux's Fant6me de l'Opera: exclusively psychoanalytic readings of these
depths too often "take as [only unconscious] 'nature' what the text presents as a
process of '"culture'," of "patriarchy" and "the 'Law of the Father' being played out
in a constructed way (Anne Williams 1995, 41). A look just past the psychoanalytic
veneer in Le Fant6me reveals the cultural agenda connected to bourgeois ascent both
in the very foundations of the Paris Opera and at the social and physical roots of
any "dream-work" suggested by a journey to the phantom's underworld. Erik's
near-connection of himself to Bluebeard, in fact, points to an ideological conflict at
the heart of this agenda. As Bluebeard and Leroux's phantom exemplify in their
movements between class positions, the one-family household of the European
bourgeoisie at the time of Le Fantome (unquestionably Erik's ideal) was being pulled
back toward much of what it had resisted in striving to replace aristocratic hege-
mony with an increasingly "free-market" world. The middle-class family licensed
by the bourgeois ideology was "both a patriarchal autocracy and a microcosm of the
sort of society that the bourgeoisie as a class" had "denounced and destroyed: a hi-
erarchy of personal dependence" (Hobsbawm, 237). Erik therefore plays out this
inconsistent script almost to its extreme conclusion in the violence of a Bluebeard,
even while some of his postures also reenact bourgeois assertions of personal free-
dom in their occasional defiance of aristocrats, the Opera establishment, and the
policemen of the city and state.
Within this script and its contradictions, Christine staves off death by slipping
into the role of "living wife" with mock-oaths of marriage sworn to Erik "on her
eternal salvation" (Leroux 1959, 478). Indeed, until she is released from this role, she
finally assumes the ironic but central middle-class posture of the "Angel in the
House," 7 sexually available to the father yet somehow above sexuality, a "white fig-
ure" by the hearth as submissive and quiet as "a Sister of charity who had taken a vow
of silence" (1959, 472). It is in this attitude, to be sure, that she embraces Erik in the
pieta pose which infantilizes him and greatly maternalizes her, leading the phantom
to rewrite his script and to release Christine, Raoul, and the Persian from their Blue-
beard-like captivity. But even this apparent reversal stays within the ideology of the
bourgeois family So Freudian and maternal a climax, with its beatific (if partial) re-
turn of the "Real" and the "abject," would not be possible for Erik or his readers if
his love-object did not already occupy the contradictory place of the mother in the
bourgeois home in a culturally prescribed relation to the conventional figure of the
father whom "little" Erik, finally as Bluebeard, has kept trying to become.
It is clear, then, from Le Fantome itself, that the pursuit of a social stature through
a performance of its ideology (however full of conflicts the latter is) helps cause the
features of the "subconscious," personal and cultural, that seem to appear in the "un-
dergrounds" --or in the dynamic psychiatry-of rising-bourgeois Paris at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century The desire for a recovery of the mother, the longing
to possess the power of the phallus (seemingly cut off from the son) whereby the fa-
ther can reenter the birth canal, the endeavor to become both the absolute father in
the house and the infant reembraced by the mother, the shifting between gender
roles even when just one is being sought, the longing to "die" into the mother (or fa-
ther) by returning to the site of birth: these "unconscious," even abjected, inclina-
tions in Leroux's book are revealed as the consequences of a culturally based effort
to build a certain kind of home, while still longing for a more rural past, so as to
achieve a social position in the city that is far more an ideological construct than a
natural reality.
Now we can begin to explain the too-obvious intensity of the "deep psychological"
ingredients in the phantom's "underground." The very insistent repetitions of these
elements in the novel are semi-transparent coverings, like Erik's thin skin, which oc-
casionally expose the less obvious "realities" behind them: the deliberately con-
structed social ideologies of class-climbing that seek to produce father-dominated
and mother-centered households of very particular kinds. Leroux's Fantome is so espe-
cially revealing of its psychological layers as based on social formations because its un-
derworld is such a blatantly fabricated one aimed at a specific cultural agenda for the
family that Erik desires after it has been both shown and denied to him. This under-
ground generates the emotions of a bourgeois dream-level, the one so thoroughly ex-
plored by Charcot, Janet, and Freud, because it is designed to pursue the bourgeois
social daydream, the cultural ideal that, if really sought, must generate both longings
with certain objects and repressions of its own foundations even as it motivates con-
structions of particular ways oflife. The "psychoanalytic veneer" of Le Fantome in rela-
tion to its socially inflected underworld in the novel is like psychoanalysis itself as it
reflects its roots in the constructions of a class; each is "a screen onto which a culture
projects its pre-occupations and values," a symbolic facade that enacts a cultural itin-
erary which it is half-able and half-unable to hide beneath its surface.
Such revelations should hardly be surprising, I might add, in a novel rooted, as we
have seen, in Nodier's Smarra and the fantastique/frenetique, on the one hand, and
Balzac's Sarrasine and realistic bourgeois fiction, on the other. Smarra at its core, after
all, is about a dream-journey towards a vampiric unmanning founded on Lorenzo's
fears of giving in completely to sexual abandon with his new wife in his patriarchal
home. The wider and deeper cultural process behind such an ideological stance is
then exposed in Balzac's brand of hyperrealism, just as obsessed with critiquing ris-
ing-bourgeois pretensions as its author was famous for pursuing them through his
life 8 Sarrasine's "Zambinella," like Lorenzo's Lisidis or Meroe and Erik's Christine,
is an object of erotic interest specifically for a male social climber, in this case for a
title character in the process of moving (very like Erik) between the rural-farming,
petty-legal, sculptor-artisan, and high-bourgeois classes (Barthes 1974, 234-36).
Alongside this irony, Balzac presents his attractivejrepulsive Opera ghost, the sculp-
tor's object of desire, as a locus of what the rising Parisian middle class suppresses
and pursues in order to achieve the public face it presents. The old and castrated
"great uncle" of the Lantys now holding court in rooms that prefigure the Opera
Garnier-"decorated in silver and gold, with glittering chandeliers" (Barthes 1974,
22!, 253)-is ultimately exposed as the principal "source" and now-hidden founda-
tion of the "fortune" being put so conspicuously on display (253). Instead of making
money from land and rents, the aristocratic-seeming Lantys are class-climbing prof-
iteers accumulating capital from investing the earnings of a dying castrato, a throw-
back to a more aristocratic age on which his descendents still depend while working
to conceal that fact, among many others. Now they are covering this history up,
along with the singer's nearly penniless background prior to the castration (Barthes
1974, 250), behind the screens of their lavish furnishings and the aging figure whom
they have turned into a "family genie ... Hidden for whole months in the depths of
a secret sanctuary" (226). With the "secret sanctuary" of its underground beneath
the Opera, Leroux's Fantome is manifestly extending Balzac's understanding of the
rising bourgeoisie as fashioning objects of"refined" desires, Sarrasine's included, by
throwing off its actual, hypocritical, "castrated," and "castrating" foundations down
to a level that it tries to distance from itself and cast away into less visible "depths."
Le Fantome de I'Opera, it turns out, presents its "undergrounds" in ways that partially
manifest, while they also conceal, a cultural project that many Western Europeans
had been pursuing for about a century, That project of constructing a "self" and a
"home space" for the "rising" middle-class person while the foundations of that class
were changing: all of this appears in the tales of Nodier, then even more definitely
in the novels of Balzac, because the articulation of the private and even "dreaming"
6o THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
self that they help to work out and critique for French (and other) readers is driven
to include the features it contains by the contradictory ideologies of bourgeois self-
formation that these texts fundamentally accept themselves, even while resisting
them, in the 1820s and 30s. Leroux's phantom is therefore, among other things, a
retrospective reflection on and a revealing performer of this cultural and class
agenda as it had become increasingly visible in Nodier, "Lorenzo," "Sarrasine,"
"Zambinella," the "Lanty" household, Balzac, and several of their successors in
French middle-class fiction (see Hale 1988b, 223-57). Arising near the end of what
some still see a "Decadent French Romanticism," then, the Erik of Leroux and his
dreamy underground are able to crystallize these earlier interconnections of the so-
cial, the ideological, and the "interior" preconscious, all in a character and a set of
images that finally make explicit what had been more implicit in the early nineteenth
century. The obviously constructed parody and pursuit of a class norm in Erik's
"depths," on the one hand, show forcefully that the features of middle-class
"Freudian" dreams are the direct products of an active effort to fabricate middle-
class postures of cultural ascent, personal space, and sexual and family relations. On
the other hand, the placement of much of this entire process "deep" beneath the sur-
face of supreme high-bourgeois display (the Opera of Garnier) points blatantly, as
Nodier and Balzac did more subtly, in two further directions. First it suggests that
the "unconscious" is a cultural construct reflecting bourgeois ideologies of how space
is supposed to be divided so as to separate the "proper" from the "improper," and
thus the "high" from the "low," for groups and individuals. Then it reveals the basis
of that construct in the efforts of rising middle-class people and groups (such as
Lorenzo and the Lantys) to "throw down" aspects of their very mixed social and per-
sonal conditions so that the "unacceptable" parts of them could be placed "outside"
(or beneath) their conscious lives, yet in ein anderer Schauplatz still given an "othered"
place within middle-class ideology,
Seen in this wide-ranging context, Le Fantome de ['Opera is a vivid, if momentary,
exposure of how the ideological agenda of a class-specific quest for identity is in-
separable from the enactment of the "depth psychology" that this ideology is in-
clined to produce. Leroux's novel exemplifies, as few others do so immediately, the
relation Pierre Bourdieu has seen between the specific kinds of behavior, display,
thought, and self-analysis performed by the members of a social class and the "habi·
tus" of that class or of aspirants to it, "the [internalized] model trajectory [that] is
an integral part of the system of factors constituting that class" (Bourdieu, no).
Among the many reasons that Le Fantome resonates so strongly with Western mid-
dle-class audiences is its compressed and intensified, though also disguised, pre-
sentation of the link between the bourgeois habitus and the assumptions of
psychoanalysis in Western culture that has helped us to produce-and to deceive
ourselves about-the construction of Western middle-class "identity" in the mod-
ern world. In Le Fantome we can both observe and avoid an only half-concealed
restaging of the process by which we of the Western middle classes fabricate our-
selves, using what seems psychological to both explain and conceal what is really so-
cial. As a result, we now have to examine what it is about Gaston Leroux and his
book that especially suits psychological interpretation and this complex dynamic
behind it. Only in that further way can we discover why Le Fantome de !'Opera, though
it indirectly questions some claims of pure psychoanalysis, still attracts us in part
because of its psychoanalytic dimensions.
THE AMBIVALENCE OF GASTON LEROUX

AND ITS ''PSYCHOLOGICAL" CONSEQUENCES
The author of Le Fantome does indeed have many sources for his psychosocial and ac-
tual-fantastic "underground." Among them, however, we must not ignore the cul-
tural and psychological drives in Leroux himself that made him similar to, as well as
quite different from, Nodier and Balzac. To begin with, like Charles Nodier (see
Nelson, 37), Gaston Leroux was illegitimate by strictly conventional middle-class
standards, yet more and more in pursuit throughout his life of what those standards
valued. He was born in Paris to Marie Bidout on May 6, 1868, a little over a month
before she legally married Gaston's father, Dominique Leroux, on June 13 in Rouen,
the northern French city near which Erik is born in the original Fantome (Lamy, 22).
Dominique was, like Erik's father, an "entrepreneurial mason" or building contrac-
tor/supervisor in transition from a less exalted level of business (operating a public
transportation company with his brother) to being the executive contractor, at one
point, for the restorations at the chateau of the Comte de Paris (Lamy, 22, 24; Ler-
oux 1984, 991). Given these "irregularities" in his family origins, increasingly con-
cealed by all family members, the younger Gaston sought frequently to fashion a
grander and hence more legitimizing pedigree; he would even talk about "himself as
a descendant of Pierre Le Roux, son of Guillaume Le Roux and grandson of William
the Conqueror" (Lamy, 22, my translation). Consequently an insatiable class-
climber, very like his Erik, Leroux makes a point in a 1925 interview of noting how
he was made the official playmate of France's prince royal when both boys attended
the College d'Eu, the exclusive private school in Normandy to which Gaston was
sent as a subsidized pensioner, a matter he does not mention in the interview so
many years later (Leroux 1984, 991; Lamy, 24).
His striving for the high life certainly continued when he went to Paris in the
188os (the decade in which the events of Le Fantome occur). He ostensibly came to
study for a law license, which was granted in r889, but he soon lost virtually all the
money consigned to him by his now-wealthy father in a continuous whirl of gam-
bling in the most fashionable salons of the Latin Qlarter and the nouveaux riches
(Lamy, 27-30; Perry, 22-24). He was constantly trying to live up to "the reputation
of the son of a father who had been able to arrive at his own means" -a quintessen-
tial rising-middle-class stance-but his losses made him also ashamed of having
"lived as more than a nabob," an already Orientalized image, in a quasi-aristocratic
round of "dissipation" that bourgeois economic judgment generally condemned
(Lamy, 28, my translation). Thus, when he let himself be de-classed into the mid-
dling position of a working reporter, even though he also wrote more high-class po-
etry, he became an incessant writer-by-deadline for the immediate franc "as if [he]
wanted by writing to exorcise the demon of the appearance of a loser or a winner at
gaming" (Lamy, 28, my translation and emphases). Some of his newer funds there-
fore came from his writing critically about high-bourgeois pretensions that he, like
Nodier and Balzac, knew all too well.
At the same time, his pursuit of a higher class standing never stopped and was
even bound up with his conversion to novel writing-quite decisively in 1907,
when he quit his position as Chief of Information with Le Matin and finished The
Mystery of the Yellow Room for a more quasi-literary paper, L'illustration (Leroux 1984,
62 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TIIE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
994~95). By that time, Leroux "projected a self-image very much more svelte"
than the social "sphere" he occupied as a journalist (Lamy, 33), that of the happily
corpulent bon viveur wearing high-class gold pince-nez, as we see in most pho-
tographs of him (see Perry, 23). In addition, his choice of a Poe-esque and Conan
Doyle-style detective story as his means for declaring his full independence with
The Mystery was specifically intended to bolster that "silhouette," as he called it. It
offered him both the requisite funds (which he kept spending, sometimes at gam-
bling) and the reputation of entrepreneurial daring, "like David able to strike
down Goliath," that he had already acquired in some of his stories for Le Matin and
that he now hoped to expand in the lucrative field of middle-class novels, even if
almost all of his fiction was still serialized in newspapers (Lamy, 33 ~34). There
could hardly be a more definite model for the family history and the aspirations
built into the original phantom of the Opera than Gaston Leroux, the incessant
pursuer of rising-middle-class status, goals, and accoutrements, including sub-
scriptions to the Paris Opera itself There is also no more immediate "source" for
a grasping Opera ghost who spends 20,000 francs a month than Leroux the com-
pulsive gambler driven toward his endless spending by a never-satisfied, Balzacian
desire to keep rising beyond, while also maintaining, the country-based, petit
bourgeois conditions of his birth.
With all of these middle-class motivations in Leroux, we also find quasi-
Freudian-and very phantomlike-"personal'' drives inseparable from his social
situation and certainly generated by it. His childhood years at the College d'Eu
were finally marred by the premature death of the mother whom he greatly loved
and from whom, since she was so much the center of his home life, he was at first
unwilling to be removed to a boarding school, however high-class it was (Lamy,
24). Then, too, this loss was exacerbated by Gaston's overworking and peremp-
tory father, fairly close to the standard bourgeois paterfamilias of the time, who
gave him over at once, like Raoul in Le Fant6me, to be raised by mainly female rel-
atives (Lamy, 24) in a wrenching change for the boy, one perhaps echoed and in-
tensified in Erik's memory that his father rejected him by rarely seeing him at all
(Leroux 1959, 256). As in the case of his phantom, Leroux briefly knew and
abruptly lost the maternally centered bourgeois ideal of the family and the home.
Thereafter, not surprisingly, he was always in search of ways to re-create that
ideal and his mother in substitutes for both. In 1902, he divorced his first wife,
Marie Lefranc, and went to live with Jeanne Cayatte, whom he finally married in
1917- She may have been a woman of slightly lower-class standing, but her "love,"
his own children have said, "had a character nicely maternal" (Lamy, 30), in some
ways close to the qualities of the bourgeois mother that we see in several sought-
after women in Leroux's novels. We need not look beyond Leroux himself, the
son of a rising-middle-class home, to see the wish-fulfillment of the author in the
climactic pieta of Le Fant6me or the final embrace of Mathilde and Joseph in The Per-
fume ofthe Lady in Black.
On top of all this, the death of Leroux's mother clearly helped him think of birth
and death as more equivalent than opposed, just the way they are in the infantile
death's-head that is his phantom's face. Even at this level his thought patterns were
suffused, as Erik's always are, with barely hidden feelings about his social origins and
initial status. In 1925 he recalled his earlier attempt to find his actual birthplace in
Paris: "[H]aving discovered among some papers the number of the suburban build-
THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL VENEER IN THE NOVEL
ing in which I was born, I got it into to my head to find the birth house myself I
found on the ground floor a funeral business! Where I sought to find a cradle I
found a coffin ... " (Leroux 1984, 991). Not only was the body (the mother) from
which Leroux was born taken into death by the time of Le Fantome; the very place in
which she gave birth to him was now occupied by a coffin, the exact kind of"cradle"
in which Erik sleeps underground in Leroux's most famous book (1959, 249). It is no
wonder that he was drawn to the Gothic mode and that he used it so suggestively to
write about the state of birth as being from death and being the start of a journey to-
ward (or, for him, back to) death. At the same time, though, Leroux's search for his
birthplace forced him to reconfront the circumstances that led his mother there in
1868: really "it was by chance and between two trains that I was born in Paris. My
parents were travelling[,] my mother [being] Norman and my father from Mayenne"
(1925 interview, Leroux 1984, 991). Somewhat of an "accident" in his conception,
Gaston Leroux was unexpectedly born "between trains" too in a hastily arranged
Paris location that has since been altered from semi-residential to something more
commercial, not to mention funereal. There was a certain theatrical thrill evoked, on
the one hand, when Leroux recalled how he was practically "born on a train" to
provincial parents "in passage," not just through Paris, but from lesser to greater
bourgeois respectability On the other hand, there was a certain shock and shame for
him, intermixed with pride, that so rising and prominent a personage as himself
should be born out of such nearly reckless conditions in a less-than-high-toned
building that now holds a funeral parlor. Precisely as a bourgeois man on the rise
from circumstances somewhat (though not extremely) less respectable, Leroux was
in himself a great deal of what Erik remains in Le Fantome de /'Opera. He was the prod-
uct of a birth intermingled with death and economic change from the start and a fig-
ure with a possibly "ugly" background who felt he must mask his original condition,
while taking pride in certain aspects of it, again and again and again.
By recasting so much of his own life and objectives, then, and making these ele-
ments the constructed basis of a "dream" world symbolizing middle-class desires, Ler-
oux offers a complex interplay of self-exposure and self-concealment in the "deep
psychology" of Le Fantome and the ways he connects it to specific social aspirations
that he depicts as motivators at the most underlying levels of the novel. Being the
semi-fantastic and "Gothic" horror he is, Leroux's Erik is manifestly not Leroux, so
he therefore, like Frankenstein's creature, hides even as he plays out much of what
his creator experienced, lost, felt, feared, and wanted, as he does for many of his au-
thor's readers rooted the same general class and cultural habitus. Aspects of Erik's
author and audience that they want to, but cannot entirely, disown are displaced al-
most completely onto him. There the most "unacceptable" of these qualities are
distanced from their possessors even more in the ways the phantom is made ex-
plicitly monstrous, criminal, and Oriental. Ultimately this phantom offers a great
convenience to both his author and the book's readers. Through Erik, if they wish,
they are all able to villainize, to see as "grotesquely" different and removed from
themselves, much of what constitutes their lives (and certainly Leroux's) while they
also position the most "respectable" aspects of themselves over against those very
basic, but now undergrounded, tendencies.
Leroux's Erik embodies bourgeois aspirations and the visible pursuit of the ide-
ology behind them, however, to such an extent that he threatens to expose their ac-
tual grounds and possibilities. He thereby "crosses a line" that is ideologically used in
Western culture to separate what are really inseparable tendencies in the middle-
class European male, Gaston Leroux especially This "ghost" of many cultural en-
deavors, in fact, blurs the supposed boundaries commonly set up by the middle class
between a great many drives that are really interconnected: devotion to the mother-
substitute/desire for the mother; fear of the father's phallic powerjdesire for that
phallus in the power of the self; the effort to realize the child's longings through the
greater power of the adult (a transcendence of death)/a longing for the state of the
child back near the breast and the womb (a wish for death); the push toward a def-
inite gender-status (in this case, of a "rising" and conquering masculinity) /the mem-
ory of an earlier state that mixes qualities only later divided under such labels as
"masculine" and feminine"; the attempt to attain a "typical" above-ground state of
urban "respectability"/the urge to climb levels of class while suppressing those
"country" elements inconsistent with "higher" levels; the construction of a "deep
psychology" that can be "rooted out" and cured/the many hidden feelings created by
the social situation in which that "treatment" is ordered; and hence, in all these, the
drive to be "like everyone" by an ideological standard/the obsession with attaining a
particular class ideal that involves revealing what is culturally "ugly" in the hidden
"depths" of that very pursuit. The author and most of his readers undeniably want,
as Erik often does, to place their public personas only on the first sides in each of
these dichotomies, since those alternatives are what we usually see as "positive" goals
even as we also recognize them as being the phantom's too. Meanwhile, though, the
original Erik allows Leroux and his readers either to see how connected the first
sides always are to the second ones or to use the first sides to cover up and "throw
down" the second ones as anathema to "high" culture, however basic to most of our
cultural constructs they actually are. Whether viewed from a psychological, a social,
or just a symbolic perspective, the phantom of the Opera is a means by which Gas-
ton Leroux and the many members of his ever-changing class can work out-in fact,
sublimate-their ambivalent oscillation between these options so connected to their
views of themselves.
That ambivalence consequently extends in Leroux's novel to the ways its psycho-
analytic "states of mind" might be read. As previous interpreters have ably shown us,
the under-grounded desires rising from a quasi-dream-level in this book can be
taken as just what they seem: indicators of deep psychological processes well under-
stood by Leroux (partly because of his personal history) and analogous to what is as-
serted in the psychoanalytic theories that coalesced in Europe at around the same
time. Even more recent French Freudian approaches to Le Fantome or similar works
have license from the book's most grotesque and overtly subliminal images for see-
ing in them the most "abjected" anomalies of somatic feeling, memory and desire as
these erupt into conscious social life and discourse. Such responses thus feel a cer-
tain permission-indeed, Zizek gets it directly from Leroux's text-to make a sec-
ondary issue out of the cultural pressures working against the emergence of the
primal multiplicities in us all, even though Zizek alludes to the "Real" multiplicity in
the class conflicts that Leroux reflects. The novel, in other words, allows itself to be
read in one or more purely psychoanalytic fashions, if a reader so chooses. The rather
thin veils, such as the phallic bronze switches, that are placed in Leroux's text over
objects of seemingly preconscious desire are the preferred surface features of a psy-
chological ideology that is working to sublimate its own roots in class-oriented be-
lief systems and economic pursuits. We can stop our reading at the level of these
THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL VENEER IN THE NOVEL Gs
veils and are even given some encouragement to do so by how very apparent they are
in Le Fantome. Indeed, if we take that course, we might well be true to Leroux's own
effort to sublimate and seemingly "throw off" from himself the anomalous elements
in his pursuit of a rising-middle-class agenda.
Nevertheless, the novel as we have it does pull in a different direction some of the
time. That is particularly true at those moments when it allows us to view its "un-
derworld" of desires in the text as the deliberate product of an artificial, ideological,
and class-oriented construction that has really been building in urban centers of Eu-
rope over the entire century prior to the book's publication. Leroux, with his unusu-
ally intimate knowledge of the benefits, ironies, and overreachings of class climbing,
employs just enough social satire in Le Fantome to let us "backstage," not only to see
the class-based politics in the Paris Opera but to confront how very much bourgeois
psychological drives are based on fabricated pursuits of identities according to cer-
tain ideological standards that are as questionable as they are artificial. His is the
principal narrative voice that admits how much the social "norm" sought by Erik is
really a series of masks, especially among the higher classes of Paris to which the au-
thor and his phantom have worked hard to belong. As much as Leroux uses Erik to
epitomize the middle-class "abjection" of problematic feelings and social conditions
into a alien, ghostlike "other," he also opens up the possibility that his audience
might see enough of the hypocrisy in those projections that the phantom as "for-
eigner" could become an uncanny revelation of what his observers really harbor
within themselves, mentally and socially, as he does.
The book concludes, we should remember, with a suggestion that the reader
might want to respond to the phantom's death with compassionate fellow-feeling as
well as horror at his "crimes": "Poor, unhappy Erik! Should we cry for him? Should
we curse him? He asked only to be someone like everyone else" (Leroux 1959,
497-98). Le Fantome de I'Opera is an extremely ambivalent "psychoanalytic" novel. The
obviousness of its psychology tempts the reader toward a quite private and emotion-
oriented reading, while its indications of that psychology's roots in a social agenda it
sublimates put in question the sufficiency of any simple-minded reaction to its
"depths." No wonder the novel ends with some questions unresolved. The author's
ambivalence about his own life and society is profoundly evident, albeit sublimated,
in his most famous work's equally ambivalent use of a "deep psychology" widely used
at his time and since. Resolving that ambivalence for ourselves-still a very basic
concern in our culture, I venture to say-is part of what draws and frightens us as we
continue to read and transform this book. Now, since Leroux took up the social
foundations of his psychology as much as he did, even if he showed some hesitation
in doing so, we need to find out more about the bourgeois cultural project in which
he and his Fantome are vivid participants at the dawn of the twentieth century:
CHAPTER THREE
Leroux's Sublimations of Cultural Politics

fROM DEGENERATION AND
THE SUPPRESSION OF CARNIVAL
TO THE ABJECTION OF MIXED "OTHERNESS"
THE IDEOLOGICAL ROLE OF THE SKULL,

THE FORMS OF "LOWBROW" DEGENERATION,
AND THE REMOVAL OF THE "OTHER" IN HAUSSMANN'S PARIS
The "burial" of inconsistent, unsociable, and thus "unconscious" longings in Leroux's

Fantome, we now see, occurs within a definite bourgeois agenda that is strikingly vis-
ible in the novel. This agenda, meanwhile, as I now want to show, rests on a shaky
ground of numerous cultural conflicts. Indeed, the novel's Freudianism seems al-
most innocuous today compared to its "undergrounding" of many social outcasts
from Leroux's time and place, several of whom are composited in the figure of Erik
and some of whom appear briefly in other characters as well. It is not simply that the
oxymoronic states of being infantile/cadaverous or inside/outside the mother are
reembodied in Erik's French/Germanic, Gentile/Jewish, and Occidental/Oriental
conditions, with each second element being the more "other" of the two. It is that
"unconscious impulses" of rising-middle-class desire, all revealed as the products of
pursuing an ideology of the "normal," are not as truly shocking, and not as often sup-
pressed by the adaptations of the novel, as the moments when Leroux's phantom ap-
pears to slide undecidably between races, genders, classes, and other levels of
existence that are sharply differentiated and politically charged in Western culture.
The scene in which Christine unmasks the phantom below ground has its most
arresting force in the novel, as opposed to the dramatizations, because the mask
she tears off for Leroux is the one in which Erik has become black and thus Moor-
ishly Oriental, singing Othello to her Desdemona. Then, too, what she uncovers
is a face that is as yellow and parchmentlike as it is a living death. Moreover, the
erotic pull that draws the original Christine, "attracted, fascinated," toward the
darkly masked "ghost," so much so that she longs to "see thefoce ofthe Voice," arises
only after he seems to turn into Othello, when "Erik's black mask makes [her]
think of the natural mask of the Moor," and she feels "the attractions of a death
at the center of such a passion" (Leroux 1959, 251-52). Her confrontation with a
fatherly skull comes after she has faced something far more "Hideous" in the cul-
ture of Leroux: a moment of cross-racial attraction, itself made possible by Erik's
deeply human-yet also inhuman-capacity for bodily metamorphosis from one
condition to another. Hence I now want to draw out the more extensive cultural
process that Leroux is playing out in Le Fantome de l'Opera beyond the psychology
generated by a middle-class habitus. Specifically, I want to expose and explain the
Western mechanisms of social "othering" behind and in Le Fantome that place such
politicized forms of difference, and conflate them together, within and beneath
its psychoanalytic veneer. These practices show Leroux's novel oscillating be-
tween the exposure of several cultural contradictions that the Western middle
class "abjects" in order to seem itself, on the one hand, and the masking of these
abjections behind a series of veneers made available by many symbols from recent
French and European history, on the other.
One such locus of sociopolitical othering is the skull-face of the original Erik,
which therefore points to much more than the death-drives or the "wages of sin"
we have seen it suggest. Leroux links this face, as noted already; to the proclivities
of a "veritable child" and has this "fatal rock" of a visage "sw[i]ng about with the
balance of a monkey;" at a moment of blatant devolution, into the underground
lake (Leroux 1959, 387, 389). As Bram Stoker does by giving Dracula a "child-
brain" and a capacity for turning into various beasts, Leroux thereby alludes to the
cultural positioning of the skull in post- Darwinian criminology and other ac-
counts of human "reversion" widely promulgated in France by the 188os. Leroux
composed Le Fantome right at the time when the criminologist Cesare Lambroso,
nearly always writing in French, was reasserting his influential view of what skele-
tons revealed, even as some of his ideas were starting to be questioned. As late as
1909, Lambroso was arguing that the analyzed skull of the urban criminal consis-
tently shows "an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious in-
stincts of primitive humanity and the lower animals" (as quoted in English by Nye,
99). For Leroux to give his phantom the face of a skull and the "balance of mon-
key," while also criminalizing the same figure, in a social setting permeated by such
ideologies is thus for him to make Erik immediately a form of the still-primitive
lurking in humankind. He threatens us with the childhood of the race that remains
a potential at the "base of [civilized] consciousness." He therefore raises worries
about the capacity in people to degenerate back towards the simian, savage, and in-
fantile states from which they claim to have evolved. The psychoanalytic death-
drive, in other words, may be no more than a semi-comforting explanation for
what was more deeply feared in Leroux's "evolved" audience as it was by many
readers of Stevenson's jekyll and Hyde: the possibility "beneath the surface" that peo-
ple could degenerate from their current states of"refinement" into the more pri-
mordial and devolved conditions lingering deep within them, particularly when
they performed what bourgeois authorities regarded as criminal acts in an in-
creasingly degenerate "underworld" of the city (Tropp, 90-98; Hurley; 55-113).
Especially given the way most people treat him and the features of anarchists and
murderers he partially duplicates from newspaper accounts,' the skull-face of Ler-
oux's "Opera ghost" clearly plays out what the contemporary theory of degenera-
tion-articulated in Max Nordau's book called Degeneration (1893)-was designed to
accomplish in urban France and other European cities around the fin de siecle.
Using figures such as Erik, as Ruth Harris has shown,
LEROUX'S SUBLIMATIONS OF CULTURAL POLITICS
degeneration enjoyed its immense popularity [at this time] because it provided a secu-
lar, scientific language for talking about the problem of recurring revolution and in-
tractable criminal and antisocial tendencies [threatening the rising urban bourgeoisie].
Political instability, class struggle, and social injustice were reassuringly translated into
medicalized terminology and explained as part of a wider psycho-social pathology
amenable to scientific investigation.... (Consequently;] history was seen as repeating
itself, albeit in transmuted form, in a way homologous to the biological reproduction of
degenerate individuals. (Harris, 78-79)
As a "degenerate," in other words, Leroux's phantom is able to enact, in a symbolic

character for public consumption, what the constructed "terminology" and "pathol-
ogy" of "degeneration" were fabricated to produce: a method for conflating, coa-
lescing, and then concealing the threats to the ascending middle classes of the
"political instability, class struggle, and social injustice" at the root of their ascent.
It is as though those threats are no more than recurrences of primitive human con-
ditions that can still be left behind. Erik the living skull, the adult-child, and the de-
volved man-monkey (a "reproduction" of a "degenerate individual"), by also
containing and confusing aspects of the Commune, the artisan classes, Orientalist
racism, and other "instabilities" and "injustices," both points obscurely at what the
theory of degeneration really tried to combine, cover up, and explain and portrays
the same theory in cultural action by being that concealment and explanation, a "de-
generation" incarnate.
Le Fantome de ['Opera also refuses to stop at this level of cultural fabrication. Its use
of degeneration is connected quite closely to yet another dimension of class politics
that had greatly intensified by Leroux's time and played a crucial role in his own
quests for status. While making its title character a quasi-degenerate skull, this novel
places his extraordinary knowledge of classical music and feel for high-class opera
alongside that childish writing style so uneducated, most visible in his "bizarre" notes
to the Opera managers, that the Erik who can restyle Mozart's Don Giovanni into his
own "Don Juan Triumphant" is the same Erik who "has not yet learned to join his
letters" at the level of rudimentary middle-class penmanship. Leroux's phantom, in
addition to the all his other contradictions, is a grotesque intermingling of the "high-
brow" with the "lowbrow" as both had come to be defined in hegemonic culture
from Europe to America. Like Leroux in being the boundary-crossing son of an up-
wardly mobile entrepreneurial mason of the petite bourgeoisie, Erik blurs a line of
distinction vital to the rising middle classes and the new or surviving aristocracy. the
very populations who made up the audience, management, and principal patrons of
the Paris Opera.
That line is based directly on the phrenological separation of "high-browed"
from "low-browed" races in the later nineteenth century that had long used skulls
to establish this very difference. In phrenology as in Leroux's novel, of course, the
skull was generally used to point to the "low" and the "primitive" in this very de-
liberate ideological construction of "high culture" versus "low culture." Take the
1865 edition of Coombs' Popular Phrenology, for example (see figure p). Here a pro-
file of William Shakespeare's head, with its "high brow" aided by a receding hair-
line, is drawn right beside the "low brow" skull, with a more sharply slanted
forehead, of a "Cannibal New Zealand Chief" dug up in an excavation and marked
as "Deficient" compared to Shakespeare in the lower cortex (numbered 19 in
Figure 3.1: Illustration from Coombs' Popular Phrenology, r865
Coombs) "and all the intellectual Organs." Though Shakespeare may not have
been "high culture" or high class in his own time, he had become the epitome of
haute culture and its connection with the upper classes in Europe and the United
States by the time Gaston Leroux was born in r868. A blatant racism thus joins
with a popularized theory of evolution not long after Darwin's Origin cif Species
(r859) to present this icon of "the Bard" as the higher-class antithesis of all that
seems "low," non- European, pre-civilized, apelike, and barbaric (all that is most
"degenerate") in the skull and its sloping brow. Because of this ideological change,
the word "highbrow" as naming a superiority in cultural acquisitions came into
general use by the early r88os, the time at which Le Fant6me takes place, and the
word "lowbrow" as an indicator of distance from high-cultural "taste" became a
common term for that supposed condition by about 1900, the start of the decade
in which Le Fant6me was written (Levine, 221-22). For Leroux's Erik to combine
the features of both, as though Shakespeare and the skull were overlaid on each
other-but with the skull showing through with haunting force-is consequently
for the original phantom to rcinvoke and challenge what had become a firmly es-
tablished distinction, as in the lingering uncertainties about the "highbrow" or
"lowbrow" status of Gaston Leroux's fiction. The Erik-skull is clearly not as "defi-
cient" in "intellectual organs" as the Coombs description of the New Zealand chief
Consequently, Leroux's phantom pulls "high culture" toward what it takes to be
some of its "low" opposites to an ominous degree that threatens to dissolve a hi-
erarchy basic to the supposed standing of the Opera and its subscribers.
LEROUX's SUBLIMATIONS OF CULTURAL POLITICS 71
There were reasons Leroux must have known, after all, as to why the Opera and
its high-bourgeois abonnes were prone to react as defensively as they do in the novel
against this blurring of different levels rising from the Opera's depths in the form of
a skull perched on top of an equally bony body True, the Opera Garnier was con-
structed from r86r through its opening in 1875 to be the most central and official in-
stitution of high Parisian bourgeois culture. Particularly in the way it subsumed so
many architectural styles from around the world (albeit within the dominance of a
neo-baroque French classicism; figure 1.5), it was the supreme announcement at its
time of France's "imperial power ... and the participation of the urban middle-class
audience in the imperial enterprise" (Lindenberger 1984, 238). Meanwhile, though,
its construction and placement were parts of a monarchical master plan that de-
stroyed-and even buried-as much as or more than it built. After his election fol-
lowing, and for many his betrayal of, the 1848 Revolution, the Emperor Napoleon
I I I (nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte) appointed the Baron Haussmann "Prefect of
the Seine" in charge of redesigning the center of the city as a celebration of the Sec-
ond Empire, which inevitably meant the razing of many structures and street-
patterns from more anciens regimes. The "broad, tree-lined boulevards and avenues ra-
diating like wheel spokes" in the Paris of today are among the lasting results of this
sweeping redesign and the "draconian powers of demolition" that Haussmann was
granted in order to achieve it (Perry, 8; see also Pinkney, 4, and Benjamin 1978,
159-60).
One consequence was a "rise in the rents" and the demolition of some slums, all
of which forced "the teeming working classes ... to the edges of the city" (Perry, 8
and Benjamin 1978, 159). Among the reactions to that "reconstruction," ironically
intended "to secure the city against civil war" (Benjamin 1978, 160), was a foreign
republican's 1858 bombing of the emperor's procession directly in front of the ex-
isting opera house, which killed or wounded 150 and came close to harming Napo-
leon III himself (Perry, 8; Pinkney, 5-6). That shock (recalled in Erik's incendiary
threats) led very soon to Haussmann's plan for a grander Opera at a new Paris site,
partly so that there could be greater security for the times the emperor attended and
partly so that the new Opera could be a more manifestly imperial and culturally cen-
tral "focal point in [the Baron's] Paris plan" (Perry, 8-9). Hence he and his cohorts
"began to lay down broad new thoroughfares which radiated outwards in seven
straightlines from [a] large square, [which became] the Place de !'Opera" (Perry, 9).
In doing so, they established the Opera house that would rise at the center of that
square as the high bourgeoisie's and imperial aristocracy's own version of the Palace
of Versailles, louis XIV's enormous and glittering neo-classic residence from which
the streets of its city radiated as well. To make way for this new "palace of the peo-
ple" displaying haut bourgeois supremacy, the "dense rabbit warren of old buildings
and alleys standing in the way of Haussmann's scheme was ruthlessly flattened,"
arousing extensive "criticism in the National Assembly" at the time and forcing even
more of the poorer and working classes to the margins of a city that has been striv-
ing to keep them out of its center, except as workers and peddlers, ever since (Perry,
9). In an effort to "strengthen his dictatorship and to place Paris under an emerging
regime," as Walter Benjamin has written, Haussmann increasingly "estrange[d]
Parisians from their [own] city" (Benjamin 1978, 159-60).
While thus creating "the quartier that has become the commercial center of mod-
ern Paris" (Perry, 9), Haussmann even went so far, quite notoriously, as to plan the
removal and stop all further digging of charity graveyards in the central city, threat-
ening the remains they held (Pinkney, 145~48). Much of what those graveyards con-
tained, though this process was only begun, were slated to be gathered together and
moved, somewhat in the way the poor were already herded, to outlying mass burial
sites very like-and sometimes including-the Paris catacombes established in the
eighteenth century These former limestone-quarry passageways just outside the
central city still show what such a removal project meant at its most extreme by the
decade of Leroux's birth: extensive and winding dirt halls below ground, open for
public tours at selected hours, in which bones upon bones relocated from many for-
mer gravesites are piled head-high for great distances along the walls. The skulls are
laid in lines atop the bone-piles, seeming to stare at the visitors from their perches
on the stacks of assorted parts from many different and unidentified bodies. For
readers of Le Fantome de /'Opera to tour the Opera Garnier and these catacombs on the
same day, as I did in 1996, is consequently for them to confront a broadly cultural
"return of the repressed" in the novel and in the history of Paris before and after
1848. When Leroux's skull at the top of an emaciated body, itself little more than a
pile of bones, invades the Paris Opera from permanent "living" quarters deep in
some underground passages, it is, among many other things, a haunting of the core
ofHaussmann's "new Paris" by the skeletons of the lower classes (from the middling
bourgeoisie down) who have been removed from the heart of the city, "othered" as
"undesirable" there, and sometimes reburied in the outskirts to make space for the
breadth and depths of the Place de l'Opera. Even the digging of the many cellars for
the Opera and the space for the lake created by the draining of the muddy ground
underneath the whole plaza (see Forsyth, xiv-xv) was clearly done at the cost of such
people who still haunt these depths in Leroux's Fantome in a composite of them all.
Indeed, given that these othered beings are wanted in the heart of Paris only as
artisans and laborers, as those who dig the foundations of the new structures the way
Erik supposedly helped to do (Leroux 1959, 497), the irony of both depending upon
these "others" for building and casting them out of the city center, especially as piles
of dead bodies, is very much a part of what horrifies us in the skeletal visage of Ler-
oux's phantom. When Leroux finally named his favorite poet to another journalist,
it was, not surprisingly, Charles Baudelaire (Leroux 1984, 997), that master of the
post- Romantic macabre, translator of Poe, and poet of the city's undersides who
died a dissipated paralytic-for some a "degenerate" -the year before Leroux was
born. As it turns out, one of the most ironic poems on the repressed roots of urban
life and poetry in Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal (1857, revised 1861), a collection fre-
quently focused on the "living dead" of Paris, is "Le Squelette laboreur" ("The skele-
ton at Work" or "Digging"). Here the speaker finds a seductive "Beaute" calling to him
when he sees
Bechant comme des labourers (Digging like laborers,]

Des Ecorches et des Squelettes. (The skinned and the skeletons,]
De ce terrain que vous fouillez, (From that earth that you turn]
Manants resignes et funebres, [Working resigned and funereal]
De toute !'effort de vos vertebres [With all the effort of your vertabrae,]
Ou de vos muscles depouillh (Or your fleshless muscles,]
Dites, quelle moisson etrange, [Tell us,what strange harvest,]
Forcats arraches au charnier, [Convicts dug from a charnal,]
LEROUX'S SUBLIMATIONS OF CULTURAL POLITICS 73
Tirez-vous, et de que! Fermie [Do you seek, and for which farmer)
Avez-vous a remplir Ia grange? [Must you fill up the grange?)
(Baudelaire, 208-10, II. n-20)
Although Baudelaire's speaker is addressing, on one level, the skeletal "emblems" he

sees in an antique (and hence quite religious) book, his fleshless figures recruited
from the bones of "convicts" in a charnelhouse are also ceaselessly digging at the
command of an unknown being for a "harvest" they cannot foresee or enjoy, partly
because they are not actually on a farm. In that effort, they are very like the "spec-
tres" of the "Seven Old Men" in another Fleursdu mal poem ("Les Sept Viellards"), all
"come from the same hell," who accost the viewer in the "swarming city" that is thus
increasingly revealed as hell on earth, a morass of the death-bound and increasingly
homeless destitute, a great "sea monstrous and without shores" (Baudelaire, 182-87,
ll. 3, 30, I, 52). Echoing all this in Erik and his immediate surroundings, Leroux con-
sequently points to an urban symboliste underworld and so vividly brings to the visi-
ble surface, for the all-too-blinded middle-class gaze, the poor, the laboring, the
exiled, the wandering, the criminalized, the "othered," the dying, and the dead.
In fact, Leroux's Erik as an outcast, digging, and aging skull is not the only allu-
sion in the novel to this horrific level of laboring corpses. Soon after Christine be-
gins her first descent with the phantom through the lower levels of the Opera, she
sees many "black demons in front of boilers," all of them "work[ing] with shovels
and pitchforks" as if they were devils or "souls of the dead" who had already crossed
the River "Styx" in the Greco- Roman-Christian hell (Leroux 1959, 237-38). These
figures, however quickly converted by Christine (as Erik will soon be) into racially
black aliens, are actual workers in the Opera's physical infrastructure. They are lit-
erally underground laborers in the "hell" of the imperial building's hidden structural,
industrial, and technological foundations. They consequently make Christine feel
"pity on the people who live 'underground'," but, as we have seen, that feeling turns
to fear and reversion the more these workers are connected to the phantom who in-
habits the deepest level of their world. The farther beneath the surface and even the
Opera infrastructure anyone goes in Le Fantome, the more those workers become con-
nected to the encrypted deathliness of Erik that is their all-too-likely destiny in the
post- Haussmann world of the city that Baudelaire, among others, exposes and Ler-
oux recalls.
It is in this sense, among others, that the skull-faced phantom alludes to the
feared "decadence," as well as the "degeneration," widely thought to underlie turn-
of-the-century Paris. As more and more of its members descended into the
troglodytic condition of urban labor and the decay of underground bone-piles, the
human race was increasingly viewed by the 188os as having to "follow the same path
as that of each individual organism," the entropy toward eventual dissolution; this
process was "decadent" because it could eventually lead to "a wholesale destruction
of civilization similar to that which submerged Rome, then Byzantium, beneath the
incoming waves of barbarian hordes" (Pierrot, 46-47) or, in this case, the waves and
eventually the corpses of the growing and supposedly "degenerate" proletariat. In-
deed, by the 188os and '90s, several middle- and even upper-middle-class artists
and writers frequently portrayed themselves, or people like them, as only barely con-
cealing a skeletal inner decay that was inhabiting them more and more even as they
lived lives apparently distant from those of the lower classes (see figure 1.4 and
Navarette, n-38). No wonder Erik's unmasked face arouses immediate fears of on-
coming death in most upper-class viewers the moment he appears above ground. In
addition to recalling the tradition of the dansemacabre, he first ascends from the crypt-
like catacombs beneath the Opera and then from the presumably "lowbrow" level of
the boiler-room workers, bringing with him all the ideological and cultural associa-
tions that those places carried with them for middle-class readers by the turn of the
nineteenth into the twentieth century
At the same time, though, as we have seen earlier, Leroux's Erik assiduously crafts
his artificial existence so as to perform his own "casting down" of the artisan-to-
working classes, even as he carries some features of these strata with him. This as-
pect of his betwixt-and-betweenness makes him partially recall that other
"decadence" attached by many French bourgeois of the late nineteenth century to
Baudelaire and several other writers or artists both known and unknown to him. As
a class-crossing, well-dressed figure with prodigious artistic skills (including a
scathing critical eye), a "wasted" physiognomy; and an ironic perspective on bour-
geois urban hypocrisies, Leroux's Erik echoes what had come by 1910 to be the
stereotype of the artistically educated, if partially "degenerate,'' decadent aesthete
modeled somewhat on Oscar Wilde and French reincarnations of Edgar Allan Poe
(Pierrot, 16-33). Like such figures, as Paul Bourget first defined them in the 1870s,
Erik is inclined to "shut himself away inside [his] inner worlds, straining to perceive
the slightest tremor from [his] secret depths," in an effort both to recast and to "es-
cape from an [urban, industrial, decaying] reality that" has to be confronted with a
horrified intensity but that finally "offers nothing [except possibly love-objects] to
fUlfill the needs of either the intelligence or the heart" (Pierrot, 16). This connec-
tion, though by no means Erik's dominant posture, is reinforced by how much his
skeletal appearance, semi-proletarian positioning, and anguished but arresting style
of singing make him somewhat resemble the actual vagabond and upper-level
cabaret singer Gabriel Randon, usually billed as "Jehan Rictus" in the Paris of the
r890s (just as "Erik" adopts a semi-foreign name and keeps his French original se-
cret). After Baudelaire, Randon- Rictus typified the "decadent" interaction of a gut-
ter-level and homeless urban reality with a distinct, almost private, poetic language
and became noted for his cadaverous physical image as a musical performer of the
underground life: "Very tall and very thin, with long bony arms and hands, a long,
haggard face with sunken eyes, [and] reddened eyelids" (Rudorff, 83) quite like the
red pupils that Erik seems to have when his own recessed eyes glow "like blazes"
from within his equally bony visage (Leroux 1959, 270).
But of course Erik is neither entirely a "decadent" aesthete nor a "degenerate" ar-
tisan nor a "simian" child-criminal nor a "lowbrow" nor a death-bound and outcast
laborer in the depths beneath the Opera. To the extent that he suggests any of these
types in French discourses and locales of Leroux's day; this "phantom" does so only
as his visage and behaviors link them to quite different aspirations towards bour-
geois "normality;" artistic "sublimity;" and the conscious and unconscious levels of
the mind that by now come with those drives in rising middle-class ideology What
he really embodies is a combination of logically incompatible tendencies that were
pulling with and against each other in Gaston Leroux and readers of his class: the
quest for haut bourgeois status and surroundings; the fear of still being connected to
lower-class and supposedly "regressive" racial tendencies; anxieties over how much
the "less evolved" conditions of the human race remain within us when we claim to
be evolved; middle-class guilt over who and what is displaced for the triumphs of the
grande bourgeoisie to announce themselves; middle-class discomfort over critiques
of its illusions from "decadent" voices within its own ranks; and the worry that
rapidly expanding and altered cities might be producing spectacular surfaces, such as
the Paris Opera, that only barely hide their links to poverty, marginalized slums,
hordes of "underground" workers, increased disease, and numerous corpses and
skeletons "underneath."
It was possible, to be sure, to think of some of these fears as receding into the
past, since Leroux's story takes place around 188o~81 and the novel was published
as late as 19ro. By the time the Opera proposed by Haussmann actually opened in
1875, the Second Empire had been replaced by the Third Republic, which Garnier's
spectacular edifice was now used to celebrate and display (Perry, 14; see figure 1.5).
By 19IO the wave of Wildean class-crossing "decadence" had crested (particularly
since Wilde had been convicted of sodomy in 1895), as had the force of Lambroso's
arguments for rooting urban crime in the devolved brains of criminals and anar-
chists. Even so, several questions remained: how far have "we" (the risen and rising
bourgeoisie) progressed beyond these recent past conditions very much connected
to what we now are? How much have the cruelest features of the Second Empire's
"master plan" and the reactions against it continued to fester in the foundations of
"our" supremacy? And how much should "we'' continue to accept the ideology of
"degeneration," along with its several racist aspects, that permeated the fin de siecle
in the 1890s? What does the human skull tell us, really; about our recent and more
distant history? Part of the terror in Leroux's phantom is not that he answers these
questions but that he poses them. He is at least a figure through which these linger-
ing problems are raised even when they seem buried and villainized in his cadaver-
ous form. What his grotesquely mixed being incarnates, we now see, is the
fundamental inseparability of the levels in social and historical being that the mid-
dle class wants to see as divided from each other but fears it cannot keep as distinct,
nor keep as distant from itself, as it would like. Erik is a "return of the repressed" or
of "the abject," then, not just psychoanalytically; but as an embodiment of the tan-
gled cultural anomalies in the ascendant class's roots that have been "thrown of£''
though far from easily; in hegemonic middle-class thinking.
At the same time, we must admit that the original phantom is an announcement
of these anomalies in a way that makes them "safe." What is most anomalous and
thus "degenerate" about him by middle-class standards is made conventionally crim-
inal by the novel's end. On the book's last page, Erik's mobile skeleton even reverts
to the state of a truly dead body open to a measure of official, journalistic, and pub-
lic examination. Still, even this final turn of events exposes a good deal about the
anxieties of the time and how they were managed by the middle-class gaze and those
given the authority to direct it. When Le Fantome concludes with the narrator's pro-
posal that Erik's skull and skeleton be placed for limited viewing "in the archives of
the National Academy of Music" (Leroux 1959, 498), it reminds us that this novel
appears near the end of an era in which the "newspapers' serial novels" (Leroux's
metier) and the Theatre du Grand Guignol (which opened in 1897; Gordon, 16) were only
two of the ways in which the middle-class public in turn-of-the-century Paris could
find the "spectacle" of death and crime deliberately displayed before them in several
officially sanctioned kinds of"public theater" (Schwartz, 157, 153, 155). An Academy
viewing of a skeleton would immediately remind Leroux's readers of both the Paris
Morgue and the Musee Grevin wax museum. Until the Morgue was closed to the pub-
lic in 1907, it offered glassed-in displays of dead bodies that were actual cadavers.
The Musee, in its turn, presented dioramas of crimes, most of them murders, recon-
structed in wax as they were supposedly committed, usually based on newspaper ac-
counts and photographs.
For the novel to depict how Leroux's deathly phantom looked or to present his
most horrifying deeds, it turns out, was for it to extend these ways in which "the re-
cently dead" or "sensational crimes" were brought under middle-class and authori-
tative control by being opened to bourgeois "spectatorship" (Schwartz, 156, 153).
Such "specularizing" of the all too "real," as Vanessa Schwartz has shown, permitted
all these museum-depictions of violence to bring crime and death under the man-
agement of "representation." There such states could be both half-confronted and
safely distanced under glass, "mediated" and "orchestrated" -sublimated in yet an-
other way-to turn "reality into an aesthetic" while still calling it "real" (Schwartz,
170, 159, 164), a function similar to the role of grand opera as a "representative spec-
tacle" that "transfigures mere existence" (Adorno, 36, 41). Leroux's greater and
greater exposure of his phantom, beginning with the assertion of his real existence
(Leroux 1959, 9) and ending with a plan to make his skeleton available for public
viewing (1959, 494-98), participates in this extensive effort to re-present and thus
aesthetically contain the "underworld" life to which the middle class was half-
attracted, yet determined to distance from itsel£ while placing it under the domi-
nance of bourgeois scrutiny In this way Le Fantome lets its readers simultaneously face
and avoid both the "degenerations" projected onto its anti-hero and the class history
of Paris during Leroux's life that the same skeletal figure layers within itself
THE NATURE, ABJECTION, AND RESURGENCE OF CARNIVAL
A very particular part of that history closely related to Haussmann's removal of the
lower classes, is the placement and displacement of carnival in Paris around the time
Leroux was born. After all, we have seen in my first chapter just how much of that
popular and counterurban festivity Leroux's Erik brings up from the depths of the
Opera and his past. As it happens, the original phantom ushers carnival into the
Opera during the precise time-frame (from the early 188os to the novel's publica-
tion in 1910) which saw the out-and-out prohibition of carnivals in Paris, and other
parts of France, at the end of the Second Empire and in the first four decades of the
Third Republic. From 1870 to 1914, carnival as it had been known in France's capi-
tal and countryside-usually an organized indulgence in "impurity (in the sense of
both dirt and mixed categories), heterogeneity, masking, protuberant distention,
disproportion, exorbitancy; clamour, decentered or eccentric arrangements" (Stally-
brass, 23)-was legally banned from all of Paris within the city limits. It was first
transformed into trade shows with military parades by the 188os, and soon even
these were forbidden altogether, under the excuse that they were impediments to
the flow of city traffic (Stallybrass, 177). For Leroux's phantom to invade the Opera
with carnival, then, and for him to be a version of carnival unmasked at the hal masque
are for him to be very literally the resurgence of a mixed-class social cacophony that
has had to "go underground" or stay outside the city as exceedingly "lowbrow" or
"childish" theatrics, however much the Opera is dependent on some ingredients of
carnival. We now need to uncover more of what this return of the repressed means
in the cultural arena from which Le Fantome arises at its own time and in reaction to
earlier French history
There was a very specific ideological relationship during Leroux's life, it turns out,
in the way opera was contrasted with carnival and vice versa. The relocated Opera
in the Palais Garnier opened not long after the banning of carnival and was quickly
used as a major extension of that "new order." Like some other structures by which
the ascendant bourgeoisie announced their power and its imperial reach by the mid-
1870s, the Opera, with its high-class core of subscribers and box holders admitted
backstage, strove to establish a class-specific "closure and stability, even a unique
sense of belonging, which obscured its structural dependence upon a 'beyond'," in-
cluding its dependence on carnival (Stallybrass, 28). There is still some debate about
how aristocratic or high bourgeoisie the origins of European opera were in the late
sixteenth century (see Lindenberger 1984, 237--41, and Adorno, 30-33). But as far
back as the 1830s in France, well before Garnier, the national Opera had unques-
tionably come to cater to "the newly risen middle class," especially after the National
Academy of Music lost much of its royal subsidy in 1831 (Lindenberger 1984,
237-41, 212, 230). As Wagner would observe in criticizing its greater commercial-
ization in Paris by 1840, opera gave the bourgeois public "a type of diversion that was
easy enough for quick consumption yet that still seemed 'serious' [including aristo-
cratic] enough to satisfy [the rising middle class's] cultural pretensions" (Wagner's
words translated in Lindenberger 1984, 228).
Opera pursued this class-defining fUnction, on the one hand, by becoming even
more eclectic than it had been. It deliberately combined different modes and genres
of the arts, some of them originally carnivalesque, thereby increasing its "show of
[bourgeois] power" (Lindenberger 1984, 75-95), in a fashion that Garnier's Opera
tried to duplicate with its imperial style of architecture incorporating many other
styles into its neo-baroque splendor (see Mead, 228-36). On the other hand, this
wide reach strove to counter Wagner's early fear of the French opera's popularity by
reinforcing the exclusion of carnival with its own dismissal of all that it wished to as-
sociate with the "grotesque collective body" away from and below it (Stallybrass, 93).
Responding to Mayerbeer's highly successfUl Les Huguenots after it opened at the Paris
Opera of1836 with an unabashed eclecticism of styles (Grout, I: 320), Robert Schu-
mann attacked the composer's use of the "Mighty Fortess" hymn by Luther, known
to the most illiterate churchgoer of the day, by lamenting that, with that tune, the
"bloodiest drama of our religious history has been dragged down to a farce at a fair"
(qtd. and trans. in Lindenberger 1984, 232). Popular hymns, among other forms,
were rarely used in French grand operas after that and were joined in their disap-
pearance after the Franco- Prussian War by the accelerating absence of almost any-
thing directly German. The result was an array of musical forms exiled to what
Schumann clearly helped define as the carnivalesque "other" of grand opera, the
"farce at a fair," a sort of catacomb realm into which the skeletons of some former
opera-and certainly carnival-devices were supposedly cast, some into the nearby
Opera-Comique and the Bouffe Parisiens (Harding, ro5-13), so that the Paris
Opera could distinguish its first-class status from such "lower orders."
Leroux's Erik thus embodies the carnivalesque, precisely as the "other" of opera,
in a great many ways, from his being a manipulator of German music and wine to
having once been a kind of "farce" (or "freak") at country fairs himself He therefore
asserts this very "other" within the realm that has most tried to throw it off, and he
does so by being a creature of carnival well before he is almost anything else. He can-
not be the father- or son-figure in a quest for the paternal or maternal in a subter-
ranean home, nor is he able to fashion the scrotumlike bag or the phallic bronze
switches in his reproduction of his mother's boudoir, unless he is already what he has
been much longer: a builder of carnival fun-houses and (more recently) Persian
"magic box" variations on them, aspects of which appear in his construction of much
of the Opera, as well as in the little "palace of illusions" (or hexagon of twisting mir-
rors) made for driving invaders mad behind the maternal bedroom (Leroux,
494-96, 433). The psychoanalytic journey to the depths in this novel, like the Opera
Garnier as Leroux presents it, is built on the foundations and from the materials of
carnival, which were literally there first but had been "buried" in late nineteenth-
century France. Indeed, it is the carnivalesque in Erik that epitomizes and even li-
censes (albeit as criminal) his many crossings of distinctions, be they ones of class,
race, gender, or even species. The "abjection" of all these betwixt-and-between
states that we have seen as basic to Erik's multiple nature and downcast position, we
have to admit, are partly caused by the Paris Opera's abjection of carnival out of it-
self into a supposedly grotesque corner of its own foundations, where the actual re-
lation of opera to carnival continues to live out of the public eye.
Leroux's novel, more blatantly than any other fiction of its time, is thereby acting
out a more pervasive cultural process. one that has been exposed most clearly by
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. Le Fantome and these scholars all show that the
verbal renderings of dreams and hysterical symptoms around the 1890s and after by
Freud, his French contemporaries, and his mainly bourgeois patients~and hence
the larger constructions of the unconscious by psychoanalysis~were often com-
posed from the "broken fragments of carnival," which kept appearing half-hidden in
many ingredients of preconscious activity during numerous psychoanalyses of mid-
dle-class people (Stallybrass, 171). "Again and again, [psychoanalytic] patients suf-
fer[ed] acute acts of disgust," just as the Opera and its inhabitants do for Leroux, by
"vomiting out horrors and obsessions which [like Erik] look[ed] surprisingly like the
rotted residue of traditional carnival practices" (Stallybrass, 174). "Forms of popular
festivity" that had been forcibly "marginalized" by the middle classes, Leroux's Fan-
tome helps us to see, "reemerge[d] in the heart of bourgeois life [in this case, the
depths of the Opera] as the very site of potential neuroses" (Stallybrass, 180). What
"had been excluded at the level of social identity" symbolically "returned at the level
of subjective articulation, as both phobia and fascination" (Stallybrass, 182), and all
of this, like the abjection of so much into Erik, stemmed from the ascendant class's
"alienation" from and lingering desire for carnival in the major cities of Europe
(Stallybrass, 171).
Consequently, by at least "interrogating the liminal position" of this alienation
and desire, the Leroux novel "stage[s] a festival of the political unconscious and
[thereby] reveal[s] the repressions and the social rejections"~including the abjec-
tions~"which formed" the political process that underlay and generated the sup-
posed dream-work of psychoanalysis the novel also replays (Stallybrass, 200). In
emerging out of this process and its ideological ways of concealing and revealing it-
self, Leroux's phantom is a carnivalesque "boundary phenomenon of hybridization
and inmixing in which self and other become enmeshed in an inconclusive, hetero-
geneous, dangerously unstable zone" manifested by all the paradoxical conditions
that Erik embodies (Stallybrass, 193). Only in that way, as in the methods by which
carnival was both exiled from and contrasted with opera, can Erik become "the
'Other' of a defining group or self" (Stallybrass, 193). The latter cannot define their
distinction, in other words, without abjecting their mixed foundations and affilia-
tions in this monstrous counterpart and thus displacing onto him/it everything that
the higher-class "group" or "self" wants to dissociate from itself in order to seem it-
self to itself (Stallybrass, 193).
In fact, the original phantom of the Opera goes even further. He composites in
himself the additional, more overriding cultural agenda that Stallybrass and White
have defined as follows: "When the bourgeoisie consolidated itself as a respectable
and conventional body by withholding itself from the popular, it constructed the
popular as grotesque otherness; by this act of withdrawal and consolidation it pro-
duced another grotesque, an identity-in-difference which was nothing other than its
fantasy relation, its negative symbiosis, with that which it had rejected in its social
practices" (193). Erik's "grotesque otherness" does not simply represent, though it
certainly includes, "the popular" from which the "bourgeoisie" has been "withdraw-
ing" so as to "consolidate" its presumed difference from that other. Since he is many
aspects of the "popular" turned into a single "other" who also strives to rise beyond
them to the ideal domestic state of bourgeois ideology, Leroux's phantom is "another
grotesque" among those that the bourgeoisie had constructed and concealed "under-
ground" so as to harbor and obscure its "fantasy relation" and "negative symbiosis"
with all that it seemingly "rejects" in order to establish itself Erik is a disguising and
a partial revelation of how the othering of the hybrid carnivalesque creates both an
"abject" of revulsion and an object of desire. He incarnates a horror both thrown off
and passionately sought-"attract[ive], facinat[ing]"-as the enticing embodiment
of what the middle class really wants, but cannot be seen, to possess. The rising mid-
dle-class habitus may need the phantom's multiple otherness to define itself by con-
trast, but he also embodies at times many elements that bourgeois culture wants to
embrace and even subsume in its quest for a comprehensive grasp of its variegated
circumstances: the cultural capital that comes with "owning," building, and produc-
ing opera; the capacity to be both child and adult; the inclination to cross over gen-
ders and races; and the tendency to be multiple selves, some of them borrowed from
carnival, in the relentless pursuit of high-bourgeois acquisition. The desire for such
forms of otherness and the cultural prohibition of that desire, which are sometimes
combined in a pitying of the othered figure (as Christine and the narrator show by
the end of Leroux's Fant6me), are both essential components of the ascendant cul-
ture's establishment of itself and the "hybridization" it both throws off and seeks in
order to achieve that objective.
The Opera and the center of Paris in Leroux's book, we must remember, do not
simply eject the carnivalesque outside themselves. From the moment it locates the
phantom in the undergrounds and backstage of the Opera, the novel is echoing the
way the ascendant culture of its era "produces [its supposed] domain [of mastery]
by taking into itself as negative introjections the very domains that surround and
threaten it" (Stallybrass, 89). In this reencrypting within itself of what has been
"thrown down" from the world of the middle class, the dominant culture and its
symbols of dominance can retain as basic to themselves what they have abjected
and desired in order to be themselves. They can incorporate and mask what they
both want and want to exclude, particularly at a time of transition in Europe
Bo THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
(1875-1914) when those striving to shore up the supposed centers of culture want
firmly to establish the included exclusions that make the dominant order what it
is, the "others" so important for defining the center that they must be subsumed
in the very foundations of it.
Hence the effort of the Paris Opera, not only to root out and demonize masked
carnival phantoms in its depths, but to co-opt and contain carnival regularly in its
annual bal masque. "This ball," as Leroux renders it from an actual Opera event that
he frequently attended as a subscriber and reporter (Leroux 1901, 3-9), is an insti-
tutionalized containment of what is "gayer, noisier, and more bohemian" than the
average middle-class fete. It is explicitly organized "in honor of the birthday of a fa-
mous artist who did drawings of [real carnival] festivities in bygone times," them-
selves imitative of a more senior artist "whose pencil had immortalized [the]
fantastically costumed revelers" that once appeared in the older celebrations of Ash
Wednesday (Leroux 1959, 179). Carnival, in other words, has been reframed within
an official Opera event, restricted to one formal indoor occasion with an "exceed-
ingly select public" invited (Leroux 1901, 7), and modeled less on original street car-
nivals and more on drawings based on drawings of them, all in sketches done for
high-class interiors and patrons, hardly for country carnival revelers. Opera intro-
jects carnival so as to be a more central "high culture" institution rising out of and
above the "low culture" that has been banned from the city, yet it also does so nega-
tively; even in its "bohemian" ball, by crafting an artificial and better-financed imi-
tation of what are already imitations of earlier high-class imitations. Carnival
returns from repression in the Opera of Le Fant6me, as when Erik appears at the ball
unmasked, only because carnival is already transmuted, incorporated, re-classed, and
subsumed in an edifice that has relentlessly sought, like official Paris, to abject it for
many years.
It is this transmogrification and introjection of carnival, more than any other el-
ement, in fact, that best explains why and in what significant ways Leroux's Fant6me
reworks Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris. Despite the many echoes of the latter in
the former, a few of which I have noted already; the crucial differences in the links
between them have yet to be studied thoroughly I can just begin to remedy that
problem here, and I can do so only because the inclusion and suppression of carni-
val by Paris and its Opera provides a key point of comparison that will help us see
how Hugo's mainly historical novel of the early 1830s, set in the Paris of 1482, is sub-
sumed and anamorphosed in Leroux's more "Gothic" and nearly contemporary tale
of Paris published eight decades later. Hugo's book, after all, like most of its adapta-
tions under the title The Hunchback ojNotre Dame, begins by foregrounding what is un-
dergrounded in the post- Haussmann city of Leroux: a vast "licentious" carnival, the
Feast of Fools, which spills out widely into late medieval Paris from its teeming heart
at the center of the city close to Notre Dame, where "all," from priest to officer to
hosier to beggar, are "confounded in the common license" (Hugo 1923, 6, 57). It is
in this very public, though regulated, festival that the hunchbacked cathedral bell-
ringer, the orphaned and grotesque ~asimodo, is made the universal scapegoat
onto whom nearly everyone projects the general cacophony by making him the
"fool's pope" of the day "according to custom" (Hugo 1923, 62).
Somewhat as Erik will be (though not because the hunchback has a death's head
for a face), ~asimodo is thus turned into a nodal point onto which innumerable
"othernesses" are cast by onlookers as though the bell-ringer can somehow embody
LEROUX'S SUBLIMATIONS OF CULTURAL POLITICS 8r
them all and can do so out in the open. To different people he variously seems the
Man-Animal of the pre-civilized Forest ("growling like a wild beast" on Hugo 1923,
91), a "misshapen baboon" like the monkeys in the margins of medieval manuscripts
(Hugo 1923, 173), "a fellow of Oriental architecture" (247), "the offspring of some
beastly Jew or other" (174), and even a cast-off from the itinerant gypsies (like the
Jews in being a "nation without a country" on 83). It is the totality of these that has
led ~asimodo to be labeled, as Erik is, a carnivalesque "monster" or a "vampire" and
hence a possible omen of either "great calamities" or positive changes-or both, as
things turn out-for the people of Paris (175). Long before Le Fantome, then, in an ear-
lier transformation of "Beauty and the Beast," the history of changing Paris and its
carnivals is already connected to cultural "othering" in many ways. Hugo anticipates
Leroux in drawing out of history a projective social scapegoating, one that coalesces
"others" in single figures in a manner that strives to displace the focus of attention
from the prejudicial ideologies and fears of the projectors. At the same time, though,
the earlier historical fiction in Notre Dame renders these abjections as they sometimes
occurred in much older and more public carnival moments. In Hugo's fifteenth-cen-
tury fetes on the streets of Paris, there is a more widespread and less class-specific in-
teraction among different social strata, themselves rapidly changing. Such activities
are broad communal attempts at temporary social unity, many of which culminate in
the casting of all major differences onto one "monstrosity" that is viewed as embody-
ing a difference from the entire social order. Compared to what we find in Le Fantome,
there is less a burial and introjection of non-bourgeois and carnivalesque "others" by
some classes and characters in Hugo's novel. Instead there is a focusing of carnival's
class-mixing energies, along with the wider drives of historical change, onto certain
places, collectivities, or individuals that can apparently epitomize social transforma-
tion and class struggle while seeming (albeit erroneously) to be the only locations in
which these conflicts are really visible.
While Le Fantome offers us only one figure harboring such projections (apart from
small aspects of them that appear in other characters), Notre Dame presents us with
several distinct scapegoats who embody different carnivalesque confusions and the
historical transitions being acted out in them. Besides ~asimodo, there is Esmer-
alda, caught as she is between being and not being a gypsy and thus between being
and not being a "born" carnival performer of song, dance, and magic (Hugo 1923,
127-28, 225-35, 540-41). She is positioned, as Christine will be to some extent, at
a late-medieval crossroads between the conflicting religious and class-based ideolo-
gies regarding women, singers, dancers, gypsies, vagrants, magicians, and witches all
at once (as in Hugo 1923, 128-29, 342-47, 358-67). There is also the contradictory
Archdeacon, Claude Frollo, often a "man in black" lurking in shadows with "two live
coals" for eyes (Hugo 1923, 335). He is pulled between the medieval constraints and
powers of his priestly vows and office, on the one hand, and the emerging Renais-
sance displays, including carnivalesque suggestions, of sexuality that draw him into
lusting after Esmeralda as soon as he hears her sing, on the other (Hugo 1923, 75, 90,
361). This combination makes him as carnivalesque as his love-object, as he admits
when he blames her for tempting him into feeling all too gypsylike, "vagrant and
wandering like thyself" (Hugo 1923, 362). Then, too, there is Jehan Frollo, Claude's
brother, who drifts from his status as a haut bourgeois student to his disguise as one
of the "Truand" thieves from the "Court of Miracles," that "monstrous hive" of"va-
grancy" hidden deep in Paris where the "limits of the different races and species
seemed to be effaced" (453---55, J05~J06). There is even the "living skeleton" of the
"Recluse" Gudule, kept in the gloom of an official mendicant's cell, who has de-
scended from being the upper-class and promiscuous "Paquette-la-Chantefleurie"
to becoming this raving "spectre" in sack-cloth who turns out to have been Esmer-
alda's mother years ago before gypsies stole the child and left the infant ~asimodo
in its place (Hugo 1923, 218, 225~38, 540~41).
All these characters, like ~asimodo (the most extreme human analogue of their
conditions), are caught in carnival fashion between multiple social and sexual roles
and are therefore finally destroyed as sacrificial scapegoats. That is because they are
engulfed by the rapidly changing currents of cultural history around 1482 as Hugo
envisions them in 1830~31 right at the time of the "July Revolution" in Paris. For
Hugo, moreover, the ultimate incarnation of this whole process is Notre Dame it-
sel£ which also happens to be the principal "skull" in the novel ("it is a skeleton"
quite explicitly in Hugo 1923, 191). Such is the appearance of that "vast body" to
Hugo both when his narrator notes that ~asimodo no longer animates it as the
semi-pagan "god of this temple" (191) and when his speaker examines "the traces of
destruction imprinted on this ancient church" enough to see in them the conflicted
social transformations, the "religious and political revolutions" and "changes of fash-
ion," that over time have "killed the edifice" -always "an edifice of the transition"-
as much as they have "remade" it over several centuries (Hugo 1923, 133~39).
Leroux's Erik, however, is not simply a singular embodiment of carnival and tran-
sition in contrast to these several in Hugo's Notre Dame. The original phantom of the
Opera contains and combines the inconsistent features of all these figures even
more than ~asimodo or Notre Dame can do, and he does so while being more so-
cially and psychologically abject-more cast out, down, under, and away from public
view-than any of Hugo's characters are, except at the very end of Notre Dame when
a hunchbacked skeleton (in a scene clearly echoed by the discovery of Erik's skeleton
in Leroux 1959, 498) is found embracing the cast-off bones of the hanged Esmer-
alda in the quasi catacombs beneath the stonework at the base of the gibbet at
Mountfoucon (Hugo 1923, 574~75). As these intermingled cadavers begin to do
only at that point, Erik sequesters and combines in his many hybrid "natures" the
man/beast, human/monkey, Occidental/Oriental, Gentile/Jewish, "normal" /de-
formed, and cathedral-musician/gypsy-child projections of others onto ~asimodo;
the gypsy-performer/country-musician-and-magician features of Esmeralda (thus
crossing the boundaries of gender as well as ideologies); the forbidden longings of
the lurking Archdeacon, especially since Erik is also a "man in black" with eyes like
burning coals (to the point of being unmasked to reveal a "demon's head" much as
Claude is in Esmeralda's prison cell; Hugo 1923, 357); the movement from bourgeois
aspirations to masked thievery to racial and social indistinctions in the shape-shift-
ings of Jehan and the Court of Miracles; the reclusive longings of the half-mad,
skeletal, spectral, and class-crossing Gudule for a lost mother-child relation in the
dimly remembered past; and the skull-like qualities of Notre Dame, as though its
embodiment of continual death and change across history were part of the under-
ground and carnivalized subtext of the Paris Opera more than its managers and sub-
scribers want to admit. Leroux's "Opera ghost" even repeats the multiplicity of
Hugo's trickster-playwright Pierre Gringoire, one of the few survivors of history's
cross-currents in Notre Dame because he adjusts to each shift more than any other
character. The phantom is a multi-skilled craftsman of "mysteries" and perfor-
mances for one occasion after another, frequently in a manner like Gringoire's that
is half "lowbrow" (not quite appropriate) and half "highbrow" (classically out of
keeping) in a setting that oscillates, as novels do generally, 2 between the extremes of
country-based carnivals and "high culture" urban cathedrals (as in Hugo 1923,
27-30, 130-32, 434-37).
For Leroux's Erik to reincarnate this entire range of contradictions and to do so
subliminally in a repressed "underground" location well into the period of France's
Third Republic is for Le Fantome to make a major statement about the cultural poli-
tics of Leroux's day compared to Hugo's Notre Dame, the 1830s, and the Paris of 1482.
In the past, Hugo's and Leroux's novels tell us together, the carnivalesque has been
a permitted and thus open challenge to higher class authority. But it has simultane-
ously been a public safety-valve in which social conflict at different times in history
has been momentarily deflected. The means of deflection have been ritualized
scapegoatings that have cast the contradictory social conditions and changes beset-
ting everyone onto certain figures who seem more grotesque than anyone else. 3
Though class conflict has broken out quite destructively anyway, to the point of in-
citing horrific repressions, as in the final street battle of Notre Dame (Hugo 1923,
460-530), the reinforcement of"high culture" by the tactical regulation, position-
ing, and even scapegoating of "low culture" has continued to be an essential strategy
for maintaining social control. By the 1870s through 1910, however, as Le Fantome
shows, rising bourgeois urban "high culture" has adopted the different tactic of
overtly abjecting its proximity to quasi-rural, "gypsy," and carnivalesque "low cul-
ture," even to the point of adding other labels to the "cast down" morass ("Oriental,"
"degenerate," Jewish, Germanic). At the same time, the bourgeoisie has retained its
desire for and dependence on that "other" by placing it deep "inside" the middle-
class home and psyche and "underground" in various kinds of catacombs regarded as
supposedly the dead past of Paris-but also as a place where what is "dead" still
"lives" as a criminalized, carnivalized, yet enticing foundation upon which haut bour-
geois acquisition builds the resplendent illusions of its dominance and permanence.
The abjection and resurgence of the carnivalesque in Le Fantome, then, is both an
extension and a critique of the history of carnival and its offshoots in Paris, partly as
that history is reconstructed in Hugo's Notre Dame. What Erik embodies, particularly
as a composite of earlier carnivalesque characters in that novel, is both the outcome
of carnival's history by the end of the nineteenth century and the unsettling sugges-
tion that carnival as "the repressed" is always present as bound up with and essential
to what has repressed it. In this ambivalent sense of"high culture's" ambitions, Ler-
oux is finally more ironic than Hugo, if not more sympathetic to les miserables of his
country's past and present. Hugo's narrator in Notre Dame, despite the tragedies in-
flicted on the novel's scapegoats for the transitions of history, ultimately has full con-
fidence in a bourgeois ideology of progress. He views the wider print culture and
increased democracy since 1482, even as much remains to be improved especially for
the beggars of the metropolis, as having "washed away" the "old governments" of"vi-
olence and brigandage" just beginning to decay in the world of Notre Dame (Hugo
1923, 80-81). Leroux, eighty years later, allows the forces of bourgeois control and
imperialism a final victory over the carnivalesque, much as "historical progress"
seems to demand for high-bourgeois Parisians. But he does so only within a vivid de-
piction of how the "other" who composites the history and scapegoatings of carni-
val is playing that role entirely as part of an effort to pursue his own progress toward
THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TilE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
the ideal self of bourgeois ideology The inseparability of carnival from the very
bourgeois aspiration that has striven to separate itself from the carnivalesque: this is
what haunts the world of the "modern" Paris Opera for Leroux in the ghosts and
skeletons of the precise history behind the center of the city
THE THREATS OF THE ORIENTAL, THE SEXUAL ''DEVIANT," AND THE jEW
Still, the further "otherings" that Leroux attaches to this abjection of carnival are
even more troubling. They so obviously reflect widespread bourgeois-Gentile prej-
udices of the time about the presumed "deviations" and hierarchies that supposedly
separated different races, genders, and sexual orientations from each other. For ex-
ample, the many "Orientalizings" of the native- French Erik in Le Fantome clearly re-
play the pervasive ideological assumption in France and England by 1900 that the
"Oriental is irrational, depraved (fallen), childlike, 'different'" while the true "Euro-
pean is rational, virtuous, mature, 'normal"' (Said, 40). After all, as a result of the im-
perialism that saw Britain and France colonize 85 percent of the globe by 1914, most
of it to the east of them (Said, 41), "European culture gained in strength and iden-
tity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even under-
ground self" (the "unconscious" of the West) much as the Phantom of the Opera is
fashioned to be in Leroux's novel (Said, 3; see also Lindenberger 1998, 181-90).
A very similar construction of "respectable" selfhood by differentiation, too, be-
came crucial to sexual and ethnic politics in Europe by the time Le Fantome was writ-
ten. Hence these politics appear quite frequently in the novel as well, usually under
thin disguises. The fears about blurring clear "male" and "female" demarcations em-
phasized in my Introduction, as it happens, coexist at key moments in this book with
suggestions and implied condemnations of both homosexuality and masturbation.
Erik's physical description joins his six-octave voice to the "thin, pale ... haggard ap-
pearance," the "sunken eye," and the "long, cadaverous-looking" visage that were
routinely associated with sexual deviance and especially with masturbation at least
since the 1850s (as we see in these phrases cited from William Acton's 1857 Functions
and Disorders if the Reproductive Organs in Wolf 1993, 26, n. 7). In addition, the "cadav-
erous" features of Leroux's phantom go on to echo, not just Du Maurier's Svengali
from 1894, but Leroux's own 1899 description of the long-imprisoned Alfred Drey-
fus, who is brought back from Devil's Island for his retrial in "a phantom landau" as
a skeletally "wan and elongated" figure (Le Matin, July 2, 1899, 2), a near-corpse
"plunged for years in the shadows of a cave ... who returns" only now "to the light
of day" (Le Matin, July 4, 1). To duplicate such a description in his Erik is thus for Ler-
oux to continue, even as he also disavows, the association of the phantom with the
Jew. That figure, Le Fantome now reminds us, was already linked in Gentile France to
the "deviance" of the Oriental, the homosexual, and the masturbator. All of these
groups were viewed as violating publicized ideals of what constituted "healthy man-
liness," an early version of Hitler's "master race," in sharp contrast to the most "de-
generate" alternatives (Mosse, 35-36, 134-35).
What is ghostly, frightening, and threatening about these combined "deviations"
in Leroux's novel, however, is not their simple otherness in one scapegoat-figure. It
is their intimate coexistence-in the mixed features of Erik and elsewhere--with the
ideals and pursuit of the French national and middle-class "norm." That is the co-
nundrum we now need to explain further, and we will find no answers based on clear
differentiations in Le Fantome de /'Opera. In fact, what this novel's title character shows
us is never simple "otherness" but the multifaceted lack of sharp distinctions be-
tween what we call "normal" and what we have abjected as "other." As "the Persian"
in the novel emphasizes in recounting the phantom's long history in the East, for in-
stance, there is no separating the Garnier-like architect and builder in Erik by the
late 186os from his apparently amoral construction before that time of"magic box"
palaces for the Shah-in-Shah of Persia or the Sultan of Constantinople (Leroux
1959, 496). This problem is exacerbated by the hidden features Erik has added to his
Oriental structures turning out to be more European (more Leibnizian, as we have
seen) than anything else. Where, as in the features of the Opera Garnier itsel£ does
the "Oriental" end and the occidental become distinctly itself? The increasingly
middle-class market for the French national Opera after 1831, we should remember,
was continuously attracted by the Opera's use, however bowderlized, of Oriental
stories, settings, costumes, props, makeup, and other elements employed in many
productions ranging from Ali Baba et les 40 voleurs, first staged in 1833, toLe Roi de Lahore,
first mounted in 1877 at the Opera Garnier and cited by name in Le Fantome (Kahane,
20-21, 44-46).
True, this appropriation of the "other," often quite fictive, was partly a celebra-
tion of the conquest of "the East" by French armies and business interests, starting
with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, accelerating after the French taking of
Algeria in 1830, and reaching its highest rate of "territorial acquisition" in Africa,
Asia, and Syria after the Franco- Prussian War of 1870 intensified the desire in Paris
for increased empire, trade, and raw materials (Said, 42, 217; Elwitt, 278-90). But
such acquisition, especially in the Opera, came to display as much interdependence
as power. By the mid-nineteenth century, as Martine Kahane writes in her account
of the French opera's long-standing Orientalism, the national Opera's quest for
Eastern objects was the same as the ideological drive in the Opera-going French en-
trepreneur, officer, or high-bourgeois individual: "The voyage [to] the Orient, with
all the trophies brought back [-] weapons, equestrian equipment, embroidered fab-
rics and shawls, costly horses and, why not, beautiful women torn from the bonds of
slavery [-] gave one the status of a person of great originality'' (Kahane, 30). Dis-
tinctive social position, in other words, both for the Opera and for rising-middle-
class people, was seen as resulting from how many features of the Orient, really just
uprooted and altered pieces of it, a rising-middle-class institution or person could
buy and display. The gathered features acquired from the "other" were therefore just
as crucial to this achievement of identity by capitalistic appropriation, an attainment
of"originality" by possessing the "exotic," as every attempt by the same aspiring self
to distinguish its supposed "essence" from whatever was "foreign" to it.
The main underside of this effort is symbolized in Le Fantome by the "set piece
from Le Roi de Lahore" being placed far below the Opera stage at a key point of pas-
sage from the surface to the depths (Leroux 1959, 374). Bourgeois imperialism, em-
bodied by the Opera, is grounded in what it appropriates and recasts because of its
drive to define itself by acquisition from the other. That is essentially what
Theophile Gautier, a frequent reviewer of the national Opera, writes only a few
years after the conquest of Algeria and the consequent exchange of fashion and
building styles between Algiers and the major cities of France: "We thought we had
conquered Algiers, and it is Algiers which has conquered us. Our ladies already wear
the brightly colored scarves woven with gold which the harem slaves wore," even as
"Algiers has become a sort of African Marseilles" in the midst of its continuing re-
semblance to "a Turkish garden" (Gautier as cited in Kahane, 39-40). As facetious
as Gautier may be here, the threat of being overrun by the conquered and their cul-
ture, part of the wider threat of a total cultural mix, is still present for him and his
readers in their apparent insouciance towards conquered places and people. It is
thus not surprising by the time of Le Fantome, when Third Republic imperialism was
near its height, that Leroux's Erik, after appropriating much that is viewed as "Ori-
ental" in order to pursue his acquisition of French high-bourgeois status, is dogged
as well as aided by the "otherness" of what he brings home from the East. The Ori-
entalizing Paris Opera itself is equally haunted, in its stored-up sets and its under-
ground phantom, by its dependence on its own history of pillaging, adapting,
misconstructing, and then "othering" the "Orient" in order to make both Paris and
the Opera centers of world and Western culture.
The fear of a hidden interconnection with the "other," meanwhile, is equally basic
to the growing French attacks on all forms of"sexual deviance" in the last half of the
nineteenth century: Several of those are therefore invoked by very deliberate sug-
gestions in Le Fantome de /'Opera, a few of which have been noted already Among these,
not surprisingly; are ones that exploit the long-established ideological links between
the "exotic Orient," on the one hand, and fearfully indiscriminate, hence "strange,"
hence dangerously attractive forms of sexuality; on the other (Said, 103). Such mixed
and vague bourgeois feelings about "other kinds" of sex would have been aroused for
Leroux's readers of 1910 by Christine's finding Erik most "enticing" when he seems
to be Othello the Moor, his making of phallic symbols for her out of "bronze from
Japan," and his attempts at taking sole possession of his sexual object with suppos-
edly "Eastern" tyrannical force, using the Punjab lasso, his knowledge of sultanic
palaces, and his Persian torture chamber of twisting mirrors. As often happened in
Europe prior to Le Fantome, whatever is in the "unrespectable," "unpermitted" range
of the continuum of sexual activity for the middle class has been thrown off onto the
difference of the "Oriental," as well as onto a figure who shifts too rapidly between
races and classes.
At the same time, we have to admit, the sexual threat the phantom poses is hardly
of the "Oriental" kind displayed by Gustave Flaubert in his (in)famous letters from
Egypt in the 1850s. These contain supposedly eyewitness accounts of public buggery
(of a man by a monkey) and open masturbation (of a dying marabout by several
"Moslem women"), as though such acts were much more common "in the East" that
they could ever be in France (quoted by Said, 103). What Erik appears to want in-
stead is something like the father-daughter or son-mother incest seen as a genuine
temptation, even a natural one, in the European psychoanalysis of repressed person-
alities from virtually any middle-class family Much as this same Western psychology
subsumes the carnivalesque to make the features of carnival seem primarily mental,
Leroux's Erik brings the most bourgeois and Western of forbidden sexual tenden-
cies into the realm of"Oriental deviance." He even does so byway of some "Eastern"
accouterments with which he masks and half-articulates his attempted seduction of
Christine, ones very like the "trophies" we have seen self-aggrandizing Westerners
wanting to possess as indicators of Europe's imperial power. If Erik is at all "un-
canny" in the Freudian sense (which I think he is), he is so most immediately as he
helps make un-homey (Orientally unheimlich) what is most basic, primally sexual, and
LEROUX's SUBLIMATIONS OF CULTURAL POLITICS
at home (heimlich) for a rising bourgeois person of Leroux's class, time, and place (see
Freud I959, 370-77).
Indeed, Le Fantome's overtones of sexual deviance go even further in this paradox-
ical direction, precisely by not going very far at all. As we have seen, Leroux's Erik has
features automatically associated in 1910 with male-female indistinction or her-
maphrodism (which also "infect" Christine and Raoul), onanism (all by himself
"down there" in the dark, which his "haggard" appearance would suggest for many),
and incitements, at least, to homosexuality, as when the Persian and Raoul "embrace"
as they reach the phantom's depths or when Erik himself enters Raoul's bedroom at
night, coming as close to him as the foot of his bed and arousing in the young Vis-
count a vague desire "to know everything ... " by seizing the elusive body of the
phantom more than he finally does (Leroux 1959, 27I). For years hegemonic ideol-
ogy had placed all of these avenues for sexual desire-right along with what was
thought to be "Oriental" or Jewish or "decadent" in the sense of being "pale, un-
muscled, and dedicated to an aesthetic type of purity" (Mosse, 45) -in a generalized
and mythic location that was thought to contain, as in one composite "abject," all the
internal threats "to nationalism and respectability posed by the rapid changes of the
[more urban] modern age" (Mosse, 3I).
Leroux's Erik is another version of that conglomeration of"others" and is there-
fore the novel's most blatant antithesis of the ideal masculine body and attitude that
were held up, in France as much as Germany around 1900, as the "national stereo-
type and the middle-class stereotype" all at the same time (Mosse, I6). "Nationalism
and respectability," which the Paris Opera (among other venues) was employed to
represent at a turn-of-the-century time of blurring cultural boundaries (see Showal-
ter, I -I 8), strove to assign "everyone his place in life, man or woman, normal and ab-
normal, native and foreign [one but not the other]; any confusion between these
categories threatened chaos and loss of control" for many people, just as Leroux's
seemingly anarchist phantom appears to do (Mosse, I6). At the same time, however,
all of these threatening levels and confusions are more attached as associations to the
original Erik than actually true of his sexual pursuits as Leroux presents them. Ex-
cept at isolated moments, his "sexual self" fulfills the middle-class and heterosexual
stereotype almost completely He comes out of the masturbatory dark to pursue a
young woman in a most patriarchal way with the aim of making her his "living wife"
by the most established standards of "respectability" and in the most avowedly re-
spectable of high-bourgeois locations and institutions.
The "sexual deviance" of Leroux's phantom, like his "Oriental nature," is as much
costume as substance, it turns out, as much "thrown off" onto him by his observers,
author, and readers as it is sought by the character himself Among the many bound-
aries he crosses, and thus the "confusions of categories" he returns from repression,
is his condition of being, like ~asimodo, so "normal" in his basic sexuality that he
is also made to seem sexually "abnormal" in the most conventionally abhorrent ways.
The line between these supposedly different states becomes impossible to draw
clearly in the original phantom of the Opera, particularly since readers are so torn
between identifying with Erik (as a man genuinely in love with a version of his
mother who feels he must mask his ugliness in his pursuit) and distancing them-
selves from him (as a "degenerate" criminal excessively inclined to act like a Blue-
beard in his too-fatherly attempt at capturing and controlling a younger woman).
What Erik as the "abjection" of multiple, including "normal," sexualities therefore
embodies is the inseparability of the social "norm" for sexual conduct from the un-
certainty of strictly bounded sexual identity, the inclination to masturbate, and the
possibility of homosexuality, along with the potential for parent-child incest that the
middle-class family structure both encourages and forbids, however much these dri-
ves are all placed in "underground" or "unconscious" levels by hegemonic ideology or
the psychoanalytic "science" that arises out of it.
Indeed, Leroux's Erik embodies this confusion of sexual categories twice over.
First he is the particular "abject" figure in Le Fantome onto whom all that is ideologi-
cally "deviant" is cast so that it can seem fundamentally separate from the rising-bour-
geois or aristocratic person (even though it is not, as Christine and Raoul show). At
the same time, he exposes how the aspiration to sexual "normalcy" (Erik's announced
goal) emerges out of a more basic mixture of sexualities present in everyone, albeit
differently configured in each of us, just as Freud was starting to say by 1905 (Freud
1975, 42-51, 57, 98- 101). In being alternately enticing and repugnant for nearly every
other character and almost every reader, Erik reveals that our sexuality can be defined,
not simply by the sexual norm we imitate, but by how much the pursuit of that norm
is related to the possibilities of desire that we feel, deny; long for, carnivalize, abject,
"bury;" demonize, and project as "other" in order to give ourselves the illusion of"nat-
urally" satisfying a "respectable" middle-class standard for sex.
While all of this is occurring, though, Erik is made most strictly betwixt and be-
tween in the ways the novel portrays him as being semi-Jewish (like Svengali or
J,
Dracula [Halberstam, 91-99 two other long-faced, "haggard" figures in black
pointing to the Gentile stereotype of the Jew at the time) -yet also non-Jewish
(since he is Aryan French inclined toward being Scandinavian and Germanic too),
still yet the quasi Semite who is a legal citizen of France, the "foreigner within," who
must be pitied, given some justice, and rescued from a state of near-death (precisely
in the way a somewhat guilt-ridden Leroux sees the skeletal Dreyfus in his reports
from the latter's retrial). Even the phantom's allusions to the Dreyfus affair alone are
unsettled and ambiguous. Dreyfus is recalled in the 20,000 francs a month that Erik
demands from the Opera management-the very figure that Dreyfus was falsely ac-
cused of having gambled away before turning informant for the Germans (Cahm,
21)-while Erik's keeping of explosives as a castigated Semite-figure underground
recalls Emile Zola's famous condemnation of anti-Semitism itself in his "}'accuse"
open letter denouncing the Dreyfus injustice in early 1898. There the best-known
living novelist in France at the time saw the "truth" about the facts in the case and
anti-Semitism as "buried underground" to the point of becoming "so explosive that
the day it bursts, it [is bound to] blow everything wide open along with it" (Zola
1996, 52), exactly as Erik threatens late in Leroux's Fantome. Some of the evidence
used in the wide public condemnation of Dreyfus in 1894 is reinvoked in this novel
to help villainize the phantom, as we have just seen, and the anti-Semitic sentiments
retained by many (and connected to every version of Svengali) were therefore at
least tacitly aroused, however much Leroux claimed to oppose them. Yet Leroux's
phantom is just as clearly associated with the pitiable and unjust "burial" of Drey-
fus-his being made a near-skeleton by his hellish imprisonment (as several editor-
ial cartoons pointed out; see figure 3.2)-and the related concealment of many "dirty
little secrets" in France (anti-Semitism included) soon to explode from repression
out of their undergrounded or "unconscious" locations, as indeed many secrets did
emerge in the Dreyfus case after Zola's diatribe.
"' ~ .... ~· ... -· .

f/·j~
Figure 3.2: "The Sponge," drawn by H. G. Ibels, 1899
The full spectrum of contradictory Gentile feelings that were directed at Dreyfus
and Jews over the course of the 1890s. with Leroux undoubtedly oscillating across
that spectrum himself, is revived by Le Fant6me in all its confusion and ambivalence.
This whole mixture, in fact, is scapegoated onto an Erik already constructed to
prompt inconsistent reactions of many other kinds. Thus fashioned to invoke such
a specific cultural politics, albeit implicitly and subliminally, the original phantom
coalesces, refocuses, and abjects the wide range of troubling contradictions in the
French middle-class consciousness about its positioning of the Jew, including the
French Jew, as "foreign" along with many additional "others." Those contradictions
were visible even in the writings of Zola himself, which could mention, albeit to ex-
cuse, the "distressing monopoly of wealth in the hands of a few Jews" in France (the
sort of monopoly that Erik tries to achieve with 20,000 francs a month), while this
same writer could also argue that the country "will die of anti-Semitism if it is not
cured" of"the hysterical hunt for 'dirty Jews' that disgraces our times" (Zola 1996, 6,
51, 47). The widely admired and widely attacked author who penned "]'accuse" and
other pleas for tolerance, we should note, was the very one whose best-selling his-
torical novel, La Debacle (The Downfall, 1892), gives his readers explicitly "a pack of
base, preying Jews" looting the "corpses" that are left on the roads by the "German
army" on the march (Zola 1985, 378).
A similar ambivalence appears in much of the French medical response to the
sharply increased influx of Jews into France in the 188os and '9os as this migration
appeared more and more in the Paris newspapers and journals that were Leroux's
primary milieu. This massive relocation was initially caused by the Russian pogroms
of 1881 (Goldstein, 535) and became itself one cause, since the immigrants became
competitors for employment, of the renewed virulence of published anti-Semitism
in France that ranged from books such as Edouard Dumont's La France juivre (1886)
to such consistently anti-Jewish newspapers as La Libre Parole (quite prominent in the
1890s; Cahm, n-12). As Jan Goldstein has shown, this new diaspora led to many
new patients for Paris psychiatrists, Charcot among them (Goldstein, 540-41).
These physicians soon found themselves reinvoking the much older image of the
"Wandering Jew" that had already been restored to prominence, long after its Chris-
tian beginnings in the thirteenth century, by Gothic fictions such as Matthew
Lewis's The Monk (1796, trans. into French 1797) and more pointedly realistic news-
paper-novels such as Eugene Sue's LejuifErrant (1844-45). For many Gentile French
doctors of Leroux's day; the Wandering Jew, now in many truly migrating forms,
came to exemplify a condition of "traveling neurosis" that was increasingly regarded
as having been endemic to the diasporic race of Jews for centuries (Goldstein,
540-43). There came to be a widely accepted diagnosis of Jews in the 1890s as in-
ordinately subject to a psychological "law of alternation" that stemmed from this
"traveling insanity" that was thought to be specific to the Jewish race alone; because
of this propensity; Jews supposedly wandered as their psyches made them do, instead
of their wanderings being the cause of their psychological conditions, and this pro-
clivity apparently "made great intellectual powers and cerebral debilities intersect"
in the behaviors of Jewish people (Goldstein, 543, citing the words of Charcot stu-
dent Henry Miege in an 1893 issue of Nouvelle Iconographic de Ia Salpetriere).
Such an intersection, of course, is precisely what is presented in the oxymoronic
mental capacities of Leroux's Erik, alternately an advanced genius and a regressive
child. He has, it turns out, been very much the Wanderer, from Russia to Persia to
Germany; prior to reaching Paris in the 186os. Indeed, with that history he in-
versely echoes Du Maurier's original Svengali, who Orientally and Jewishly takes
his hypnotic methods and anti- French prejudices by the end of Trilby from parts of
Germany to Paris and then from Paris to Russia and points further in the "poiso-
nous East" before he dies suddenly of "apoplexy" (Du Maurier, 296), thus begin-
ning and ending as a Wandering Jew with both unusual genius and "cerebral
debilities." The living versions of such a figure for fin-de-siecle psychiatrists were
viewed by most of them quite ambivalently indeed, either as sadly in need of sym-
pathetic assistance or as doomed to be always aberrant and drifting vagabonds in

Paris-or both at once (Goldstein, 527-29). Such, as we already know, is the dou-
ble-edged attitude of pity and abhorrence with which Christine, the Persian, and
the narrator end up regarding the non-Jewish/Jewish phantom in the final pages of
Leroux's novel (1959, 496-98).
But the problem remains: as much as the original Erik has features attached to
him that invoke anti-Semitic or at least Jewish stereotypes, he is explicitly not Jew-
ish (as opposed to the indicators, say, that Stoker's Dracula might be Jewish; see Hal-
berstam, 91-99, and Malchow, 148-66). He is also definitely more native than
non-native in his chosen country, more Occidental than Oriental, more heterosex-
ual than "deviant" by hegemonic standards, more conventional than perverse, more
person than beast, more alive than dead, and so on (all unlike Dracula, who is as
much one as the other in each opposition). To be sure, the second elements in these
pairs are repeatedly attached to Erik, but only to the point of making it difficult to
say where his "intrinsic" qualities end and those projected onto him by others begin.
The shock in this figure for readers of 1910 was probably not the interconnection of
so many "othered" states of being in Leroux's phantom, particular since the Jew, as
we have seen, had been ideologically connected to virtually all the rest of these "oth-
ered" conditions-and even to the itinerant and mixed-race gypsies (Malchow,
161-62)-for several decades. What was less common by the time of Le Fantome,
given such immediate predecessors as Dracula, was for an "actual-fantastic" novel to
offer a monstrous "other" who is almost completely "normal" for middle-class Gen-
tile readers and even has the most conventional of bourgeois aspirations, yet is also
the locus by association of virtually all the "abnormalities" prejudicially consigned to
Gothic and additional "others" in Europe by 1900.
Confronted with this irony, we can now begin to detail the layers of cultural work
that Leroux's phantom as the "other" and the "standard self" in extremis is able to per-
form by being such an anomaly composed of many other anomalies. In the first
place, to be sure, the "deviant" racial and sexual connections projected onto Erik
without necessarily being endemic to him simply allow him to be conventionally vil-
lainized and outcast when he crosses any lines between "acceptable" middle-class ac-
tivity and any behavior or stance that should supposedly be "thrown off" from it.
Consequently, the temptations toward parent-child incest that the Western bour-
geois family structure half-encourages are apparently dissociated from it in the ways
Erik's relation to Christine (or vice versa) seems to slide over into Oriental-Jewish-
sexual "deviance," however much their relationship continues to remain alarmingly
close to the potentials of the middle-class household, especially as it is viewed by
psychoanalysis.
More radically, though, in the second place, as we have started to see, the novel's
and Erik's continual intermingling of many abjected "abnormalities" with the bour-
geois standard "normality" points to how bound up with all the "othered" beings and
states the supposed "standard self" really is. 4 Given everything we have noted in Ler-
oux's "Opera ghost," that "confusion" means, first, that conventional bourgeois aspi-
ration so needs its "others" in order to establish its difference from them that they
are elements within the definition of that "self" precisely in their supposed exclu-
sion from it, just as in the phantom's exclusion from the Opera above ground while
he also occupies its deepest foundations. Moreover, that link means that the con-
struction of the bourgeois self is always an attempt to distill an illusory "purity'' with
precise boundaries out of an actual foundation of impure mixtures. The need for
such a process proves that apparent opposites by middle-class standards are actually
basic and essential to the individual existence that wants to define itself by abjecting
these roots of itself, much in the way that the Kristevan "identity" strives to cast off,
even as it retains, its relation to the primal state of being inside and outside the
mother. Leroux's phantom, in yet another anomaly overarching the many he em-
bodies, is a half-revealing, half-concealing symbolic manifestation of this continual
paradox that is fearfully but truly basic to the assertions of selfhood that ironically
claim, as Leroux sometimes did, to leave their socially mixed roots and inclinations
behind.
Slavoj ZiZek reveals how this process works in a way that parallels Leroux's novel,
not so much when he writes on Le Fant6me as in his wider cultural analysis of The Sub-
lime Object <?{Ideology. Once we realize that the original Erik's "othered" and abjected
complex of contraries is, in part, a reference to the inseparability of class levels and
states of existence that really underlies the ideology of the bourgeois subject, Zizek's
response to the "Jewish question" in The Sublime Object becomes quite applicable toLe
Fant6me de !'Opera: "Let us examine anti-Semitism. It is not enough to say that we must
liberate ourselves of so-called 'anti-Semitic prejudices' and learn to see Jews as they
really are-in this way we will surely remain victims of these so-called prejudices.
We must confront ourselves with how the ideological figure of the 'Jew' is invested
by our unconscious desire, with how we have constructed this figure to escape a cer-
tain deadlock of our desire" (Zizek 1989, 48). Such a statement, while certainly true
of the indirect allusions to Jews in Le Fant6me, applies equally to such pejorative con-
structs as the "Oriental," the "homosexual," or the "deviant" in other senses. Zizek
shows what Le Fant6me suggests: that contradictory or other abjected states of exis-
tence are not "othered" into races of people or additional kinds of scapegoats only
because some of us refuse to see "what those beings are really like"; witness how
much we hear of what Erik is "really like" in Leroux's increasing revelations about
him. Actually, such throwings down and under occur because any attempted ideol-
ogy of definite selfhood or class-identity, particularly the bourgeois Gentile ideology
(the one Erik is trying to suit), misrepresents, even in claiming to represent, the "an-
tagonism" or "traumatic social division" between groups of people or between indi-
vidual inclinations as different cultural groups and belief systems interpret them
(Zizek 1989, 45). 5 It is out of the competing ideologies generated by this antagonism
that suppositions of identity assert themselves by seeming to cast this conflict off,
abjecting it ideologically as well as psychologically into such "undergrounds" as are
combined in anti-Semitism and Leroux's Erik. To image or articulate this antago-
nism, this welter of contradictory social agendas and positions difficult to separate
or reconcile as they impinge on every person, is to cover it up with an ideological
mask that conceals it, the way Erik keeps doing and high-culture Paris does too. As
a further result, this concealment finally confronts its users with a "deadlock" of their
"desire," since it cannot enable them to behold the complex "object" oflonging and
abhorrence that it both holds out and withholds from access. The bourgeois subject
thus half-sees and is kept from seeing that its claim of certain status is really based
on a pervasive uncertainty (the "antagonism" and the concealment of it) in the his-
torical foundations and sanctions of bourgeois domination.
Capitalist thinking, as Zizek goes on to say and Leroux's grasping phantom
demonstrates, only compounds this irony by adding to it the "contradiction" basic to
capitalism "between the [actually] social mode of production and the [supposedly]
individual, private mode of appropriation" that has to misrecognize and abject its
multiple underpinnings (Zizek 1989, 52). This further "antagonism" allows particular
people, supposedly as entirely private beings (such as Erik), to incarnate and then ob-
scure vast and interconnected social struggles that really make those individuals much
of what they are. The abjection of the antagonism behind this construction, however,
can too easily force the potential disruption of its own act of sublimation, as we have
seen in Leroux's phantom. The contradictions at the heart of this process continually
threaten to declare themselves within the configuration that barely conceals them, as
Erik shows. This tension can seem to be overcome by the self-deceiving Gentile
bourgeoisie only if the layering of inconsistencies in the early stages of this process
can be embodied by such people in a very specific "other" (such as Erik), be it the
"traumatic figure of the Jew" or the "Oriental" or the sexual "deviant" or the carniva-
lesque trickster or the working-class person exiled from the central city Any such fig-
ure can seem both to harbor and to bury the basic contradictions from which a
bourgeois person emerges (allowing that confusion to live as dead, in a certain sense)
while thereby becoming, as such a negation, the "positive condition" upon which a
"higher culture" identity is fashioned by contrast (Zizek 1989, 176). In this way, the
projectors of this otherness, in the words of Thomas Pfau, can "compensate" for the
"unbearable knowledge of their historical instability" the sort of knowledge with
which the boundary-crossing, death-bound, and would-be bourgeois phantom
threatens his observers in Leroux's book (Pfau, 3). They can "represent [such] histor-
ical knowledge" as supposedly the "malignant intentions" of an "other," as though, in
what is then constructed as the "opposite side" of that alterity, there could be "a non-
contradictory and fully aligned 'self' and 'culture"' (Pfau, 3). This is the great illusion
that helps sublimate the real antagonism of basic cultural existence and turns that re-
ality into a distant, cast-down, semi-fantastic horror apparently alien from the
"wholeness" that needs that "other" in order to define itself
Leroux's original phantom does not merely incarnate, though he does rcsymbol-
ize, a series of many "others" projected as "abnormal" by Western and Gentile mid-
dle-class ideology, He is a complex interplay among many different "differences" of
the time, then a revelation that these may be more projections from class-climbing
people (including his author) than realities endemic to any aberrant condition, then
a demonstration of how such projections create "abjected" others that obscure their
ideological roots and purposes, then an exposure of how the "normalcy" that is given
ideological distinction by abjection is therefore connected with what it would throw
off, and then a suggestion that this entire complex of culturally motivated self-con-
struction-by-abjection (all parts of which appear in Erik) is what must be abjected
most and made most anomalous, using the most established "otherings" available, if
the selfhood that is fashioned in this process is to sublimate its multiple and con-
flicted roots with lasting success. After all, as Zizek says, the genuine "object" or
"Real" behind any "sublimating" construction-the "Real" that is an incoherent
morass of social contradictions and the ambivalent psychologies based on them-
must be present in the construct as unrepresentable. It is an object only of desire that
can never be reached through the signs of it and can therefore remain as eternally
incomprehensible as middle-class thinking wants it to be. Consequently, in Le Fan·
tome de l'Opera, "the skull" (also discussed as a symbol by Zizek) does not easily give up
all the ghosts, the sublimations of politics, that it harbors. While calling us toward
94 TilE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
the morass it strives to deny and yet affirms by taking so many otherings into it, the
skull faces us with the "impossibility" of any such representation ever fully revealing
the amorphous social "Thing" that it both claims and claims not to represent (Zizek
1989, 208).
THE REMNANTS OF THE COMMUNE

AND THE ''THROWING DOWN" OF MIXTURE ITSELF
The most obfUscating sublimation of politics in Leroux's novel, however, remains his
and Erik's reworkings of the Paris Commune and the history that surrounds it. In
several ways, the phantom's uses of fragmentary leftovers from the Commune occu-
pation of the Opera in 1871 fail to connect with the attempt at revolution to which
those remnants ostensibly refer. As I noted in chapter one, Leroux's Erik employs
Commune passages and Commune cells left under the Opera entirely for his own
largely bourgeois purposes and very little for Communard aims. He is thus styled as
a throwback to the Commune only as he resembles a potential incendiary or perhaps
a prisoner in Communard dungeons. Even the latter suggestion is both extended and
evacuated by Leroux himself Recalling the sporadic excavations of bones beneath the
Opera and the actual burial of a time capsule there in 1907 (Duault, 68; Wolf 1996,
25n.), he has his narrator in the Foreword toLe Fantome claim, echoing the conclusion
of Hugo's Notre Dame, that workmen digging "in the basement of the Opera" to "bury
the voices of artists [now preserved] on phonograph records" (the main ingredients
of the capsule) have "laid bare a skeleton" which he firmly declares to be the real
corpse of Erik. "It makes no difference to me," this narrator adds, if"the newspapers
say that what has been found here is a victim of the Commune." He is certain that the
"unfortunates who had been slaughtered by the Commune in the caves of the Opera
were not buried in this corner" of the lower cellars, but rather in a repository of
"skeletons" that he promises to (but never does) reveal "far from this immense crypt
in which there had been accumulated, during the siege [of Paris by the Prussians], all
sorts of provisions for eating and drinking" (Leroux 1959, 14-15). Associations with
the Commune are at once loaded onto the skeleton of the phantom, with particular
emphasis on the group's "slaughter" of "unfortunates," and then removed so com-
pletely from it that the remaining substance of the Commune is placed in distant bur-
ial plots. Only certain leftovers of Commune use (the passageways and some cells and
barrels, all now depoliticized) remain for Erik and others, including Leroux and his
frame narrator, to employ for their own quite different ends. To the other anomalies
abjected into Erik's underground is now added one even more conflicted than they
are. Here signifying remnants both carry their historical and political connections
with them and have them forcefUlly withdrawn, so much so that they become signi-
fiers pointedly detached from their original referents.
I want to close this chapter by ferreting out what this extreme contradiction
means. Eventually I want to show how it relates to all the other cultural anomalies
and sublimations in Leroux's book and thus answers the question of why there is
such a combined revelation and obfuscation of history in Le Fantome de I'Opera. There
is, as it happens, no shortage of connections to other "undergrounded" realities in
this novel when we allow the pieces of the Commune it retains to point us towards
the actual conditions in Paris that obtained from March to May of 1871. As Prosper-
Olivier Lissagaray recalls in his eyewitness History of the Commune written shortly be-
fore his return to Paris after the amnesty granted to Commune sympathizers in
1880, the central city became, once the Commune had occupied the Opera, a brief
and last-ditch resurrection of carnival. If he were to lead his readers on a tour of the
parts of Paris controlled by the Commune three days before the final crackdown,
"we" would, Lissagaraywrites, behold a "ginger-bread fair," one even "prolonged" for
a "week." There the "swings move to and fro, the wheels-of-fortune turn, booth-
keepers cry their sixpenny wares, the mountebanks allure spectators, and promise
half their receipts to the wounded" (trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling, rpt. in Roger
Williams, 13). Shortly thereafter, "we [would] visit the numerous skeletons of the St.
Laurent Church, arranged in the same order they were found in, without coffins and
winding sheets" much like the lower-class bones in the catacombes so clearly denied
decent burials and swept outside the heart of Paris; "Is it not the duty of the Com-
mune," we would be asked, "to expose these illegal proceedings, which are in fact
crimes?" (Roger Williams, 14). We would even hear that the old national Opera,
with the Opera Garnier yet to open, would soon be used for a "special performance"
of "Gossec's revolutionary hymn" while "the Revolution mounts the pulpits" in ten
churches filled with choruses of"the Marseillaise," all of which would be used to help
"drive away the musical obscenities of the [Second] Empire" (Roger Williams, 19).
If the time of the Commune and its occupation of Garnier's Opera were actually to
be recalled in the depths of the latter, especially if a skeleton found in those depths
were seen to be left over from the real Commune, the violence and political disrup-
tion revived from that time would almost have to bring along with them the carni-
valesque, the skeletons of the poor in the marginalized "closets" of the Second
Empire's supporters (Haussmann among them), and the reversal of the official
Opera's efforts to keep both revolution and the popular hymn outside its walls as
though such activities were all "farces at a fair."
Yet what is recalled much more in Leroux's uses of vestiges from 1871 is the way
the Commune after its defeat was deliberately made a monstrous demon against
which the bourgeois classes most important to the Third Republic were able to de-
fine themselves from the later 1870s through the turn of the century. Le Fantome's eli-
sion of the Commune's actual politics and circumstances and its greater association
of Commune remnants with military countertyranny and "incendiary proclama-
tions" (Leroux 1959, 354) echo Leon Gambetta's efforts in Paris across the 1870s to
establish the ascent of a "new social stratum" -the "enlightened republican bour-
geoisie" (Elwitt, 54)-by urging this group to draw boundaries around itself in ways
that set it explicitly apart from those "utopians and dreamers, [who have been]
showering the masses with unrealizable promises"; for Gambetta these extremists
can be easily linked in propaganda to "brutal revolutionary action" and "horrible so-
cial wars" -which clearly meant the Commune to readers of the 1870s-that are in-
imical to "working out" what Gambetta saw as the "legitimate consequences of the
French Revolution" (Gambetta, trans. in Elwitt, 54-55).
Armand Duportal made the link by name and added other ideological associa-
tions to it when he regretted his own involvement in a version of the Commune in
Toulouse and castigated all such "exploiters of the basest instincts of the mob" by
claiming that the "Republic wants nothing of these false benefactors, these Jesuits in
trousers, these chanters of Communard and red pater-nosters" (Duportal, Emanciap-
teur, July 21, 1872, trans. in Elwitt, 6o). Eventually even this forced link between the
Commune, "red" communism, and the much older domination of France by the Je-
suits proved not to be enough of a bogey for rising bourgeois purposes. Henri Al-
lain-Targe, for example, well known for opposing all socialist political schemes,
which the Commune was thought to epitomize (especially given Marx's exaltation
of it in an address of May 30, r87r; Roger Williams, 47-57), achieved his strongest
attack by arguing that socialism as advocated by the Commune and others was suit-
able only for Orientals: "Asiatics" or "Moslem and Slavic peoples" (Allain-Targe,
Union republicaine de Paris, August 22, r88r, trans. in Elwitt, 270). Apparently the Com-
mune could even be as heavily and falsely Orientalized as Erik himself if such a de-
vice helped to position it as the evil other of high bourgeois Republicanism, which
Commune space as occupied by Leroux's phantom is in fact made to seem with the
aid of several Orientalist features.
Le Fantome de l'Opera, then, detaches the remnants of the Commune from their
roots, dimly indicating then quickly effacing Leroux's slight allusions to what could
resurface with it, by performing the same scapegoating and abjection of it as we find
in much pro-Third Republic rhetoric. At the same time, however, the novel makes
this setting the primary location for a figure prone to very unstable class-shifting
who also flees from (while using) Commune attachments toward some of the very
attitudes that turned the Commune into a whipping-post to distinguish themselves
from it. What is repressed in Leroux's underground and Erik's actions in it is not
simply the truth about the Commune, which survives in decaying pieces, but the ex-
tensive process of trying to use it to distance and overcome it. The great secret in the
relation of the bourgeoisie to the Commune after 1871 turns out to be the former's
attempt to dissociate the latter from the grounds and history of the ascendant classes
while still maintaining it as basic to that history precisely in the bourgeois attempt
to keep the Commune's actual complexity buried. The self-displays of the Third Re-
public are constructed over the remains of the Commune, which therefore still
haunt the depths of the surface structure, because the "new order" is attempting to
deny-or at least submerge-some of the very "materials" out of which it is built.
like the primitive "degenerate" levels of being, the masses displaced by Hauss-
mann's rebuilding of Paris, the history of carnival, the "Oriental," the sexually "dif-
ferent," and the Jew, the Commune is an important "other" within the bourgeois
ascension on which that ascent depends and from which it is partly composed. The
Third Republic was born, we should recall, out of the nearly anarchic crucible in
which the Prussian-German invasion of 1870 gave rise to both the Government of
National Defense and the Paris Commune, and both of these were violently dis-
placed in 1871 by the brutal massacre of May 21--28 ordered by the Committee for
Public Safety ensconced at Versailles (Roger Williams, r-8). Yet the kind of"other-
ness" in Leroux's Erik that recalls all of this is effaced and devalued in favor of only
the remnants of the Commune's destructiveness. That is because the removal and
abjection of everything that the Commune involved politically, including a forget-
ting of the conflicts between the various factions in it, are essential to the bour-
geoisie's illusion of complete triumph over all the "bad" social conditions and levels
(all symbolized by Erik) that it strove to throw outside of its central position in the
Third Republic. This is the reason the Commune is present in Le Fantome mainly as
a signifier of nothing more understandable than violence and incarceration.
A similar reason also explains why the phantom is less a Communard in that hol-
lowed-out setting and more the mere vestige of the Commune that many observers
of the time, including Leroux as a reporter, saw in the isolated anarchists that peri-
odically threatened the Third Republic (see Leroux in Le Matin, Juin 30 and Aout 4,
1894). Such figures could nearly always be construed as aberrant murderers with
quite private and irrational agendas rather than practitioners of a political program
that could, as the Commune did, govern the capital city, however briefly Anarchists,
like the phantom seems to, can haunt the ascendant classes with the threat of iso-
lated violence, but not (the upper classes fancy) with the overthrow of the modified
class structure that the three-month life of the Commune threatened and could still
threaten if it were kept too thoroughly in the cultural memory. Under that ideolog-
ical pressure, all that Leroux's Erik retains of the "incendiary'' Commune's energy are
its now empty fragments and the reduction of its revolution to sporadic anarchist as-
saults. These are the signifiers of obscure and finally insignificant referents not ulti-
mately dangerous, it would seem, to the supposed core of the social fabric. The
threat of the Commune and of Leroux's readers perceiving the actual dependence of
the bourgeoisie on it can thereby be made both present and absent at once.
By going to such an extreme, this device helps Le Fantome simultaneously suggest
and veil the many absurdly mixed and "othered'' conditions, the several interactions
between states of existence ideologically opposed in Western culture, that are gath-
ered together in Erik and the underground he occupies. His anomalous positions as
Communard/isolated anarchist, bourgeois/Communard, and Commune relic/social-
climbing entrepreneur, we should now recall, join a train of a great many oxymoronic
states from highbrow/lowbrow to Gentile/Jewish that Leroux's phantom seems to
contain, yet at other times to deny. Why largely middle-class audiences are drawn to
such a figure-so extremely like and unlike them--can now be explained from what
Leroux's novel shows us in all its abjections of states that have been "othered" from
cultural norms. The original phantom and the characters who resemble him show us
how we all construct ourselves or at least how groups of us fashion our class's stan-
dards: we clearly do so out of conditions that mix different cultural and economic lev-
els, yet against which we nevertheless strive for ideological coherence, usually the
consistency of a certain class-scheme for identity For a bourgeois person of late nine-
teenth-century France, the "in-mixed'' circumstances from which self-definition pro-
ceeds include a recent history of successive revolutions from 1830 to 1871, conflicting
ideologies of social order and sexual "normality," increased racial mixtures (especially
in Paris) spawned by French imperialism, the extreme violence of civil wars and an-
archist attacks on several occasions, and an increased potential for slipping back and
forth between different class standings, all of which Gaston Leroux had witnessed or
experienced himself On some level, rising-bourgeois perspectives thus have to feel
and fear, perhaps more than ever, the "unbearable knowledge of their historical in-
stability," the sense that their "antagonistic" surroundings and connections (such as
their dependence on lower-class labor or foreign cultures) are precisely what they do
not want to accept as the real grounds of their constructed beings. An ideological
method must therefore be found whereby all the "instability" from which such peo-
ple actually come is placed outside them and thus abjected into an "other," which then
turns out to contain, as Erik does, both the dreaded mixtures and the process of self-
fashioning-by-othering that has just been performed. At the same time, this effort
will not accomplish the repression for which it aims unless the resulting "other"
masks that entire "reality" from view, ultimately as much as Erik's remnants of the
Commune obscure the complex "antagonism" that the Commune really was.
It is not, we should note, that Leroux was a post- Commune radical exposing the
duplicities and abjections of his own class so as to overturn its supremacy He was, in
fact, steadily committed to "a stable bourgeois system fortified against both aristo-
cratic reaction and social revolution" (the goal of the Third Republic; Elwitt, 10) and
thus opposed to communistic movements (clearly like his narrator in Le Fantome).
Hence he caustically expresses his fear in the 1920s that "if these imbeciles [such as
the Bolshevik radicals] persist, they will force us to choose between two tyrannies,
that of Caesar and that of the concierge," between whom Leroux himself would "love
Caesar more" if there came to be no middle ground (quoted in Lamy, 18). Meanwhile,
though, he saw himself as a balance of tendencies in his writing. "I have taken on the
skin of an honnete homme [the bourgeois standard self]," he had written by 1904, "and
[I] am at the same time an assassin" not entirely unlike the incendiaries about whom
he both worried and reported (Leroux 1985, 7). Well aware of the problems and
hypocrisies in class-climbing and class-descent because of his own life, he chose to
confront his middle-class readers with horrifically disguised versions of their own ab-
jections, a great many of them in Le Fantome, as though those very readers could and
should be haunted by the contradictory conditions and fears that surrounded them
even as they strove, like himself, to rise beyond such levels of awareness.
In doing so, Leroux was once again echoing the Baudelaire he so much admired,
even though he was aping him in a less fully rebellious way This double-sided, Janus-
faced posture is very like the one Baudelaire gives his own persona in Les Fleurs du Mal
when his "I" faces his confessed attraction toward urban middle-class pleasures along-
side his caustic attacks on their hypocrisies and admits how he wounds himself inver-
bally "killing" others. In this "vorace [indeed, voracious] Ironie," Baudelaire writes,
Je suis Ia plaie et le couteau! [I am the wound and the knife!)

Je suis le soufflet et Ia joue! [I am the breath and the cheek!)
Je suis les membres et Ia roue, [I am the limbs and the wheel (of the rack),]
Et Ia victime et le bourreau' [And the victim and the killerjexecutioner!]
Je suis de mon coeur le vampire, [I am in my heart the vampire,]
--- Un de ces gran des abandonnes (One of those greatly outcast]
Au rire eternal condamnes, [To laugh eternally (as) condemned,]
Et qui ne peuvent plus sourirel [And who has no power to smile any more!)
(Baudelaire, 30-31, 11. 21 -38)
Leroux's milder reenactment of this paradoxical stance is even reinforced by the fact
that the word "assassin" is originally from the Arabic, as Leroux the semi-Oriental-
ist would likely have known. In Islamic history as reconstructed by the West, in fact,
just as the O:iford English Dictionary tells us in identifying the word as coming into Eng-
lishfrom French, "assassin" or hashshiish (changed into the Latin hassisis) originally
meant "hashish-eater,'' especially as the latter had come to be applied to those Is-
lamic sectarians of the Middle Ages who intoxicated themselves with that drug just
before killing targeted enemies of their sect. Baudelaire as poetic "assassin" was also
(in)famous for his drug-taking "decadence," and Leroux was probably recalling that
fact even as he half-echoed Les Fleurs du Mal, itself replete with exoticized temptations
from "I 'orient" (see Baudelaire, 6-9), all as he both characterized his authorial self as
honnete hommejassassin and projected aspects of that posture into his Orientalized,
decadent, semi-vampiric, and incendiary fontome.
LEROUX'S SUBLIMATIONS Or CULTURAL POLITICS 99
To a considerable extent, then, though in a limited way, Leroux reworks the per-
sona and the posture Walter Benjamin has seen in the writings of Baudelaire: that
of the Parisianfldneur (the "stroller" or "one who walks to and fro in the city"; Ben-
jamin 1973, 44). After all, this figure-or this style of relating to urban life-
knowingly echoes the tendencies of Edgar Allan Poe, Stevenson, the detective, and
the reporter who resists "the division of labour which makes ~)eople into specialists"
(Benjamin 1973, 48, 51, 40-41, 54), all of whom Leroux did emulate (along with
Baudelaire) in some of his postures, disguises, reportage, and fiction. Such attitudes
combine a fascination with the crowds, marketed objects, and showplaces of the
urban landscape, an "inexhaustible wealth of variations" (37), with an ironic bal-
ance of distance and penetration that is "not blind ... to the horrible social reality''
underneath even as these "horrors have an enchanting effect" on the jldneur as well
(59-60). This distinctive interplay of being "intoxicated" and "withdrawn" (59),
somewhat like the position of Erik as Le Fan tome presents him, is part of what allows
the honnete homme and "assassin" to coexist in Gaston Leroux and to manifest itself
in his style of quasi "fantastic realism" and its ability to suggest the "really mon-
strous" within a big-city crowd of conflicting "private interests" ( 63). The Leroux
we still read even shares Baudelaire's awareness of the immense appeals and dan-
gers of an increasingly "commodity" culture (55). In his canniness about what sells
in both newspapers and popular fiction, Leroux virtually lets himself (and finally
his phantom) become a commodity, the "viewpoint" of which the observantjldneur
feels and expresses; concurrently, though, as in Erik's dark loneliness, he also ren-
ders the "isolations" of people frustrated by the continual distance between their
private desires and the public market for commodities that seems to promise satis-
factions it can never fully provide (Benjamin 1973, 59). "The more conscious he be-
comes about his mode of existence" in such a city, Le Fantome suggests about its
author, "the more he is gripped by the chill of the commodity economy" even as he
continues to feel and depict its attractions in Paris (Benjamin 1973, 58). Ultimately,
to be sure, this journalist-novelist (less often a poet) would not let himself become
as conflicted and outcast a figure as Baudelaire in fulfilling his jldneur role, in part
because Leroux had the commodity longings and needs of the gambler brought on
by the encouragement of"fraudulent speculation" in an era when Haussmann had
transformed Paris on the basis of heavy investment in "finance capital" (Benjamin
1978, 159). Leroux had an interest in remaining a marketable commodity and
therefore in not abjecting the "horrors" of modern alienation through any image
other than a "veil" of continuing intoxication (1973, 6o), which Le Fan tome de !'Opera
certainly is. Even so, he built just enough of a counterpoint between attraction and
ironic critique into this novel, stemming from just enough of the "assassin" and the
jldneur in the stance of its author, that the focus came to be on a figure devoted to
the standard bourgeois aims as much as any character or reader while also symbol-
izing a great many of the undersides that these very aims usually make us forget.
He went so far with Erik, in fact, as to make him incarnate that particular striv-
ing and its intimate connection with blurred, rather than strict, cultural boundaries.
Now even his own slippage between honnete homme and "assassin" was effectively pro-
jected onto his title character, as well as villainized to the point of concealment when
taken to the extremes of the phantom's most violent acts. In making the line be-
tween bourgeois "right" and "wrong" so difficult-and yet, from a distance that a
reader can adopt, so easy-to draw, Leroux even today allows us both to face and to
keep at arm's length the mythic process of middle-class self-construction, so much

so that he gives us an enactment of that process that we can choose either to see or
to avoid. We keep coming back to this story; increasingly as a kind of myth, in part
because it presents us with some key features of our most basic cultural mythmak-
ing, the production of bourgeois identity, in the title character and the way the other
characters-and readers-are encouraged to relate themselves to him. Along with
those revelations, however, because of Leroux's own ambivalence about the
"assassin" side ofhis efforts, we also see the myth worked out so completely and con-
ventionally that all the mixtures in its "political unconscious" can be obscured, as en-
tirely as the real Paris Commune can be kept away from our gaze and demonized as
simply a violent "other" in the way Leroux employs Erik's "way of the Communards."
Surely one method of obscuring the political is the subject of the previous chap-
ter: the schemes of psychoanalysis so much used in Leroux's novel and its adapta-
tions to keep the myth of identity-formation alive within the schemes of bourgeois
ideology. Yet a fairly recent modification of psychoanalysis itself can help us see how
far Le Fantome moves and refuses to move from the Freudian surface that it undeni-
ably uses. I refer to Nicholas Abraham's notion of "the phantom" in his and Maria
Torok's 1970s "complement" (as they put it) to Freud's psychology of repression.
There is indeed a parallel between this concept and Leroux's "phantom of the
Opera," though not the one that strict psychoanalysts might expect. The original
Erik cryptically symbolizes and masks numerous social antagonisms to the point of
concealing his own (and his author's) history for nearly all of the novel. In doing so,
he anticipates Abraham's sense that many evasions in the "cryptonymic" words spo-
ken, partly from the unconscious, by psychoanalytic patients are actually indicators
of a "phantom," ghostly signs of a "gap that the concealment of some part of a loved
one's [earlier] life [has] produced in" the speaking subject (Abraham, 75). This con-
cealment for Abraham is usually the obscuring of an unspeakable social condition,
such as the illegitimacy that Leroux so rarely acknowledged, that one of the speaker's
immediate ancestors (in this case, Erik's author, perhaps) has attempted to eject
from his or her consciousness. It is this kind of "unspeakable fact within the loved one"
that the speaker buries yet again by introjecting a masked memory of the ancestor
(the "phantom") and then turning that introjection into a concealing crypt that ap-
pears as such in both the speaker's preconscious and the speech that half-reveals it
(Abraham, 76).
This reencrypting of what another's unconscious has attempted to hide, to be
sure, can be taken in a narrowly Freudian direction, even in readings of Leroux's
book, if the reader chooses to stay at a "mental" or just "familial" level. Though there
is little clear evidence of this kind in Le Fantome, a reader might force it to suggest a
dark, perhaps incestuous secret in the younger lives of Christine's or Erik's fathers,
ones that might explain the former's amazing vocal gifts or the latter's "defective"
birth as a figure of death. But what is most unspeakable and unconscious in what we
know of the fathers of Erik and Christine in Leroux's novel is what happens in and
behind their class shifts. On the one hand, there is the oscillation between sheer
mason and entrepreneurial contractor in Erik's (and Leroux's own) father, who is
otherwise not mentioned much in the text. On the other hand, there is the sudden
decision of old Daae, upon the death of his "invalid" (or impotente) wife, to sell his
peasant's land-holdings and "seek musical glory [for Christine and himself] in Up-
sala"; there "poverty" forces him back into the state of a fiddler wandering "from fair
LEROUX'S SUBLIMATIONS OF CULTURAL POLITICS IOI
to fair" or seeking for a bourgeois patron, and he consequently begins a seesaw exis-
tence between country and city life that finally makes people "not comprehend any-
thing about this violinist who roamed the countryside with a beautiful child who
sang so well," a role the phantom replays in several different disguises (Leroux 1959,
97~99). As the novel does with and for Leroux, the phantom and Christine extend
and surpass these "incomprehensible" movements across class levels in their ances-
tors to the point of sublimating them, even leaving them behind, partly through the
"sublime" figure of the "Angel of Music," a death's head in disguise, within the Paris
Opera. Thus, the way patients do with Abraham's "phantom," they repeat and ob-
scure the ghosts of what are already paternal misrepresentations, in which the par-
ents-and now their descendents even more-strive to mask the social divisions,
slippages, mixtures, and "antagonisms" in their own foundations. The "phantom"
that haunts the main characters in the original Fantome (and clearly Leroux and his
readers too) is like Abraham's because it is the skeletal vestige of some boundary-
crossing efforts prior to them that have already led to repressions and abjections de-
signed both to contain and to conceal the multiple origins of the class-climbing self
Even if the encrypted ancestors in Leroux's novel do not reveal some one primal sin,
the combined revelation-and-masking of them in the behaviors of their descen-
dants, like Erik's use of Commune leftovers, does point to the contentious sociopo-
litical history underlying both generations and works to obscure that history
completely all at the same time.
To that extent, Abraham's process of"the phantom" epitomizes the sublimation
of many levels of politics in the original Fantome. As we have seen Neil Hertz say,
"sublimation" half-faces potentials for "disintegration" -such as the crossings or
even deaths of the cultural boundaries used for marking off identities-but it does
so to produce a "figurative reconstitution" (the Angel of Music masking the skull or
Leroux's phantom concealing some of his author's own social anomalies) that fi-
nally does not refer clearly to the dissolutions in what has become the sublimation's
political unconscious. Moreover, the main goal of this fictional reconstitution is to
produce a claim of "stability" by a person or a group "at some other subject's ex-
pense" (certainly at Erik's and somewhat at Christine's, Raoul's, and the Persian's).
This aim must be accomplished by rendering that "other" as highly anomalous and
thus as able to contain the tangled history projected onto it. Yet this same process
must "raise the subject up" from such levels, thereby obscuring them, so that the
subject can pretend to be independent from the "abject" that really harbors its
mixed social foundations. Just as Adorno has suggested, that very "escape" is in-
creasingly the aim of bourgeois opera as its history progresses, so much so that it
works to become "a blind and unselfconscious system" in which "all [the] ostracized
or outside," characters in it lose all connection to real "social conflicts" (Adorno
34 ~36). Now we can understand how and why this novel reveals as much of the cul-
turally repressed as it does alongside the efforts of its main class-base to conceal all
of that too. Gaston Leroux, in this novel more than anywhere else, gives roughly
equal force to both pulls in the tension of sublimation, allowing us to see the pos-
sibilities of class, sexual, racial, and political instability that faced rising bourgeois
consciousness and even "grounded" it, while at the same time-like opera-reen-
acting the process of "othering" and demonizing that permitted that same con-
sciousness to achieve the ideological obfuscation it often had to have. We can
choose which tendency to emphasize, just as the various adaptations have. The
I02 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
"assassin" in Leroux's mixed writing posture does not finally undermine the "honnete
homme," who also asserts himself But Le Fantome does leave us where Leroux the
near-jldneur was when he wrote it: poised at the fulcrum where we can either face or
continue the abjections and deceptions by which middle-class identity is formed in
the sublimated cultural politics of the urban West at the beginning of the twenti-
eth century and for all the decades since.
CHAPTER fOUR
The Ghost of the Counterfeit

LEROUX's FANTOME AND THE
CULTURAL WORK OF THE GOTHIC
THE GOTHIC AS A SITE FOR

CULTURAL AB]ECTION~AND COUNTERFEITING
By now, we should not be surprised that Gaston Leroux's conflicted social vision and
its disguised exposure of cultural "abjections" appear most fully in a novel deeply
rooted in the "Gothic" tradition. Over the last two decades, the study of the Gothic
as a mixed and unsettling mode in fiction, theater, film, and other media has in-
creasingly revealed how the archaic spaces and haunting monsters that loom before
us in performances we call Gothic provide methods of"othering" that have definite
ideological and social, as well as psychological, functions. In the Gothic from the
later eighteenth century on, as David Punter has shown, "the middle class" often
does what we have just seen Leroux do in Le Fantome: it "displaces the hidden violence
of present social structures, conjures them up again as past, and falls promptly under
their spell" with feelings of both fear and attraction towards the phantasms of what
is displaced (Punter, 418). The Gothic, well before Leroux adopts it, enables a grow-
ing bourgeois hegemony to be both haunted by and distanced from the "hidden bar-
barities" that have helped make it possible (Punter, 419)~and hence the repressed
uncertainties it feels about its own legitimacy (as in Abraham's "phantom") ~by pro-
jecting such anomalies into the horrors of apparently old and alien specters, build-
ings, and crypts.
Indeed, as Anglo- European and American Gothic fiction progresses from The
Castle ojOtranto (1764), The Mysteries ofudolpho (1794), The Monk (1796), and Wieland
(1798) to Frankenstein (1818), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), jane Eyre
(1847), Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), The Picture ofDorian Gray (1890), Dracula (1897),
and The Turn ofthe Screw (1898), it keeps confronting the middle-class reader, and its
own class-shifting protagonists, with relocated, "othered," monstrous, andjor ghost-
like forms of the contradictions (and hence the potential dissolutions of identity)
that threaten~and threaten to expose~ the unstable and mixed foundations of the
very cultural positions that authors, inhabitants, and readers of the "Gothic" want to
secure for themselves. This encounter is constructed so that the middle-class subject
can be kept from beholding these contradictions directly by the extreme strangeness
104 Tl!E UNDERC;ROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF TilE OPERA
or ghostliness of their Gothic reincarnations (see Moretti, I04-108). Just as Jose

Monleon has said, the Gothic and its derivations have enabled the bourgeoisie in the
West to be "plagued by vague fears" in a way that lets that class "postpone" or at least
couch "the unveiling of naked truth," particularly as the Gothic both spectralizes and
"relegat[es] to the other side of an ideological barrier all the elements that [have]
haunted [bourgeois] existence" (Monleon, 6r). As part of this postponement, we
now see, the Gothic has helped generate, especially in the French fontastique andfrene-
tique from Nodier on, the depictions of mental levels and depths that characterize
Freudian psychoanalysis, which has consequently become an effective lens for read-
ing the Gothic, at least up to a point. Yet this veneer, for all its helpful linkage of ar-
chaic settings and specters to infantile impulses still seeking fulfillment in "uncanny"
ways, arises out of and manifests a much broader cultural process whereby the
Gothic struggles with all the kinds of "otherness that I [ie] next to" the supposed
"core of the bourgeois world" (Monleon, 34).
By the end of the nineteenth century, in fact, the Gothic has gotten to the point,
in a Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a Dracula, or a Picture cfDorian Gray, in which the ghost/ mon-
ster in a tale of terror persistently "condenses various racial and sexual threats to na-
tion, capitalism, and the bourgeoisie [all] in one body" (Halbcrstam, 3). Convincing
recent scholarship has shown us that the Gothic by 1900 "produc[es] the negative of
the human" for public consumption-particularly in ghostlike incarnations of col-
lapsing sexual, racial, national, and class boundaries--so that "these novels make way
for the [re]invention of [a cultural 'norm': the essential] human as white, male, mid-
dle class, and heterosexual" at a time when the certainty of this standard is being
called into question by rapid changes in the urban centers of Europe and America
(Halberstam, 22; see also Showalter, Tropp, and Hurley). The psychological "abjec-
tions" that take place in these works, where Gothic monsters do often embody the
pre-Oedipal state of being half-inside and half- outside the mother that Kristeva
emphasizes, therefore symbolize processes of cultural abjection too. They manifest
"throwings off" of betwixt-and-between social, racial, and sexual conditions-or
sometimes conditions of slippage between the human and the non-human (the
states called "abhuman" in Hurley, 3-4)-onto a seemingly grotesque "other" who
also is made to seem "thrown under" the normative human existence that the dom-
inant classes keep striving to assert. When Le Fant6me de !'Opera enacts this kind of ab-
jection and well as the psychological kind, as we have already seen it do with Erik as
its site of the "abject," it is performing that process within a specific genre basted
together from other genres that has always been torn between "high culture'' and
"low culture," has been engaged in this kind of symbolic "technology" for over a cen-
tury prior to I9IO, and has become a tool for cultural abjection especially by the time
Leroux takes it up. Insofar as he is fearfully and enticingly "sublime," as Christine
calls him, then, Leroux's phantom reenacts the Gothic sublimity and sublimation of
terror first defined by Edmund Burke and Horace Walpole in the 1750s and '6os
(see Morris and Mishra). He acts out, in the words of Zizek on the "sublime object"
created by capitalist ideology, the simultaneous embodiment and concealment of a
"traumatic social division" or "antagonism" at the heart of Western culture as it is
distanced by those who wish to pretend that they arc free of it and therefore trans-
form it into an ominous but impenetrable depth, a fictional "otherness" far less
threatening than the actual social conflicts and blurrings of cultural boundaries that
are abjected in it.
THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT !05
What may seem surprising in the face of all this, however, is the way Leroux in-
termingles so many Gothic devices in Le Fantomewith his more modern emphasis, de-
tailed in my Introduction, on reality as already counterfeit and simulated, even at the
level of objects and people directly perceived. It is his narrator-persona who flatly
writes that in "Paris, one is always at a masked ball" even when one is not at an offi-
cial bal masque. Such a suggestion of signs pointing only to signs, so much that there
seems to be nothing beyond sheer simulation in Leroux's world, appears to leap well
beyond the Gothic combination of the realistic and the supernatural that Leroux re-
plays in his fantastique actuelle style and his "romance of reportage." As it happens,
though, even his most pointed references to counterfeit and simulation turn out to
be precise extensions of an element basic to the Gothic tradition, one that goes all
the way back to Walpole's first "Gothic Story" and continues throughout the history
of the mode. For Le Fantome to find the countryside already layered with texts of past
stories or to see the deepest foundations of the Opera as occupied entirely by simu-
lations of simulations of the already counterfeit is for this novel to echo the extreme
fakery that pervades The Castle cfOtranto from its false initial announcement of itself
as a translation by a nonexistent person of a fifteenth-century Italian text that never
existed (Walpole, 1-5) to the haunting of Otranto, not just by an emblematic skele-
ton but by the fragmentary and enlarged pieces of an effigy, a "figure in black mar-
ble" on top of a tomb (Walpole, 18), and the walking specter of a portrait on the wall,
all of these figures of simulated figures instead of actual bodies (23-24; see also
Hogle 1994).
In point of fact, there is really no major work in the Gothic tradition since Wal-
pole that is not in some way "grounded" in the counterfeiting of aging artifacts or
bodies and of the present conflicts that often hide behind them. The influential
Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s, as Terry Castle has shown us, are dom-
inated by entirely artificial, even "spectralized" versions of reality, to the point where
all her books call attention to the abjection of the physical by a bourgeois ideology of
her own time deceptively bent on seeing the private mind as an independent entity
reading only its own thoughts, the "spectres" of its experience (Castle, 237-51). Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, of course, presents the counterfeiting of a human being from
fragments of dead bodies, as well as from previous alchemical texts that described
medieval experiments with humanoids. This layering of fabrications reveals how nu-
merous fears in the culture of the author's day-conflicted anxieties about the "ad-
vances" in science and technology, the inseparability of birth from death, the control
of female reproduction, the industrial revolution, the growth of the "giant" working
classes, the dependence of the English middle class on the colonizing and immigra-
tion of the racially "other," and the alienation of artistic "creation" by market-driven
"production," to name a few-can be projected and abjected into a fake person made
from decaying ingredients that both acts out and obscures those very fears (see Hogle
1998a). By the time such Gothic devices reappear in Poe's tales, it has become im-
possible to distinguish what is monstrous from what is projected and hence to estab-
lish any hard-and-fast difference between the normative "self" and its abjecting
"others." Consequently. "true" and "counterfeit" reference cannot be distinguished in
the Poe-esque Gothic any more than the "natural" and the "supernatural." Madeline
Usher is encrypted alive when her brother represents her as truly dead, and the title
character in "Ligeia" (1838) seems to the narrator to reappear in the body of his de-
ceased second wife. Gothic counterfeiting is now the animation of "external" and
dead matter by the desires of the projecting self to a point at which we cannot be sure
that Ligeia has ever been more than a projection, even a sexist and racist one, fabri-
cated from many different and older perceptions by the "I" of the tale (see Poe,
234-40, and Dayan). When we reach Henry James's The Turn cj'the Screw in the his-
tory of the Gothic, that tale-within-a-tale so (in) famous for leaving us undecided as
to whether the narrating governess projects the ghosts she sees or confronts specters
really outside her, we find counterfeiting and projection so bound up with each other
that the fake images presented by old mansions, ghosts, or apparent "monsters" are
repositories of abjected levels of the self that are simultaneously psychological and so-
cial, internal and external enough that these realms cannot be separated, even as "re-
ality" seems to offer nothing more than simulations of past formations.
To be sure, the European-American "Gothic" at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury is by no means limited to Jamesian plays of ambiguity in which "inside" and
"outside" are hard to distinguish for the reader. Yet even when there are more old-
fashioned "monstrous others" in the Gothic of the fin de si!xle, as there certainly
come to be in Le Fantome, the entirely fake world of the Gothic is just as apparent as
ever-indeed. even more so by the 1890s and early 1900s. There is no way for Oscar
Wilde's Dorian Gray to "throw off" those inclinations in his body-language (from
the homoerotic to the class-crossing) that threaten his carefully constructed identity
but to place them within the body in a portrait of him and thus fake their divorce
from his seemingly stable (and apparently conventional) public appearance, itself a
fabrication. Bram Stoker, in his turn, goes on to extend the Gothic penchant for sto-
ries within stories by composing Dracula entirely out of coded journal entries, letters,
transcriptions of recordings, descriptions of photographs, telegrams, and newspaper
articles or advertisements, the very sorts of technological simulation that the jour-
nalist Leroux would use (if somewhat differently) in Le Fantome de !'Opera. As Jennifer
Wicke has argued, this emphasis on the emerging modes of communication at the
turn of the century points to "the mechanical replication of culture" as one of the
processes, along with the vampire, by which life is sucked out of all living beings in
Stoker's book (Wicke, 476). It is as though modern forms of representation for the
growing mass market were indistinguishable from vampirism. Both transform their
targets into the merest husks or signs of themselves, "the extraction out of an essence
[by] the act of consumption" (the production of living death), in a process that in-
creasingly generates "evacuated social languages" to be the simulations of people by
which we know each other (Wicke, 472, 478).
The Gothic by 1900 consequently makes us see, if we will look, that the aes-
theticism of Dorian Gray and even the undecidability of what is mental or external in
The Turn cf the Screw may be extensions of the increasing turn in Western urban life
toward the greater distancing of an already unattainable "Real" by technologies of
simulation that point primarily to earlier simulations, to objects as always already in-
terpreted and mediated over and over. Opera, so tied to the origins of the Gothic (as
noted in chapter one), has arrived at much the same point by this time, certainly in
Paris. Virtually every newly mounted production at the Opera Garnier from 1875 to
1910 is the "creation" of a well-established work in a manner more concerned with
enlarging and gilding-or richly "ghosting" -tradition than in changing the basic
perceptions of the abonnees who pay for such illusions of cultural continuity (see Mer-
lin, 221. 60-71). In carrying out the tendency in the Walpolean Gothic toward the
recounterfeiting of what has become a set of counterfeit or hollowed-out effigies,
THE GHOST OF TilE COUNTERFEIT !07
both Gothic fiction and opera as Leroux finds them by 19IO face him and his read-
ers quite forcefully with their barely disguised renderings of how much perceptible
existence has turned into the signs of signs, the "undead" condition of human un-
derstanding as based very much on cultural forms that are always the "ghosts" of
their supposed objects.
We can say, then, that Le Fantome de l'Opera emphatically continues the Gothic tra-
dition both by employing quasi-antiquated settings and ghostlike figures to abject
middle-class anxieties and by extending the foundations of both the Gothic and
opera in its simulation of the already counterfeit, especially the greater drive in fin-
de-siecle Gothic and opera toward confronting the "real world" as already buried be-
hind layers of representation. At the same time, though, it is too simple to say, even if
it is true, that Le Fantome reenacts and develops these fundamental drives in the Gothic
that had been accelerating in such fictions for a century and a half To say only that
much is not to explain, for one thing, how simulations of counterfeited reality, and
even of counterfeit money (as in Erik's notes from the "Bank of St. Farce"), provide
sites for the bourgeois abjection of anomalous states of being, both in the Gothic gen-
erally and in Le Fantome de l'Opera specifically We also have yet to understand the wider
cultural processes that the Gothic carries out as it progresses from its initial obsession
with recast counterfeits to its reinscription of runaway simulation in Dracula and Le
Fantome at the dawn of the twentieth century. We still must wonder why there has
been such a long cultural life for particular Gothic tales ranging from Frankenstein to
Dracula and Le Fantome, given the fact that these are the "horror stories" most explicitly
concerned with artificial, even media, representation as well as the abjection of mul-
tiple states of being by individual persons and whole classes of people.
We must therefore look more closely in the rest of this chapter at the history of
the Gothic and the fakery on which it is founded as both develop from the time of
Horace Walpole (and even before) to the belle epoque of Gaston Leroux. In that
process, we can uncover the social, political, and resulting psychological aims that are
increasingly pursued in this ghosting and re-ghosting of counterfeit representation.
What we will ultimately find is a partial awareness and partial avoidance in Gothic
counterfeits of a growing Western sense of "the Real" as increasingly inaccessible,
fearsomely yet also desirably so, an "allegory of death" in which "natural substance"
is almost entirely "replace[d]" by "synthetic substance" (Baudrillard, 71, 52). This
understanding, in turn, is one consequence of a Western capitalist economy based
increasingly on debt and the concealment of debt and on the attendant struggle to
fabricate an autonomous whole "self" out of what is really an indebted, fractured,
multifarious-and hence abjected-state of existence. We need the Gothic and its
fakes as Le Fantome carries them out so that we can keep reproducing a delicate bal-
ance in our ideologies of self-construction between acknowledging and obscuring a
continual pursuit of death-the death of all immediacy-at the core of our modern
quests for "identity" and "culture."
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GOTHIC

AS THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT
"Gothic" (or really neo-Gothic) fiction and theater, we discover, did not begin as just
a display of counterfeit figures, even though all its foundations (from opera seria to
I08 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TIT£ PHANTOM OF TJIE OPERA
"Gothic revival" architecture) were clearly re-presentations of earlier representa-

tions already refracted through intervening interpretations. Particularly in Walpole's
Castle ojotranto, his nco-Gothic house at Strawberry Hill, and his Gothic play The
Mysterious Mother (written in 1768 but never staged prior to his death in 1797), the
flatly "imitation Gothic" of the eighteenth century is a ghost, or belated specter, of
earlier counterfeiting that is echoed within many features of the modern genre that
Walpole was the first to name the "Gothic Story." As I have shown in detail else-
where (Hogle 1994 and 1998a), the Walpolean Gothic text was based, the way Wal-
pole acknowledges in the Preface to his Second Edition ofOtranto (Walpole, 8-u),
on a source from a century and a half before that was itself laden with counterfeit-
ings that had definite cultural assumptions behind them. The Castle ojOtranto is very
much rooted in Renaissance tragedy and especially in Shakespeare's Hamlet
(r6oo-r6or), the play from which several plot elements in Otranto are directly
adapted. In Hamlet, the Ghost of the former King, Prince Hamlet's murdered father
(the principal model for Walpole's mobile effigy and portrait), is both affirmed and
doubted as authentic from its first appearance on (Hamlet 1.4.39--44), and the Prince
confronts his "incestuous" mother with the cultural status of the Ghost's image at
Shakespeare's time when he faces Gertrude with two portraits, which he calls the
"counterfeit presentiment of two brothers," one of old Hamlet before his death and
the other of the usurper-murderer Claudius (3-4-54). Here Hamlet exploits the fact
that "counterfeit" in the England of r6oo could mean any "representation" as well as
a "false coinage" (which of course Claudius is as a king, compared to old Hamlet, in
the eyes of Shakespeare's angry hero).
Such ambiguities are possible in Shakespeare because of what Jean Baudrillard
has shown us especially well in Symbolic Exchange and Death when he surveys the chang-
ing assumptions that have underwritten the Western uses of signs from the Renais-
sance through the late twentieth century Baudrillard, with a great deal of evidence
to support him in his own account and those of several others (Stone, Greenblatt,
~int), reveals the view that signifiers have the qualities of "the counterfeit" to be
the most widely accepted conscious or preconscious belief about how signs refer
from the time of the Renaissance to the stirrings of the industrial revolution. Think-
ing in terms of counterfeit signification for a Shakespeare, Baudrillard writes, meant
viewing all signs the way Hamlet views the Ghost and its portrait: as beckoning us
toward "the appearance that [the image] is bound to the world" by some "natural"
reference points ('Til call thee Hamlet,jKing, father, royal Dane," cries the Prince to
the Ghost at 1.4.44--45) yet also as harboring only the "dream" of"reference to the
real" (Baudrillard, 51). It is because of this double attitude that Hamlet sees the
ghost as appearing to him "in such a questionable" form (1.4.43) that it provokes
doubts about the deceptiveness of a "pleasing shape" after it has vanished (2.2.596).
Representation as thus hopefully true but possibly false, and hence as "counter-
feit" even in an "accurate" signifier, emerged in the European Renaissance among
the educated classes, most famously in that era's promotion of personal "self-
fashioning'' through a reworked classical rhetoric (see Greenblatt). After all, this pe-
riod, especially in England and France by the sixteenth century, saw the first wide-
spread effulgence of a truly mercantile or early-capitalist economy and the
assumptions it both demanded and allowed. Literate Europeans felt that they were
leaving behind, though they still had longings for, the era of what Baudrillard calls
the "obligatory sign," a more medieval episteme in which "assignation is absolute and
THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT 109
there is no social mobility," so much so that the accouterments and behaviors con-
nected with a cultural position gave signs an "unequivocal status" that was not trans-
ferable from a person supposedly "bound" to his or her social station (Baudrillard,
50). By Shakespeare's day social status and the signs of cultural capital, including the
rhetoric associated with it, came to be viewed as more transportable from person to
person depending on one's economic success and acquisitions. "With [this] transit
of values or signs of prestige from one class to another" came a "proliferation of signs
according to demand" without their being fixed to people by birth. The result was
both a denial of the "obligatory sign" and yet the "counterfeiting" of it (since "the
modern sign [alwaysJdreams of its predecessor") in transferences of what had once
been status-bound to those not originally born to it (Baudrillard, 51). Signs could
therefore serve, as they do in Hamlet, both as partially empty recollections of former
statuses and as announcements of "natures" that could seem recoined, rhetorically
transformed, or simply masked (counterfeited into a "questionable shape") by new
displays of social position that reused the signifiers of older ones.
It is this regressive/progressive drive in the counterfeit of the Renaissance that
the eighteenth-century "Gothic," more blatantly than other discourses that pre-
ceded or surrounded it, took to greater extremes over one hundred and sixty years
after Hamlet was first staged. Indeed, the very label, "Gothic," that this new mode
adopted to classify itselflooked back to a term in art history that was a Renaissance
counterfeit from the start, one that was referential both nostalgically and fraudu-
lently. The first use of "Gothic" (or gotiche) as a label for religious and other archi-
tecture, and sometimes modes of living, in the Middle Ages was an invention of
Italian artist-scholars in the neo-classic Renaissance of the early 1400s. They em-
ployed the term to misname several medieval building patterns, now viewed as too
low-class or "rustic" compared to Greco- Roman architecture, as though these styles
were all connected with certain non- Roman tribes-the "Goths" or "Visigoths"-
who actually had little to do with what was attributed to them (Frankl, 259-60). By
the time Walpole borrowed "Gothic" for Otranto and additional purposes, in other
words, the label was the shifty recounterfeiting of a Renaissance counterfeit that was
itself transferred from one realm of reference to another. With such a foundation in
rhetorical displacement, "Gothic" became an immensely mobile term used to desig-
nate different undesirable "others" at different times, from "primitive" European
warlords and "idolatrous" old Catholics to the very dark and foreign Moors. That
rootless freedom in the term's ongoing fakery eventually allowed it to represent an
authentic and pious "medievalness" taken by Walpole and others to refer to "the an-
cient English constitution (see Tucker, 149-55, Madoff, and Kliger). "Gothic," it
turns out, is the ultimate in floating signifiers vaguely haunted by a perpetual long-
ing for a history that has long since faded into ruined memorials. Walpole's attrac-
tion to the Gothic, he tells us in his letters, is to the relics of "centuries that cannot
disappoint one," because "the dead" are now so disembodied, so merely imaged, that
there is no reason to "quarrel with their emptiness" (Walpole, x). Consequently,
Gothic is the best counterfeiting of earlier counterfeits, and therefore the best va-
cant repository, into which post- Renaissance Westerners can project their "other-
ings" as though these existed more in the past than they do in the present.
At the same time, though, the Gothic's recounterfeitings in the eighteenth cen-
tury and since, exploiting the transferability of the unbound counterfeit sign in
Shakespeare's time, have made some crucial shifts that further uproot the nostalgic
IIO THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
references in the Renaissance "original." By the 1760s the image or fragment of that
nostalgia has taken over the position of the past referent in the neo-Gothic sign;
hence the "grounding" of "Gothic" signifiers, as in Le Fantome, mostly in other signs,
the reference of Walpolean ghosts to portraits or fragmented effigies, or to earlier
authors' ghosts (such as Shakespeare's), rather than "natural" persons or their sta-
tuses. The supposed medieval "endogamy" of sign and status, or self and "natural"
origin, has been reduced to a trace of itself, left to be both dimly longed for and al-
most entirely, though never quite, thrown away The counterfeit, or more precisely
the Renaissance counterfeit of the medieval (as in Hamlet), has now become the "sig-
nified" of the Gothic signifier. Hence the Gothic is haunted by the ghost of that al-
ready spectral past and thus by its refaking of what is already fake. From Walpole's
Otranto on, the Gothic reflects, on the one hand, a longing for the supposed securi-
ties of the "obligatory" medieval sign now fading almost completely behind the sur-
face of Renaissance representations (including the neo-classic Baroque that is recast
in the Paris Opera) and, on the other, an opportunistic manipulation of old symbols
for a newer class-climbing acquisitiveness (from Manfred's in Otranto and Walpole's
in writing "Gothic Stories" to Erik's in Le Fantome and Leroux's desires as his "Opera
ghost" reflects them).
The "Gothic revival" and the resulting Gothic tradition, we must recall, occur in a
world of increasingly bourgeois "free market" enterprise that tries to look like a
process sanctioned by much older imperatives yet also strives to regard the old icons
as empty of meaning whenever they threaten to inhibit post- Renaissance acquisition
in the marketplace. No wonder E.]. Clery sees Walpole's Preface to the Second Edi-
tion of Otranto-the one in which he trumpets how "desirous" he is to leave the "great
resources" and "powers of fancy at liberty to expatiate through the boundless realms
of invention" (Walpole, 7)-as assuming "infinite vistas of commercial expansion"
after its writer had spotted a "gap in the market" and had come to see "fancy" as a
form of "wealth" able to be invested and recouped in the "commodity" of "fiction"
(Clery, 65). The Renaissance counterfeit's hesitation between nostalgia for the me-
dieval self-and-status link and the transfer of older signs of status from the people of
one class to the social climbers of another: all this has become the "Gothic" hesitation
between counterfeits of the old nostalgia (signs of an "emptiness") and recoinings of
such bogus archaisms into commodifiable signifiers able to "expatiate" (or "spead
out" rootlessly) in a market circulation where "Gothic" fictions can now be repro-
duced from a new mold composed out of the re-ghosting of ghosts.
Now we have a further explanation for one of the additional points made quite
often in the recent study of the Gothic: the fact that it oscillates more obviously than
most modes of fiction between "conflicting codes of representation or discourses"
(Miles, n), especially between European symbol-systems that are fading into the
past, as they were starting to in the Renaissance (the priestly, the aristocratic, and
the land- or estate-based), and the ideological schemes that have gained dominance
in the West from the eighteenth century on (the capitalist, the bourgeois-oriented,
the mass-market mercantile, and the industrial and post-industrial based on me-
chanical reproduction and the distribution of duplicated products). These tugs of
war in the Gothic are all rooted in the fundamental and original tensions basic to its
being born from the ghost of the counterfeit in the 1760s. Pulling in one direction
are this ghost's regressions toward the remnants of an enticing but long-lost past,
and pulling in another are recastings of those empty images determined to make
THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT III
them into cultural capital from which individuals can appear to form "free" new
identities in an arena of acquisitive circulation and profit. As a result, virtually all the
Gothic novels and plays written in the wake of Horace Walpole look with some nos-
talgia towards some fake medieval-to- Renaissance reference-points (to the Paris
Opera and the vestiges of old-style rural or provincial life, in the case of Leroux's Fan-
tome). At the same time, they always show at least some awareness that this kind of
nostalgia is based on inauthentic signs of forms that have lost their original mean-
ings. Retrospection in the Gothic is really connected to motives of capital acquisi-
tion that seek to reproduce the simulacra of the past by more modern means to
extend the boundaries of the present self's quest for upward mobility (one of the
principal drives, as we have seen, in the original phantom of the Opera and in every
Paris Opera-goer whose undersides he partly represents).
Gothic fiction, from Otranto toLe Fantome, thereby plays out, with some disguising
of it, the ongoing terror of our historical passage into a mechanistic system of sign-
production and reproduction that is both promoted by the bourgeoisie and out of any
one person's control. This way of relating signifiers to other signifiers, more than to
signifieds or referents, constantly threatens to alienate and misconstrue the "free self"
it claims to underwrite in its resistance to decaying systems of self-definition that
now seem as attractive as they do outdated (as argued in Kilgour, 31-43). In the
Gothic's fictional version of such a world, every longing for older sureties of refer-
ence, however ideological they really were at their own time, is pulled into capitalis-
tic market-exchanges of signs for signs and the consequent effort to represent a now
more privatized "inner" self in "outer" figures (such as Frankenstein's manufactured
creature, Dorian Gray's picture, and Dracula or Erik in the newspapers) that are re-
produced artificially and circulated by those mechanisms through and beyond "pri-
vate" spaces (see Henderson, 38-58). For Leroux's Fantome to carry out the tendencies
in the Gothic most connected with that mode's ghosting of the counterfeit is conse-
quently for this novel to reenact for its readers one of the longest-lasting ideological
conflicts in middle-class Western life: the problem of"grounding" the self in vestiges
of older constructions (which seem the most secure foundations of identity at first)
when the more modern use of these vestiges makes them the merest signs in a world
of future-oriented marketing that carries them off into relations among other signs
(such as the various letters, reports, and accounts recirculated in Leroux's book that
reflect and interpret the phantom's interior actions far outside him). Even the in-
creasing confusion of the "internal" and the "external" or the "unreal" and the "real"
in the Gothic, in which Le Fantome participates by filling Erik's deep "unconscious"
world with imitations of what are already replicas, is an understandable extension of
a highly conflicted awareness that the supposedly bourgeois "private self" is actually
defined by the externalities (old and new) that it strives to possess as its own while
they remain in public circulation and frequently adrift from their previous founda-
tions. The attraction of the Gothic and particularly those versions focused on the
construction of the self from seemingly antiquated signs outside it, Le Fantome in-
cluded, stems from this mode's enactment and obfuscation of a quintessentially mid-
dle-class quandary-that the self is defined "within" itself only as it is constituted by
signifiers "without" -in the Gothic's acceleration of the movement in Western signs
from the Renaissance counterfeit to its eighteenth-century ghost.
Moreover, it is just this multilayered duplicity in the "Gothic" ghost of the coun-
terfeit that allows Gothic writing to "abject" cultural and psychological anomalies
II2 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
onto it. Half-inside, half-outside conditions can be "thrown off into" and "thrown
under" ghosts of counterfeits as much as they have been because the counterfeit and
especially its ghost, as processes of signification, are already betwixt-and-between
interactions of regressions toward and distancings of the past. On the one hand, the
counterfeit, even at its earliest point in the Renaissance, offers a belated nostalgia
for a self"bound" to its others (its statuses), as though thatlink were "natural" at one
time. This nostalgia is very like a child's "outside" longing for the oneness that seems
to lie back "inside" its mother. On the other hand, there is the countering drive in
this same counterfeit, and even more in its Walpolean ghost, whereby selves or signs,
like infants only partly "inside" mother as they emerge from her, strive to throw
these past bonds away. to break "outside" them (albeit with lingering memories of
them) toward a "free market" quest for self-definition in relationships with older, or
newer, signifiers (patterns of words, forms of money. modes of dress, etc.). In this
progression, the always already counterfeited past turns more and more into the
locus of its own death, as the Ghost of Hamlet's father was already doing. The body
of the maternally oriented "original" becomes the empty sepulcher of what it was,
the fragmented effigy or the walking portrait in The Castle oJOtranto. In that way death
itself behind the vacated sign, as in the skull-face of Walpole's hermit or Leroux's
phantom, becomes the main point of reference, the new object of nostalgic desire.
At the same time, this fading of the supposed original relation between signifier/sig-
nified or inside/outside makes the increasingly "floating" signifier or self carry its
otherness-from-itself with it like permanent baggage. As in Leroux's Erik, the self as
articulated by its signifiers is left desirous of but torn from a quasi-maternal origin
now irretrievably dead and dimly visible only in other figures taken as substitutes for
it. The self or sign in a Gothic world of ghosts of the counterfeit, then, remains
haunted by the mixture of insidejoutside in its nature and the death that is at the be-
ginning, as well as the eventual end, of that nature, even as the same figure moves to-
ward a seemingly "open" economic circulation with other signs and selves in the
social arena. The very qualities in the ghost of the counterfeit sign, it turns out, are
those of the Kristevan abject, which is the locus of indistinction between inside and
outside and life and death that is "thrown off" to give the self the illusion that it can
"freely" construct its identity from publicly available signifiers as they combine with
each other.
To be sure, the signifier/self in the post- Renaissance world wants to increase its
mobility toward a status, like the social ascent sought by nearly all "Gothic" charac-
ters, that seems to be promised by capitalist conditions supposedly divorced from
the old "obligatory" links between signifiers, statuses, and people. The self and any
signs it employs for self-definition, though, always carry with them some memories,
however dim, of their earlier-and sometimes most primal-interconnections with
older contexts. Among these are the worlds of the obligatory sign or the maternal
body. which include what was most closely attached to both, such as Erik's mother's
bedroom furniture. Those contexts now seem sublime (as vastly and gloriously reen-
gulfing), on the one hand, and frightening (as actually multiple, logically inconsis-
tent, threatening to reabsorb the emergent sel£ and bound up with the death and
dissolution of the past), on the other. Particularly fearsome, alongside the birth -state
of being half-inside/half-outside and half-deadjhalf-alive, are the conflicting pulls
on the emergent self in its cultural context, including the different classes or races of
people in a person's or sign's early environment or ancestral history and tugs of war
TilE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT II3
between waning and rising belief-systems or ideologies at the time a person lives.
These inconsistencies must seem to be "thrown off" and "thrown down" if a self or
symbolic scheme is to seem to rise out of them as both distinctive (giving off the il-
lusion of self-made self-containment) and "free" (able to be defined by new rela-
tionships among circulating signs without being too tied to fading associations).
Since what is thus abjected cannot entirely disappear, being basic to the self and the
sign-systems under construction at any time, it must be "thrown" into a site of sig-
nifiers that appears to be entirely "other" than the "normal" self or symbolic order,
a locus that seems monstrously anomalous "over there" so that the self and its signi-
fiers can seem genuinely coherent "over here."
This process is the one by which the ghost of the counterfeit operates just in car-
rying out its own drives, most visibly in "Gothic" writing. It thereby makes possible
a symbolic pattern in which Western Anglo middle-class abjections can find a genre
exactly right for carrying out their displacements and self-concealments. What has
to be displaced or "monsterized" to ensure a rising bourgeois illusion of selfhood and
cultural dominance may change some from the time and the British orientation of
The Castle cj'Otranto to the era and the highly French concerns of Leroux's Fantome. But
none of the abjections enacted in these Gothic works or others would have been
possible without the development of the neo-Gothic from the ghost of the coun-
terfeit, the cultural contradictions played out in it, and its later permutations. Cer-
tainly the original Fantome could not have used the skeletal and carnivalesque Erik,
along with everything else sequestered with him in his "underground," to displace so
many psychological and cultural fears or inconsistencies of its time and audience un-
less there had been both the Gothic mode and the cultural history of Western sign-
making that this mode reenacts.
FROM THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT

TO SIMULATION AND THE SUBLIMATION OF DEBT
The extreme emphasis in Leroux's novel on the simulation of what are already sim-
ulacra, however, much as in the cases of Wilde's Dorian Gray and Stoker's Dracula, re-
flects a definite change in the Western sense of the counterfeit since Horace
Walpole first played with the "Gothic" possibilities of its ghost. By 1910, as Bau-
drillard has shown us, the implicit Western understanding of signs had passed
through two later stages after the sign viewed as counterfeit had quietly controlled
much of European thought from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries.
Each of these built on the assumptions in the counterfeit signifier, and both were in-
cipient in the counterfeit's fading into a ghost of itself by the time the "Gothic" ap-
peared. The stage into which the counterfeit finally dissolved, the one that became
dominant with the effulgence of the industrial revolution in the early nineteenth
century, was the "entirely new generation of meaning" that Baudrillard sees as con-
trolled by the assumptions of the "simulacrum." Here every sign was regarded as a "re-
production" struck off from a mechanically produced mold (itself a ghost of the
ghost of the counterfeit) whereby the labor behind every product was "killed" as part
of "the extinction of original reference" within a potentially infinite "line" of "ob-
jects [that were now] indistinct simulacra of one another" in an order of"serial pro-
duction" (Baudrillard, 55-57). That phase then gave way; at the turn of the
II4 TilE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
nineteenth into the twentieth century, as in the many forms of media based on
media in Dracula (Hogle 1997b), to the era of the sign as drifting toward sheer "sim-
ulation," to signifiers referring only to other signifiers without even the possibility of
an original industrial mold. Though a very weak nostalgia for "obligatory" reference
still remained as an inclination within such thinking, the actual "ground" of all
meaning became the "hyperreal," "that which is always already reproduced," a "code" of
hegemonically accepted relations among signs in which the image "anticipat[ed]
every possible reality" that could be projected by it instead of reflecting any sort of
reality prior to the "operational simulation" of signifiers differing from and defer-
ring to other signifiers (Baudrillard, n 57-58, 67).
For Baudrillard this progression has hardly meant progress in a positive sense. He
laments that our own recent fin de siecle of still greater simulation in a computer-
generated hyperreality has subjected us to a "programme" now "hardwired into our
cells," in which "social control" is exercised and all our responses predetermined by
word-processed and digital "prediction, simulation, programmed anticipation and
indeterminate mutation, all governed ... by the code" outside of anyone's power
(Baudrillard, 58, 6o). Le Fant6me de !'Opera, by this account, in extending the develop-
ment of the sign as counterfeit to the point of suggesting an entirely simulated "re-
ality" as its base, is reenacting the movement of the Gothic and Western humanity
in general toward both facing and abjecting the life-threatening horrors of what
Marshall McLuhan has called "the mirage of technology" (Baudrillard, 84, n. I).
Such a vision is indeed accurate to the original Fantome, as I read it, but it applies
in certain very particular ways and for very specific cultural reasons. On one level, of
course, Leroux's choice of the Gothic mode-and especially his indebtedness to the
construction of Stoker's Draw/a-conscripts his efforts into the drive of the Gothic
already under way, in which it was increasingly turning its ghosting of the counterfeit
toward obliquely confronting and displacing the modernity of an already simulated
existence. On another level, too, Leroux is quite directly transferring into his novel
the sense in his "newspaper culture" that what it was depicting in its reports on life in
Paris, even outside the Opera, was really layers of fakery, with a confusion of cultural
levels at their foundation instead of the sharp social distinctions that people were try-
ing to achieve in their styles of public behavior. In February 1896, just three months
before the same paper made much of the chandelier falling at the Opera ("Five Hun-
dred Kilos on the Head of a Concierge," Mai 24, 1896, 1-2), Leroux's own Le Matin
gave the primary columns on its front page (on February 12, to be exact) to an edito-
rial by "Etincelle" (the "spark") on the complete dominance of"dissimulation" in the
"world of life, politics-everything" (February 12, 1). It is especially "today," the
"spark" laments, "that man, under the pretext of disguising himself, reveals himself"
as able to express virtually anything but "the truth"; hence "All is disguise" even behind
the facades of public posturing (February 12, 1). Indeed, the hypocritical suppression
of actual carnivals on the streets of Paris by this time is all the more ironic in the face
of the "perpetual Carnival," the pervasive and everywhere "comic" putting on of
"masques," that is being carried out at every moment, yet is not recognized as such,
precisely by those bourgeoises who place themselves beyond the carnivalesque (Feb-
ruary 12, r). While attempting to seem highbrow rather than lowbrow, the classes ad-
dressed by Le Matin are actually adopting the strategies of what they take to be "low,"
all the more so in disguising from themselves the process of mask-wearing they use
and its foundations in carnival. When Le Fant6me's narrator intrudes enough to say
THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT II$
himself that in "Paris, one is always at a masked ball," it is this newspaper context and
the awareness it reflects to which he is immediately referring. That reference be-
comes even more complete when Leroux reinforces such a claim by having his mask-
ings at the Opera, on and off the stage, rest on a deep, albeit "phantom," foundation
of carnivalesque deception, counterfeiting, and simulation.
The passage from the assumptions of the counterfeit to those of the simulacrum
and simulation, however, is surely most evident in Leroux's book when Erik contin-
ues to blackmail the Opera for 20,000 francs a month-a huge debt for the man-
agement to pay to keep up appearances above ground-and then starts to turn bank
notes in that amount, already a kind of counterfeit, into an re-presentation of the
notes that goes beyond the deception of mere counterfeiting by openly simulating
the fakery that counterfeit money usually conceals. This process, particularly as it
suggests an interdependence between the surface and the depths of Paris's main in-
stitution of "high" culture, points to an abjected anomaly in urban high-bourgeois
existence, and a very "Gothic" one at that, that lies at the core of the dominance and
fear of simulation in the West by I9IO. For the rising-bourgeois or aristocratically
mercantile readers or characters of Leroux's novel, there must be both a visibly
demonstrative, prodigious expenditure on the accouterments of high culture, as dis-
played in the above-ground splendors of the Opera, and an invisible indebtedness of
great size too, a continuous outflow of expenditure without any promised return on
the investment. The latter is most visible when the phantom keeps drawing large
sums from the managers for a vague protection of the Opera from his own destruc-
tion of it and gives back clearly simulated bank notes that explicitly acknowledge
their falsity even as they come from and reveal an "underground" economy quite dif-
ferent from the one on display. There is a deep economic secret, in addition to other
kinds, at the root of the threats to the Opera from deep within the Opera. The pri-
mal counterfeiting (or phantom-izing) of that secret is very like the deceptive trans-
fer of inheritance and the way it is concealed in many previous Gothic novels
starting, as we have seen, with The Castle cifOtranto. This secret and the multileveled,
obscured economic history on which it is based are part of what Leroux's phantom
embodies in both a spectral and a monstrous form. Le Fantome's fairly direct exposure
of a world that never really leaps beyond forms of simulation turns out to be bound
up with a sublimation of debt that is basic to the culture that announces itself in the
Paris Opera of r880-1910.
As Leroux's novel renders it, after all, the Opera deceives the public and the
newspapers about its economic, political, and cultural status. True, it presents itself
as the perfect balance in the center of culture between some government subsidies
and considerable private investment, including the large subscriptions of the aristo-
cratic and high-bourgeois abonnes. But the Opera Garnier was built, we should re-
member, as part of the Haussmann city plan that rested upon a "flowering of
[financial] speculation" from "playing the stock exchange" to the "gaming" of deficit
financing (Benjamin 1987, 159). Hence the Opera, by Le Fantome's account, sustains
itself to a great extent by secretly "paying off" a creditor: a carnivalesque artisan,
reminiscent of the skulls of the buried lower classes, who is also striving to duplicate
the high-bourgeois norm of public and private life by masking his many class-
crossing, "foreign," and "abhuman" elements behind a facade that requires massive
infusions of capital to support its fabrication. What has been placed supposedly out-
side the standard Paris economy turns out to be what that economy is connected to
n6 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TIT£ PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
the most. Even the French, Gentile, heterosexual, patriarchal, and supremely civi-
lized nationalism that the Opera promotes in its exclusions or transformations of
Germanic as well as Oriental culture is based, at the same time, on its economic ex-
changes with a possibly German, dimly Jewish, Asian-influenced, potentially bisex-
ual or multigendered, and even troglodytic "other" haunting the deepest
foundations of the whole enterprise. The quasi-Gothic, backward-looking, neo-
Baroque features of the Opera are thus quite ironic in their faking of the mytholog-
ical Greco- Roman past. That is not simply because they are very new refabrications
of the very old, but because they are grounded, even more than the settings of pre-
vious Gothic novels, in a misrepresentation of their real financial roots. Those roots
actually involve a modern and self-concealing indebtedness on the part of the dom-
inant classes to levels and beings that are supposed to be divorced from those classes
and their cultural centers.
Consequently; when the new Opera managers first try to detect the presence of
the phantom in Box Five on Tier One, they do so in the setting of a dark and empty
theater that is Gothic in both its ominousness and its mockery of its visitors. There
the "cloth that covered [the seats of the orchestra] looked like a tempestuous sea
whose blue-green waves had been instantly immobilized by the secret order of a
giant" hidden from sight, and the ancient mythic "figures" in the ceiling fresco
painted by "Lenepveu" (a piece later covered up by the Chagall mural that is there
today) apparently "grimaced, laughed, jeered, scoffed at the apprehension of Mssrs.
Moncharmin and Richard," even though "these figures were ordinarily quite seri-
ous" (Leroux 1959, 126). There are a "secret" hidden cause and a jaunty irony here,
both of which seem to change the attitudes and gazes of the painted demigods on
the ceiling. Such anomalies betoken another level of understanding now watching
the managers from beneath the sea of cloth and through the eyes of the myth-
figures so reminiscent of the animated portrait in The Castle '![Otranto.
This level starts to declare itself in an earlier scene that has motivated the man-
agers' visit to the vacant theater. By that previous time, the new directors have con-
fronted two ironically gracious messages, one from "F. de 1'0." (le Fantome de
!'Opera's own initials for himself) and the other from the retiring managers. These
documents first present a bill for the amount of back "pension" owed by manage-
ment to the phantom-233,424 francs still unpaid, almost a year's total-and then
reassert the "ghost's" claim of "exclusive" rights to Box Five as per "article 63" in a
standing "book of instructions" to which the new directors are legalistically referred
(Leroux 1959, 74-75). When Moncharmin and Richard ask for commentary on
these notes, they turn to their petit bourgeois "secretary; Monsieur Remy;" whore-
ceives 2400 francs annually from them to be a troubleshooter outside of the sanc-
tioned Opera budget and "could be discharged without compensation at a moment's
notice, since he is not recognized by the [official] administration" of the Opera
(Leroux 1959, 76-77). The Gothic mystery suggested by the features and gazes of
the empty Opera is tied, at least in part, to continual payments, debts, and agree-
ments that are "off the books" and "under the table." Erik and Remy are parallel fig-
ures for Leroux in two senses: first, that the phantom's off-the-record "pension" for
a year is exactly ten times the amount ofRemy's hidden salary and, second, that both
have arrangements with management essential to what the directors can keep pre-
senting to the public yet are repositories kept entirely out of the public eye (until
now) into which the indebted managers are continually pouring unofficial funds in
THE GHOST OF TilE COUNTERFEIT II7
substantial amounts. There can be no clearer indication that the fakery in the world
of Le Fantome is secretly but intimately connected to an economy of self-masking in-
debtedness outside of all sanctioned exchanges that makes all simulations in the
novel the covers for a potentially endless drain of funds that does not promise clear
returns beyond the maintenance of appearances.
Such a deceptive economy within the supposed national economy was increasingly
understood in Leroux's Paris by the time he wrote this novel. In 1910 itself, the same
year that daily circulation for Paris-based newspapers reached five million compared
to the two million in r88o (the year of Le Fantome's story), Francis Delaisi published a
treatise attacking the typical press rendition of the nation's finances as the govern-
ment presented them (Zeldin I: 55). He revealed that, contrary to common opinion,
half of the national budget was funneled "to the state's contractors and suppliers of
armaments and public works." Even at that level the actual laborers who made these
products were paid very little of those funds, to the point at which their higher-class
employers and the latter's investors were actually taking in "three-quarters of the tax-
ation" paid by everyone (Zeldin r: 55). At the same time, the Germany that France
was publicly castigating even in the 1890s and right into World War I was less obvi-
ously becoming one of Paris's most important trading and financial partners, not un-
like the way the Germanized phantom is granted a great deal of money by the
anti-Germanic Opera. In fact, the "French invested about three times as much in
Germany as Germans did in France," owning around "Boo million francs' worth of
German shares" by 1914 compared to nearly half that amount in German investments
in French enterprises (Zeldin 2: rr8), a disproportion similar to the one between the
Opera's massive "pension" to the phantom and his quite limited personal investment
in the Opera above ground.
All this while, too, the individual haut bourgeois Parisian was often living a dou-
ble life in which one announced financial base hid a series of others very much
needed, as Leroux felt his gambling was, to underwrite the accouterments of"distinc-
tion" sought in a rising bourgeois "style oflife" (Zeldin I: 15). A case in point was the
Senator Humbert who also ran the very Le Matin for which Leroux worked. Hum-
bert's 1890s "expenses were 64,200 francs a year" on average, while his official "par-
liamentary salary was rs,ooo." The amount he drew off from Le Matin (r8,ooo a
year) did not make up the difference without his also being paid (or paid off) by an
armaments firm, conflict of interest notwithstanding, during the years he was "rap-
porteur of the war budget" in the National Assembly (Zeldin r: 56). The rising Paris
bourgeois of this time whom both Leroux and his Erik tried to emulate in their sim-
ilar and different ways was virtually always in arrears (like most Gothic villains from
Walpole's on) living beyond the means of his most manifest and sanctioned source
of income-and thus constantly engaged in either paying off or collecting debts, pri-
marily by way of unofficial incomes that were paid to him by others (as Leroux was
paid by Humbert) who were involved in the same crafting of appearances over a
foundation of indebtedness to "unacceptable others."
As both the principal creditor and himself a debtor in this novel, Leroux's phan-
tom thus occupies yet another symbolic position with many layers, this time in the
way the book exposes and disguises the economic roots behind a world of simulation.
He is indeed a suggestive composite, as well as a "deadening," of many abjected work-
ers, foreigners, class levels, and carnivalesque multiplicities to which the rising French
bourgeoisie is deeply indebted without wanting to admit it. Even so, as we have noted,
rr8 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
he also symbolizes more nakedly than most the bourgeois drive toward turning these
connections into, and thus concealing them behind, a relentless agenda of social
climbing, one that both hides its real foundations and equips its surroundings with
furnishings that grant it cultural capital by being imitations of other counterfeits.
When Erik first ushers Christine into his subterranean and imitation drawing room,
he surrounds her with "embalmed" versions of bourgeois bouquets of flowers that are
themselves based on the blatant simulacra of rural nature sold on the boulevards of
Paris. Like his other country-bourgeois or more class-climbing (and musical) fur-
nishings, these accouterments become as "stupid" or frightening as they seem to
Christine because their fakery grounded in other fakes is made so apparent-and
hence the nature and process of bourgeois aspiration are more directly revealed by
being so artificially buried deep in the foundations of the modern city. It is no won-
der that Erik, the figure who is thereby made the scapegoat for all these contradic-
tions in bourgeois desire, is able to turn the already counterfeit, and thus disguised,
nature of money into an explicit representation of that counterfeiting (the "St. Farce"
banknotes). His repositioning of all the objects that surround him has in fact uncov-
ered the counterfeiting in them too, and these furnishings therefore all come to seem
more explicitly fake once they are in his "underground," even though they are not
much more artificial there than they are on the surface of the earth.
At the same time, Erik, his author, and many of their readers work to mask this
entire underpinning of rising middle-class "reality" by presenting those "under-
grounds" as ostensibly grotesque and villainous, far removed from the class behavior
and interconnections they actually depict. This process, it turns out, is part of what
is being enacted when Erik replaces Opera bank notes with what is obviously "play
money" printed by himself, a potential incendiary instead of some sanctioned au-
thority In this way; the phantom extends the illusory bourgeois claim that counter-
feiting happens only among anarchists and other criminals. This suggestion had
already been advanced at the time by Emile Pouget, editor of the anarchist paper Le
Pere Painard from 1889 to 1894, who explicitly asked his followers "to counterfeit
bank notes" as one way of decimating the economy and bringing on a revolution
(Rudorff, 158-59). By apparently following Pouget's orders, Leroux's Erik confirms
that anarchist stereotype and thereby hides the many connections of counterfeiting
with bourgeois aspiration. All the while, though, he equally reveals that this very de-
sire, because of its efforts both to conceal its basis and to define the acquisitive self
by demanding that it attach itself to signs of other signs, leads to counterfeiting
(with its nostalgia for "real" reference) being irreversibly transformed into sheer
simulations of counterfeits (as in the notes from "St. Farce"). There may finally be
nothing beyond simulation in Le Fantome de !'Opera because the middle-class aspira-
tions driving and acting out the French economy demand it even as it commands
them, however much all of this is done under cover, simulated rather than unveiled.
The indebtedness that permits bourgeois ascent must be deceptively obscured (in-
deed, sublimated and abjected) for the ascent to occur, and what the aspiring bour-
geois must draw toward himself or herself are signifiers that are always versions, like
the Paris Opera, of already processed and reinterpreted symbols from a vacated past
or a present that fakes and reconfigures pieces of that past. Leroux's Erik, by em-
bodying all of this at once, shows how these drives are inseparable. He thus reveals
how totally sublimation and simulation are interdependent by 19!0, especially in the
way Le Fantome Gothically incarnates the specter of endless debt and the incessant ac-
THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT II9
quisition of fakes as much of what haunts the haute bourgeoisie from the earliest
years of the twentieth century
The phantom of the Opera is thus not the hoarding monopoly capitalist that Bram
Stoker's Count Dracula tries to be (Stoker, 56; Moretti, 91-94). Instead Leroux's Erik
is a locus of the continual drain of debt hidden by middle-class aspiration and a skele-
tal figure for emaciation by that debt, albeit behind a mask. He aims at duplicating the
"figure" of the "normal" bourgeois above ground and so reveals the debt that this fig-
ure actually accumulates and expends, precisely by seeming to be the extreme "other"
of the bourgeois "norm." Like Dracula, the original Fant6me confirms Karl Marx's fa-
mous statement in Das Kapital that "Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives
only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks" (Marx I: 342).
Yet Leroux's version, unlike Stoker's, adds the dimension of the bourgeois self-and
the capitalist system-being vampirized as much as it vampirizes its objects. Erik in-
carnates many of the levels of labor that are sucked into a deathlike state by middle-
class capitalist acquisition and simultaneously embodies that very sucking to the extent
that his class-climbing self is bled bone dry by the debts he amasses while drawing
much of the financial lifeblood out of Paris's most imposing center of high bourgeois
culture. One reason this figure has proved so compelling for the middle classes of the
West is the way it conflates, while it also abjects, so many different sides of the actual
economic and social layers of debt on which "upward mobility" is based.
Then, too, even more dimensions are conveyed when Erik turns bank notes into
explicitly counterfeit versions of them, since there he is really violating the norms of
counterfeiting-revealing the fakery rather than disguising it-even as he exposes by
exaggerating the counterfeit reality in which the characters live throughout Leroux's
novel. In this "trick," the phantom is somewhat repeating the deceptive deed that is
the focus of the short prose narrative "Counterfeit Money," written in the 1850s by
Leroux's favorite Baudelaire and recently reemphasized by Jacques Derrida as a fore-
shadowing of the postmodern problem of asserting any kind of"truth" or "presence"
in an exchange of signs. Baudelaire's bourgeois narrator finds himself in Paris with a
rising middle-class friend who has just put different kinds of change in different coat-
pockets after a purchase at "the tobacconist's" (whom the lower classes would rarely
visit). Together on the street they encounter a "poor man" with a striking "mute elo-
quence" about him and whose "eyes" seem to convey both "humility" and "reproach"
(Derrida 1992, 176). The friend gives the poor man a two-franc piece (a large amount
for a street-gift), the same coin that the friend had placed by itself in his right coat
pocket after having examined it closely Once the beggar leaves, the friend reveals to
the narrator, much as Richard and Moncharmin discover in opening the sealed enve-
lope they have left for the phantom, that "It was the counterfeit coin" the poor man
was given (Derrida 1992, 176), apparently the only one in the friend's collection of
change, even though all the coins the friend has, despite the difference in amount, are
not much different in appearance from the one he has given away
At this point Baudelaire's narrator realizes, first, that there are many potential
consequences of this gift that is not much of a gift. He speculates on "all possible de-
ductions from all possible hypotheses" that a "counterfeit coin in the hands of a beg-
gar might engender," ranging from "Might it not multiply into real coins?" to "Could
it not also lead him to prison?" (r76). Soon, though, he confronts his friend's insou-
ciant act as its own kind of counterfeiting: "his aim had been to do a good deed while
at the same time making a good deal" and thus "to pick up gratis the certificate of a
charitable man," to possess a sort of signifier, like the counterfeit money he gave, that
may point to no accessible signified or referent and certainly to no authentic charity
(176). While the narrator ends the tale justifiably outraged at the willfully ignorant
"ineptitude of his [friend's] calculation" about the possible consequences of his act
(176), the haunting fear remains that it is impossible to tell the difference between
legal or counterfeit coins or signifiers even and especially after the falsity of some of
them has been revealed, as is the case with the "play money" the phantom leaves in
the Opera managers' envelope for nearly all the time they believe it to have con-
tained legal tender. There is also the problem that the expending or gathering of
counterfeits by social-climbing Parisians barely hides a calculation of profit to the
self that also abjects, or miscalculates, the consequences for other classes and so
"throws [them] away" from conscious awareness.
Leroux's Erik, as one redevelopment of Baudelaire's suggestions, therefore com-
bines the emaciated beggar, as what has been thrown "underground" in the minds of
Paris operagoers, and the rising-bourgeois giver of counterfeits who, even in finally
revealing his use of "false money," does not consider the consequences of his self-
serving evasions. The result is a new (and more childishly insouciant) version of the
Don Juan whose word is never his bond and who is always counterfeit to some de-
gree, finally by his own admission. This conflation of different social stations shows
that the positions of the beggar and the rising bourgeoisie are symbiotically bound
up with each other, however much their relationship is abjected, not only in the
phantom but in the modern economic order in which money can be as easily coun-
terfeit as it is authentic, never clearly one or the other. To be a rising bourgeois fig-
ure, Leroux and Baudelaire show, is to abject one's real connections to other classes,
to obfuscate that abjection, to mask that obfuscation behind a facade of money and
accouterments (from tobacco to bouquets) that come from sources of a certain class,
to keep paying out much of that money in debts so as to acquire "certificates" of
class-climbing success in the public eye, and to reveal only to others of roughly the
same kind the actual fakery in the whole process.
Granted, the use of signs as nostalgic counterfeits has given way to simulations of
simulacra because print-based and other technologies have allowed the increased
mechanical and post-mechanical duplication of representations; Le Fantome, espe-
cially since it is by a newspaperman, is as affected by this progression as is Stoker's
Dracula, and the terrors of these transformations are among the fears these Gothic
books work to displace and disguise. But this change in modes of production is en-
couraged and accelerated by, even as it helps to underwrite, a drive in the dominant
classes, the drive in Baudelaire's two friends and Leroux's phantom: to refashion a
"self" with multiple and mixed foundations into a display of acquisitions that hides
its great indebtedness behind a perpetual capacity to confuse real with counterfeit
purchasing power (a capacity occasionally exposed to others who have the same
aims). The ultimate simulation sought in this process at rare moments is the illusion
that debt is not debt, that Baudelaire's Good Samaritan can boost his self-image by
giving money that will cost him nothing and Leroux's most rabid class-climber can
remit bank notes with play money while not being seen to do so until it is too late.
To expose this attempt, albeit briefly, though, is also to reveal how we recast even
that attempted myth, as Baudelaire's story and Leroux's novel do, into something
supposedly "horrible," monstrous, and "low" so that we can dissociate it from our-
selves even as we pursue that whole gambit incessantly:
THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT 12!
In sublimating-and thus only somewhat showing-this abjection of debt by the

indebted, in any case, Leroux's Fantome, even more than Baudelaire's "Counterfeit
Money," plays out a particular economic-aesthetic process that has always been basic
to the Edmund Burkean "Sublime of Terror" and has consequently become an aspect
of the Gothic from Horace Walpole on. Peter de Bolla has shown quite thoroughly
how the "analytic discourse on excessive experience" which was the theory of the sub-
lime by the 1760s, especially in Burke (de Bolla, 12), was parallel to and interactive
with "the discourse on the national debt during the Seven Years War" from 1757 to
1763 (de Bolla, 14). The "aesthetic turn" toward facing and distancing the terror of
death in Burke's treatise on the sublime (first published in 1757 and twice revised over
the next few years) "occur[red] precisely at the same time as the discourse on debt
discover[ed] that it help[ed] produce the conditions under which the debt in-
crease[d] at an alarming and uncontrollable rate," much as the discourse of the sub-
lime found itself producing excesses of feeling and losses of control that could not
easily be contained (de Bolla, 14). The,.se two discourses moved in such parallel direc-
tions at this time, the same time that saw the birth of the Walpolean Gothic, because
the "ethics of the aristocracy" were just now coming to be truly revised "into a poli-
tics of the bourgeois," wherein the "the values of commerce were [being] figured into
a new [rhetorical] ordering of the social, cultural and political" (de Bolla, 103-104).
Consequently, insofar as the "discourse of the sublime was marked by the emer-
gence of a discursive excess, the production of an inflationary element," there were
inevitable "links between this discursive excess and the representation and legisla-
tion of the 'real' excess of credit that flooded the national financial markets" in Eng-
land by the early 1760s (de Bolla, 109). Just as the "public debt," then, came to be
viewed as "a virus that spreads division throughout the 'body of the people"' (de
Bolla, n8)-a virus exacerbated by the devaluing of English coins overseas to the
point at which Britain seemed "in danger of being 'owned' by foreigners" (de Bolla,
II1)--the excesses opened up as possibilities by "sublime" responses to experience
came to be viewed as dangers to the body (or certainly to the illusion of a self's co-
herence within a newly emergent middle-class ideology) much in the way the social
drain of debt appeared to threaten the "body politic." The excesses in both domains,
it turned out, at least as bourgeois ideology saw them in its quest to establish the "in-
dependent individual" as having the powers once ceded to an oligarchy, could be
managed only if the "subject" were created by discourse in a fashion that allowed it
"legislative" authority over what it perceived and associated within itself
The result in the discourse of the "terrific" sublime is Burke's and others' claim
that the subject can "throw off' distance, and thereby control any fearsome excess
it posits, even though it is the discourse creating that subject that projects that ex-
cess "out there" in the first place. After all, the parallel discourse of debt offered a
model in the 1760s: the political turning of the "national debt" into an "imaginary
treasure" seen "in monetary value [as simply] beyond the entire wealth of the nation"
(de Bolla, 136). This othering allowed "legislative theory first [toJ recognize and
then cast out the unlegislatable" (de Bolla, 159). The discourse of sublime awareness,
including the earliest nco-Gothic versions, then responded in kind by rhetorically
placing "the sublime [excess] under the sign of the subject as that which tells the
subject it is autonomous"; it did so by giving the subject the verbal means to turn
that excess into a fearful dissolution which it then placed, or really abjected, outside
the individual mind (de Bolla, 295). From what we have seen of the Gothic already,
it is clear that this foundation of"terror sublimity" has always been basic to it. What
is ghostly or monstrous in Gothic tales are always excesses or incongruous intercon-
nections that are really parts of the would-be bourgeois self"thrown off" onto some
repository that haunts the self-constructing subject from a gaping archaic space that
is terrifying because of its contents (the "uncannily" familiar) but pleasing because
of its presumed distance and otherness. Gothic fictions thus set up their "subjects"
and readers over against a site of the abject so as to "delay for as long as possible the
recognition that the fractured social subject," the actual basis of the discourse of ter-
rific sublimity, "is the 'real' social subject" behind the sublime or the neo-Gothic that
try to articulate, even as they put in question, "an autonomous unified subject posi-
tion" in relation to its "others" (de Bolla, 292).
Leroux's Fantome de ['Opera manifestly replays this tradition of Gothic sublimation,
and it does so by returning, with more modern intensifications, to the bourgeois
sublimation of debt with which the "Gothic sublime" began. By the turn of the nine-
teenth into the twentieth century, in France as well as England, the economy was
ominously international, the white colonization of "other" peoples threatened the
very racial purity it claimed to ensure, the boundaries between sexual genders and
orientations seemed more fluid than they had ever been, the belle epoque seemed
determined to keep building its bourgeois-oriented public palaces over the remains
of working-class life, and above all the members of the rising bourgeoisie, including
Gaston Leroux, financed their acquisitive lifestyles with illusions of steady income
that were actually covers for an extent of debt, particularly behind the scenes at the
Opera, that was far greater than that of the Seven Years' War back in the eighteenth
century All of this, if there was not to be a panicked resignation to the "unlegislat-
able," had to be seen as an excess coincident with the development of the bourgeois-
oriented Third Republic and its discourses. Yet it also had to be viewed as an
"otherness" able to be cast onto a "sublime" but "underground" scapegoat who could
seem to pre-date the Republic. In Leroux's Fantome, then, the scapegoat becomes the
"monstrous double" (as in Rene Girard, 159-68) that harbors all of the conflicts and
blurred boundaries that the Republic wants to cast off into an archive of the past, in
this case into a burial site filled with artifacts from the reign of louis- Philippe and
the Paris Commune.
Bound up with and allowing this whole process is the ever-increasing production
of simulations of simulacra, a hyperreality that strikingly occupies the deepest levels
of Le Fantome's setting (Erik's lair) and its outer limits (the text's way of telling the
story through journalistic reports, interviews, or letters, all presented as removed
from eyewitness immediacy). Such a dynamic that keeps masking what is already
masked is encouraged by bourgeois desire to hide what it works to abject, but it also
urges the rising bourgeois construction of layer upon layer of simulation-cellar
upon cellar topped by an Opera that surrounds its theatrical space with hall upon
hall of gaudy display-that keeps the middle class from having to face its "real" mul-
tiplicity directly Leroux's phantom is an explicit enactor of these dynamics and
hence a figure into which all the contradictions of being bourgeois are thrown off so
that even the multi-layered "reality" of bourgeois simulation has a terrifyingly sub-
lime location into which it can be abjected, as though it were freakish rather than
normal. The process and fact of continuous simulation thus turn out to be among
the debts of the bourgeoisie that need to be concealed by layers of simulation. Le Fan-
tome de /'opera is an unusually forceful extension of the sublimation of debt that the
"Gothic sublime" has always articulated. Here sublimation and debt even go so far as
to return hauntingly from repression in the novel itself. precisely because this book
is its author's most forceful simulation of the Gothic ghost of the counterfeit that
arose in the eighteenth century:
GOTHIC SUBLIMATION AND

SIMULATION AS THE REEMBODIMENTS OF DEATH
Insofar as Leroux's Erik is a Gothic ghost of the counterfeit, though, he is an unusu-

ally explicit "ghost," even by Gothic standards. He faces all viewers and readers as the
skull-face of death itself. only rarely used since The Castle ojOtranto, while most often
presenting himself as such in the midst of an explicitly simulated world (either the
Opera or its fabricated underground). We have already examined many reasons for
that symbolic choice by Leroux and the many cultural agendas that such a death's-
head carries out, especially in 1910. But we have yet to face up to what it means-
and meant at the time-for the known world as possibly simulated even at its
deepest levels to be so connected with the blatant symbolization of death. We have
yet to understand why. when the tendencies of the Gothic specter are carried to such
extremes, the ghosting of counterfeits and the announcement of death become vis-
ibly identical to one another. I therefore want to close this chapter and my extended
focus on the original Fantome by examining the cultural work being done by the
"deadness" of the phantom and the ingredients of his underworld yet again, this time
from a perspective that considers why death-and death at the stage of the skull-is
so forcefully linked in Leroux's book to Gothic sublimation, the increase in simula-
tion at the dawn of the twentieth century. and the relation of both to the ubiquity
and concealment of middle-class debt. Indeed, I want to show that death and sim-
ulation become increasingly the same as Leroux participates in emptying out most
meanings in the signs of death.
Certainly Leroux alludes to a very wide range of contexts in which the image of
Death has specific meanings. We have already noted, first of all, that the death's-
head figure being reused in Le Fantome has a lengthy French history in the tradition
of the danse macabre alongside Leroux's debts to contemporary phrenology and the
English and American Gothic. It is also a small step, we now see, from these various
pre-texts to the fin-de-siecle vision of the belle epoque as fearfully undergirded by
death as "degeneration," as in the supposedly devolved skulls of urban criminals, the
diseases spreading from lower to higher classes, and death as "decadence," be it that
of the whole civilization emphasized by post- Baudelairean aesthetes or the later as-
sociation of those very figures with the increased blurrings of boundaries between
races, genders, and sexual orientations. Erik consequently suggests all of these
together, and all the cultural quandaries linked to them in my previous chapters,
thereby bringing the history of the danse macabre very much up to date in 1910 while
combining that iconography with several others at once.
In this process, Leroux's novel also invokes the rural French folktale traditions on
which danses macabres were often based. These arise especially in the novel's pointed
shift from Paris to the village of Perros-Guirec and the tales remembered there out
of Christine's and Raoul's country past, from the stories of the dancing "korrigans"
that appear to reanimate the landscape to the symbolic meanings of the rural
churches that seem to rest on foundations of stacked-up skulls. Those "low culture"
schema, as it happens, had recently been revived in Paris itself, albeit with some aca-
demic and bourgeois condescension, in such edited collections of tales about coun-
try hauntings as Anatole Le Braz's The Legend if Death (first published in 1893 and
revised in four augmented editions through 1928). For Leroux or any French writer
of his time to connect the iconography of Death with rural as well as urban Catholic
systems of symbols is therefore for them all to extend a definite middle-class enter-
prise of that era: the academic reconstitution of folklore. In fact, it is to adopt and
continue the ideological conflicts underlying that very effort. Within the thinking of
Le Braz and several others, this whole project was caught in a tug of war between
simply recalling "the apparent integration of life and death in small communities,
symbolized by the survival of cemeteries in the center of many villages" (as in Per-
ros-Guirec) and "objectively" regarding these "picturesque" rituals as anachronisti-
cally unworthy of credence, however much they were able to "provide relief from an
increasingly urban and technological society-a society engaged in an effort to hide
the presence of death" at every turn (Kselman, 40). Thus we have Le Fantome's com-
bination in the Perros scenes, articulated from the perspective of Raoul (who has
lived in both city and country worlds), of a nostalgia for a simpler and more tradi-
tion-filled rural life alongside a fear that "primitive" country legends might actually
invade the more "advanced" world of the city That is why the young Vicomte both
chases his beloved Christine back to their common rural origins, a quasi Eden seem-
ingly beyond the class boundaries that divide them, and yet recoils in distaste from
what she tells him of the "Angel of Music" coming to her Opera dressing room as an
echo of her father's country beliefs, "as if he were beholding a person who was ut-
tering an enormous lie or affirming a wild vision in which she believed with all the
strength of her poor sick brain" (Leroux 1959, us).
Consequently; as Leroux pulls this entire French history of beliefs into Le Fantome, he
plays up the irony visible in such conflicting attitudes. Particularly since he himself was
a skeptical agnostic who refused to link the many Catholic icons he collected to any "be-
yond" that was not "an indecipherable mystery" (Lamy; 56), Leroux allows his novel to
echo the views of the folklore scholars and many other middle-class French of his day
who saw the religious meaning of the classic death-figure as both attractive and ques-
tionable, just as much as the even older assumptions about death in the tales of country
folk. When the original Erik leads his love-object to his sleeping/resting place in his lair
below the Opera, he reveals a "bedroom" (his own, as opposed to his mother's) that ap-
parently suits his skull-face perfectly and yet includes several elements that unsettle that
easy connection. As Christine describes it in her narrative to Raoul,
It seemed to me that I had penetrated into a mortuary chamber. The walls were hung
in all shades of black, but instead of the white tears that ordinarily fill out funereal or-
namentation, there was an enormous staff of music, with notes on it repeated from the
Dies Irae. In the middle of this chamber, there was a dais where there hung a canopy of
red brocade curtains and, under this, an open coffin ... "This is the place where I
sleep," said Erik. "We should get used to everything in life. even to eternity" (Leroux
1959, 249)
As much as a quasi-medieval destiny of Death and Eternity is evoked in this funeral

parlor, in part by Erik's quasi-Catholic resignation as much as by his face, there is
also a nagging focus on a death-state for sale. The sort of "destiny" offered here is
that of a mortuary display-room set up for those seeking the most seemingly luxuri-
ous accouterments of death. At the same time, this extremely conventionalized
death chamber, so mock-standard as to seem irreverent as well as religious, violates
normal French bourgeois expectations with its inserted, oversize, musical notation
of the Dies Irae that begins the Catholic Mass with the terror of the Day of Judgment
(Wolf 1996, 177, n.19). Even though the inevitability of facing that Day is cotermi-
nous with conventional Christian Death and the Apocalypse at the End of the
World, this added display is ambiguous as to whether it suggests the Wrath of God
faced by anyone who dies as Erik may or the wrath of the composer-phantom that
will later flare when he threatens to incinerate the Opera if Christine refuses to
marry him. That ambiguity then gives way to the more famous one between sleep
and death, which Erik invokes precisely by sleeping and not dying in his coffin-bed.
Every time this artificially standard death-room borders on simply housing the face
of Death appropriately, it turns simultaneously toward irreligious attitudes, em-
phases on costly decorations and furniture, and indications that Erik is playing with
death for the sake of performative, and even class-climbing, effect rather than qui-
etly accepting an eternal end as though he were an authentic believer and not a Don
Juan triumphant crying out his wrathful defiance from the depths of a hell beneath
the center of Paris. In this scene, we can therefore say, Le Fantome de /'Opera reflects
growing French "anxiety and doubts about the meaning of the rituals of death that
were being contested and reshaped throughout the [nineteenth] century," so much
so as to expose how much "the cult of the dead" in France, by 1910 and even earlier,
had become "a fragile construction vulnerable to conflict, avarice, and disbelief"
(Kselman, 299, 301).
To be sure, conventional iconography is never entirely overcome in this under-
world that simulates the simulacra above ground. Leroux's Christine is constantly
tempted to see the phantom's lair as a kind of underground Hades, the locus of ul-
timate Christian death, across the river "Styx" (Leroux 1959, 238). But such symbols
have become so detached from definite meanings, even as they continue to be used,
that they can also be pathways to ''the swelling of gigantic chords" from Erik's organ
"in which [his] sorrow [is] made divine" and thus affirmatively; as well as frighten-
ingly; "sublime" (1959, 259). Christian and folklorical death has become an almost
completely floating signifier, able (like "Gothic") to suggest several logically incon-
sistent meanings at once. Hence Christine, just before her passage through her
dressing-room mirror, hears the phantom utter "Lazarus' moan when, at the sound
of Jesus' voice, he begins to open his eyes and see the light of day again" (1959, 233).
Within that allusion, we are aware that this interpretation is framed within a mem-
ory of the "Voice's" earlier promise to "play the Resurrection ofLazarus [for her] with
the violin of the dead" at her father's country tomb (1959, 231). What momentarily
seems an authentic embodiment of death resurrected by the Grace of Christ turns
out to be based on an announcement of a musical composition's title-a figure for a
fictional rendition of the resurrection of Lazarus (which is all that the moan is any-
way) -and a promise from the phantom that will be deceptively carried out on an
instrument (Erik's own violin) as though it were somehow old Daae's, given the am-
biguity in the phrase "the violin of the dead."
The biblical symbol, the story of Lazarus, has been faked and faked again. The al-
lusions to old French figures of death in Le Fantome de /'Opera, though they are very
much in evidence and their former meanings are used as suggestions in newer con-
texts, are increasingly announcements of how the age-old icons have had their firm
older reference-points scooped out of them. Such figures have become counterfeits
of counterfeits of themselves, and so the danse macabre's central figure has actually un-
dergone the death of Death. Erik is not simply old Death, though he recalls aspects
of it. Consequently; as a more mobile and less anchored symbol (and thus a simula-
tion of a Gothic ghost of the counterfeit), he can become the vast repository he is of
many more recent fears and abjections. These can all threaten to surface from a
buried state, much as Death has done in the past, while at the same time they can
seem to hide behind Death as though its traditional suggestions are operating more
exclusively than they actually are. This change in the role of the danse macabre's skele-
ton is already visible in Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" so clearly recalled in Ler-
oux's masked ball. When "tall and gaunt" Red Death visibly appears inside the
"castellated abbey" of this tale and intrudes upon an exclusive "masquerade" being
used by "knights and dames" to keep the wider world's "contagion" outside their
high-class existence, Poe's horror quickly comes to embody less the wages of sin and
more what has been inside the palatial world of masks and fakery all along: the in-
termixture of the "beautiful" and the "bizarre," of contraries "that might have excited
disgust" among the participants on another occasion, in the "writhing" behavior of
the dancing lords and ladies who are filled with the very "contagion" they want to
connect only with the lower classes and the teeming cacophony outside their grand
preserve (Poe, 253-57). To replay this scene as Leroux does at his Opera's hal masque
is for his novel to continue Poe's iconoclastic employment of a standard Death icon
as the locus of a vast political unconscious that haunts all those who would use an ex-
clusive quasi palace and its masquerade to divorce themselves from the full social re-
ality to which they are thoroughly connected.
Leroux's Poe-esque construction of his phantom as a skull decisively moves the
meanings of death from an older set of levels to a very modern one. In the anti-
quated country church of Leroux's youth, as in Perros-Guirec, there remains a cer-
tain presence and ongoing life to the stacked-up skulls that make them seem a visible
foundation of the faith that rises above death but never forgets or completely buries
it. That is one reason why it is so hard to tell the difference between an entirely dead
and a living skeleton (Erik) in the skulls piled at the base of the Perras church. But
in Erik's death-as-life beneath the more skeptical, industrial-era, and high-bour-
geois Opera in Paris, death is suppressed and kept out of sight, buried as well as en-
crypted, and kept at bay by furniture and acquisitions, such as the features of Erik's
mortuary-bedroom in which he does not die. Le Fantome shows us, and certainly read-
ers of 1910, how much death has moved from being a "physical materiality" within a
"social relation," in which the so-called "primitives live with their dead under the
auspices of [religious] ritual," to being a "distortion" and "death" of that older "sym-
bolic process" behind an "illusion" that claims to define the self by economic ex-
change as a rising above death, a sublimation (Baudrillard, 131, 134). Such an illusion,
buoyed by promises of monetary profit, looks only toward "the phantasm of death"
(le fontome) as its partly repressed underground and therefore toward the merest
ghost of the earlier counterfeit of death, a specter of a specter "that reduces life to
an absolute surplus-value by [implicitly] subtracting death from it" and thereby
"killing" death's reality and older meanings (Baudrillard, 127). What is left after the
subtraction, instead of physical death, is the demise of direct reference, the supposed
THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT I27
"other" of every signifier, in a world of perpetual simulation with deep roots in debt,
which is, after all, the absence of immediately available specie-another kind of ref-
erent-to underwrite a promise of payment. Just as Leroux's Erik threatens the
above-ground Opera world with revealing how much its pretensions may be mean-
ingless because they are based on degeneration, decadence, and a black hole of in-
debtedness, his face declares the loss of the foundations behind every posturing
figure and symbol, so much so that "every separate term for which [this] other is its
imaginary [counterpart] is haunted by the latter as its own death" (Baudrillard, 133).
The meaning of every signifier by 19ro, we find, is the death of any earlier reference
point it might have. It is the turning of every sign into an epitaph, particularly as
such simulacra, like some older graveyards of Paris whose bones were moved to the
catacombs, are covered over by re-simulations of them, including the Paris Opera
that rises over a funeral parlor deep in its own foundations.
To some extent, this irony was personal for Gaston Leroux. As I noted in chap-
ter two, he was both shocked and amused, on revisiting the building where he was
born in Paris, to find that his own "birth house" had become a "funeral business,"
along with many other things, since 1868. Yet beyond the fact that the locus of the
"cradle" was now that of a "coffin," partly because his mother had long since died,
Leroux must have realized that even the most primal reference point of anyone's
earthly existence, the site of birth itself, was a vessel of ever-shifting contents, a
crossroads of changing economic interplays (like all of Paris), and therefore a locus
for the death of all previous meanings even while remnants of them still exist. His
pursuit of an acquisitive, social-climbing existence, so typical of those at the Opera,
was rooted in the uprooting and recurrent transformation of a supposed primal sig-
nifier from the depths of the past, a signifier that was always a "coffin" mainly in the
sense that it kept symbolizing the death of past meanings. At one level, the ultimate
signified of any signifier has to be a figuration of death. Most of the time, a signifier
stands in for its reference point when the latter is absent and is in that sense a mark
of the "death" of (or an epitaph for) what it means. But the death of Death in mod-
ern symbolic activity, as Baudrillard sees it and Leroux suggests, takes that inherent
irony further by distorting every older "symbolic process," the kinds based on more
direct "exchange" and "ritual," into "an economic process," where death is abjected
by its "redemption" in marketable sign-systems that refer back only to the phan-
tasms of death that are saleable simulations (Baudrillard, 134-35).
For Leroux to confront as a "coffin" the newly marketed transformation of his
birthplace into a "funeral business" and then to transform that "burial" into the place-
ment of the phantom's coffin-bed in a simulated mortuary sales room beneath the
Opera is for him and Le Fantome to reveal early twentieth-century bourgeois life as "a
culture of death" -and now of a "death that is no longer exchanged and can only be
cashed out in the phantasm" of it (Baudrillard, 147-48). His use of a skeleton (Erik)
as death's phantasm, though adopted from the older danse macabre, is one way Leroux
continues this transmogrification. Even in pre-industrial Europe, as Baudrillard has
reminded us, the skeleton seen as the body having already gone through death has
always helped groups of the living to stave off the fear of death as "decomposition."
"The skeleton, with its stripped bones, already seals the possible reconciliation of the
group, for it regains the force of the mask and the sign," easily becoming an allegor-
ical emblem that keeps the physical process of death concealed (Baudrillard, r8o).
Leroux's original Erik as a living skeleton incessantly pursuing rising-middle-class
acquisition while also threatening it with the exposure of its abject foundations car-
ries this potential in all skeletons to a twentieth-century extreme in which Death as
sheer mask or sign, even more than in Poe, symbolizes the burial of itself-and so
much other "reality" -behind an "ethics of accumulation and material production"
(Baudrillard, 145).
What this death of Death in Le Fantome means for its time and civilization, though,
is represented by more than just the mother's replicated bedroom being placed near
the son's fake mortuary chamber (one simulation next to another) in the founda-
tions of the Opera. Its most frightening consequence really appears in the most hid-
den of all of the rooms in the phantom's complicated lair: the Orientalized,
hexagonal "chamber of tortures" (la chambre des supplices), constructed by Erik from
both Eastern and Western models, into which Raoul and the Persian tumble behind
the maternal boudoir and Erik's funereal bedroom (Leroux 1959, 407-09). As the
Persian fearfully describes the scene, one he has already viewed in Mazanderan
(where Erik built one of these for the Shah in Shah),
the six wall-panels were covered on their insides by mirrors ... from top to bottom ...
In the corners, one could see very well the "rotators" [or rotating drums] of each mir-
ror ... and I recognized the tree of iron in one corner ... with its iron branch-for
hangings ... It sufficed to place in one of the corners a decorative moti£ such as a col-
umn [or this tree], to instantaneously have a palace of a thousand columns [or trees],
for, by an effect of the [turning] mirrors, the real room augmented itself by six hexag-
onal rooms, each one of which multiplied itself to infinity ... When the ceiling became
brightened and, all around us, the [supposed) forest illuminated itsel£ the stupefeca-
tion of the Vicomte (&lou!] surpassed anything one could imagine. The apparition of
that impenetrable forest, whose innumerable trunks and branches seemed to interlace
around us unto infinity, plunged him into a frightful consternation. He passed his hands
over his forehead as if to chase away a dream-vision, and his eyes blinked like eyes that
were having trouble, upon awakening, regrasping any knowledge of the reality of
things. (Leroux 1959, 409, 433, 435-36)
It is no wonder the previous victims of such a room that produces endless images of
other images of what are already counterfeits have ended their torment by hanging
themselves from the iron tree's most accessible branch, which is "placed in such a way
that, as he was about to die, [each victim] had been able to see, kicking convulsively
with him-supreme consolation!-a thousand hanging men" (Leroux 1959, 436).
The terror here goes far beyond the potential madness prompted by such infinite
confusion or the anticipated sensory pain of the ever-increasing "electric" heat that
makes the illuminated chamber feel like a "equatorial forest" intensified to searing
extremes beyond any natural temperature (Leroux 1959, 434-35). The most re-
peated fear expressed in this scene is of illusion upon illusion without ground or bot-
tom, an infinity of simulations so void of definite beginnings or ends that dreaming
and waking become impossible to separate and the perceiver completely loses the
capacity to distinguish "the reality of things" from a mise en abyme of reflections of re-
flections of reflections. The ultimate choice is between seeking physical death, which
may at least restore some "reality" by using an actual branch (albeit an iron one) for
the hanging of the body, and facing the insanity that is the death of all referentiality
beyond signifiers in a continuous multiplication of them rooted in the already imi-
tated and artificial. Even if some natural reference point, such as an equatorial for-
est, can be supposed as lying at the base of all these representations of representa-
tions, that very referent turns out to be the effect of reflections that refer to reflec-
tions, not an actual forest of interlaced trees "out there somewhere" beyond the
simulations. The placement of this chamber of horrors at the most "deep" and hid-
den level of the phantom's underground lair, behind even his and his mother's styl-
ized bedrooms, shows that one of the greatest terrors or horrors in what Erik
"means" at bottom is his reference to a world, one that deeply mirrors the reflec-
tiveness already pervasive above ground (as in the many galleries of mirrors in the
Paris Opera), that finally kills the possibility of attaining the Real in any way, shape,
or form. The torture and incitement to madness underlying the many levels of illu-
sion in Leroux's Paris comes from the realization that there may be, at the base of it
all, no escape from layers of masks that keep revealing other maskings beneath
them~or else the death even of Death~ad infinitum.
The phantom's use of this chamber to threaten Christine with the possibility of
Raoul's insanity and death unless she marries Erik, of course, seems to make the
threat of endless mirrors an evil Oriental goad toward a quasi-incestuous marriage.
Such a union must finally be prevented for the sake of eventualities more acceptably
"real" and Western: the exogamous wedding of Christine to Raoul and the survival
of the Opera. But Christine's response to that threat, which finally leads Erik to free
Raoul and the Persian from the chamber of mirrors, is, as we have seen, the as-
sumption of a pose~that of the "Angel in the House" ·--that is at all times an imita-
tion of a much-marketed middle-class icon. That performative fakery is signaled
when she intensifies her enactment of the domestic "white figure" by suddenly ap-
pearing to sit ascetically and read from "a very small volume with gilded edging like
one sees on religious books" (Leroux 1959, 473), such as The Imitation <if christ men-
tioned as an example (a devotional book from the 1400s that was often reissued in
new gilt editions for middle-class homes; Wolf 1996, 314n.). This book is manifestly
a prop for a theatrical illusion, albeit one laced with features of a high-bourgeois sta-
tus. There is no non-theatrical reason for such a volume to be in the phantom's lair,
unless it is part of the bric-a-brac he has used to recreate his mother's bedroom, and
there is nothing in this underground that is not a theatrical fabrication or an item
borrowed from above for a stagy presentation below.
At the same time, Christine is clearly playing a role for a particular effect, almost
wearing a mask as much as Erik has, however much she seems momentarily resigned
to this role lasting an indefinite time. Her guarantee to be Erik's "living wife" to en-
able Raoul's and the Persian's survival ironically fulfills Erik's fear that she had really
been his "dead wife" up to now. He views her revised stance as "sincere," as he recalls
it later for the Persian, because she has "sworn on her eternal salvation" at the time.
Yet that oath is the death of its meaning because it can be as much of a sheer per-
formance as Christine's reading of the gilt-edged book (which may; after all, be an
Imitation, even in French; Leroux 1959, 478 and 473). Indeed, by now an experienced
actress, Christine ensures that her angelic wifely role need not last very long as she
turns its quasi-religious ingredients toward a more Magna Mater pose modeled on a
pieta. It is only the phantom's interpretation of her weeping over him in that guise
that establishes it as a return of "little Erik" to the embrace and fluid of the mother.
Even the saving reactions to the potential for endless simulation end up reenacting
simulation in Leroux's Fantome. The very attitudes of Christine that allow for a re-
lease from the chamber of mirrors are themselves phantasmal performances, and
they lead to "salvation" for the all the major characters mainly because she shifts
from one imitative posture to another.
Le Fantome de !'Opera, we must conclude, has taken fundamental drives in the
Gothic mode-especially the tendencies in the ghost of the counterfeit toward be-
coming simulacra and simulations-and carried them out to arresting and revealing
extremes. In the process, it has both exposed the many abjected levels of culture that
are "thrown off" onto its Gothic monster/ghost and linked them all to the fear in the
West of an increasingly simulated world, one where grounds of"reality" for signifiers
may be completely "dead." This fear is thus intimately associated with everything
that is half-hidden and half-revealed, and thereby sublimated, in the "under-
grounds" of Leroux's novel. All the fearsome blurrings of racial, sexual, class, and
life-or-death distinctions that are projected onto and sequestered in Erik and his
underworld are bound up with the additional abjection of a condition that under-
writes Western culture more and more: the continually simulated state of a debt-
ridden middle-class existence that the fake Gothic in fiction and theater, as well as
grand opera, has always been about to some degree. In fact, Le Fantome helps us see
how the positing of ein anderer Schauplatz so basic to notions of the unconscious and so
emphatically symbolized by the Gothic since Walpole is fundamentally connected to
the greater "discontinuity" of the human "subject" that now has to articulate itself
through simulacra and simulation. As Leroux's main characters produce their very
performative "selves" by employing or being ghosts of counterfeits, they come to
contain deep and mysterious levels concealed from all others and even from their
own awareness ("things that I hide at the base of my consciousness"), and those are
the levels that become most visible to characters and readers in the undergrounded
spaces of the novel's symbolic realm. Such a self-deepening configuration, clearly the
product of a cultural ideology, takes this layered form because defining the self
through simulations demands that the meanings of that self always be other and else-
where than its signs, the more so as its signs become signs of other signs. "The idea of
the unconscious," in other words, is "an idea of discontinuity and rupture" because
the simulating means of composing a self include within them "the irreversibility of
a lost object and a subject forever 'missing' itself" (Baudrillard, 143). Such an "oth-
erness," once constructed as an apparently archaic repository in the Gothic espe-
cially; can be a locus for "throwing off" a host of anomalous conditions that threaten
a rising-middle-class identity, but only if that "other showplace" is the product of a
simulating sign-system that keeps "killing" and burying all points of reference out-
side of signs themselves.
Leroux's Fantome, I would argue, enables the sublimation of cultural abjections-
and continues to be important to us in doing so-because its Gothic process of tar-
geting an "other" as the site of the abject half-confronts and half-conceals the
modern symbolic logic by which "otherness" (like the Gothic) is generated. In Le
Fantome we see unequivocally how the "haunting double" in the post- Renaissance
West really manifests "the subject's discontinuity" within the modern use of signs
for self-definition even as it tries, as an "other," to help produce an illusion of co-
herence in the bourgeois self (Baudrillard, 142). We in modern Western civiliza-
tion need such phantoms, it seems, both to scapegoat our multiple foundations,
quandaries, and discontinuities and to obscure, while also embodying, the "deadly"
symbolic order of simulated counterfeits by which we construct ourselves, quite
Gothically; as unified yet "deep." The cultural work of the Gothic, we must remem-
TilE GIIOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT 13!
ber, is the partial concealment and partial acknowledgment of a haunting sense of

debt on the part of the middle class. It plays out a subliminal awareness that we are
acquisitively fabricating our class-based self-images in ways we owe to other and
mixed levels of being, among them levels of sheer simulation, that we keep trying
to dissociate from ourselves.
The original Fantome de !'Opera places us, particularly in its "romance of reportage"
variation on "actual fantastic" Gothicism, at the point of simultaneously observing
and burying how the construction of Western "high culture" (supposedly "pure") is
indebted to a great deal associated with "low culture," always a locus of incongruous
mixtures. This debt and its sublimation are made possible, in part, because the his-
torical turning of counterfeit signs into simulations makes signs from different quar-
ters potentially equivalent to each other, inclined to blur into their counterparts in
modern times, while the different signs, like classes of people, keep insisting on their
distinctiveness from the others. The cultural functions of the Gothic as Le Fantome
extends them allow the constant tugs of war in this irony of simulations to be en-
acted for readers haunted by it, yet they equally follow the impulse in simulation to
give the illusion of the "actual" in reportage and so to conceal the fact of the underly-
ing irony, here by abjecting the contradictions of phantasmic signification in the
contradictory ingredients of the "really existing" phantom of the Opera. The alter-
nating feelings of sympathy and revulsion that Leroux's Erik provokes in us still
come from this sublimated acknowledgment of Gothic simulation as much as any-
thing else. As with all the illogical anomalies that the original phantom of the Opera
contains, we think and live with simulations, yet we prefer to have their nature and
dominance concealed even as we use and confront them. Leroux's most Gothic book
permits us to act out that complex, with all the risk and all the relative safety in-
volved, while we also act out the cultural and psychological abjections we still need
to perform to fashion ourselves as what we want to seem.
SECOND PART
The Major Adaptations

NEO-GOT HIC SUBLIMAT IONS
OF CHANGIN G CULTURAL fEARS
CHAPTER FIVE
Universal's Silent Film

THE RECAST SCAPEGOAT,
THE ~EST FOR THE WIDEST AUDIENCE,
AND THE MANAGEMENT OF lABOR
From the very first one in 1924-25, as we have seen, the many adaptations of Ler-
oux's Fantilme have frequently obscured the novel's most disturbing implications, its
emphasis on modern simulation among them. At the same time, however, these el-
ements can never be said to disappear completely They are frequently transformed
into displaced anamorphoses of them, sometimes in the very mode of adaptation.
The initial transfer of the novel to film, a medium that fascinated Leroux himself to
the point of his becoming a film-company investor and screenwriter as early as 1918
(Lamy, 69), shifts the book's intimations of groundless phantasmal simulations from
the words of Leroux's narrator to the ghostly flickering images projected onto a
screen. The work of fiction in what is already an age of technological reproductions
of reproductions, in other words, continues to fUlfill its always simulated founda-
tions by being relocated from one phantom state to another, the second of which is
even more obviously a series of shades referring to shades (as discussed in Michaels,
I -32). Simultaneously, though, this transfiguration can also be used to disguise the
insubstantiality of perpetual simulation. By putting moving photographs of bodies
and faces on multiple celluloid prints and screens, the filmmakers-and author-can
claim to be giving physical embodiment to written descriptions, somewhat as in live
theater. What once seemed encrypted in words now "rises from the dead" to live and
move quite substantially, it seems. Upon the final release of The Phantom of the Opera
with Lon Chaney two years before Leroux suddenly died in 1927, the author issued
a statement reasserting the existence "in flesh and in bone" of the "real ghost" be-
hind his story He repeated his reporter-narrator's claim at the beginning of his
novel, but now with the aid of"one of the most extraordinary strips of film [bandes]"
and "one of the most sumptuous of the present day" in which the famous Chaney
makes Erik vividly "swim before my eyes" (Leroux 1970a, ix-x). The thinness of the
"strip" and the "swimming" quality of the film image are mentioned, but they are
wrenched toward supporting the claim that a visually and financially "sumptuous"
film, silent or not, can make a novelistic figure come so much to life that evidence of
his real physical basis can again be asserted in a reporterly fashion by the original au-
thor. The most abjected aspects of Le Fantilme, including the fear of simulation, we
THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TilE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
can say, continue to play roles in the recastings of it throughout the twentieth cen-
tury But they are now more subordinated to newer forms of the conventional coun-
terclaims encouraged by the novel, and they remain visible mostly in the background
or media out of which the story is reconstructed.
I therefore want to trace the history of the most famous adaptations by focusing
on the changing interplay between, on the one hand, the features put forward as
dominant in each reconstruction and, on the other, the subtexts that emerge--
disguised, to be sure-in the process, conditions, and materials from which each new
version is composed. Every transformation, or even half-use, of Le Fantome is bound
up, we will find, with some abjection of cultural and psychological anxieties. This ab-
jection is visible in both the dominant elements and the subtext of every new ver-
sion. Such anxieties combine ongoing cultural concerns basic to the novel, Gothic,
and opera with newer combinations of middle-class fears that are particular to the
time, place, and social conflicts from which each adaptation emerges. Not surpris-
ingly, we will find that each version makes its changes from the novel in part because
of the economic, ideological, and therefore psychological issues of its moment, since
every adaptation works both to half-confront and to half-avoid these issues in its ap-
peals to viewers who enter the theater with the same general aim. But this struggle
in each case becomes manifest in quite different ways at the various stages and lev-
els of each production. Consequently, the changes made in the process of crafting an
adaptation are often as significant as the symbolic features of the final released ver-
sion. Every reconstruction arises out of quandaries faced by its producers, investors,
directors, scriptwriters, actors, technicians, and target audience. These problems are
pushed toward apparent resolutions as each adaptation progresses and its dominant
features are determined, to be sure. At the same time, the competing concerns and
root uncertainties behind them remain in evidence because of that progression to-
wards the final version and the symbolic abjections that are enacted by that time.
The resolutions generally turn out to be fashioned from neo-fake-Gothic combina-
tions of fundamentally incompatible materials as though these could finally be made
consistent with each other, somewhat as in the conflation of multiplicities "thrown"
into Leroux's original Erik. The deeply conflicted constitution of the novel is thus
reenacted, generally speaking, in every attempt to both reproduce and suppress it.
Above all, the never-ending and always-wavering struggle to define "high culture" in
relation to "low" counterparts is acted out again and again-under sublimation-in
the history of The Phantom after 1910, even as the ways of making such distinctions
keep having to change with the times.
THE LAYERS OF CHANGE AND THEIR "BURIAL'' OF LON CHANEY
The Universal silent picture released in 1925, unquestionably the first adaptation, is
perhaps the supreme example of such a multilayered but ultimately marketable
process. Even the first reviewers of the highly successful final version that premiered
in September of that year noticed the "re-cutting" that had taken place many
times-for Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times it looked "as if too many cooks had
rather spoiled the broth" (Sept. 7, 1925, Herrick Library 1990) -and today we have
several accounts of this Phantom's "troubled production" by an ambitious but "inde-
cisive studio that jumbled multiple scripts and endings" (Gary Giddins, Village Voice,
UNIVERSAL'S SILENT fiLM 137
Jan. 23, 1996, 47, in Herrick Library 1990). Carl Laemmle, then president of Uni-
versal, was attracted to the Fantome novel that Leroux gave him just after they visited
the Paris Opera together (see Turner, 673) in part because he saw it as a promising
follow-up to Lon Chaney's sad-grotesque performance in Universal's silent Hunch-
back of Notre Dame, which was well into production in 1922 when Laemmle visited
Paris to scout locations and ultimately opened to splendid box-office returns in 1923
(Perry, 46; MacQJ,een 1989a, 35), But the first treatment of The Phantom that
Laemmle ordered drew strong opposition from the studio's story department. The
"romance" was not sufficiently "emphasized" as it had been in The Hunchback, they
felt, and the "mystery" in Leroux's more Gothic fiction was viewed as "no asset," a
point driven home with a very economic term because box-office failure seemed a
real possibility at a time when "there was no tradition of [fully Gothic] horror films
to build on" in the American movie industry (MacQJ,een 1989a, 35-36, 39).
The result was a feverish, two-year succession of much-contested rewritings, and
these began with at least two scripts by Elliott Clawson, the favorite scenarist of Ru-
pert Julian, whom Laemmle had chosen to direct The Phantom after Julian had effi-
ciently completed Erich von Stroheim's expensive and languishing Merry-Go-Round in
1923 (MacQJ,een 1989a, 36). In this process, the scenarios evolved from a "faithful
transcription of the novel," Clawson's first draft--in which there was even "a lengthy
flashback" to explain the history of"the Persian" (played by Arthur Edmund Carewe,
who kept the astrakhan cap in the final print)-to 1924 redrafts that added backstage
comic-relief characters, including a mincing aide to Raoul. Ultimately these revisions
"jettisoned" the "entire Persian flashback," so much so as to turn the Persian himself
into an undercover French detective with very little reshooting of that actor's scenes
(MacQJ,een 1989a, 38-39). The ending became a particular bone of contention, so
much so that Leroux's sad tete-a-tete between a mother-abandoned Erik and a pity-
ing Christine, already shot, started to be combined with a growing mob of stagehands
and other Paris workers enraged by the phantom's backstage killing of Joseph Buquet,
one of their own (Mac~een, 1989a, 40). A January 1925 test screening then drew
responses so negative that the studio, which had now invested over half a million dol-
lars in one film, abruptly assigned the ending and some earlier scenes to the studio's
"Hoot Gibson western unit"; Edward Sedgwick, with Julian now removed from the
production, finally directed a much-expanded and sped-up closing chase that in-
cluded Erik fleeing from the mob in front of the Notre Dame facade built for The
Hunchback on the Universal lot (Mac~een 1989b, 40; Perry, 46). Further test screen-
ings showed enough audience confusion that most of the comic-relief scenes were cut
out too. It was only the version that finally opened in September at the elaborately
readorned Astor Theater in New York (Blake, 67) that fulfilled Laemmle's ambition
to present the film as a "high-priced roadshow attraction'' with enough widespread
popular support to ensure hefty box-office receipts at both the downtown movie
palaces and the humbler neighborhood theaters in which it would be shown over the
next several years (MacQJ,een 1989b, 34).
Much as he seems to have resisted some of what occurred, this series of struggles
and changes greatly altered Lon Chaney's planned characterization of Erik-and thus
the phantom's role as a cultural scapegoat in the 1920s-at least in what audiences fi-
nally saw of him. By 1923, to be sure, Chaney had already become famous for "one basic
portrait" in silent films within the many variations he achieved in makeup, body con-
tortion, and pantomime: "the twisted outcast betrayed by life whose physical suffering
and isolation from society force him into evil acts of violence that contradict his innate
longing for love" (Mac~een 1989a, 36). But Chaney was clearly determined at the
outset, quite in concert with Clawson's first two scripts, to become an incarnation of
Leroux's skull-like phantom. He worked to bring out the skull within his own face by
pulling his nose up from the front with a strip of fishskin, gluing back his ears with
spirit gum, surrounding his eyes with very dark liner, creating prominent and jagged
teeth with guttapercha, and adding a skullcap with sporadic hair sewn into it and edged
by muslin so fine that the right foundation and lighting could blend it into his fore-
head in most shots (see figure 5.1 and Blake 1995, 63, the best account we have of
Chaney's makeup for this role). Having shown an early interest in the original novel
(serialized in Los Angeles in 1911 while he was performing on stage there; Blake 1995,
62), Chaney was also striving to capture the repulsion and attraction, and hence the
balance of horror and pathos. that Leroux's phantom apparently aroused in a fair num-
ber of readers (Mac~een 1989a, 36; Blake 1995, 67). Despite his many disagreements
with Rupert Julian, with whom he finally communicated only through others (Mac-
~een 1989b, 36; Blake 1995, 65), Chaney agreed to film Julian's preferred ending~
later cut from the picture~in which the phantom, kissed on the forehead by a
now-sympathetic Christine who finds that he has been deformed from birth and
therefore rejected by his mother (as in Leroux), slowly dies of grief at his underground
organ after voluntarily giving Christine up, somewhat as in the novel and much as in
the sad final sequence of Universal's Hunchback.
In this process of developing his performance, Chaney was making some sugges-
tive allusions, consciously or inadvertently, that brought several recent contexts
(along with the anxieties swirling around them) into his silent phantom. His posture
of obsessively training and hypnotizing a younger female singer continued to recall
the figure of Svengali~though with less blatant anti-Semitism than we see in Du
Maurier~not primarily because of Trilby the novel or play, but because of the numer-
ous silent films focused on Svengali that played in America from 1912 to 1922 (Kin-
nard, 51, 68, 141), not to mention myriad screen versions of Beauty and the Beast over the
same period (Kinnard, 12, 19, 23, 53, 8o). Less obviously, Chaney's way of bringing
Christine to Erik's lair, with its turning of actress Mary Philbin into a virtual sleep-
walker and her captor into a black-caped and white-masked predator whose facial ex-
pressions appear only in his eyes, recalls the most acclaimed German Expressionist
film prior to the mid-twenties, Robert Weine's The Cabinet q[Dr. Caligari (completed
in Germany in 1919 and released in the United States in 1921; Skal, 40, 43). Chaney's
Erik has features of both the black-caped and top-hatted Caligari, the carnival hyp-
notist, and his pasty-faced minion, Cesare the zombielike sleepwalker, who slumbers
in a coffin, is dressed entirely in deathly black himsel£ and is robotically stiff save for
his penetrating eyes that become most pronounced as he stalks Jane Olsen at Cali-
gari's command and steals her from her father and her suitor, carrying her to a reclu-
sive and highly artificial sanctuary until he is chased down by a mob led by Jane's
father (Weine; Kinnard, 97-103; and Skal, 40-41). The teller of this story in flash-
back, Francis the suitor, turns out to be the inmate of an asylum, like every other char-
acter, all of whom are either treated or manipulated (it remains unclear) by the
doctor whom Francis sees as the performer Caligari (Weine). These scenes and char-
acters, we can now conclude, are anguished cultural reactions to World War I, partly
to how that conflict produced half-dead and "disfigured bodies," partly to how it led
to extensive mental illness, and partly to how men had been turned into automatons,
UNIVERSALS SILENT FILM 139
Figure s.r: Lon Chaney and Mary Philbin in the 1925 Universal Phantom
like Cesare, hypnotically controlled by hidden commanders, like Caligari, with secret
designs (Skal, 48). Chaney's Erik incarnates all those levels and the fears about them
in one contradictory being. The image of Svengali lurking behind it all then adds the
suggestion that the manipulative side of this composite may be rooted in an old-
world European mentality; a shadowy Eastern European/Semitic influence repugnant
to many Americans, all of which could vaguely be seen as a hidden cause of the Great
War that killed or wounded so many American men, leaving some of them as insane
as Cesare, Francis, or Erik the phantom.
Indeed, such allusions are really just extensions of a larger postwar context that
Lon Chaney brought to this role and audiences would have firmly associated with
him by the time The Phantom premiered. The previous film that most established him
as a star was The Penalty (from the Goldwyn studio in 1920), in which his physically
taxing performance as an underworld amputee pointedly suggested "the impotent
rage of maimed war veterans who were being assimilated back into society in un-
precedented numbers" (Skal, 65) and were leaving their neighbors torn between pity
for them and fear of the potential for violence in their anger. Chaney's vivid trans-
formation into the ~asimodo of The Hunchback only solidified that association be-
tween his "thousand faces" and "the mutiles de guerre that haunted Europe and
America" at the time (Skal, 66). Audiences thus had to have carried these connec-
tions over into his next self-distortion as the phantom of the Opera, so much so that
his "Erik's bulging bald head and stiff carriage," as David J. Skal suggests, probably
"gave him the aspect of a ruined penis that can no longer seduce, only repulse the
beloved" (Skal, 68), drawing forth the fears of sexual incapacity in those severely in-
jured by the war.
To these half-piteous and half-fearful contexts, Chaney even added their in-
creased association with the carnivalesque as it was now being conceived, not just
because his showman's roots were in lower-middle-class vaudeville but also because
several of his freakish film characters had already been members of circuses or car-
nivals, as in The Miracle Man (1919). Then, too, his very next film after The Phantom, re-
leased at about the same time in the end, was M-G- M's The Unholy Three (1925), in
which this other Chaney was a circus ventriloquist prone to many disguises (quite
like the Erik of Leroux), one of which even altered his gender (Blake 1998, 144-47;
Skal, 64-65; Kinnard, 180-81). This carnival element, particularly since it was
linked to Chaney's own rise from circuslike "low culture" to highly paid film star-
dom, attached suggestions of the self contorted by war to the joys and fears of the
rising middle class, especially when it found itself to be transferable from one con-
dition to another, like a masked carnival figure. Such a notion of selfhood in the
1920s viewed the 'T' as so subject to change-by the consequences of war or the eco-
nomic upheavals of an increasingly corporatized world-that it raised both the at-
traction and the terror of a continual loss of identity. No wonder David Thomson
has written of Lon Chaney that no "screen performer" before or since "so illustrates
the fascination for audiences of the idea, promise and threat of metamorphosis"
(Thomson, 93). At least as he was working out his rendering of the phantom in
1923-24, Chaney was enacting a basic, if tacit, obsession in the West with possibil-
ities of self-transfiguration that were both enticing and abhorrent to filmgoers at
this particular time.
While this process was going on, however, several script changes at the studio
were already backing away from so much ambiguity in Chaney's character. Clawson's
Oriental flashback, though it did not last long, threw out the deformity and mal-
leability at birth by recalling that an already criminalized Erik had been sentenced by
a sultan to be tortured with his head forced down into an anthill, where his face was
partly eaten up before the Persian could rescue him and spirit them both away to
Paris (Mac~een 1989a, 38). Later, after Julian's preferred finale was briefly used in
a test screening, an internal memo to Universal's New York office argued that this
ending was "not logical or convincing. A monster, such as the phantom," the note
added, "could not have been redeemed through a woman's kiss, nor could a girl who
UNIVERSAL'S SILENT fiLM I4I
had witnessed his diabolical acts have been moved to kiss him merely because he
drooped his head sadly. (Viewed this way, with the connection to Christine's father
vague enough now to be ignored, the phantom's] death rang false .... Better to have
kept him a devil to the end" (Mac~een 1989b, 39-40). Consequently, Universal
finally removed even the previous history of Erik that made him "Chief Inquisitor
during the Second Commune" (as though there were a Second Commune). It also
tossed out the mildly "old fashioned furniture" in the underground bedroom he left
unused, "the idea being that it belonged to Erik's mother," a notion that remained in
the scenario at least through Clawson's second rewrite (Clawson, scenes 318 and
269). Replacing all of this in the final released version is a sudden note to the police
and opera managers provided by the once- Persian/now- Parisian "Ledoux": "ERIK-
Born during the Boulevard Massacre.-Self educated musician and master of the
Black Art.-Exiled to Devil's Island for criminal insane.- ESCAPED-NOW AT
LARGE" (Julian).
There is no longer any clear statement about his face being deformed from birth
or after, so his visage tends to become a physiognomy for a depraved moral condi-
tion associating him with several obscure terrors at once: a vague French violence
(rather than the Commune or the wider war in Europe) as if that violence were his
mother and birthplace; black magic (rather than country carnivals) as if that practice
were closely linked to private self-education; and criminal insanity (as though
Devil's Island were more a repository for homicidal maniacs than, say, the prison of
Alfred Dreyfus from 1894 to 1899). As such changes become more complete, the
skull-like quality of Chaney's Erik becomes deemphasized, however much there are
still early references in the film to a skeletal figure seen by the Opera stagehands (Ju-
lian). His wearing a mask of a skull to the masked ball is clearly stipulated as early as
Clawson's second script (Scene 231: "It is plain to be seen that the death's head man
wears a mask"). The end result divorces much of the older death's-head symbolism
from this Erik, even more so as the film is further changed to make him a very
earthly "devil." Christine thus has no doubt in the final film that the phantom is sim-
ply "a monster-a loathsome beast," especially when Erik recaptures her after the
masked ball, throws her on an underground bed in the posture of a potential rapist,
and taunts her (according to dialogue projected in the final version) with "Now, you
shall see the evil spirit that makes my evil face!'' (Julian).
If there is a many-sided phantom with a pitiable past in this film, he remains only
in the beseeching gestures of Chaney when Mary Philbin's Christine beholds the
masked Erik pleading for her love upon her first descent into his lair (Julian). If there
might have been an Erik in this version who had a complex relationship to a multi-
faceted French history, that dimension has been buried by September 1925, even as
the narration in Clawson's second script stating that the Opera had been a "military
headquarters" particularly in "1870" (Clawson, scene 12) has been supplanted by the
final film's initial descriptions of the Paris Opera as "rising nobly over medieval torture
chambers, hidden dungeons, long forgotten" (Julian, my emphasis). The quasi-
Gothic sets for this phantom's underground, originally sketched by Frenchman Ben
Carre from his own remembered viewing of the Paris Opera cellars (Mac~een
1989a, 37) and then intensified to resemble the dark Carceri etchings of arch within
arch by Piranesi in the eighteenth century (compare Kupfer 42, 43, 45,47 with figure
5.2), are finally pulled away from attempted authenticity by an added label ("me-
dieval") that brings out their castle-stone and quasi-monastic, hence ominously
$:
N
Figure 5.2: Lon Chaney on Universal's 1924-25 underground set for its Phantom ofthe Opera
UNIVERSAL'S SILENT fiLM 143
Catholic, qualities, all of which are reinforced by Erik's pipe organ and his semi-
religious bed-and-death chamber (Julian; see also figure s.r). Gone are virtually all
the half-sublimated references in the book and the earlier scripts to French and
Western cultural conflicts of the previous fifty years. Even the film's one possible di-
rect reference to modern simulations, the hell of twisting mirrors that is indeed im-
ported from the novel as a death-trap for Raoul and his guide, is deflected by being
cast back into the Middle Ages once Ledoux recognizes it as "the old torture cham-
ber" within the context of the final film's opening description of the Opera (Julian).
What is "abjected down below'' in this version, we find, is far less immediately-
though occasionally-what is "thrown off and under" in Leroux's novel.
Now those original "abjects,'' while sometimes discernable in bits and pieces, have
given way to others half-related and half-unrelated to them, especially in the final
presentation and placement of Chaney's phantom. The "underground horror" is
here a tuxedoed and diseased quasi aristocrat, an all-too "old world" European, made
more "decadent French" by his resemblance to Toulouse- Lautrec's 1893 poster-
portrait of the chanteur Aristide Bruant, especially with the black cape and broad-
brimmed hat that this and later productions clearly adopt from that poster (see fig-
ure 5.3). This phantom thus recalls medieval warlords in castles with torture
chambers (such as Dracula) while also being much more of a self-employed entre-
preneur like Dr. Caligari. In addition, he is a source and instigator of labor unrest
through mob action-perhaps a vaguely French revolution-partly in the way he
embodies an "underground" (and Catholic) threat to the rising middle and upper
classes attending a palatial theater. As a Devil's Island escapee who is "insane" by de-
finition, too, he becomes a focal point for growing middle-class fears of the uncon-
trollable and not-very-hidden criminality that is clearly, by the 1920s, a byproduct of
increased urbanization right under the noses of well-heeled city dwellers. Moreover,
Erik's ubiquitous domination of the Opera house and its environs from behind the
scenes, now that such power seems firmly Satanic as well as Faustian, provides a
clearly "evil" explanation for why all the people in the theater-inside and outside
the film-feel threatened by a loss of self-determination because of hidden forces
beyond their control.
Even the question of whether middle-class women should work outside the
home, as Christine and Mary Philbin do, is given an answer by this Erik being more
and more a bestial and black-magical seducer. For a woman to place herself in a pro-
fessional setting is now for her to risk, not so much incestuous relations with a fa-
ther-figure (with most of these overtones confined in this film to a
much-abbreviated graveyard scene), but victimization by older male predators in the
workplace who will at first conceal their lascivious intentions behind the seemingly
magical poses of "unseen" teachers or mentors. The vaguely Oriental and exotic
bedroom that such men might offer women beyond public scrutiny, as in the gilded
gondola-bed for Christine purchased by Universal from the effects of a notorious
European entertainer (Mac~een 1 989a, 38), becomes the ultimate sign of a deca-
dent eroticism threatening the undomestic woman, instead of the original Erik's de-
sire to recreate the maternal boudoir as it once was. The modern woman, the final
film suggests, is well advised to seek the protection of a well-off younger (but not too
young) man in marriage, particularly if he is a soldier in uniform known for his
valiant protection of the weak, which all applies to Norman Kerry's mustachioed
Raoul in the Lon Chaney Phantom. Though there are certainly vestiges in all of this
I44 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TilE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
of a gilded age too blindly ignoring the underlying death that is the "wages" ofluxu-
rious sin, the emphasis now is on a vague feeling that modern twenties hedonism
may be haunted by a somehow "foreign" figure (or set of tendencies) from the past
that threatens to pull apparent "progress" backwards, as the neo-Gothic under-
ground of this Phantom seems inclined to do beneath Universal's spectacular recre-
ations of Paris.
THE CORPORATE CULTURE AND THE AUDIENCES OF THE I920S
As it happens, cultural reasons for these many changes are not difficult to find. In
both the struggles of its production and its final version, the 1925 Phantom is a re-
vealing epitome of the economic and social history of both the middle class and the
film industry in America between the turn of the century and the 1920s. Over that
time, the United States saw a massive increase in urban and suburban populations
and a concomitant movement of working people, not just from agriculture to indus-
try, but from smaller businesses to growing corporations. The consequences for the
middle classes were increased leisure time and a boom in consumer goods available
to them, but at the cost of increasingly "unbridled corporate power," which the gov-
ernment came to support by the 1920s, and hence some vaguely felt "erosion of
community and personal autonomy in the face of an increasingly nationalized and
organized society" (Dumenil, 7, I2). For many the resulting prosperity was thus more
illusory than real, but the corporately controlled organs of publicity helped maintain
the illusion, most successfully in the twenties:
The mass media, largely accepting of business propaganda, made it abundantly clear
that corporations were the source of American well-being. The enjoyment of prosper-
ity by the middle class was particularly important. It helped deflect that group's inter-
est away from social reform and made it more readily convinced of business's
beneficence and contribution to law and order.... [The overall affect was] a shift in
behavior and values away from the Victorian "production" ethos of work, restraint, and
order, toward one that embrace[d) leisure, consumption, and self-expression (includ-
ing the opera and the "movies"] as vehicles for individual satisfaction. (Dumenil, 33, 57)
The growth of the film industry in Hollywood over this very period followed much the
same course and so came to pursue similar goals in its motion pictures. Pioneering pro-
ducers such as Carl Laemmle began as owners of nickelodeons, which "admitted all
customers at a single [low] price and allowed them to sit wherever they wished,"
thereby drawing mostly "workers and immigrants," as opposed to higher-class
climbers who preferred the stratified seating of opera houses and so-called legitimate
theaters (Ross, 18). As filmmaking expanded, consolidated, and sought to attract more
middle-class audiences while keeping the ones it already had, "modest-sized" produc-
tion companies and distributors "were steadily supplanted by an increasingly oli-
garchic, vertically integrated studio system based in Los Angeles and New York and
financed by some of the largest banks and corporations in the nation" (Ross, n8).
Such corporatization, which in film meant "the integration of production, distribu-
tion, and exhibition into a single company" (Ross, 120), came to be dependent for its
continued growth on getting upper- and "middle-class folk" to make "moviegoing" a
UNIVERSAL'S SILENT FILM 145
Figure 5.3: 1893 poster by Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec
"regular part of their lives" at somewhat higher prices; the studios-and certainly Uni-
versal-by the early twenties therefore strove to fashion "a cross-class entertainment
experience designed to attract greater numbers of prosperous middle-class patrons,
while retaining their steady working-class following. To that end, they erected exotic
movie palaces [such as the Astor at which The Phantom finally premiered] and produced
lavish films aimed at turning moviegoing into an experience that both transcended and
reshaped traditional class boundaries," hoping to avoid "class hostilities" by "appealing
to cross-class fantasies ofluxury; comfort, and consumption" of which the film corpo-
ration would be known as the provider to everyone (Ross, 175).
It was this exact agenda that Universal's first Phantom if the Opera was designed to
fulfill, more so than any of its previous films. Hence the designation of this picture
as "Universal's Masterpiece" on posters and lobby cards in 1924-25 (Perry, 47)-and
the problems that arose for the studio as it faced the contradictions that were really
involved in pursuing that goal. Once he had read the novel, Laemmle made it clear
from the start that The Phantom was to be primarily directed at upper- and middle-
class movie-palace audiences, the sort who aspired to the "high culture" opera with
which the film would surround them while the theater itself would engulf them in
its own gilded splendor (a "cathedral for the people"; Ross, 173-74). As a result, to
achieve such "production values," the studio built the largest and most detailed inte-
rior in its history; a "full scale replica of the Paris Opera auditorium" that was the
"first [set] ever constructed on a structural steel framework set in concrete founda-
tions" (Mac~een 1989a, 36; Turner, 674). This set was so expensive, as well as
durable, that it became a perennial background in many later Universal productions,
including the studio's reworked Phantom if the Opera of 1943 (Turner, 677, 733-40).
Accordingly, so that even more "masterpiece" touches could emerge from such a
large investment, two portions of this set-particularly the Paris Opera foyer cen-
tered on the grand staircase-became the stages for two crowd-filled sequences
filmed in Technicolor (Mac~een 1989a, 37-38). The most technologically accom-
plished of the two, still available in color, is that portion of the masked ball when the
skull-masked phantom descends the staircase costumed as Red Death (see Julian
and figure u), an image later turned into a life-sized figure displayed in the foyer of
the Astor at the premiere (Blake 1995, 67). Such glittering amenities initially
seemed in line with the early Clawson scripts so close to the novel, and the planned
Oriental flashback was intended to match that level of spectacle much in the way
Orientalism at the Opera gave wealth-seeking Western audiences the flavor of the
mastered "other" whose accouterments they could seem to afford-and now to pos-
sess in movie theaters (witness Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood, com-
pleted in 1929). Class-blending "fantasy" in the film palaces of the twenties, after all,
was fashioned to be "less an escape from something than an adventure into a wonder-
fully different world" accompanied by "luxury [and usher] service" while it was also
"entertainment at affordable prices" (Ross, 183).
Many of the changes made in the course of this production, however, were
prompted by a clear imbalance that rapidly emerged in 1923-24 within this project's
intense pursuit of the operatic and the "highbrow." The story editors who rejected the
first script were concerned about the Gothic "mystery angle" being added to the Hunch-
back elements because it bordered on a tradition in theater and prose fiction thought
to be too quasi-aristocratic and slow-moving (however much that opinion changed
five years later) for the widest range of class audiences the studio was trying to attract.
To tilt so completely toward grandeur and operatic acting, they feared, would be for
Universal to lose the lower-middle and working-class moviegoers who were still part
of the public they sought. It was this concern that surely led to the cutting of the slow
musical death at the organ, the somberly tragic exchange between Erik and Christine
just before it, and the flashback to resplendent Persia, along with the Persian, each of
UNIVERSALS SILENT FILM 147
which was too like esoteric performances at the opera in addition to being "just too
slow" The same general reason also accounts for Universal's experiments with "lower-
brow" comic relief, the larger roles given to stagehands with whom working-class view-
ers could identify, so much so that one revision created "Simon," Joseph Buquet's
corpulent and rabble-rousing worker-brother (Clawson, scene s), and of course the
decision to end the picture with a fast-action chase filmed by the unit most experi-
enced in westerns. The tension between "high" and "low" culture in the novel em-
phatically returned in the making of the Chaney film, albeit with very little direct
reference to the carnivalesque in the end or to the lower classes shunted to the out-
skirts by the rebuilding of Paris. Here class conflict reappears in the audience-oriented
cuttings, reorderings, and recuttings, and the studio quarrels behind them that are so
plainly visible in the final film and the tangled history of its making. The resolution of
the struggle seems to be the class-inclusiveness in the final basting together of older
and newer scenes, just what the Hollywood studios tried to achieve in movie-palace
films at the time. Yet the attempted conflation of quite different elements is so glar-
ing in the film even today-the picture tone varies from straight black-and-white to
different shades of sepia to brief uses of color (Julian)-that the contending social in-
terests and cultural agendas announce themselves as still unsettled in the very effort to
make them disappear behind an all-embracing onslaught of "production values" and
the shock of the Chaney-phantom's face once his blank-white mask is torn off by Mary
Philbin's Christine in the picture's most famous scene.
The kind of scapegoat the phantom becomes in the first adaptation of him is thus a
very particular extension, and "abject" repository, of this broad-based cultural process.
If one objective of the studio and the hegemonic culture in this and other films is in-
deed to promote an "ethos" of"leisure, consumption, and self-expression" for the rising
middle class in a way that either endorses or conceals the increasing power of corpora-
tions, Leroux's Erik finally has to be recast-and more strictlyvillainized-into a reflec-
tor of conditions that this supposedly cross-class ideology needs to position as "other"
than and threatening to itself Hence the ugliness of a semi-skeletal visage drifting to-
ward death, which is all too easily (if vaguely) connected to black magic, becomes asso-
ciated with a composite of the former "masters of industry," whom the class-climbers of
the 1920s want to see as increasingly outmoded even while they haunt the present from
out of the recent past. That is why Chaney's Erik is both a Draculaic throwback toward
the aristocracy and an "insane" version of the self-employed entrepreneur. The latter of
these, in retrospect, seemed the dominant rising-middle-class figure in the late nine-
teenth century, even though he had been overtaken by, while remaining attractive to,
"the 'new middle class' of professionals and salaried corporate managers" (Ross, 14) ex-
emplified in this version by the career-officer Raoul, the Paris police (including
Ledoux), and the Opera directors (who are slightly but finally less the objects of satire
here that they often are in the novel). Now this just-past model of upward mobility can
be "undergrounded" and defeated, as if by the workers, in order to establish the distinct
identity of the corporate professional targeted as the fastest growing segment of this
film's audience. The "old world" undesirability yet dim attractiveness of this "other" ini-
tially are even compounded by his being so blatantly Continental. Indeed, that is not a
surprising device considering how often American films of this time used "the Euro-
pean" to be the locus of more extreme emotion, and hence more wildly passionate evil
(especially; German evil), than was ideologically allowed to Americans still rooted in a
fading Puritanism (Sklar, 96~r02).
Meanwhile, what remains most disturbing about a more "advanced" corporate

America is also scapegoated into this cadaverous figure, mainly in his deeply hidden
power over all aspects of the Opera. Now the potential among audience members for
feeling robbed of their supposed autonomy by the growth of corporations can be
shunted off onto Chaney's "monster" as though this one shadowy and abhorrent fig-
ure were the unseen manipulator oflives, jobs, and big buildings rather than any orga-
nization, Universal included. The phantom of the Opera can thereby become both the
easy explanation for an increased feeling of powerlessness-there is now a specific and
Satanized location for blame-and the momentary non-corporate embodiment of the
grasping and dictatorial egotism that was feared to be at the root of the unbridled cor-
porate domination sanctioned by the government. Such a device can even blend the
corporate and the criminal in a way that suggests a possible linkage, but then it can
break the link too by finally drawing the audience to connect the urban criminality it
fears with the "insane" and largely selfish social outcast and relic who associates him-
self illegitimately with high culture and romantic aspiration. Chaney's Erik can thus be
both the threat to working women of victimization by older mentors in the big-busi-
ness world, insofar as criminality and business are viewed as connected in the phan-
tom, and a hint that female independence--newly debated in the wake of increased
corporate jobs for women outside the home and the granting of the vote to women in
1919 (Dumenil, 99-127)-could lead a woman toward illicit "underground" sex that
she cannot control, particularly if criminality is thought of as separate from work and
linked instead with the fears about the greater sexual freedom of the 1920s.
A cultural tug of war pulling at female moviegoers of this time drew them both
regressively toward the ideal of the "Angel in the House" and progressively toward a
less defined (even fearsome) liberation and self-expression. This conflict is reen-
acted by Philbin's Christine in how often she seems a hesitant and fearful "fish out
of water" torn between sanctioned and bestial men in the corporate world of the
Opera and yet how well she achieves moments of personal glory singing alone on the
stage as though she were not as dependent on male tutelage and protection as she
constantly is in the rest of the film. Running through all of these quandaries, we
must realize, is the larger 1920s conflict of ideologies between the promise of per-
sonal gratification in a "progressive" and expanding consumer culture (valued in the
splendor of the Opera and the production values in this Phantom) and the fear that
the greater corporatization on which all this pleasure and "freedom" depends may
hide an obscure and ugly will to power, with Victorian or even medieval features,
waiting to punish all us hedonists beneath the glittering surface of prosperity-a will
unmasked, albeit displaced, in Chaney's Erik, as well as the many struggles for power
that gave birth to "Universal's Masterpiece." What is "abjected," then, onto a new
Erik in this film's production process and its final version is a complex of anxieties
generated by the undecidable contradictions that underlay the value-systems most
promoted in the 1920s by corporations and their media.
THE FINAL ENDING AND ITS DEFLECTION OF THE UNION MOVEMENT
At the same time, though, the most radical change this film makes in Leroux's novel
and in the early drafts of its script remains the final chasing and killing of the phan-
tom by Opera stagehands and many other Paris workers. This shift, which began (as
UNIVERSAL'S SILENT FILM 149
we have seen) in early script revisions and then swelled into great prominence (like
the mob) in the final film, reflects and tries to temper a further set of anxieties
aroused by the working-class labor conditions of the 1920s, especially in Hollywood.
Right at the time The Phantom was being made, Carl Laemmle was one of the big-stu-
dio executives who was fighting hard to stave off large-scale unionization, somewhat
among film actors but primarily among the industrial and craft workers. From 1917
through 1925, these associated producers combined their forces in a series of orga-
nizations designed to maintain an open shop against rising pro-union pressures. The
most lasting of these was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of Amer-
ica (MPPDA), which called its labor-relations branch the Association of Motion
Picture Producers (AMPP) and by 1925 moved to control the employment of craft
workers and technicians through the Mutual Alliance of Studio Employees
(MASE), a quasi union dominated by the producers themselves (Nielson, 6). This
kind of process became a top priority for film studio leaders, as well as for other cor-
porations, when a series of union and unorganized labor strikes across the nation in
1919-seen by many as a "Red Scare" that might carry the Russian revolution to the
United States-helped cause union membership in America to rise sharply (by 49
percent since 1916). That led the chairman of the Motion Picture Section of the U.S.
Labor Department to send a memo urging corporate film producers to stem this
tide without direct attacks on union types in films, counseling the "constructive ed-
ucation" of workers through motion pictures rather than overtly "destructive propa-
ganda" (Ross, 126-28). On the labor side of the film industry; unionization was both
vigorously growing and highly conflicted over the same period of time. By 1908, the
Los Angeles area had a local chapter of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage
Employees and Motion Picture Machine Operators (the IATSE or IA). But a full
union agreement with the producers for a closed shop was long prevented, even in
the early twenties, by quarrels over jurisdiction between local film-worker unions in
Hollywood (Nielson, 2-4; Lovell, 14-16). "From 1919 to 1925 there were several in-
stances of union members going out on strike only to find that other unions would
supply strike-breakers to the studios" (Nielson, 5).
This series of conflicts was coming to a head, at Universal and other film compa-
nies, precisely in 1924-25, the very period when the Chaney Phantom underwent the
most script changes. It was in 1924 that Actors Equity proposed a union agreement
covering film performers to the MPPDA only to be "flatly rejected," with very pub-
lic outrage on the actors' side (Clark, 32), and several local craft and technical unions
signed pacts with the IA all at once to form a more united front, showing decisively
that the producers' '"divide and conquer' strategy had outlived its usefulness" (Niel-
son, 7). The eventual (if temporary) result, just over a year after the Chaney Phantom
was released, was the 1926 Studio Basic Agreement. It recognized the IA and sev-
eral other unions as bargaining agents for film workers while the unions relinquished
demands for a totally closed shop and settled for a pacifying series of negotiating
"procedures" instead of a "contract per se" (Nielson, 7-8; see also Lovell, 16-17). In-
dustry insiders and many filmgoers, at least in California, could hardly have missed
linking this widely known context to the highly visible actions of "organized" labor
in the final 1925 Phantom of the Opera. To be sure, Universal's decision to emphasize
and gather the backstage workers under the leadership of Simon was undoubtedly
prompted by the need to increase the action component and maintain some work-
ing-class audience for the film, if not also by the mob-chase sequence in The Cabinet
ISO THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
cifDr. Caligari. But an increased emphasis on mob action and crowds of massed work-
ers as the destroyers of the phantom as the production went on cannot be explained
only by an earlier film or the desire for laborers to identify with aspects of the pic-
ture, particularly since this version of The Phantom is the only one to opt for anything
like this "final solution" to the problems Erik presents. There are just too many vis-
ible relationships between this film's working-class and mob scenes and the his-
tory~and anxieties~connected with labor unrest after 1918.
Certain historical parallels to the actions of the mob here, in fact, seem almost
uncannily exact, even though these parallels finally lead in this Phantom to ideologi-
cal resolutions that are neither those of most unionized workers nor those of their
most vocal enemies. When the ever-swelling crowd of workers breaks in on Erik and
Christine beneath the Opera, chases them into the streets, and finally beats the
phantom before throwing his mangled corpse into the Seine near Notre Dame, it is
echoing one of the most horrific incidents in the "Red Scare" of 1919, one that con-
nected the growth of unionization to the virulent anti-Communist reaction against
it by pro-nationalist organizations. On Armistice Day in October of that year, an
American Legion parade in Centralia, Washington, marched by the meeting hall of
the supposedly "red" union of unions, the Industrial Workers of the World (the
IWW or "Wobblies"). The IWW members in the building were armed, fearing
reprisals already, and when some legionnaires moved toward the hall, some Wob-
blies opened fire, killing two. After several Wobblies were arrested, an increasingly
angry legion mob stormed and broke into the jail. They dragged out a major IWW
leader, Wesley Everest, and promptly castrated and lynched him, an act that was
never prosecuted even though trials did go forward for some IWW members (Du-
menil, 222-23) just as Universal's mob of workers is presumably not charged for
what is clearly a lynching of the phantom of the Opera. On the one hand, the film's
echo of the Everest incident and others like it arouses audience fears about mob vi-
olence generally, most of all when it is connected with protests by organized labor-
ers, however much sympathy there is for some of the victimized workers. On the
other hand, the American worries and the anger toward Everest are now focused on
the extremelyvillainized phantom, as though the darkest sides of~and even the op-
pressions behind~the labor unrest can all be placed "over there" and consequently
removed from the workers, who are finally preserving their corporation, the general
public, and perhaps a redomesticated womanhood, as well as their own livelihoods,
without any formal unionization or "red" affiliation. As it happens, there is another
nearly uncanny parallel between this ending and a labor incident, this one from 1929
and thus forecast by Universal's Phantom. In that year textile workers in Gastonia,
North Carolina, staged a mass protest against the increased mechanization of their
plant by holding a parade designed around a coffin bearing a cadaverous "effigy of an
unpopular superintendent" (Dumenil, 6o-6r). The workers in the Chaney film are
making a very similar attack on an oppressive "upper-cruster," especially by pursuing
a figure who sleeps in a coffin, yet they are doing it with no union and not really to
a superintendent, but rather to a demonic and deathly threat to labor and manage-
ment alike.
In the end, the Chaney Phantom is made to deflect and sublimate the unresolved
labor problem at the time and place of this film's production. If Simon and his fel-
low workers begin the final screenplay by feeling mistreated and even threatened
with violence at the Opera, they ultimately do not organize or fight against manage-
UNIVERSALS SILENT FILM I5I
ment; they allow their growing resentment to be focused on the phantom alone,
whom Simon finally calls an "assassin" in gathering many Paris workers-and Uni-
versal extras-to move against this threat to them all (Julian). Any complaints about
working conditions that might be leveled at owners or managers and any harangues
about the need for labor to be organized have all their energies channeled toward a
Satanic interloper with no legitimized social role (a composite of outmoded captains
of industry) who harasses management as much as the workers and comes close to
blowing up the whole corporation by nearly incinerating the Opera as he threatens
to in the novel. Moreover, in case this Erik's being a murderer of stagehands and a
near-rapist is not enough to justify a lynching, Chaney's final scene has him seem on
the verge of tossing a small bomb at the mob from an upraised fist and then laugh-
ing fiendishly when he opens his palm to show it as empty, his final sleight of hand
(Julian). This leering bravado dredges up memories of World War I, earlier French
terrorism, and even makeshift labor bombings, none of which is funny to the work-
ing-class extras in the film or to any class of moviegoers, particularly those with any
connection to potential or actual victims of violence.
The 1925 version of Erik thus becomes the main source and repository of all vio-
lence (including fake movie violence), appropriately for a figure born from and
emerging out of a history of"Massacre." Threat in him becomes so general and sim-
ply evil by the final script that every hand is against him in Universal's attempt to
unify the different classes in its audiences, this time by giving them all a common
enemy: Rather than be disrupters themselves and threaten the middle-to-upper
classes in the audience, the laborers are turned willingly into the executors of a gen-
eral social will and thus the ultimate servants of the corporation and the nation, re-
alizing (Universal may have hoped) that their energy should be channeled in that
direction rather than carried out in angry unions against their employers. The de-
structively violent side of worker tendencies can be explained by and shunted off
onto the phantom, even as the workers execute him for all our sakes in their under-
standably "low class," rather than fully civilized, response to the horror of him. This
result is a sublimation not very distant from the semi-diversion of labor's interests
in the Studio Basic Agreement, in which the recognition of organized labor (which
even Chaney's phantom must accept, in a sense) was achieved at the price of a still-
open shop and the disappearance of a solid contract behind layer upon layer of ne-
gotiating procedures (much like images on a screen eternally divorced from their
most "real" substance).
Universal's silent Phantom if the Opera, then, works on the heterogeneous film-
palace audiences of its day-and ours, to some degree-by thoroughly; if obscurely;
reenacting the politics and demographics of studio movie making at the time, and the
wider ideological quandaries bound up with them, in this picture's images and pan-
els of dialogue. This process and the many stages through which it progressed allows
middle-class filmgoers, under the cover of "high culture" terror, to abject onto the
picture and its phantom numerous irresolvable contradictions and mixtures peculiar
to the audiences of the 1920s: the possible slippage between "high" and "low" be-
haviors of this era in the class-crossing viewers targeted by the big film studios; the
new fluidity between traditional and "liberated" roles for women; the haunting of
the now corporatized middle class by earlier forms of the class-climbing self; the
threat to the illusion of personal autonomy in the unseen corporate control over in-
numerable lives; the pull of what is older and European against the effort to leave all
I 52 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
that behind in what is "progressive" and American; and the increasing intrusion of
working-class conditions and unionizing actions into middle- and upper-class pre-
serves, especially the film palaces, that are just as dependent on those "other" people
as the big studios and many other companies.
Of course several abjected anxieties continue from the text and time of the novel
and are still "thrown off" into the phantom and his underground, ranging from the
unresolved quandaries over father-daughter relations to the now-vaguer Orientaliz-
ing of all "otherness" (including the unconscious) to the threats to class distinctions
in the ubiquitous and underlying inevitability of death. Yet the Chaney Phantom re-
mains an indicative and multilayered scapegoating of the complex of fears plaguing
the middle classes specifically in the 1920s. That is certainly one reason why this
production is Gothicized in ways that the novel is not. Here the Chaney-Erik's un-
dergrounds are not only called "medieval," however falsely. but many of that cellar's
ingredients are also quasi- Catholic and visibly foreign at a time when the many "old-
stock Protestant Americans" saw "Catholics" and old-world "immigrants," along
with ethnic minorities, as threats to their self-serving vision of a "homogeneous"
American dominance of the globe, a vision to which the major film studios were try-
ing to appeal (Dumenil, 202). These added ingredients, furthering some but not all
of Leroux's, allow the quandaries of the twenties to seem truly "other" than their
own time and yet to be as visibly present as they are undergrounded, one of the key
double-binds in modern thought given its greatest symbolic force by the Gothic tra-
dition. By these means, the audiences for "Universal's Masterpiece" of 1925 can find
pleasurably terrifying ways to live with their contradictions without ignoring them
completely. Meanwhile, the "production values" of a big studio can mold public
opinion, without seeming to do so, in the direction of the solutions to ideological
conflicts, such as the killing of union labor's most forceful violence by labor itsel£
that the corporate America of the 1920s was perpetually marketing to its citizens.
CHAPTER SIX
The 1943 Remake

RECOMBINING FILM STYLES,
STRUGGLING WITH PSYCHOANALYSIS,
AND SANITIZING WORLD WAR II
THE REUNION OF FILM "CLASSES"

AND A REFORMED PHANTOM FOR THE TIMES
The Chaney Phantom set a standard for retelling the story, partly because of its on-
going popularity after the mid-twenties. Yet it also helped establish some studio
modes of filmmaking that could then be split apart and recombined in later produc-
tions. Oddly enough, it was Universal's attempts to extend the popularity of its 1925
version that helped instigate the splitting of The Phantom's different elements. In
1930, with Chaney now irretrievably under contract to Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer
(and near the death from throat cancer that took him in August of that year), Uni-
versal re-released its "masterpiece" with a soundtrack of its own, including extensive
synchronized music, dialogue sequences reshot and recorded by Mary Philbin and
Norman Kerry (albeit quite feebly), and a publicity note almost happily admitting
that "Lon Chaney's portrayal of the Phantom [remains] a silent one" (Blake, 73).
The coming of sound, of course, had rapidly moved the film musical to the fore-
front-the 1929 Academy Award for Best Picture went to M-G-M's The Broadway
Melody (Osborne, 17)-so, given the close connection of the musical to opera, there-
uniting of The Phantom cif the Opera with sound must have seemed an inevitable
method for extending the film's vaunted "production values" and its audience by fill-
ing the one great lack in a silent film about opera, all at relatively little cost to a stu-
dio now facing great losses in the Depression along with nearly everyone else.
At the same time, the continuing silence of the film's "monster," which thus ex-
tended to the underground scenes most associated with Gothic "mystery," proved
highly prophetic about Universal's future in horror films of the 1930s and after. This
side of the Chaney Phantom became one of the foundations for the studio's sharp
turn, under Carl Laemmle, Jr., toward neo-Gothic "creature features" in Tod
Browning's Dracula and James Whale's Frankenstein, both released in 1931, the year
now regarded by most critics as marking the "invention" of the "modern horror film"
(Skal, II4). Chaney, it turns out, was the actor originally intended for Dracula by Carl
I 54 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TJlE PJlANTOM OF THE OPERA
Sr. as his condition for letting his son option the novel and the Broadway play based
loosely on it (Skal, II5). Even when Hungarian Bela Lugosi was finally chosen tore-
peat his stage performance on film after Chaney's death, Browning was determined
that "sound and dialogue should be used sparingly" in Universal's Dracula to increase
its eerie effect, so much so that, as he put it himself, "bits and touches we used to put
in our silent pictures" had "to be reinstated on the screen once more" (from a 1931
interview quoted in Skal, u6). James Whale had much the same view when he
adapted Mary Shelley's Frankenstein from a 1927 dramatization by Peggy Wehling
(Skal, 98-ro1). He retained Wehling's silencing of the monster's voice in Boris
Karloff's famously mute creature, which was itself reworked from all previous ver-
sions, aIa the robotic Cesare in Caligari, to seem more obviously "machine-tooled" in
the wake of"the world's first completely industrialized war" (Skal, 132). Many of the
cultural fears already abjected onto Lon Chaney's Erik in 1925 were now intensified
by means of continued silence and similar "underground Gothic" settings (though
some of them were in towers), in part because "the trauma of the Great Depression"
had more fully motivated the use of extremely aristocratic or gigantic working-class
monsters as scapegoat "metaphors of economic and class warfare" (Skal, 159; see also
Prawer, 22-29).
Universal's rerelease of its first Phantom, though, was a complete box-office fail-
ure, surely because the piecemeal soundtrack brought out even more how much the
film was a thing of shreds and patches, not to mention technologically dated by then.
The sound-musical and silent-horror strains of this version were consequently split
up decisively from 1931 on. The musical film, laced with sporadic reintroductions of
opera as the 1930s developed (Kobal, 172-77), went very much off on its own. It be-
came mostly the domain of the M- G- M and RKO studios, since it readily fit their
desire to attract middle- and upper-middle-class audiences, who highly valued such
celebrations of technical virtuosity and elegance of production as the great escape
from the threats of the Depression to them (Kobal, II1-14) even, perhaps especially,
when such pictures focused on an enterprising chorus girl who rose in social class by
both performance and marriage (as in the Gold Diggers films of the early thirties;
Kobal, n6-19). The horror film, meanwhile, became Universal's primary claim to
motion-picture fame over the same period, so much so that the studio became
widely known as the "House of Horror" by the 1940s (Burkhart, 97). That trend was
one reason, along with the increasingly obvious economy in most of its productions,
why Universal was soon typed as a "B-picture" studio by the time World War II
began, particularly after foreign and Hollywood censors started to crack down on
"the 'horrific' category" more consistently after The Bride cifFrankenstein in 1935-a film
more explicitly Gothic in style than its 1931 predecessor-prompted the studio to
announce its "desire to produce a second sequel" (Sklar, 205). Part of the problem
was undoubtedly the appeal of the Gothic horror film to lower-middle and even
working-class audiences. They had been more or less invited in by Whale's first
Frankenstein, which ends, somewhat like the Chaney Phantom, with a mob of common
laborers, clearly angered by too little work and the death of a worker's child in what
seems a genuine Depression, chasing down the monster and apparently burning him
alive (as an "other" abjecting the effects of the Depression on them), albeit at the
seeming request of both Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) and his father, the
Baron. The different cultural styles that were deliberately wrenched together in the
1925 Phantom had been just as deliberately reseparated over the 1930s into what fi-
THE 1943 REMAKE I 55
nally became clearly "highbrow" versus "lowbrow" classes of films, at least by com-
parison to each other.
Universal's remake, Phantom of the Opera, was intended from the beginning to ad-
dress this problem. The studio had reventured into musicals, even operatic ones, by
hiring the teenage soprano Deanna Durbin in 1936 (Kobal, 1So), hoping to recapture
more of the higher-class audience that was flocking to M-G- M's operetta-style films
with Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald, who made nine pictures together from
1935 to 1942 (Kobal, 174--76). Pleased with the relative success of its Durbin alter-
natives by then, Universal reoptioned Phantom in September 1941 (Mac~een 1993,
So) with her very much in mind for a revised Christine and the Paris Opera interior
still available on the studio lot. The idea was to reunite their present and former au-
diences by "cross-pollinat[ing] their two most lucrative genres, horror movies and
Deanna Durbin musicals" (Mac~een 1993, So). They planned to build on the
name-recognition of a story made "classic" by their own earlier production, and they
initially hoped to add the more classic stature of The Hunchback cifNotre Dame, as they had
before. Their aim was to cast Charles Laughton as the phantom after his triumph in
RKO's 1939 version of The Hunchback, as well as his performance as Durbin's father in
Universal's own musical It Started with Eve (released in 1942; Mac~een 1993, So).
Almost inevitably, this second attempt to blend and expand audiences by combin-
ing the "highbrow" and "lowbrow," though these were now defined differently, led to
another succession of extensive conflicts and redrafted scripts. These lasted until
shooting began in January 1943, and continued right up to the film's premiere in Au-
gust of that year at the Palace Theater in Cincinnati (Mac~een 1993, So--85). As
this process intensified and many delays ensued, Laughton proved to be unavailable;
another choice for the phantom, Broderick Crawford, was drafted into the military
shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor (Perry, 56): Durbin withdrew, finding too
little of a musical in the first script written by John Jacoby (Mac~een 1993, So; Mc-
Clelland, 319): with a musical emphasis later restored, Nelson Eddy, now too old to
be drafted, was signed to play the character eventually called "Anatole Garron," the ro-
mantic (and operatic) male lead, right after his M-G- M contract expired in 1942
(Mac~een 1993, S1) in a move clearly designed to bring his audiences over to this
picture and to revive his sagging film career; and all the unity that was lacking on con-
cept, script, and casting was transferred to the careful designs for a Technicolor and
enhanced-sound production-very different from the black-and-white and often
silent horror films-that, if it was not to be the studio's "Masterpiece" again, was at
least to be its most lavish and high-class achievement in many years.
Consequently, as virtually all its known viewers have agreed from 1943 until today,
this version, as finally released, is "less phantom and more opera," in the words of the
New York Times (Feb. 2I, 1943) and "more trills than thrills," according to Time maga-
zine (Aug. 30, 1943; USC Cinema Library). In the struggle between class and film vo-
cabularies this time, musical "high culture" won the day as forcefully as it could
without alienating too much of the middle class, which gave this Phantom very sub-
stantial box-office support for months, helping it become "Universal's biggest attrac-
tion of the season" (Mac~een 1993, Ss). The Hollywood Reporter declared that the
story had been "subtly altered" enough to make this picture "an attraction for the dis-
criminating," as the more horrific earlier version and most Universal pictures sup-
posedly were not (Aug. 13, 1943), and in October the New York Daily News celebrated
the "color schemes of its operatic settings" as achieving "the brilliance and beauty of
I 56 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF TilE OPERA
fine tapestry at times" (USC Cinema Library). At the 1943 Academy Awards held at
the Chinese Theater in March 1944, this Phantom won Oscars for Best Cinematogra-
phy and Best Interior Decoration in a color film (Osborne, II4, uo), further secur-
ing the "highbrow" pedigree, at least from "production values," that Universal had
always sought to gain from adapting Le Fantome de l'Opera. A closer look at the quan-
daries that arose throughout the making of this version, however, reveals a far less de-
cisive process, one that produced a highly conflicted cultural positioning of the story,
the characters, and their settings at every stage of the film, including the final prod-
uct. The clash of ideologies so basic to the novel and the silent film turns out to have
been repeated once more, but now in connection with some very different social con-
ditions and altered assumptions about the "levels" of culture.
This time the primary pressure on the construction of the phantom from the
start was that he not be as simply villainized as Chaney's Erik had finally been. To
offer another such "monster," for one thing, would be for the studio to type the film
as B-movie horror, particularly in the face of its recent low-culture success with The
WolfMan (1941), in which Lon Chaney, Jr played a Jekyll-and- Hyde figure who al-
luded both to the werewolf tradition used in parts of Dracula (and hence to the whole
tradition of the "beast within") and less directly to the celebration of wolves as fig-
ures of power in the recorded statements of Adolf Hitler (Skal, 2II-15). Steering
away from this sort of "Opera ghost," consequently, meant steering away from Ger-
manizing him, as the name "Erik" had done even in Leroux's book. Jacoby's first
script therefore renamed him "Erique Claudin," an appellation (often reduced to
"Claudin") that lasted all the way through the film's release, thereby granting at least
the phantom's earlier self an unambiguous and admirably cultured French status
(Mac(Qleen 1993, So). That choice, as Jacoby must have known, would immediately
draw some American warmth towards the title character at first, given the current
outpouring of sympathy for now-occupied France and the widely accepted influx of
French escapees, among them many noted French artists, into the United States
over the past several years (Perrett, 387).
Such a decision was one reason that the role was finally offered to and accepted
by not Lon Chaney, Jr. (much to his dismay), but the seemingly high-cultured
Claude Rains, possibly a source for the "Claudin" name, who had appeared as the
principal raisonneur and pursuer of evil in The WolfMan (Skal, 214; Mac(Qleen 1993,
82) the year before his turn at Warner Brothers as the initially collaborative but fi-
nally anti-German Captain Renault in Casablanca (first released in November 1942;
Osborne, II5). Rains himself was worried about being typed into horror films, and
hence B-grade salaries, when he was first approached about Phantom. He consented
only when he was shown the many changes in the part, as well as the style of the pro-
duction, that swerved emphatically from the Chaney standard (Mac(Qleen 1993,
82). True, Jacoby and the studio did decide that the "audience will wish to recognize
the old picture in the new one" (quoted from Jacoby in Mac(Qleen 1993, 8o)-
Rains's phantom does dress in black with a cape and a broad-brimmed hat, cut down
the Opera chandelier, and get unmasked by the new Christine (see Lubin)-but
Universal still shifted away from the ghoulish scapegoating of 1925. The resulting
production process led to an uneasy tug of war in this revision, first between "low"
horror and "high art" in the entire film and then between a deadly threat and the sad
oppression of good French culture (very like the two sides of Captain Renault) in
the phantom himself.
The struggle proved even greater over the kind and degree of horror in the phan-
tom's unmasked face. At the outset of this project's development, Jacoby argued fer-
vently that the new version should not make his "ugliness" even seem "congenital"
(Mac~een 1993, So) in explicit contrast to the novel and the Chaney characteri-
zation. Such deathlike bestiality, though suggestive even in the twenties of a
troglodytic "degeneration," was now too connected with the supernatural elements
and low-culture superstitions in WolfMan- like B pictures. Then, too, Europe was vi-
olently at war, and the United States was drawn irreversibly into the vast conflict it-
self soon after the first new Phantom script was begun. With men now being brutally
killed, injured, and scarred again for real-and at the same time never allowed to ap-
pear much disfigured in propagandistic Hollywood films after 1941 (Skal, 215~16)
a phantom's face like Chaney's, which was truly linked to the previous war, would
have been too reminiscent of French director Abel Gance's antiwar film ]accuse
(1937), in which Zola's famous title referring to the Dreyfus case was transferred to
a surrealistic raising of the horribly mangled dead from graves dug in World War I
(Skal, 205~207). Given that fighting had started again, it was imperative that such
images not be recalled by a Hollywood studio now under heavy pressure both to sup-
port and to sanitize the reality of World War I I. Hence, as Jacoby put it to his su-
periors at Universal, an innate "physical deformity" should be avoided because it
would arouse "disgust" rather than the "pity" he was already planning to draw to-
wards "Erique Claudin" (Mac~een 1993, So). Susanna Foster, the singer-actress
finally cast as Christine, remembers distinctly that, "because so many servicemen al-
ready had been maimed and disfigured in the war," the studio really feared that
highly grotesque makeup for the phantom "might prove not merely frightening but,
in view of current conditions, offensive to the public" (McClelland, 66). This incli-
nation was reinforced by the insistence of Claude Rains, who, as director Arthur
Lubin later recalled, flatly "refused to have his face scarred like Lon Chaney;" argu-
ing that "if his public saw him like that he would never be able to play leading roles
again" (Mac~een 1993, So, S2).
Universal must now "create a new formula for portraying horror," Jacoby wrote in
a memo, especially in the context of a high-culture musical (Mac~een 1993, So).
But what would the formula be if it was to trade congenital ugliness for something
more externally caused, yet not obviously war-related? Jacoby's initial plan was for
Claudin, as an egotistical and already delusional composer living in a garret apart-
ment, to be imagining the applause of a crowd for a concert of his music, whereupon
he would be ridiculed by a neighboring prostitute, who would then slash his face
with a knife as he vengefully throttled her (Mac~een 1993, So). At least three
rewrites later, that idea had clearly been rejected as too low-class, immediately vio-
lent, and sexually suggestive at a time when Joseph Breen's "morals" office under the
MPPDA was rigorously enforcing post~1933 standards for muting sex and violence
in films, partly in the interest of diverting sexuality toward national objectives in
wartime (Mac~een 1993, S4~S5; Skal, 171). When shooting finally began, the
script in force was the treatment dated January 20, 1943, by Eric Taylor and Samuel
Hoffenstein, the pair eventually given screenplay credit (with the "adaptation by" Ja-
coby). There Claudin, mistakenly thinking that a piano concerto of his ("My
music!") has been stolen without payment by a publishing firm to whom he has sub-
mitted his only copy; hysterically attacks the least sympathetic of the two publishers
and is then chased off screaming, his hands covering his head, when a secretary
Figure 6.!: Claude Rains unmasked in Universal's 1943 Phantom ofthe Opera
douses his face with acid used for the printing of etchings on sheets of music (Tay-
lor, 40; see also Lubin).
The face-melting and reddening effects of the acid, crafted by makeup specialist
Jack Pierce, who had worked with Chaney and Karloff (Mac~een 1993, 82), are
kept from the audience until near the end of the film (see figure 6.1), much later
than in the novel or the Chaney version. The new unmasking while the phantom is
playing his piano now occurs at a climactic moment when all the most sympathetic
responses to Claudin's earlier struggles as a musician/composer and all the horrified
reactions to the murders he has committed, the mania he has shown, and the stealth
he has employed come together at once during the only scene in which he is fully be-
held by all the characters we identify with the most: Christine, Anatole, and a greatly
refashioned Raoul (now Inspector Raoul D'Aubert of the Paris police, played by
Edgar Barrier). The "new formula" clearly attempts something like the balancing of
pity and fear in tragedy as these are all defined in Aristotle's Poetics (XI I I-XIV), long
since a reference text for standards of high culture in drama. Within that schema,
however, it also permits the put-upon and aging victim of insistent authorities, in
the guise of an exiled musician from occupied France, to be turned more and more
into a deserving target of retribution for his anti-social behavior. It is as though there
could momentarily be a combination of the trapped good soldier (the wounded vi-
olinist of the Opera orchestra) and the darkly deceptive monster (the would-be dic-
tator to everyone, masked and largely hidden from sight) projected-and
abjected-into a single scarred figure. This film addresses, among other fears, the
American anxiety at the time over how the dominant personality-type of Europeans
(from an American perspective) could inexplicably shift from the cultured pursuer
of individual rights to the cunningly disguised fascist murderer.
From our present vantage point, we can now see why such a contradictory com-
posite was pleasurably scary to American filmmakers and filmgoers of 1943. In al-
lowing viewers at first to be sympathetic to a Claudin confused and brow-beaten
by "the system," from the Paris Opera and a police manhunt to a large publishing
house with layers of bureaucracy and miscommunication even between its execu-
tives, the final version of this film gave the audiences of its day a focal point and
scapegoat for their feeling that their lack of self-determination was even greater
now than in the 1920s. Especially as World War I I increasingly dictated a subor-
dination of personal lives to a national emergency, nearly "every [one i]n the nine-
teen-forties ... felt [his or her] sense of self threatened, indeed under imminent
danger of utter destruction, by organized society," to a point at which this thrust
toward "eliminating individual identity ... resulted in widespread alienation-
alienation from one's work and from one's self-and in severe anxieties" amount-
ing to an "existential crisis" (Eisinger, 143). This film's Erique Claudin lives this
crisis in helplessly facing the loss of his youth, his job, part of his face, and the own-
ership of his work amid several huge bureaucracies, however few the people are
who wish these fates upon him (it's the system) and however protectively this se-
ries of alienations is placed in a Paris of the late nineteenth century. The 1943 Phan-
tom thus continues, if not too obviously, the Gothic tradition of allowing a
counterfeit "ghost" to act out audience anxieties that its viewers want to cathect
away from themselves and thereby face only indirectly.
At the same time, though, this picture as it developed at the studio and develops
in the released version makes any scapegoat who pursues only his private agenda in
a time of national upheaval--which now the phantom of the Opera is seen as causing
in his world-an object of opprobrium, and in fact a feared horror, when hegemonic
ideology demands that one person's desires be sacrificed for the preservation of
larger institutions (as in Casablanca). Even as it seems removed from its own era, this
Phantom and its title character's face act out the most irresolvable cultural and indi-
vidual feeling of its time: the fear oflosing self-determination entirely that exists be-
side an ideology, equally strong, that the individual must be willingly subordinated
to the collective, a notion that can be seen (like Claudin) as both anti-fascist and fas-
cist. Now the phantom of the Opera is attractive and repellant because the mixture
of different styles in his character and his film helps him to abject 1940s contradic-
tions genuinely distinct from those most pervasive in 1910 and 1925. There is great
irony in the film's final pronouncement after Claudin's death that "his madness will
be forgotten, but his music will remain" (see Lubin). The individual talent, sadly, ful-
fills itself only if the collective finally embraces its products. yet apparently that
r6o THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
should occur in the 1940s only if the individual resistance to the collective (here de-
picted as "madness") has been castigated, eliminated, and then buried from view
THE ATTRACTIONS AND REPRESSIONS OF A NEW FREUDIAN SCENARIO
Still, that hesitation among attitudes comes closer to being resolved than this film's
deeply troubled flirtation with psychoanalytic assumptions. One Freudian schema
much used in the novel leads to a problem this time that even the final print cannot
put to rest. Far more than the Chaney film, the 1943 version does raise the issue in
Leroux of a deep erotic attraction of a father for a daughter, just as James Twitchell
has shown (283-85). Though the released film does not affirm a biological connec-
tion between the phantom and his protege, the Hollywood Reporter felt compelled to
say that the "performance by Rains leaves no other conclusion possible" than
"Claudin, the broken-down violinist, is Christine's father" (Aug. 13, 1943; USC Cin-
ema Library). One reason for that reaction is simple enough: the initial and even
much later drafts of the script planned to make this phantom explicitly the father of
Christine. John Jacoby turned him into a long-impoverished composer who had felt
forced to give her up in infancy to his dead wife's sister (still the "aunt" in the final
film) and was now using any money he could earn by playing in the Opera orches-
tra or selling his music to pay for her singing lessons, watch her from a close distance,
and advance her musical career, all in secret (Mac~een 1993, So)- hence his ex-
treme reaction to thinking his music "stolen."
As late as the script of January 1943 by Taylor and Hoffenstein, Anatole (Nelson
Eddy) learns, in a conversation with the aunt near the midpoint of the story; that
Claudin deserted his wife and the child Christine years ago because of his obsession
with music and is now "making amends" to his daughter even in his "lunatic" guise as
the Opera ghost (Taylor, 112-15). This sequence was filmed and then edited out in
the later stages of production without there being changes in the remaining scenes,
"leaving Claude Rains' paternal concerns for the girl [as he had intentionally played
the part] explicable only by sexual motives" that could now be associated with a "dirty
old man's" obsession (Mac~een 1993, 84). Susanna Foster recalls that "they were
very confused about how they were going to handle" Claudin's motivation at virtually
every stage of"making the movie" (Mac~een 1993, 84). Arthur Lubin has claimed
that the final decision was made over his objections. "I always felt he should be her
father," he has said in an interview, "because otherwise it would be a little nasty"
(Mac~een 1993, 84), as indeed it remains for some viewers of this production faced
with definite suggestions of paternity that are finally left only vaguely in play How
else are we to feel, not just when gray-haired Claude Rains obsesses over the much
younger Christine, but when Foster is still scripted to sigh after Claudin's demise that
"he was almost a stranger to me-and yet somehow- I always felt drawn to him"
(Lubin; Taylor, 144)? Even when the revelations about Claudin's past were still in the
film, Eddy's Anatole does not give her a complete answer at this point, and that si-
lence on the matter is what Universal decided to leave with its 1943 audience.
Leroux's Fantc5me, as we saw in chapter two, employs psychoanalytic motifs espe-
cially about father-daughter and mother-son relationships-and thus somewhat en-
courages this film's use of those concepts-but the novel does so in a way that reveals
such notions as consequences of the cultural and ideological construction of the
THE 1943 REMAKE I6I
bourgeois family: The 1925 silent film, as it develops toward the final released ver-
sion, increasingly mutes quasi- Freudian suggestions, except in a few scenes that re-
main from earlier scripts and the ruined-phallus quality of Chaney's phantom, so as
to occupy a safe middle ground in the controversies of its time over how much
Freud's exposure of repressed and family-based sexuality encouraged sex as essential
self-expression, as many in the 1920s claimed and others denied (Dumenil, 133-34).
The 1943 version, in its turn, seems to be a return of the repressed during a decade
in American films that saw popularized psychoanalysis become unusually visible as
an explanation for mysterious actions by vaguely tormented characters. This grow-
ing tendency becomes most apparent in Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), in
which psychiatrist Ingrid Bergman draws out the repressed childhood trauma (in a
dreamscape designed by Salvador Dali) that has caused the peculiar behavior of Gre-
gory Peck (see Hitchcock), and it continues, as though it were almost pro forma, in
Laurence Olivier's 1948 film of Hamlet, in which Elsinore Castle is explored by the
camera as a deep, Gothic, shadowy unconscious and the pale hero's brooding inac-
tion is linked almost directly to a frustrated lust for his mother (played by Eileen
Herlie, then twenty-seven to Olivier's forty-one; Osborne, 155-57).
At a time when self-determination by one's own will was so often put in question
and an emergence of male aggression seemed both desirable and sinful, psychoana-
lytic explanations, by now a standard Western vocabulary, provided a readily avail-
able solution for such quandaries. Freudian psychoanalysis allowed Americans and
Europeans to explain violent tendencies and the guilt over them as rooted deeply in
one's personal foundations, yet as unconscious drives for which a person was not
knowingly responsible. At the same time, the sense of being driven into conflict by
deeply hidden forces could be ideologically shifted from a political to a supposedly
personal causality: Family-based traumas and desires could now seem the root of
troubling behavior rather than the social or national pressure that was often being
applied to people so that violence could be directed at overseas enemies (Hitler or
Hirohito as versions of the tyrannical father) rather than domestic ones.
The 1943 Phantom's use of the father-daughter attraction, even when it becomes
only implicit, allows this kind of explanation for a range of relationships that are
actually based on social oppression, some of which is directed at Claudin by mul-
tiple institutions and some at Christine by senior divas and men who are pressing
her for either sexual relationships or her total commitment to a professional,
rather than a personal, life. Just as one-dimensional Freudian rationales have
sometimes been used to mask more complex cultural foundations, so the notion of
the phantom as an overly obsessed father-lover in this film can be a safe and eas-
ily accepted way of motivating several conflicts that can be connected, though not
reduced, to this one cause. Certainly several reviewers at the time were grateful to
find so much "legitimate motivation" for and "credibility" to the phantom's actions
compared to what was left unclear in the final version of the Chaney film (Variety,
Aug. 13, 1943, USC Cinema Library). So much that was socially disruptive could
be projected onto Chaney's Erik because of how congenital and shadowy his mo-
tivations seemed. The psychoanalytically coded construction of Rains's Claudin
limits the range of possible meanings in a more predictable and containable way,
one that had gained wide public acceptance by 1943. A schema that had seemed
too "low culture" for some even in Leroux's day had now become almost a part of
middle-class respectability:
!62 TilE UNDERGROUNDS Of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Yet the "confusion" at the studio that Foster remembers over this dimension of
the 1943 Phantom shows that the rooting of causes in a "family romance" raised as
many conflicts as it tried to conceal. Had Universal stayed with its plan for Claudin
to be exposed as Christine's actual father, on the one hand, it might at least have pre-
vented Breen Office (and other) concerns over the indistinct but insidious sexual-
ity in the phantom's Svengali-esque approach to the young singer. That issue, after
all, had been raised again by Warner Brothers' 1931 Svengali with John Barrymore, a
critical success but a box-office flop for which Universal's Paris Opera interior had
been borrowed for one sequence (Turner, 735). On the other hand, making the
phantom so definitely Christine's father, aside from diminishing the Freudian ambi-
guity in Leroux's sense of their relationship, would have meant questioning the so-
lidity and supposed asexuality of fatherhood itself at a time when that institution
was caught more than usual between different cultural placements of it. By 1943, as
Dana Polan has shown. wartime films were increasingly pulled "between the effec-
tive representation of an oedipal situation under the sway of a father-the authority
of a dominant system, the formation of couples under the sign of the benevolent, pa-
ternal system-and the perverse representation of an unbridled phallic power that
knows no name-of-the-father" (Polan, 135-36), the latter of which appeared mostly
in war films in which fake male soldiers fervently attacked, with phallic machine
guns and rifles, the outposts of a paternalistic dictator who was the "bad, castrating
father" displaced into the enemy of the nation. The sense of independence needed
for soldiers to "kill the father" away from home conflicted with the need to shore up
the centrality of the father to the home during years when he was often physically ab-
sent from it. Erique Claudin as a genuine father, and yet as an unstable and exces-
sively controlling one too, would have threatened support for this ideological
centrality as well as denying, in his constant presence behind the scenes, the possi-
bility of the distance from the father that was necessary if a "son" were to attack a
displaced version of the patriarch.
On top of all this, a definite paternity joined with a quasi-erotic passion for the
daughter (which is how most of Rains's scenes still play today) would have made
the threat of incest more immediate instead of an implied potential as it is in Ler-
oux's novel. There were even concerns at the time about fatherly older men seduc-
ing younger women that pervaded Hollywood and the journalism about it, given
the well-known trial of Errol Flynn for statutory rape in 1942--43 and Charles
Chaplin's notorious marriage to eighteen-year-old Oona O'Neill, daughter of Eu-
gene O'Neill, in 1942 (Perrett, 245, 385-86). Taking out all fatherly qualities in
Claudin, however, in addition to requiring too many reshot scenes, would have led
to this phantom being too simply a dirty old man ("nasty," as Lubin said) and would
therefore have villainized him far more than the studio wanted to do for all the rea-
sons we have mentioned. The eventual product, then, is an indecisive silence on the
exact relation of Christine to Claudin. While it docs fuel audience speculation
about a reverse-Oedipal scenario behind the interactions of these two, that con-
ception is not so very threatening at a time when such assumptions were publicly
acknowledged, provided incest is not really a threat in the film and the pursuit of a
younger woman by an older man is punished and buried (as indeed it is) before it
comes close to a sexual consummation. Concurrently; though, the final indecision
allows all the hard edges of the conflict over the centrality and role of the father to
be blunted, as though there were less of an ideological struggle than there actually
THE 1943 REMAKE
was, and permits what then seemed irresolvable in the conflicts over the status of
the father to be located in the contradictory Claudin instead of any members of the
audience or the Hollywood elite.
It is not that the 1943 Phantom is completely evasive about the cultural issues it
raises out of the psychoanalytic concepts it employs. It is rather that the final film,
along with some of the process leading to it, symbolizes and sequesters the Freudian
quandaries it suggests in a fashion designed to deflect social conflict at a time when
the construction of national unity was the highest ideological priority The addition
of Eddy's Anatole to this story for the only time in its history and the extensive re-
working of Raoul into a police inspector-both of whom are manifestly older than
the usual romantic leads, with so many younger actors now in the military-keep the
problem of and uncertainty about the fatherlike lover of Christine very much in the
film outside the character of Claudin. For much of this version, and with the jealous
Raoul's support some of the time, Anatole is suspected of the crimes that the masked
Claudin commits. After both the drugging and later the killing of the Opera's reign-
ing diva, here called Mme. Biancarolli (played by Jane Farrar), Anatole is under di-
rect suspicion because of his obvious desire to advance Christine's career in
Biancarolli's roles and possibly to further his romantic interest in the younger so-
prano by the same means (see Lubin and Taylor, 78-89). Moreover, just after the
concealed phantom is heard to whisper in Christine's dressing room "You'll be a
great and famous singer! I'll help you," Anatole says those exact words to her when
they meet near the foyer on the way to the stage, prompting her to ask, "You mean
it was you?" and him to respond, "At last you heard me" without knowing of the
dressing-room incident (Lubin; Taylor, 69-70). Most indicatively; when Anatole fi-
nally has a chance to chase after the apparently "ghostly" threat to Christine and oth-
ers, he pursues a Claudin swathed in a black cloak with a red lining through the
upper walkways and rigging backstage dressed in a black cloak of his own, albeit one
lined in white (Lubin). At the near-climax of that chase, Anatole confronts his
quarry through a web of vertical ropes-a moment of suspension and suspense dur-
ing which the two stare silently at each other as the camera cuts back and forth be-
tween them (Lubin)-in a segment that unquestionably recalls Henry Frankenstin
and his "monster" gazing at each other through the vertical breaks in a rotating mill-
wheel near the end of Universal's first Frankenstein in 1931 (see Whale). The alter-ego
doubling that is famously achieved in that older scene is thereby pulled quite clearly
into the Anatole-Claudin mirror-image relationship of 1943. Out of this pattern of
suggestions left in the final print, Claudin emerges as Anatole's id, much as the crea-
ture does for Frankenstein in both the Whale film and the Shelley novel. This phan-
tom carries out the aggressions and passions that Anatole feels but does not fully
enact, with Claudin striving to be the father-lover that Nelson Eddy dare not play
He is therefore an "uncanny" Freudian double, the dark extension or underside of
the romantic lead in this version of the novel.
To a lesser degree, the same applies to the relation between Claudin and Inspec-
tor Raoul, who is as passionately interested in Christine as Anatole and the phan-
tom are, though without the musical connections they have with her. When he tries
to trap the hidden criminal behind all the recent invasions of the Opera-possibly
Anatole, his rival for Christine-he fills the stage just before a performance with of-
ficers disguised as masked chorus members (Lubin). They turn out to be concealed
behind prop-room masks of the same kind the phantom wears, so he easily comes to
THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF TilE OPERA
seem one of them just by adding one piece of their costume to his. Thus hidden in
plain sight, Claudin leads Christine toward his lair from under their noses as though
he were an authorized member of the police, whose possibly extreme aggressions--
including those against him earlier when he flees from killing the music publisher-
are acted out by his performance of the very kidnapping that Raoul and the police
are at the Opera to prevent (Lubin). The phantom of 1943 is much more than the
fearsome alter ego (the hidden aggression in wartime) behind the smooth facade of
the romantic lead; he is also the possibility that the police on the home front may
not sufficiently hide or interdict a potential for tyrannical violence (a fatherly ten-
dency that could result in a fascist dictatorship) presently concealed by the public
face of local law enforcement. Now we find that the quandaries swirling around the
figure of the lover-father are linked to the cultural fears attached to the guardians of
the state's paternalistic laws and powers. The American political method of ad-
dressing this concern, especially given President Roosevelt's crippled state and de-
clining health, was to make the "authority figure" an "absent cause" as much as
possible, granting to it a "certain insubstantiality" while never denying its power
(Polan, 136). Universal's second Phantom faces and then fends off this problem with
a somewhat similar approach: distancing aggressive force from, though showing it to
be present in, those most sanctioned by the audience to use it in the film (Anatole
and Raoul) and abjecting that force onto an "Opera ghost," frequently unseen or
only a shadow, who may or may not be the primal father at the root of the heroine's
life or all the actions of the "ghost" haunting the depths of "high culture."
In any case, the potential marriage of Christine to a father-figure and the psycho-
analytic anxieties that might have come with it are finally deflected altogether by the
way this film ends. Though Anatole and Raoul have provided the main comic relief in
the picture as two older men awkwardly jockeying together for Christine's attention in
scene after scene, they ultimately go off to dinner arm-in-arm with each other several
months after Claudin's death, leaving Christine with a crowd of backstage celebrants
to revel in her latest singing triumph and her decisive choice of career over marriage
for now, to which Raoul and Anatole quite cheerfully accede, though only in this ver-
sion of the story (Lubin; Taylor, 149). Perhaps, then, the most effective complicator of
the psychoanalytic schemes adopted in the I 943 Phantom is the changing and unre-
solved status of women in Europe and America in the early 1940s. Christine's choice
of an independent professional life-if only for a time, to judge by the subsequent ca-
reer of Susanna Foster (McClelland, 68-69) -reflects both the rapid influx of women
into the paid labor force, given the absence of men, after 1940 (a so percent increase
from 1940-45) and even "an ideological climate supportive of women's movement
into the public realm" that accompanied this expansion of their lives outside the home
(Hartmann, 20-21). The problem of Christine being pursued by several older men,
and thus of women potentially being "taken away" from younger men at war, can now
be resolved without social disorder by her refusing to marry any of her fatherly pur-
suers and listening to such men as her voice teacher and conductor, who both advocate
forgetting about male suitors and devoting herself to her art and her job, however fa-
therly their manners of speaking to her may be (Lubin; Taylor, 26).
The cultural sanctions allowing Christine these choices are there as never before in
the history of this tale, and they obviously provide a very useful avenue for the chan-
neling of other cultural quandaries as well. As a result, there is almost no remnant in
Foster's performance of the maternal dimension of Christine so important to Leroux
THE 1943 REMAKE 165
and to Elliott Clawson in his second and third scripts for the 1925 film. If her pursuit
of father-figures is at least ambiguous in this version, the phantom's and Raoul's pur-
suit of mother-figures through Christine is almost completely absent, save perhaps for
that brief moment during which Christine greets both Anatole and Raoul at her apart-
ment with an apron on, in the process of helping her aunt clean house in the long tra-
dition of women as primarily domestic creatures (Lubin). Hence some of the most
Oedipal parts of the original novel arc eliminated, even as the reverse-Oedipal attrac-
tion of the father for the daughter is intensified, all in the wake of time-specific
changes in women's roles that Freud and psychoanalysis had not previously faced.
At the same time, though, this film's enactment of such changes shows how many
restrictions and hesitations still accompanied them. For all her seeming indepen-
dence, Foster's Christine lives always and only "between men" (to use Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick's title for her 1985 book). She spends most of her screen time as an object
of attraction and dispute between Anatole and Raoul, who frequently seem more in-
terested in the effects of their actions on each other than in how she feels herself (see
Lubin). The final scene, in which the two men heartily link arms and head off on the
town without her, confirms the dominance of that "homosocial" tendency-men's
desire for the desire of other men, homosexual or not-which by then is com-
pounded by Claudin's efforts to be the controlling male in her life, as though his re-
venge on other men for what he feels they have done to him and her is more
important to him than his own "possession" of Christine (the exact nature of which
is never made clear). On their side, her voice teacher and conductor strive to "pos-
sess" her for their musical worlds, for which they demand she renounce all personal
male relationships, which is the criterion they intone most often for the professional
success she pursues instead of. say, the quality of her voice, barely mentioned by both
of them (Lubin; Taylor, 26). This Christine must always choose, not between her
own alternatives as she sees them, but between those options offered only by several
men, each more powerful than she is, albeit in different ways. Moreover, when men
do give her choices, these are absolute and exclusive ones: she must be a professional
musician or a lover, but not both at once; she must choose one man or another or no
man at all, but never date more than one at a time (in their eyes); and she must "be-
long" to one man quite obsessively if she chooses any man among those available.
Extreme versions of these positions arc seemingly divorced from Anatole and
Raoul by being "thrown off" into Claudin alone after he becomes the wild-eyed and
possessive phantom, in whom these pervasive tendencies are masked as supposedly
"abnormal." But Christine's freedom is hardly increased by that symbolic gesture.
Since she aspires to the position of Mme. Biancarolli at the Opera, she must accept
the restrictions that the otherwise ineffectual managers impose on that character
when she makes demands on them: her "career is bound to the Paris Opera," they as-
sert without anything in the screenplay (or the Hollywood studio system) to con-
tradict them (Lubin). Unless a woman's person is joined to a man's, she is contained
at least by an institution and the preferences of its male directors. Indeed, if Chris-
tine strives to reach that career-woman level, she clearly risks being perceived as
Biancarolli is in this film, as cold, selfish, calculating, ruthless, imperious, and unrea-
sonable in putting her own interests ahead of the larger culture's, an all-too-typical
characterization of established working woman, even though there were now more
of them in films of the 1940s (Hartmann, 201-202). As a "good" woman in a stu-
dio production of this era, Susanna Foster as Christine must maintain a precarious
r66 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TilE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
and artificial balance, the one expected of newly emergent women in America, be-
tween seeming independence and extensive dependence, apparently open choices
and actually restricted options, being self-determined and being an object of ex-
change, assertiveness and submission, the position of rising star and the posture of
damsel in distress. the "hard" masculinity of public prominence and the "soft" fea-
tures of a "feminine" appearance, and a limited devotion to personal career goals
alongside the belief that these must finally be set aside if they conflict with the in-
terests oflarge social institutions. The chorus girl now, compared with the versions
of her in 1930s films, may no longer be a "gold digger" with a lucrative marriage as
the real goal of a life in show business. Yet her emergence as a freer person in the
1940s is hobbled with continuing limitations that make her a site of ongoing con-
tradictions, especially when she is successful in the world of her film.
For this and other reasons I have noted, the quasi- Freudian scenario of the 1943
Phantom remains unsettled and conflicted, particularly after its ways of altering previ-
ous versions have been finalized. A parent's special feeling for a child of the opposite
sex, along with a pre-conscious attraction on the side of the child, is rendered simul-
taneously understandable and dangerous; the rooting of one's definable selfhood pri-
marily in the father, if not his name, seems both unavoidable and objectionable; an
underground figure of whom most people are initially unconscious seems to embody,
while he also displaces, the most erotic and destructive drives in the other male char-
acters. All of these maneuvers in the final script. on the one hand, are solidly within
the psychoanalytic tradition. On the other hand, this very tradition is repeatedly
swept away The primary female in this version is less of a substitute for the mother,
given limited newer beliefs about female independence from that role. The phantom
as father is left unacknowledged and spectral at best so that the connection between
familial and national patriarchs can be muted in an era of fascism. At the base of all
this, the space most analogous to the unconscious in the novel and the silent film-
the vast cellar of the Opera-is rendered in the released version of 1943 as largely
empty and already crumbling (as it could not have been in r88o), save for an im-
ported piano, a violin, and a bust of Christine, hardly the phallic symbols of the deep-
est levels in Leroux. The painstaking reconstruction of Erik's family history in the
undergrounds of the novel, turned into a repository of the more impersonal Gothic
past in the 1925 picture, is here replaced by a dug-out and decaying void, which leaves
the unconscious more strictly and unreachably mental, for one thing, and the social
and ideological bases of that whole psychoanalytic construction more completely in-
visible to the characters and audience, for another. Freudian conceptions are as often
buried or effaced as they are reinvoked in this version. The result is a resublimation
of the already sublimated. It allows only the safest and least troubling of psychoana-
lytic ideas at this time, the ones most helpful for explaining wartime violence and
anxieties apolitically, to have any visible force in this Phantom, and only to the extent
that they can be made compatible with a "high culture" scenic design that tries to bury
the "low culture" of horror films as much as possible.
THE PRESENCE AND ABSENCE OF WARTIME
As it happens, the justly touted "production values" in this film are extraordinary for
both their blatant concealments and their striking revelations of several cultural and
THE 1943 REMAKE
ideological quandaries with which Americans and Europeans were struggling in the
midst of World War II. Even as they help enact hesitations about psychoanalysis,
women, and fathers, the sounds, colors, and spectacles of this production strive to
work out attempted resolutions-which arc also maskings-~of several conflicts
prompted by and including the war. One of these, of course, given the class-based
concerns of the novel and the classification of film styles that gave rise to this adap-
tation, is the problem of how to view class levels at a historical juncture during which
the glories of "high culture" are viewed as especially under threat (as though they
alone embody "civilization") and yet all classes must be enlisted and unified in the
enterprise of preserving them, not to mention insuring the film a "cultured" yet suf-
ficiently wide audience. This quandary is addressed partly in the choice of music for
this highly musical picture, in which Gounod's Faust is completely avoided, despite its
being used in the Chaney production as well as the novel. Only one of the several
stagings of opera scenes in this film comes from an actual operatic work, Friederich
von Flotow's Martha (r847), a piece in the German language, but in a French style
and adapted from a French ballet, that debuted in the very Vienna that Nazi Ger-
many had conquered in the 1930s (Cross, 367). The opening of act three from that
opera (starting with a drinking song just right for Nelson Eddy) is an apt choice for
beginning this film, since Martha is about a shifting of classes, first by a noble hero-
ine disguised as the serving maid of the title and later by a farmer-hero ignorant of
his noble birth, in which the movement between social roles allows both finally to
accept their love for each other in a more widely harmonious social order (Cross,
368~74)-not unlike Christine's ascent in class with secret assistance even as
Claudin descends and as Anatole and Raoul jockey to play the highest-class suitors
of the rising Christine they can.
Especially notable in the original Martha is its incorporation of folk tunes, partic-
ularly the old Irish air that is the basis of "The Last Rose of Summer" sung at criti-
cal moments of resurgent love by the two leads (Cross, 371-74). The 1943 Phantom
adapts this adaptation of folk material to high culture by having Claudin recompose
in his concerto, and Christine remember by singing. a country song from their rural
origins. It is here called the "Lullaby of the Bells," repeated as a running theme in the
film, and played at a climactic moment by" Franz Liszt" on the Opera's grand piano,
even though it is an original composition by the film's producer, George Waggner,
and its music director, Edward Ward (Perry, 59). All class boundaries seem to be dis-
solved and the classes blended by the power of music, however fraudulently "au-
thentic" this film's primary song actually is. At the same time, though, we behold the
added power that accrues to "high" culture in its appropriation and sublimation of
the "low," both in Martha and this Phantom. That very power is here asserted by Uni-
versal studios, which can even go further and appropriate folk music and opera si-
multaneously for its class-blending audience, in part by creating a version of the
former to subsume it into the latter. Such appropriation and fakery are so pervasive
in this film that the two other extended opera scenes it presents on stage-suppos-
edly from the courtly French Amour et Gloire and the peasant-oriented Prince de Cau-
casie-are entirely new concoctions by Ward based on themes by Chopin and
Tchaikovsky (Perry, 59). These are, in fact, power-plays that add somewhat different
national traditions to Martha's and then pile on fake versions of different class-levels
and cultures, all in a glittering and apparently inclusive wartime pastiche of once-
conflicting styles.
!68 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF TilE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
The great excuse for so much music and color at the time, of course, was how ef-
fectively it offered "escape for a while from the realistic horrors of the war" (a phrase
applied explicitly to this film by the Hollywood Reporter on Oct. 18, 1943; USC Cinema
Library). But the production values of the 1943 Phantom really bespeak the war again
and again in their very attempt to distance it and cover it over. In the process, they
tell us a great deal about Hollywood's ideological sublimation of the war in the early
1940s, in which the obvious sanitizing of the conflict was really part of a widespread
effort to construct national purposes for it. Even what we have noted about the op-
eratic music in this picture is a statement about the war and corporate resilience in
the face of it. The main reason so much opera was fabricated this time was the un-
availability of copyright clearances, except for Martha, due to the inaccessibility of a
war-torn Europe, all of which left mostly public-domain compositions-- Chopin's
and Tchaikovsky's but rarely operas-as the only ones available (MacQ!een 1993,
83). Universal nearly boasted about the ingenuity in its "selection of music" during
production notes it issued for the 1943 premiere (USC Cinema Library). It saved its
strongest self-praise of this kind, however, for the seemingly lavish settings and use
of color in this Phantom's production design, the beginning of a very deliberate cam-
paign that certainly helped lead to the Academy Awards that the film finally won for
these achievements. The production notes are quite brazen: "Art Directors John B.
Goodman and Alexander Golitzen created massive settings that seemingly ignore
the war conservation limitations [now imposed by law] while actually remaining
within the ceiling for construction costs" (USC Cinema Library), which was then
$10,000 per film for the building of new sets (Turner, 738).
This balancing act was aided, to be sure, by the continuing existence of the Paris
Opera set, but additional costly looking cost-containment was required as well. In
September 1943, Modern Screen let out the news, quite likely with the studio's help, that
many employees at Universal had combed their houses for enough "little crystal
pieces" to fill the new chandelier in the film, and Universal's own publicity noted this
Phantom's use of" impressive furnishings" from the "historic California estate of [the
late railroad magnate] Mark Hopkins" (USC Cinema Library). The film's color
scheme, moreover, supervised by cinematographers Hal Mohr and W Howard
Greene and consultant Natalie Kalmus, made effective use of settings and properties
already constructed for black-and-while films by frequently placing isolated bright
colors, including considerable blood-red, in front of the "cool blues, grays and earth
tones" of backgrounds from older productions (MacQ!een 1993, 82-83). These
much-publicized "economies" trumpeted how much 1940s bourgeois-based technol-
ogy could accomplish within budgetary restrictions but with the object of attaining
the appearance of"high culture" nevertheless. In that fashion, it was implied, even the
deprivations of war (up to a point) could be subsumed and overcome within a cor-
porate industrial system, which strove to present itself as mindful of current condi-
tions yet as productive of colorful and seemingly class-crossing achievements that
could be viewed and held up as what the war was being fought to preserve.
This film, like many others, of course, had to keep the war removed from the safe
haven offered by its "costume musical" retreat into a seemingly less complicated past.
The softening of Claudin's scarred face, which both alluded to and sanitized the war,
as we have seen, turns out to be only one way in which a fearsome larger reality was
both recognized (as in the acid burns) and obscured (as in Rains's rejection of the
Chaney face and the hiding of his own behind a prop-room mask). The most telling
THE 1943 REMAKE
suppressions that point to the war and what it was made to mean are two major se-
quences in the January 1943 script that were not included in the final print but are
most revealing in their written existence and ultimate absence. The first of these oc-
curs when the acid-burned Claudin is fleeing the authorities after killing that pub-
lisher, at which point the January script has him confronted by a "big and
brutal-looking teamster" who helps the police by trying to wrap a whip around
Claudin as he strives to, and finally does, escape over a wall (Taylor, 43-45). It ap-
pears that there was temporarily an effort to make the phantom again a target for an
embodiment of labor, physically like Simon in the 1925 picture, in a manner that
seems to cast organized workers once more as supporters of established authority.
The second sequence occurs shortly after this one as soon as Claudin has fled un-
derground and bathed his burning face in sewer water (another brief suggestion of
what wounded field soldiers may have faced). In the January script, he then comes
upon an underground chamber-the most "Gothic" setting in any of the scenarios
for this film-and there he beholds "the skeleton of a French soldier of the days of
the Commune," with other skeletons of soldiers also scattered about, amid "high
quality" furniture, including a dusty but "magnificent piano," the one that later ap-
pears in his own lair in the final film (Taylor, 51). We are to understand, if this scene
had survived, that this space once contained "high-ranking officers during the days
of the siege" but that all of them had been killed by an "unexpected and violent act
of war," as revealed by "the fact that one wall has been completely blown in, as from
the concussion of a bomb" (Taylor, 51).
Both of these moments refer fairly directly, however displaced in historical time
and location, to wartime realities that many Americans knew. These make the sup-
pression of each scene understandable, if not commendable. The first sequence, for
all its stereotyping of the burly teamster, recalls the growing labor unrest of 1942-43,
which stemmed from a no-strike pledge by major national unions after Pearl Har-
bor, granted in return for presidential promises on wages and inflation, that labor
groups saw as betrayed by a federal ceiling on wages passed in October of 1942 and
a "hold the line" order by President Roosevelt that further restricted wage adjust-
ments by April of 1943 (see Louis Stark "What's the Matter with Labor?" Duly
1943], in Polenberg, 43-45). Somewhat as in 1924-25, Taylor and Hoffenstein's
1943 teamster (presented as vaguely from the r88os) is an attempted channeling of
nearly violent worker anger away from a whipping of management and government
toward the capture of a scapegoat who embodies but also diverts the conditions of
labor, in this case an insufficiently compensated musician marginalized by his ex-
treme response to his loss of power over his work. The underground chamber,
meanwhile, is of course a thinly disguised reference to World War I I, particularly in
its allusion to sudden bombings in European cities, despite this segment's partial
recollection of Leroux's allusions to the 1871 Commune (whose "officers" would not
have been accoutered as this scene's skeletons are). With a new phantom here being
set up to build his own underground from the remnants of this intrusion of war, the
January script was moving towards a striking symbolic scheme. In it, had it survived,
the Opera's above-ground (and this film's) escape from war would rise deceptively
over the buried skeletal remains of war's destruction, which the phantom would
then come to embody both as a subliminal war-wounded figure (if not as the skele-
ton of Leroux) and as an intrusion of unpredictable violence into an operatic the-
ater-and film-seemingly insulated from surprise bomb attacks (of which the
phantom would be a new incarnation). Clearly these suggestions of wartime labor

problems and bombings were seen as far too close to the physical truth and thus too
unsublimated to be fully depicted in the film that Universal released to provide an
escape from immediate anxieties.
Concurrent with this decision, though, were smaller ones that actually left slight
indicators of these suppressed elements in the final version. The Claudin of the re-
leased film makes his escape from the police through a manhole in the street, which
is normally entered only by working-class laborers (a role he thus assumes, if briefly),
and the piano he was supposed to find in the chamber of dead soldiers does become
the center of his underground home, where he still harbors a face and psyche deeply
wounded by a chemical device, concealed though his visage may be (see Lubin). As
much as this film tries to bury the war and its workers, especially between its penul-
timate and final scripts, it repeatedly fails to do so precisely in its attempt to achieve
that aim. To ignore the full grim reality, however distant, was as impossible and im-
moral as a pleasurable confrontation with it. The new, more musical Phantom had to
sublimate the war extensively but not forget it completely so that it could be a dis-
tancing of it that also gave it meaning. In this way, World War I I could seem the low-
culture underside, the necessary evil (yes, the phantom), behind the preservation and
attainment of high culture, all of which was being visibly pursued on film in the face
of war-based (or acid-burned) casualties of it that could also be threats to its realiza-
tion, like the workers it needs, if they were beheld too directly The relation of the
1943 Phantom to World War II is very like the dim echoes of the sounds from above
that Claudin tells Christine he hears in the hollow caverns below the Opera: "The
music comes down here and the darkness [as in a movie theater] distills it-cleanses
it of the suffering that made it [another version of'the madness will be forgotten, but
the music will remain']. Then it is all beauty-and life here is like a resurrection"
(Lubin; Taylor, 138) even as it is also an escape by burial, a sublimation that Gothically
obscures the tragedies and violence it most remembers and fears.
Paul Fussell, we should note, has quite thoroughly proven that World War II,
with its unprecedented carnage even by 1943, "seemed so devoid of ideological con-
tent that little could be said about its positive purposes that made political or intel-
lectual sense" (Fussell, 136). One consequence was an equally unprecedented
reliance by national leaders on a media-generated "morale culture," including Hol-
lywood films, which took deft advantage of the visible war's distance from America
in these "pre-television days" to control the ways in which the public's "imagination
was obliged to fill in the missing visual dimension" (Fussell, 164, 181). The "real war,"
including its home-front deprivations, thus had to be an absence in the depictions of
it to a point at which such representations were considered most successful if they
distanced their objects, including fear, behind a purely rhetorical and theatrical (and
by those means "high"-cultured) "high-mindedness" (Fussell, 164). The effect of
wartime films on many of those who sat through them, as a result, was a half-aware-
ness, powerfully expressed by Barbara Deming at the end of the 1940s, that "the
predicament[s] from which [a] movie-dream [would] cunningly extricate us" were
conditions "we could never admit," so much so that these films actually "grant[ed] us
a vision of the Hell in which we [were] bound" in their effort to do the opposite
(Deming, 2, 201). As Dana Polan sees the same irony, most studio pictures of this
time were interactions of "power and paranoia" in their cinematic techniques and
screenplays, with "power" being sought in the "narrative system's" capacity "to write
THE 1943 REMAKE 171
an image oflife as coherent," even resplendently so, and the "paranoia" being appar-
ent in the variously expressed "fear of the narrative" toward the "horror of all that
escapes its seemingly overwhelming force" (Polan, !2), an "all" that was extensive, vi-
olent, and chaotic throughout World War II.
The 1943 Phantom if the Opera is a quintessential example of this will-to-power and
its paranoia working together in a major studio production. In combining the musi-
cal and the horror film and then suppressing the horror beneath operatic songs and
settings, or reviving psychoanalytic motivations only to limit (or even erase) what
the unconscious is now allowed to remember, this picture uses the power of its heav-
ily rewritten and repressive narrative, along with its technical virtuosity in sound and
production design. to keep World War II and its ideological contradictions as con-
tained and removed as it can without making the Leroux story and Chaney adapta-
tion unrecognizable to audiences attracted by a "classic" that supposedly blends two
popular film genres. At the same time, this film enacts its suppressions so forcefully,
especially in its final screenplay, that it brings to the surface some of what it would
bury It also too blatantly turns its "undergrounds" into a largely empty cavern (par-
ticularly in cutting a war scene written to be placed there), enough to make the au-
dience wonder, "Where's the rest of it?" The theatrical "high-mindedness" of the
surface tale and its opera scenes thus rests on a gaping-if unstable-hole ("the miss-
ing visual dimension"), a space that has been paranoically hollowed out and stripped
of the war-ravaged reality it was inclined to suggest. The little that is left from
World War II and its contradictory effects at home therefore tends to speak vol-
umes despite all these silencing efforts, most of all in the acid-scarred face of the
phantom that was redesigned from Chaney's makeup largely to avoid the World War
II associations that it nonetheless retains. This film is virtually an allegory of the
Hollywood filmmaking process of its time. It is partially about its own sublimation of
the war and so makes strikingly manifest the repressions and effacements that most
contemporary films (including this one) never admit. As part of the allegory, this
Phantom's "high culture" sheen emerges as what the distant fighting seems to be for,
as the purpose and meaning of a conflagration that otherwise lacked both and now
seems not to exist, while it still resides in its enforced absence, below a spectacular
surface of highly advanced sound and color. At first glance, Universal's 1943 remake
may appear to be anything other than a Gothic sublimation, partly because the
Gothic seems to have disappeared except in the shadows of the underground phan-
tom that occasionally cross the brightly operatic sets. But with World War I I and its
ideological struggles being sequestered in this film's Gothic features and then with
these features being diminished as the picture moves towards its final release, the act
of sublimation that The Phantom if the Opera can perform using Gothic elements is
given new force and additional irony in a very 1940s manner, one that shows the de-
gree of cultural power and paranoia that this story is still able to accommodate and
hence another powerful cause for our need to keep retelling it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Culture of Adolescence

THE LLOYD WEBBER MUSICAL AND THE
ADAPTATIONS THAT PAVED THE WAY, 1962-1986
THE MUSICAL's TURN TOWARD THE ADOLESCENT
No later adaptation of Le Fantome de /'Opera was nearly as popular as the Universal

films until the British musical drama by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Charles Hart, and
Richard Stilgoe. Granted, there are some culturally revealing features (which I will
soon discuss) in the most notable adaptations between the 1943 remake and the
Lloyd Webber version: the 1962 British film from Hammer Studios, the 1974 rock-
musical movie Phantom ofthe Paradise, the English stage Phantom ofthe Opera by Ken Hill
first produced in 1976, and the 1983 television film broadcast by CBS with Maxim-
ilian Schell in the title role and Jane Seymour as the Christine-figure (see Perry,
60-63). Yet, while these all found audiences, however limited, none of them drew
the vast and continuous middle-class response that the Lloyd Webber musical has
enjoyed since its London opening on October 9, 1986, and its New York premiere
(with the original British stars) on January 26, 1988 (Walsh, r8o; Perry, 81). There
are several obvious reasons why this adaptation has "struck a chord" to such a degree.
In a stage revival of the dazzling spectacle in the 1925 and 1943 versions-no more
than half-attempted in the intervening productions-the musical offers its increas-
ingly broad-based audiences, somewhat as Universal did, a sort of"ticket backstage"
to the splendors of high-culture opera (at appropriately high ticket prices) without
being so operatic as to alienate the many who aspire to that level socioeconomically
but find real opera too slow and remote. Indeed, as in the 1943 film, this musical's
segments of "opera" are entirely new and fake ones devised by the composer of the
score, this time without fully operatic features or direct echoes of well-known fig-
ures, yet with attributions to such nonexistent but opera-sounding names as
"Chalumeau" and "Albrizzio" (see the libretto in Perry, 141, 151).
At the same time, the now-famous songs by Lloyd Webber and Hart are far more
deliberate echoes of quasi-nineteenth-century melodies and far less repetitions of the
soft-rock music in Lloyd Webber's earliest stage hits with lyricist Tim Rice, especially
jesus Christ Superstar (fully recorded in 1970 and staged in 1971; Walsh, 70-75). After a
period of "hard-edged and bitter" Broadway musicals from the late 1960s through
the early '8os, according to director Harold Prince (a prolific contributor to that very
trend from Cabaret and Company to Follies), this Phantom unabashedly claimed to restore
"the romantic" to the musical theater (Perry; 69). It promised to and does take musi-
cals back toward the Rodgers-and- Hammerstein traditions of the 1940s through the
early '6os by employing sweeping melodies to retell an established story of impeded
love, something nearly all of us have experienced and the very emphasis that Univer-
sal initially sought in its 1923 story conferences for its silent film (Mac~een 1989a,
35). In the process, this version tries to advance the greater sympathy sought for the
phantom in the Claude Rains picture, now by mildly emphasizing the "normal,
healthy sexuality" that Prince says he found in researching handicapped people (Perry;
74), not a surprising decision after the "sexual revolution" of the later 1960s. Even the
elaborate "production values" reflect that eroticism, particularly in the florid set de-
sign by Maria Bjornson of the English National Opera and Royal Shakespeare Com-
pany, whose overarching "proscenium" visible throughout the show features (in
Prince's words) "statues intertwined in some moment of passion which the audience
[continually] sees and absorbs" (Perry, 8o, 74).
What is less an extension or "modernization" of older productions, though, is the
adolescent quality in this musical's treatment of love-and therefore its strong effect
on many adolescents as well as more mature audiences. The proliferation of Phantom
T-shirts and other memorabilia bought by teenagers since 1986, all with the musical's
logo of the phantom's white mask on them, attest to the appeal of this show for
teenage sensibilities, alongside the attraction of its adolescent elements to numerous
playgoers of older generations. The Lloyd Webber-Stilgoe libretto, if we look more
closely at it, offers us at least two highly adolescent leads. First there is a tenor-voiced
phantom with broken-out skin (not an aged skull-face; see figure 71) in love with a
late-adolescent girl who seems attainable to him only by "magic." Then there is the
young singer herself, still fixated on her father (whose grave scene is partially restored);
like adolescents generally, she feels torn between the semi-erotic draw of a paternalis-
tic "Angel of Music" ("Guide and guardian" in her eyes) and the more conventional at-
traction of the "brave young/suitor" Raoul, who once more offers the safety of having
been her childhood companion and a vicomte, both of which he was in the novel
(Perry; 144~45). Right after Lloyd Webber's phantom has drawn this Christine down
to the underground lake, moreover, we hear directly from her that the phantom incar-
nates the "man and mystery" in "all [the] fantasies" of her pubescent "dreams," quali-
ties that Michael Crawford has said he worked deliberately to convey in his creation of
the title role for this version by striving for an "inherent nobility" along with being
"sensual and seductive" (Crawford, 274). At the same time, this Christine's unmasking
of Crawford's phantom in his lair (though not yet to the audience) in act one exposes
the "loathsome" face of a quasi-teenage loner who has "secretly" been dreaming of fe-
male "beauty" in private isolation, an onanistic performer of"The Music of the Night"
who now wants a real woman to join him in that "intoxication" at last (Perry; 146~47).
Finally, just before Christine exposes the phantom's face frontally to the audience dur-
ing a performance of his "Don Juan Triumphant" near the end of act two (not staged
in any other version), both of them sing the very liminal "Past the Point of No Return,"
which builds towards the most adolescent of questions: "When will the blood/ begin
to race, / the sleeping bud / burst into bloom? / When will the flames, / at last, con-
sume us ... ?" (Perry; 164). The phantom then reveals how arrested and protracted his
adolescence has been by recalling how his "face,/ which earned/ a mother's fear/ and
loathing" -at no specified time and thus not simply at birth-has "condemn[ed] me"
175
Figure 71: Michael Crawford in makeup, unmasked, in the 1986 Lloyd Webber Phantom
almost menstrually "to wallow in blood" but continually "denied me I the joys of the
flesh" for which he increasingly aches (Perry; r65).
All of this does somewhat restore the Freudian dimensions of the novel that we
have seen only sporadically in previous adaptations. Again we are given, with re-
newed emphasis, a daughter's attraction to a "father" who is definitely not her father
and the "son's" perpetual longing for a mother-substitute who will reverse the
mother's (r)ejection of him-not terribly controversial notions after the sexual rev-
olution had helped revalidate portions of Freudian thinking. But with this phan-
tom's face being far from old and skeletal and his voice sounding so youthful, the
fleshly adolescence in these feelings becomes more emphatic than it has been in any
of the versions we have discussed so far. Christine's climactic kiss on the phantom's
lips in this variation, instead of Leroux's more maternal pietil conclusion, is, among
other things, an acknowledgment of arrested adolescence ("What kind of life I have
you known ... ?"), if not the cure offered by the actual intercourse in Susan Kay's
Phantom novel of 1991. We therefore need to understand more about how and why
this musical's great success with audiences, if not always with critics, is bound up
with its unusual stress on the qualities of adolescence. As it happens, this emphasis
is not really shocking at all if we look more thoroughly at this musical's origins, both
the immediate ones and the versions that built up to it, and these are what I now
want to explore further in this chapter. Indeed, I want to suggest that this adapta-
tion has the symbolic force, and thus the popularity; it does because it epitomizes in
a timely way a whole culture of adolescence in the West and the ideological quan-
daries within it, a culture that developed in stages, as earlier Phantoms show, but has
certainly come to a climax in the final decades of the twentieth century
LLOYD WEBBER'S DANCE ACROSS SOURCES AND CHOICES
In some respects, to be sure, this culture is already under way in Gaston Leroux's
original book, and the 1986 musical could be credited simply with drawing that as-
pect out. When Lloyd Webber allows Christine-a role written for and first played
by Sarah Brightman, his wife from 1984 through the early '90s-to be cast briefly
across sexes in the story as the ingenue-pageboy of the fake opera II Muto (Perry;
149), he positions her as poised between sexual conditions and inclinations as much
as Leroux's Christine was in playing Gounod's Siebel. That liminal state in the novel,
as we have seen, is but one aspect of the shifting back-and-forth between many dif-
ferent states in Leroux's Erik, who acts out an arrested adolescence in being unwill-
ing to leave many childhood inclinations behind and unable to pass over into the
married bourgeois state for which he continually longs. Leroux's own era, as it hap-
pens, was unusually preoccupied with adolescence and riven by ideological conflicts
over its newly increased cultural importance. As John Neubauer has shown, the pe-
riod in Europe from r890 to 1914 was the time when "adolescence," like "the child,"
was first defined systematically "as a middle-class formation in industrial society
generated by the [recent] expansion of secondary education" and when a "semi-
independent adolescent subculture around 1900 [concurrently became] larger and
more cohesive than earlier adolescent-age societies" (Neubauer, 6-7). One result,
right when Leroux was writing fiction, was an effulgence of"interlocking discourses
about adolescence" embracing "psychoanalysis, psychology, criminal justice, peda-
THE CULTURE OF ADOLESCENCE 177
gogy, sociology, as well as [a great deal of] literature" (Neubauer, 6), some of which
raised the fear, embodied by Erik, of whether a newly significant adolescence might
mean that "maturity is no longer the standard" (Neubauer, 77). Le Fantome's partici-
pation in this reassessment, concerned as the novel is with numerous slippages in
fixed grounds for identity, is therefore one of many signs that this "age focused on
adolescence (in part] because it found therein a mirror of its own uneasiness with its
heritage, its crisis of identity, and its groping for a new one" (Neubauer, 10).
By returning to this dimension of the novel, however, the Lloyd Webber version
echoes this uneasiness more narrowly, first by eliminating Erik's advanced age and
classical learning and then by playing up its new phantom's obsessive, private, quasi-
masturbatory fantasies, often in long-established ways that are given updated forms.
We observe these, not just in "The Music of the Night" (the "biggest hit" among the
show's songs, often played separately on teen-oriented radio stations), but in the
phantom's carefully wrought and animated wax dummy of Christine in a wedding
gown, which he has kept underground for some time behind a life-size frame con-
cealed by a curtain (Perry, 147), recalling the Dorian Gray who instigated his own
private, curtained, and life-size portrait partly to suspend his own emergence from
adolescence (Wilde, 19-25). This kind of suspension is even echoed by the highly
Gothic features of the new phantom's lair that surrounds his onanistic statue, as well
as by his own white-masked figure dressed totally in black at all times. These reflect,
to a degree, the subliminally sexual attachment of adolescents in the 1970s and '8os
to quasi-Gothic costumes, face-painting, deliberate grotesquery, and room decor
available in several venues of the day, from horror-oriented wax museums and the
magazine Fangoria (started in 1979) to "a new kind of shock-rock generally known as
Gothic" and the Hollywood "Gothic" clubs for cults of teens with names such as
"Theater of Blood, the Veil, and Helter Skelter" (Skal, 328, 339).
If the Lloyd Webber phantom becomes the basis for a line of products that were
readily marketed to teenagers, then, it is in part because he is mildly continuing and
recasting another phenomenon that recalls the last turn of the century: the fervent
and sometimes violent, if usually playful, attachment of some teens to quasi-Gothic
settings, reenactments, and paraphernalia as avenues for channeling adolescent de-
sires and anxieties. These signs of adolescence in the musical, though, are in many
ways a far cry from the turn-of-the-century kinds known to Leroux, which were not
so exclusively Gothic in exoticizing the adolescent condition (Neubauer, 189-219).
The musical's Gothic features are also not mere repetitions of the teen Gothicism of
the 1970s; by the early '8os, that style of music and clothing was viewed in public
statements as quite "low culture," given its links to "the burgeoning punk sensibility"
(Skal, 339). Aspiring to a "higher" middle-class audience, the Lloyd Webber version
steers between these extremes, I would argue, by taking its own approach to this
story's classic problem: its method of finding the "right" balance between "high" (or
operatic) and "low" (now rock-music) cultures. Indeed, by distinctively resolving
that long-standing conflict, particularly among its many different sources, the Lloyd
Webber musical quite thoroughly reveals the culture of adolescence as including but
also extending far beyond the problems peculiar to teenagers alone.
A major reason lies in the most immediate origins of this Phantom, which actually
began to take shape as a reaction to the contest between "high" and "low" cultures in
another musical version of the same story: The impetus for Lloyd Webber to readapt
Leroux's novel started in 1984 with his own viewing of what he must have seen as an
assertively romantic, yet also comic, stage version of The Phantom cif the Opera (Perry,
66). This was the theatrical Phantom first scripted and directed by Ken Hill in 1976
for the Newcastle Playhouse that Hill, a frequent adapter of horror classics, based on
his own reading of the book rather than the films. Nearly eight years later, this adap-
tation had been somewhat rewritten and remounted, in a "joint production" with
the Newcastle, "at the Theater Royal, Stratford, in East london, using generous por-
tions of the music of Verdi, Gounod, and Offenbach" as settings for Hill's lyrics,
with "a dash of Grand Guignol to set the mood" (Hill, iv; Perry, 66). Such a place-
ment of Hill's production turns out to be crucial to what it finally emphasizes, since
an East End venue in greater london was and remains a "lesser" middle-class and
occasionally upper-working-class space, especially when linked to Newcastle, which
has long been "other" than the West End "high culture" theater district of Drury
lane, Covent Garden, the Old Vic, and other long-established houses.
This cultural positioning and East End feelings about it are quite apparent to
Hill's final script for the 1984 version, which he has since used for English and
American revivals in the 1990s (Hill, iii). A great deal is made here, quite satirically,
of "the Paris Opera House at the turn of the century" (Hill, 1) being taken over by
the kind of corporate management that had come to underwrite the West End and
more "high culture" in the early 1980s. The exposition of past events at the start of
the play is recited for a bumbling new manager, Richard, who arrives as the former
"President of the Northern Railways" that he has proudly helped to downsize and
"eradicate" (3). He is hopelessly inadequate in his knowledge of the arts, with singing
experience only in the "Stock Exchange Choir" (n). He is unfamiliar with the
Gounod Faust about to be performed by the Opera (19) and must have many of his
sentences completed by his petit bourgeois, yet more knowledgeable secretary, Remy
(2, 4, 14). Raoul in this production is Richard's son, "good-looking" but "slightly
daft" in his rapidly shifting enthusiasms (3), and "it is obvious that thinking doesn't
come easy to him" as he tries to solve the "Opera Ghost" mystery by failing to pen-
etrate the quite visible clues that gradually confront him (43). linked to these half-
ridiculous characters on a roughly equal social level are the "plump, pompous" and
gay tenor who sings Faust (and only Faust; hence that is his name on or off the stage;
Hill, 5) and the demanding but frequently incapacitated Carlotta who finds it as easy
to dictate terms to Richard, whom she calls a "short-arsed little frog," as she finds it
"difficult" to "sing and move at the same time" (46), a frequent criticism of opera
divas at Covent Garden or the Metropolitan Opera. Contrasted to these pretentious
incompetents are the much more sensible sub-managers and workers backstage,
ranging from a truly knowing and resourceful Madam Giry, so finally necessary to
Richard that he starts to fall in love with her (calling her "Amelia" by act two,
93-96), to the Groom of the horses in the Opera stables (a Cockney Englishman),
who finds he knows so much more than Richard about the "underground lake" that
he scornfully asks the new director "How'd you get this job?" (3r). The jaundiced at-
titudes of East End london audiences or theaters toward West End superiors could
hardly be more sharply endorsed or given voice and characterization with more acer-
bically comic effect.
Consequently, the "underground" of this Phantom cif the Opera becomes the realm
from which some blunt, East End honesty about stark truths and feelings rears its
head pragmatically, politically, romantically, and even adolescently Madam Giry re-
veals this abjected reality in the Opera's lowest depths when she vaguely recalls ler-
oux's use of the Commune and describes the underground lake as "where the secret
police dropped the bodies during the last uprising" -a rebellion against the powers
now embodied in Richard-so much so that "the lake's full of bones" much like the
Paris catacombs and the face of the "Ghost" that we finally see (Hill, 32). The Hill
"phantom," given no more of a name than that, is thus positioned as honestly andre-
vealingly lower class, despite his presumptuous evening dress. That basis of his being
is soon confirmed by "the Persian" (now revived), who informs the other characters
that their "walking nightmare" was once "trained in the circus as a magician," appar-
ently in the Oriental kingdom where "a certain Sultan" used him to fashion "engines
of torture" and "a whole new palace" because of his magician's "skill" with "mechan-
ical devices" (Hill, 85). This version, in other words, reworks Leroux's compositing
of sub-middle-class, carnivalesque, and Orientalized "otherings" in the phantom. It
even leaps past the novel in finally exposing its subterranean monster as really the
Persian's older brother from an Oriental, therefore non- French, and certainly not
West End "mother" (95). Rather than remain too attached to such an origin, we
eventually hear, this skull-faced Easterner has avenged himself for his circus family's
revulsion at his ugliness in what the Persian reveals as "the murder of our mother
and father" through a "greas[ing]" of their "tight-rope" (95). His deepest Gothic se-
cret is the act of a Freudian child unrestrained by a superego-here the Persian-
whom he has also tried to have murdered to eliminate anyone who might know of
his real appearance.
Hill's phantom is the ultimate family and social rebel, "beyond reason" even now
(95). He is unable to grow into the Persian's maturity because he is fixed in avenge-
ful posture of!ate childhood, yet in this clearly adolescent state he is able to declare,
even more than Giry and the Groom, the basic, naked passions of anger and longing
that his brother and all the supposedly higher-class characters work to repress in as-
piring to the West End status of this Paris Opera. To that extent, he exposes deep
truths that the conventions of high-culture pretenders keep them from facing as di-
rectly, and he does so for audiences in a theater still positioned as adolescent in its
development compared to its West End counterparts. Christine Daae is not so much
caught between country and city or father and suitor, though echoes of these attrac-
tions do remain in this Phantom. She is now more beset by hollow pretensions from
corporatized "high culture" pulling at her from one direction (which includes the
world of the West End as well as Raoul) and the barely masked demands for funda-
mental love and devotion reaching out to her through a semi-childish phantom from
a "low culture" realm of circus-based, lower-class, culturally adolescent and physi-
cally racial otherness (a mixture associated with the East End in the location and
overtones of this play's 1984 performance).
Astute English members of this production's audience, Lloyd Webber included,
must have felt pulled by the same dilemma in viewing it, particularly the way this
version oscillates between styles of musical and emotional expression. The setting of
some Hill songs to melodies from Verdi, Mozart, Donizetti, Gounod, Bizet, and Of-
fenbach, though this range itself moves from "heavy" to "light" opera (see and hear
MacNeill), requires some of the performers (as Hill says in his instructions) "to con-
vince as opera-singers" without question (Hill, ix). In some cases, to be sure, "the
airs from opera are used for musical comedy purposes," but Hill's phantom must go
ever further afield. He should "reach across and 'touch' us" in ways that older opera
and musical-comedy styles may not any longer, and to that end "a modern voice is
best here ... even high rock," according to Hill (ix); such is the "pop" voice of Peter
Straker, the singer-actor cast as the phantom in 1984 and several later stagings (Hill,
iii-iv), who also happens to be black and thus unusually able to render both the
wide-ranging vocal and racial/class "difference" that this character is rewritten to
embody on an East End British stage. The result, at this Phantom's deepest level, is the
crying forth of very basic longings, ultimately in a "highfalsetto scream" (Hill, 101), from
a "low'' -cultured, "popular" -ized, variously "othered," and adolescent (even adoles-
cent-sounding) space to which the many surfaces in the Opera give way as this play
reaches its climax. With his motives reduced compared to Erik's while the cultural
abjections onto him remain much the same, Hill's phantom simply "loves," unre-
servedly if violently (107). That simplicity is what he sings to Christine in "Floating
High Above" (set to Bizet) and "Ne'er Forsake Me, Here Remain" (set to a solo from
Gounod's Faust itself; see MacNeill and Hill, 42-43, 1000-01), all in an uncovered,
non-operatic, rock-stylejadolescent, tenor-falsetto sound, ringingly clear and unen-
cumbered by the standards of West End opera.
This level of romantic-erotic desire in the Hill version turns out to be the sub-
text within several of the above-ground songs offered earlier by characters who
claim to be quite distinct from the "Opera Ghost." Faust's rendition for Richard of
"Accursed Be the Shackles Binding Me So Cruelly to Life" directly from Gounod
(Hill, 20) anticipates the phantom's "Free Me from This Dark Despair" (101);
Raoul's jealous song on hearing the voices in Christine's dressing room ("How dare
she!" set to Verdi) edges towards the phantom's brutal violence with "I'll commit as
many murders" as "he has a thousand lives" (Hill, 28); and Raoul's fullest aria oflove
at the close of act one is actually a duet with the hidden phantom ("To Pain My
Heart Selfishly Dooms Me" set to Offenbach) to a point at which both the "high"
and "low" suppliants to Christine are singing exactly the same song expressing the
very same desire (Hill, 61-63). "Cultured" West End vocal styles and pretensions
turn out to be hard to separate from the "popular" or East End ones behind and
around them. That underlying confusion is now the principal cultural anomaly that
this Phantom both abjects and rescues from repression. Such a paradox seems re-
solved, though it really is not, only when universal romantic and erotic longing
breaks through the barriers of all "higher" cultural levels in this play to declare its
naked need at the unrepressible base of all social and theatrical differences and all
satiric renderings of high-cultural pretensions. Little else can explain the rather
forced decision of all Hill's characters, once his surrounded phantom has stabbed
himself to find his love in death (107), to close the play in a unified chorale offel-
low-feeling: "He Will Not Go Without a Friend" set (ironically) to a chorus from
Mozart's Don Giovanni (see Hill, 108, MacNeill).
Lloyd Webber clearly had many choices to make as he responded with great ex-
citement to such an eclectic, irreverent, class-conscious, semi-adolescent, but finally
romantic Phantom. At first he and his then-favorite producer, Cameron Mackintosh,
toyed with reworking the Hill production itself for the actual West End. Then, re-
sponding to Hill's satirically comic edge, they came to have "something like The Rocky
Horror Show in mind" (as Lloyd Webber has said in an interview; Perry, 66). For a time
they were planning to go obviously adolescent and expand on the largely teenage cult
audience that was already flocking to movie theaters (sometimes in costume) for
midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), the ftlm based on the ear-
lier Rocky Horror Show presented on stage at London's King's Road Theater (andre-
cently revived in 2000) (Twitchell, 197). This mildly kinky and rock-musical spoof
of the Frankenstein tradition, "almost a caricature of English schoolboy humor" at the
time (Twitchell, 197), turns the "mad scientist" into a transsexual, Mick Jaggerish
singing star (outrageously rendered by Tim Curry in the film). This character, "Frank
N. Furter," deliberately reverts to a half-Gothic adolescence-to the point of onanis-
tically fabricating the supreme male body that is the imagined goal of Western
teenagers ("Rocky Horror" himself, played on film by Peter Hinwood)-in order to
delay the rigidly conventional marriage of two uptight WASPs (acted by Susan
Sarandon and Barry Bostwick in the movie) who are stranded at Furter's mock-
Gothic mansion without having discovered the full range of their sexuality and thus
without having experimented with polymorphous perversity, as they now proceed to
do, before their adolescence gives way to acceptably adult behavior (see Sharman;
Twitchell, 197-203). James Twitchell has rightly called Rocky Horror "one of the most
artful condensations of the anxieties and excitements of puberty" in film history
(197). From the beginning, then, the Lloyd Webber Phantom set out at least to play; on
the one hand, with adolescent experimentation already semi-frozen in a state of
safely kinky suspension. In this condition, the end of adolescence would seem mo-
mentarily postponed, much more than it does even in Hill's Phantom, while certain
adult pretensions could be burlesqued right along with aspects of teenage Gothicism.
These tendencies, combined with several from Hill's version, are retained in the final
Lloyd Webber production's jibes at the Opera managers and Carlotta, as well as the
exaggerated fake-opera scenes that half-satirize that form from the perspective of
soft rock and the middle-class musical, not to mention the arrested adolescence of
Christine and the phantom.
At the same time, on the other hand, all these inclinations are restrained by this
Phantom's reminders, in its highly romantic melodies not far from some in Hill's pro-
duction, that its composer had started to write the songs for Aspects cjLove (finally
staged in 1989) when he first saw the Ken Hill show and linked portions of it with
Rocky Horror (Perry; 67). Aspects already planned to juxtapose several stages and types
of both older and modern love starting with and surpassing the adolescent, and
Lloyd Webber felt the pull of that wider romantic perspective, so much so that he
later turned songs initially composed for Aspects into pieces for The Phantom, including
"The Music of the Night" (Walsh, 14, 182). He also now revived (he has since con-
firmed) his long-standing desire for a "plot," not satisfied by Aspects, that would be-
come the basis for his own mature South Pacific, the film version of which he had seen
at least "twelve times" (Walsh, 28). For years he had been seeking a "major roman-
tic story" with more high culture to it than Rocky Horror allowed, not surprising for a
thirty-seven-year-old in 1984 then completing a very non-rock Requiem, entering
fully into marriage with Sarah Brightman, and hoping to write a musical more suited
to her increasingly operatic abilities after she was approached (and declined) to be a
replacement Christine in the Ken Hill musical (Perry, 66-67; Hayward, 138). When
the stage director of Rocky Horror and the london production of jesus Christ Superstar,
Jim Sharman, now a director of "mainstream opera" in Australia, pointed out the
"great romantic plot" beneath his own reading of Leroux's original and Harold
Prince soon after expressed his desire to direct "a great romantic musical" at long last
(Perry; 66, 68), Lloyd Webber started poring over the novel in late 1984 and (as we
now realize) drawing out the "romantically" adolescent elements in it and the Hill
Phantom, while avoiding the explicit othering of class, ethnicity, and theatrical spaces
that Hill had emphasized in his version that quite openly mixed levels of culture as
Rocky Horror had done in different ways (Perry, 66).
The final combination and balancing of these tendencies by Lloyd Webber began
to emerge in two partial forms. The first was a private presentation of an initial act
one, with Sarah Brightman and Colm Wilkinson (of Mackintosh's Les Miserables),
during a 1985 summer festival at Lloyd Webber's country estate at Sydmonton
(Perry, 68), a very high-culture preview, to say the least. The second was a version
that same year of a pattern Lloyd Webber had used with his earlier, rock-musical
shows: the issuing of a single record and then a video of the play's most pulsating and
rock-like song, "The Phantom of the Opera" itself, which had once been a quite dif-
ferent but generally "rock-and-roll number" in Lloyd Webber's earlier 1980s reper-
toire. The recording and the video, the latter directed by Ken RusselL featured, in
addition to Sarah Brightman, "Steve Harley, the former lead singer of the rock group
Cockney Rebel"; the video, in turn, as was Russell's wont in his most adolescent films
of the 1970s and early '8os (The Music Lovers, The Devils, Gothic), offered an extrava-
gantly fake-Gothic voyage of attempted-and-arrested seduction in which the
masked and caped Harley hovered all around a hypnotized and sequined Sarah
Brightman (Perry, 68-69). This effort was even succeeded in May 1986 by a
straight-pop record-and-video treatment of"All I Ask of You," Lloyd Webber's and
Hart's main duet between Christine and RaouL here performed by Brightman and
the pop singer Cliff Richard (Perry, 68; Walsh, 179).
By the time of the musical's actual opening, after some previews and repairs, with
Michael Crawford in the title role, this Phantom was therefore launched as a popular
but not too popular amalgamation of many different "voices": slightly farcical and
teenage Gothic, bits of soft (or very dimly punk) rock the growing young-adult
video market, the satirizing of corporate (but old) high culture, nostalgic middle-
class romanticism, the old Rodgers-and- Hammerstein musical norm, aristocratic
staging-grounds, the nearly but never directly operatic, the quasi-adolescent aspects
of the noveL and the overtly passionate but safely restrained eroticism of a toned-
down sexual revolution, all subsumed and displayed within class-climbing "produc-
tion values" that Hill had used less in order to critique the pretensions of
corporatized high culture. No wonder "Lloyd Webber modulates frequently" in his
music, as Michael Walsh has observed, to the point of achieving "a deliberately am-
biguous tonality," especially in the "scales associated with the phantom" (Walsh,
183). This show's conflation ofheteroglossic styles and echoes is obviously quite in-
tentional, partly to achieve market success across different classes of audience (as
Phantom adaptations have always tried to do) but also to attain both a suspended con-
tinuation and a protective containment of adolescent elements. Lloyd Webber, in
the wake of his controversial Requiem, was hoping to achieve theatrical and musical
adulthood in the public eye at last, throwing "aside all pretense of being a pop com-
poser" primarily of rock musicals (Walsh, 172), while also wanting to exploit and
conflate several clearly adolescent forms in an enticing but securely nostalgic-and
even quasi-operatic-combination. The irony; of course, is that he attained his
"growth" in the view of the public at large, albeit to the catcalls of several critics who
saw an ill-assorted mix undercutting itself in the end (Walsh, 204 -208; Hayward,
141-42), yet he did so by prolonging adolescence on several levels in his Phantom cif
the Opera, from some of the stylings in his music and the erotic-fantasy sets to the
final scene's exclamation of its title character's post-pubescence, which remains ar-
THE CULTURE OF ADOLESCENCE
rested even as it is briefly aroused and then obscured. Michael Crawford's now-
famous phantom, once his stunted desires are at least acknowledged by Christine's
kiss on a mouth distended as though scarred by acne, finishes his story by melodi-
ca1ly relinquishing his hopes-"It's over now,/ The music of the night" -and then,
rather than stabbing himself to death, completely shrouds himself under a black
cloak. Leaving his physical fate in suspension, he simply vanishes beneath a magi-
cian's cloth in his still-adolescent condition. Ultimately only his half-face mask (a
fuller version of which is the logo of the show) remains visible to the other charac-
ters and the audience as the curtain falls (Perry, 166).
THE ARREST OF ADOLESCENCE IN

PHANTOMS FROM THE 1960s TO THE '8os
Lloyd Webber and his team, though, and even Ken Hill and his associates could not
have taken Leroux's story in this partly old, yet also new, direction simply on their
own. Their very mixed inclinations would never have been what they were in the
1980s, nor would the European and American middle-class public been so ready and
eager for such resplendently adolescent (though equally old-fashioned) musicals,
had Western culture not been building for several decades toward a conflicted state
of widespread, if often hidden, adolescence, both literally and metaphorically: The
many indicators of this progression, it turns out-and as I now want to show-
include the most important previous adaptations of the same story from the early
1960s to the mid-1980s. The late twentieth-century culture of adolescence in its
gradual formation moved through definite stages that are surprisingly well reflected
in the major versions of The Phantom <if the Opera from Terence Fisher's to Andrew
Lloyd Webber's.
Fisher's film was his 1962 color production for England's Hammer Studios, by
then well established-since producing The Curse q{Frankenstein in 1956-as Univer-
sal's chief smaller-studio companion (indeed. often its business partner) as a "house
of horror" (Hutchings, 19, 39). One could argue that Hammer was so ensconced in
its market niche by 1962 and Fisher so routinely the director of its "classic horror"
variations from The Curse and The Mummy (1959) to The Brides q{Dracula and The Two
Faces ofDr. jekyll (both 1960; see Hutchings, 57) that their Phantom, not a success at the
box office, suffered and still suffers from a tired senescence that seems to miss the
dynamics of 1960s adolescence completely: It is as if Fisher and screenwriter "John
Elder" (a pen name for producer Anthony Hinds; Hutchings, 61 and 95-96, n.14)
started already derivatively with the 1943 version of the story and worked to make
the phantom, still disfigured by printer's acid (see figure 72), yet another older and
self-obsessed but misunderstood composer, this time somewhat more sinned against
than sinning. Here, played by Herbert Lorn, he is revealed to be a "Professor Petrie"
who composed an opera version of Saint joan ten years before the vaguely late-
Victorian time of the film and whose score was kept without permission or payment
by the imperious Lord D'Arcy (Michael Gough), the grasping aristocrat in need of
funds whom Petrie once approached for patronage. Now D'Arcy is demanding to
have the composition he has stolen produced as his at an English opera house, man-
aged by a Mr. Lattimer (Thorley Walters), and is simultaneously trying to seduce the
young soprano "Christine Charles" (Heather Sears) who has auditioned for the lead,
Figure 72: Herbert Lorn as the unmasked Professor Petrie in the 1962 Hammer Studios
Phantom
much to the delight of the production's equally young director, Harry Hunter (Ed-
ward de Souze, the closest to a "Raoul" there is in this version).
The havoc wreaked on rehearsals of Saint joan from the start of this film is part of
a quest for revenge by the now-hidden and masked Petrie, who is rumored to have
died from a fire in the printing house to which D'Arcy sold the opera, but who was
really burned severely when he ignited those flames in the act of pouring acid on the
printed copies of his misattributed work (see Fisher). Yet the most violence against
the opera and its people is actually committed by a grotesque dwarf (played by Ian
Wilson), who has acted on the reclusive Petrie's behalf ever since they met in the
THE CULTURE OF ADOLESCENCE r85
sewers through which the burned professor crawled to seek shelter in the watery
depths of the opera house. Though it is the "high cultured" Petrie who "haunts" an
opera box kept empty by the management and speaks to Christine through holes in
backstage walls in hopes of becoming her true teacher of his music instead of D'Arcy,
it is the far more "low cultured" dwarf who hangs a stagehand, kidnaps Christine to
sing for the professor in the depths, creeps after the rescuing Harry through the un-
derground lake while breathing through a reed, and finally climbs menacingly on the
opera-house chandelier when Saint joan is performed under its real composer's name
near the conclusion of the picture (Fisher). The phantom's pitiable condition, with
his id so clearly displaced from him onto a version of the hunchbacked assistant
"Fritz" in James Whale's first Frankenstein film (Twitchell, 180), can thus be turned
into a sacrificial heroism in the end. Petrie finally rushes out under the chandelier to
rescue Christine from the dwarf, as a protective father-figure might, and is killed
(along with the dwarf) when the chandelier falls, leaving his stilled, staring, grayish,
and red-blotched face to be unmasked for the first time just before the cast-list rolls
over a freeze-frame of his detached and solitary mask (Fisher).
Granted, this version is continuing some of the evasions of Leroux and of disfig-
uring wars abroad (now such as Vietnam) that we have found in the 1943 picture
from Universal. Indeed, this modest-budget (albeit gaudily colored) film, quite typ-
ical of Hammer productions in "mak[ing] no pretense of being a 'big' pic" (Variety,
June 13, 1962; Herrick Library 1991), seems to have no "outside world" in it besides
a river flowing through sewers under the opera, and even that is photographed with
a claustrophobic narrowness. Still, Fisher's production does manage to carry forward
most of its studio's own cultural agenda with Gothic horror films in the late 1950s
and early '6os, albeit with some hesitations (I will soon argue) that may have left
viewers puzzled and more likely to stay away In that process, this version actually
says a great deal about the positioning of adolescence in 1962 on which later sym-
bolic constructions of that state would build. Certainly there can be no doubt of
adolescent qualities in the Hammer Phantom. Lorn's Petrie, after all, once his face is
visible (figure 72), has an extremely blotched visage (however ashen from the fire)
that now seems quite close to the acne-scarred features of his Lloyd Webber coun-
terpart. In addition, this Petrie, when a younger man, has been the aspiring preco-
cious genius who can respond to the more "adult" appropriations of"my" music only
with emotional rage and (unlike Claude Rains) mischievous subterfuge-very ado-
lescent behavior indeed. He can then hold all his desires in abeyance for a decade in
another arrested adolescence that seeks only to have its obsession acted out and
finds this Christine attractive mainly to the extent that her singing can be the in-
strument of fulfilling this phantom's youthful ambitions.
Such a figure is clearly not as morally jaundiced for the viewers of this film as the
too-aristocratic, lecherous, and money-grubbing Lord D'Arcy, the old-world
hanger-on (much more than the phantom this time) unable finally to dominate the
artistic or business worlds or the womanhood he would still like to control. By con-
trast the Hammer phantom is at least an eager aspirant to private vision and self-ful-
fillment, those independent states of the post-pubescent young not unlike those of
nineteen-year-old Joan of Arc (his opera's subject). Fisher's film, like Hill's musical,
places these conditions over against the world of "corrupt" government and corpo-
rations that the thinking of the 1960s was increasingly starting to question. Ulti-
mately, though, this liminal (as well as subliminal) character cannot be given the high
level of audience approval extended to Christine, as long as she listens to the "best"
men in the story, and even more to Mr. Lattimer and Harry Hunter, who finally
prove themselves capable adult managers (Harry only after going through some tri-
als, of course) by overcoming the threats of the dwarf, expelling D'Arcy from their
theater, saving a young woman from real harm, uncovering the phantom's history
and hiding place, and finally restoring his rightful authorship and staging his work
successfully without validating his most self-pitying and self-centered, and thus
most fully adolescent, behavior.
Hammer Studios, we must realize, aimed for and found the market that they did
in the late 1950s because their executives and principal filmmakers, having risen
mostly from the working into the middle classes (Hutchings, 6r), faced the same po-
tentially horrifying anxieties that their audiences did, partly because moviegoers had
in fact become younger-sometimes 72 percent teenagers (Skal, 255)-as the age of
television progressed and the numerous babies born after World War I I grew into
adolescence. All sides in this relationship, at least preconsciously, felt the force of a
cultural identity crisis brought on in England by several factors at once: "the incursion
of 'Americanized' mass culture" such as the Universal horror film; a concomitant
"growth in consumerism," including television, "that obscured [already fluid] class
boundaries"; an "apparent weakening of the family structure" in a late-industrial
economy that worried both teens and the adults who wanted to see teen rebellion as
the cause; the "ongoing dissolution" of "Britain's international influence" brought
home in 1956 by England's loss of the Suez Canal; and the gradually "shifting" nature
of gender roles, in the workforce and elsewhere, that led the figure of woman (the
Hammer Phantom's Christine, for example) to be feared or fought over as a "symbol of
undesirable social change" in her increasing movement from the domestic "angel in
the house" into more independent employment (Hutchings, 55). All of these omi-
nous undertones had replaced the earlier fears of nuclear fallout and interplanetary
(i.e., Communist) invasion symbolized in the very non-Phantom-like monster films
produced through the mid~1950s-one reason why there are no significant Phantom
adaptations from World War I I to the I 960s. Now what was most under threat from
all these concatenating forces of the later 'sos, both for largely male film producers
and the teenage or young-adult males who most determined the choice of films on
dates, was the ideological solidity and survival of "the male professional authority fig-
ure" that the Terence Fishers and "John Elders" had become and the younger males
hoped to be, whatever their temporary avenues for self-expression (Hutchings, 56).
The Hammer Gothic horror films, then, as Peter Hutchings has argued, usually
worked toward a "positive valuation of professionalism" as a "potent model of self-
definition and worth" by pitting aspirants to or exemplars of the "true" professional
against exaggerated social or monstrous threats to that ideal, generally in florid "pe-
riod settings" that vaguely "permitted a conservative nostalgia for a fixed [but not
completely old-style] social order" (Hutchings, 62, 65).
The Fisher Phantom ofthe Opera, for the most part, is a late-stage fulfillment of this
Hammer ideology As "period" as its setting may be, it locates the greatest "evil" of
its world in the fading aristocrat, a representative of bad high culture, who is stealing
the products and proceeds of creative entrepreneurs. They, like Hammer producers
and directors, want to work within corporate (but old) systems (such as the opera)
if only the outdated, old-world seducers will leave the stage to them, which D'Arcy
finally does at Lattimer's behest. Woman, at least prior to her child-bearing years (as
Christine Charles is), may attempt some brief self-fulfillment in this setting, pro-
vided she finally chooses to be managed and protected by corporatized father-
figures (Lattimer) and a prospective husband (Harry) who is a rising middle-class
professional in training. What is most objectionable by these standards is "ama-
teurism," partly associated with "parasitic aristocrats'' but more often with what
Michael Frayn in 1951 called the "do-gooders" and "gentle ruminants" of the "radical
middle classes" who seemed at best ineffectual "small businessmen" and at worst (as
ideological constructs, anyway) pursuers of unsatisfiable and finally self-centered
longings, often to the point of being debilitated by unmanning sexual yearnings for
too-dominant women or excessively aesthetic idealism that cannot lead to produc-
tivity and profit (Hutchings, I07, 63). It is these qualities that are half-demonized in
the Hammer phantom, who can attract some post- 1950s sympathy for personal free
enterprise in this perspective but is also wrongly caught between ungoverned "desire
and a neutered ineffectuality" (Hutchings, 69).
This is the state most feared by would-be middle-class professional men of this
era as they faced the many challenges of the day to their supposed dominance. They
therefore sought to "abject" into monstrous others-including the "low culture" as-
pects of them-any such "masculinity that [was] deeply troubled and anxiety ridden"
(Hutchings, 8r), the masculinity they subliminally felt to be their own changing and
heterogeneous condition at the time. As Hutchings shows, moreover, this fearsome
otherness in Hammer Gothic films was frequently connected with "those members
of the cast who most closely approximate[d] the peer group of the film's intended
audience," the teenagers who felt "most ineffectual in terms of the power and au-
thority they wield[ed]" (Hutchings, 66). Hence even the somewhat older Professor
Petrie in this Phantom, as teenagers are thought to do even by themselves, "suffers
from fits of rage and a wide range of nervous moods and twitches," paralleling the
many actual adolescents who have "little control over either their bodies or their
eventual fates" (Hutchings, 68). In 1962 the phantom of the Opera turns out to have
been needed, along with other monsters or their creators, as a place to "throw off"
the key middle-class anxieties about being a man and to "throw [all this] under" the
arrested adolescent as an embodiment of a pervasive instability that could fictively
make that feared condition seem but a passing phase.
At the same time, however, there remain considerable positive feelings for Her-
bert Lorn's phantom at the end of this film, ones almost as warm as those that audi-
ences have said they have felt towards Michael Crawford in the Lloyd Webber
version. A partial reason, certainly, is that Professor Petrie in his last act finally
chooses patriarchal responsibility in contrast to his earlier and more socially destruc-
tive self-involvement. Another reason, of course, is the Hammer Studio's choice to
abject the most anti-social and low-culture elements already abjected onto the phan-
tom yet again onto a bestially ugly, if dwarfish, monster unused in any previous ver-
sion of this story but particularly attractive as a "Mr. Hyde" double after Terence
Fisher had recently directed The Two Faces q[Dr.jekyll. Yet this last decision can also be
viewed as joining with some others in Hammer's Phantom to put in question this pro-
duction's, and thus the studio's, dominant ideology, As adolescent as Professor Petrie
is, he is also the creative author/composer whose work has been appropriated with-
out credit by a corporation, even though most of the blame is siphoned off from the
middle-class managers onto an aristocratic parasite hanging on from the past. It is
only the resulting anger and recriminations that are acted out by the dwarf (the phan-
r88 TilE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF TilE OPERA
tom's "lower,'' sewer-based side); the right to just rewards and recognition for his per-
sonal work remains with the scarred Petrie alone, and the film validates that right by
restoring his authorship in the final performance of his Saint joan and having Christine
sing his music as truly his at that point, the best apotheosis of their relationship (pro-
fessional more than personal) that this version can devise.
Extending the increasing Hammer tendency after 1960 to include the occasional
"critique of a more general social repressiveness" (Hutchings, 93) and building on
the 1940s sympathy for Claude Rains's phantom as a wronged composer, Fisher's
film deliberately arouses audience anxiety and fellow-feeling about the alienation of
the individual in late-industrial organizations, where any person's work is constantly
in danger of being sucked away by the corporation for its profit rather than left in
the creator's control. Even within the frame of valuing the middle-class male pro-
fessional as the resolver of current social instabilities, that very professional, as he
thinks of emerging from private adolescence into more occupational adulthood, en-
counters the uncertain boundaries between what is "mine" and what is "the com-
pany's or the government's" in a bourgeois-controlled society that both overtly
values and covertly preys on "free" personal initiative and private property. Audience
uncertainty about the Hammer phantom, and hence perhaps this film's unpopular-
ity, may stem from this tangled ambivalence in the attitudes of Western middle-class
culture, which makes arrested adolescence seem as desirable as it is fearsome. This
awareness is one that many filmgoers may have wished to avoid in 1962 but that be-
came increasingly articulated as the 1960s progressed, especially by teenagers and
slightly older adolescents, the very groups, we now see, with which the Hammer
phantom of the Opera is most culturally connected.
That connection, as it happens, becomes even more complete on film by the

mid-1970s in Phantom cifthe Paradise, written and directed as a soft-rock musical by the
American Brian de Palma just two years before his more widely popular film of
Stephen King's Carrie (released in 1976). This Phantom is a far more energized and
creative adaptation than the Phantom cifHollywood movie-for-television also presented
in 1974. The latter was set, quite routinely, on an old sound stage undergoing demo-
lition that is terrorized by an aging film actor (played by Jack Cassidy) disfigured by
a production accident years ago, whose arrested quasi adolescence has kept him from
leaving his workplace, in the by-now tired tradition of the obsessive Norma
Desmond in Billy Wilder's highly Gothic Sunset Boulevard (1950). Phantom cifthe Paradise
is openly, even eagerly adolescent enough to make its deceived and disfigured com-
poser-another one-an out-and-out teenager at war with the greed of the corpo-
rate world in the 1970s. That is just the beginning, in fact, of a hyperkinetic, darkly
satirical, rock-Gothic vision that roots the entire world of corporatized popular
music, and finally the larger culture it implies, in several simulations of arrested ado-
lescence and an adolescence of endless simulations now envisioned as permeating
the entire civilized world.
The composer in this 1970s version is young Winslow Leach (William Finley), at
first a "tall, blond, angular [and gangly] rock freak" (to quote the penultimate script
in de Palma 1973, 1). He initially appears as an intermission pianist and singer in one
of the studio clubs owned by the shadowy but omnipresent impresario behind
"Death Records'' known only as "Swan'' (Paul Williams, also the writer of this film's
Figure 7-3: William Finley as Winslow Leach in Phantom if the Paradise, 1974.
songs; de Palma 1973, Prologue and 10), originally named "Spectre" in an earlier
draft of the screenplay (de Palma and Rose 1973). Faintly reminiscent of lord
DArcy, among his other echoes of Gothic film characters, Swan, through a sleazy
minion who promises leach future stardom, appropriates the manuscript music for
Winslow's rock "cantata" Faust, hoping to bill it as relatively high-culture music by
Swan himself, leaving leach as "low culture" behind, when he uses it to open his
grand new "rock palace," the "Paradise" (de Palma 1974). When the anxious com-
poser tries to see the reclusive Swan, Winslow sneaks, dressed in drag, into a group-
sex (rather than singing) "audition" for young women at the nco-Gothic "Swanage''
mansion. On his first attempted visit there before this, Winslow has heard one of his
pieces rehearsed by the attractive "Phoenix" (Jessica Harper, this version's Chris-
tine) and fallen so in love with her that he wants to recover his songs so that she can
sing them (de Palma 1974). Swan discovers leach in the Swanage's quasi harem and
arranges the planting of drugs in his "purse" by two local cops, leading to his arrest
for possession of one of the things he never really possesses. In prison at "Sing Sing"
(of course), Leach is sadistically subjected to a "Dental Health Research Program"
funded by "the Swan Foundation," to such an extent that all of his teeth are ex-
tracted (de Palma 1974). Eventually "his mouth makes ominous clicks from the chat-
tering ... of his stainless steel false teeth," and his "body" becomes "ghostly lean," his
"sunken eyes gleam[ing] with a rage that takes all of his will power to contain" (de
Palma 1973, 23).
Once he has escaped upon hearing his music played on "Death Records" over the
radio, he is even further disfigured when he rushes angrily into Swan's recording stu-
dio to recover "what is mine" and ends up getting the right side of his face and his
voice box crushed in a record press while retreating from a security guard (de Palma
1974 and 1973, 26). After concealing his new deformities behind a helmet-mask
with a birdlike beak and a black leather outfit with a red cape, both of which he finds
in the Paradise's supply of costumes for quasi-"Gothic" performances (see figure 7-3),
Leach is saved from recapture only by signing a thick, incomprehensible contract to
become an unbilled "ghost" songwriter for the very Swan he hates (de Palma 1974).
Swan conscripts him even more by creating an electronic voice for Winslow with
studio equipment and then "adjust[ing] it to sound exactly like his own," telling
Leach that from now on, "you can plug yourself into [a] console for singing" while
Winslow holds out the hope that Phoenix will ultimately become "my voice" of the
future, now that she too is under contract to Swan and scheduled to be a backup
singer at the opening of the Paradise (de Palma 1973, 37-38).
There could hardly be a more direct, as well as sardonically fanciful, statement of
the undercurrent we have seen just emerging in the Hammer Phantom: a nagging
awareness that any result of a person's creativity, intensely important to adolescents,
can suddenly become the property of an impenetrable corporate system and be sub-
sumed entirely into its (not the creator's) supposedly "high cultural" modes and
methods of production. That vast machine of alienation here blatantly transforms the
creator, the desiring adolescent, into an artificial composition of largely inorganic
parts that mechanically keep the teenage state of unsatifaction perpetually alive while
destroying pieces of the creator's actual body (including his voice) and replacing them
with manufactured substitutes. Even Winslow's methods of rebellion, including his
space-age Gothic costume (complete with brown lipstick; de Palma 1974), are pro-
vided by the very organization whose reifications of people, Phoenix especially, he
keeps trying to undo. His conversion into a corporatized entity who will serve Swan
while resisting him becomes most visibly complete when Swan "helps" Leach synthe-
size a new voice for himself with professional technology As the fully costumed
Winslow sings almost silently into microphones while playing the studio's electric
piano built into a much larger console (again figure 7-3, one of the clearest visual
echoes of earlier Phantom films), de Palma's camera pans from him, through two walls
and across huge masses of tangled wires, to a whole room of amplifiers and synthe-
sizers without any human presence. It finally comes to rest in Swan's own mixing
room, where he filters, adjusts, and redials an entirely electronic sound so that it be-
comes the singing voice of Paul Williams (de Palma 1974). With every move he
makes, the "phantom" Leach is dispossessed of what he performs and given substitute
possessions he never thought he wanted in place of those he thought were his own.
Instead of being mostly in the future as they were in the Hammer Phantom, the
1960s have completely and contentiously occurred by the time Phantom cifthe Paradise
opens, outside as well as inside the film. Now the dominant ideology of 196os-based
teens, de Palma's target audience, makes them quite ready to see and hear that per-
sonal features, longings, creations, performances, and property as adulthood ap-
proaches-and even life itself, given the Vietnam War-can be taken completely
from any of us by a government in league with corporations (at Sing Sing, for exam-
ple) or by the corporations on their own, particularly the entertainment giants who
make the products most craved by teens themselves. As matter of fact, that sense of
the world reflected a genuine reality of the time: "since the middle of the 6os an in-
creasing number of [record company] mergers had resulted in the [far less competi-
tive] situation which characterized the market [of the mid-to-late '7os], when only
five companies controlled" 70 percent of all popular recordings (Bodker, 173-74).
Hence what de Palma presents as a giant, vampiric draining and dispossession of
everyone by electronic audio and visual means of simulation can for him truly corpo-
ratize, and thus dehumanize, us all. Even our rage against it (like Winslow's) can be
expressed only through its grotesque anamorphoses of them, as they grab onto peo-
ple like a "leech," because of a corporate monopoly on forms of human, and especially
musical, expression. The rest, we can even say, is silence by the end of this film.
Phoenix, when she ultimately realizes her own mistakes, is demonically robbed of her
voice and rendered permanently mute by Swan even as she is "saved" by Winslow
from an assassination of her set up by Swan for a showy effect, all during the grand fi-
nale on the enormous Paradise stage placed in the midst of a neo- Baroque and plush
red decor blatantly (and corporately) reminiscent of the Paris Opera (de Palma
1974). In the end, too, the resulting silence goes virtually unnoticed, and so is silenced
further, by the blindly happy reaction of the teenage audience to the sheer sound and
spectacle of the "production values" that Swan and his company have prepared. Fi-
nally this cheering, huge, adolescent crowd watches Phoenix become voiceless and
Swan and Winslow die as though each of these destructions and the conflicts behind
them were just part of the show (a fool's "Paradise'' indeed), as though there is no
meaningful difference any longer between "high'' and "low" culture, sound and si-
lence, or performative life and performative death.
This last indistinction particularly, as things turn out, also becomes intimately
and chillingly connected with the arrested adolescence in this film, so much so that
the reduction of all life to image instead of substance becomes a basic ingredient in
the adolescence of the entire visible culture. Underlying Swan's obsessive drives to
steal quasi-high-culture rock music and to open a concert palace that is both innov-
ative and traditional, we find, is his passion for "eternal youth," his determination
never to age much beyond the seventeen years at which "he gave up singing" to be-
come ''the first teenage multi-millionaire" in the pop-music business (de Palma
1973, 74 and Prologue). As Winslow discovers by finding a tape of the event in
Death Records' huge video library, Swan has already sold his soul, or actually his one-
time appearance in 1953 (recalling the initial naming of him as Spectre), to a mirror-
image of himself in a bathtub-hence his passion for versions of Faust-that has
Satanically granted him a Dorian Gray-like capacity to retain the features of a late
adolescent permanently while Swan as an "old, horrible, pimply faced creep" (the
worst of both age and adolescence rolled into one) is transferred onto a well-hidden
tape "that draws off all the degeneracy and corruption" (de Palma 1973, 75-80 and
73). An eternal adolescence now seems possible through the corporatized technol-
ogy of audiovisual reproduction. The main proviso is that this lasting liminality, now
quasi-mythically linked to a mastery of the corporate world that no teenager could

attain, will continue only as long as there are recorded videotapes, not still pho-
tographs, of the artificial Swan's every move and as long as Swan keeps providing
material for those tapings by ruthlessly changing modes and styles of music (stealing
them, if necessary) almost as soon as new ones have been codified (de Palma 1974).
The costumed Winslow even attains some of this dark "immortality" himself
once he is taped within the Death Records complex, partly during his own viewing
of existing tapes in the library. When he tries to stab himself after realizing some of
Swan's larger designs on Phoenix, Swan pulls out the knife and interdicts physical
death by informing Leach that "you gave up the right to rest in peace when you
signed [the] contract" with Death Records (de Palma 1973, 70). As long as their self-
images are alienated onto company tapes that keep accumulating as available for
viewing-including the tape now being made of them as they enact this scene-they
both cannot die or even visibly age, although destruction of the tapes will make
Winslow's wound reopen and Swan's face will then reveal all the hideousness of his
decay. Here is why, on the one hand, the tape library is so vast, including "24 tape
monitors" that maintain recorded surveillance over every space within the Paradise.
It is also why, on the other hand, the elimination of the tapes (which Winslow finally
sets afire) means the physical deaths of Leach and Swan together. Leach's stab-
wound starts bleeding uncontrollably at the very moment Swan becomes "a pathetic,
wrinkled old monster" just as he cries out "He's destroyed my picture" upon seeing
a reflection of his suddenly aged face in an onstage crystal prop during the final scene
(de Palma 1973, 73, 91). The recorded and re-recorded video reproduction conse-
quently appears more life-sustaining, and life-taking, than any form of the living
body it was created to represent. By the time the adolescent Paradise audience
clearly cannot distinguish between fake and real death, the audience for the film has
been put in the same position (its own cultural adolescence, whatever the ages of the
individuals present), completely unable to determine which has primary control in
this picture: the reproduced image, the image reproduced, or the person reproduced
by both images.
Phantom tifthe Paradise anticipates the Lloyd Webber musical, we have to admit, by
intensifying and updating the adolescence in the novel and the Terence Fisher film,
but only as it also brings forward and transmogrifies Leroux's neo-Gothic sense of a
world dissolving into simulations of simulacra of counterfeits. Adolescence now
seems only momentarily to be an honest, creative. 1960s resistance to incorporation
and alienation within big-business production and marketing. Its survival in the face
of corporatized adulthood, though still appealing because of what adulthood is now
shown to be, has come to depend on the corporate images and performances, and
the technological duplications of those duplications, that maintain the simulations
of adolescence as able to be seen, reproduced, and purchased. By "the second half of
the 70s," as Henrik B0dker has shown, "the rock record's aura as a commodity had
diminished [from its cultural status in the '6os] to the extent that it was almost
stripped bare of its social significance" and "began to appear a hollow enterprise with
no visible core [only the symbols of one] apart from the remnants of an incorporated
[6os] ideology lurking behind the scenes" as de Palma's Winslow Leach does (B0d-
ker, 174). Consequently, to "sell out" genuine teenage creativity in Phantom tif the Par-
adise is still to "sell one's soul to the Devil," particularly if one "trusts a person over
thirty" who is deceptively trying to appear "hip" in drawing youth into his or her self-
aggrandizing web. But that entire way of thinking has also been subjected already to
the surveillance of corporatized filmmaking and sound recording and their siphon-
ing off of real social change and conflict (often as "low culture") from the sights and
sounds it reproduces, as in the bleeding away of Leach's "phantom" life-"leaching"
in the sense of washing away parts of a substance with liquid-while the film's final
video image records his prone body reaching out hopelessly for a Phoenix drained of
sound. Nineteen-sixties ideology has therefore become a deathly simulacrum of it-
self and sheer technological reproductions of its images from the moment it arises
in de Palma's ironic satire. Even the deaths or silencings of Leach, Swan, and
Phoenix, the poetically just "punishments" for their failures to maintain authentic-
ity, are validated only by being observed and filmed. De Palma makes us see as much
at the end by calling attention to the sweeping backward movement of his camera
that now so blatantly records this staged series of sacrifices, placing it under surveil-
lance, just as Swan's many cameras have taped everything else (de Palma 1974).
The most desired solution to this ideological and cultural quandary; of course, is
a survival of rebellious adolescent creation, now "valued up" after the 1960s, in a way
that is consistently compatible with business productivity and profits and the simu-
lations that make them possible. This is the compromise made by many former
rockers and radicals in the 1970s (Bodker, 168; Miller, 139-40) that de Palma's
Swan ostensibly works to achieve. That solution, however, is so self-contradictory
and internally conflicted in 1974 that even this film's elimination of those who most
obviously attempt it only restates the problem it tries to solve. To seek "authentic-
ity" over against corporate simulation by way of just such simulations is to be sucked
in-and then repeatedly simulated and resimulated-by the very means and avenues
available for self-creation and self-fulfillment. In Phantom if the Paradise it is this un-
decidable tug of war, quite basic to middle-class thinking by the mid-1970s, that is
abjected and then ironically confronted in the film's most grotesque characters and
images. Even with the unusual addition of a Satanic "Swan" figure, though, this fun-
damental confusion is still thrown mostly into, and thus "leached" off onto, the me-
chanically contorted "phantom" himsel£ Winslow Leach. His persistent and musical
protests against business corruption, its alienation of labor and art, and the disap-
pearance of all authenticity behind multiple corporate simulations (which he tries to
burn up) coexist in him, as they do and did then in many adolescents, with a drive
towards the business-world acceptance of his songs and a longing for his personal
work to appear in numerous re-recorded simulations of performances. Hence his
way of rebelling against the ironies of post-industrial self-fashioning is his adoles-
cent adoption of a by-now conventionalized "phantom" costume, one made even
more conformist, as teenage garb often is, in its quasi-space-age and motorcycle-
helmet features. This immediately visible contradiction helps embody, as well as
conceal, the quandaries of middle-class aspiration in the '70s that now tries to seem
quite individual and corporately successful at the same time, all the while hoping to
have this impossible solution both ways and thus staying (like Swan, most of the
other characters, and even the film's audience) in the limbo of an unresolved ado-
lescent state.
In this whole effort, as in Lloyd Webber's version, "low-culture" rock music tries
to meet "high-culture" business structures halfway. But the result is a broad social
portrait of a deeply felt cultural impasse that at the time of this film, it would seem,
cannot be escaped no matter where we look. The rock-palace setting of this Phantom,
after all, was and remains unquestionably symbolic of culture as a whole for de
Palma, in part because rock palaces as actual venues were mostly things of the past
by 1973-74. The picture had once been called Phantom ~the Fillmore in a screenplay
from an earlier stage of production (de Palma and Rose 1973), but that title had to
be altered, surely because the Swan-like "Bill Graham [had] closed his [real] Fill-
more rock temples on both coasts" in 1971, leaving one of them to become a very dif-
ferent-style disco (Jones, II6, 267). like many of its features, the Paradise is but an
image in the de Palma Phantom and as such can more completely incarnate a wide-
spread cultural irony that continued to exist well after explicitly rock palaces had dis-
appeared. This irony, especially as we view it today, remains that of a cultural
adolescence stuck in a persistent hesitation between a 6os-based "authentic art"
supposedly committed to cultural transformation, increasingly typed as "low cul-
ture," and a corporate totality mainly committed to perpetuating itself, simulation
after simulation, by marketing as "higher culture" its hollowed-out symbols of that
immediate but fading past.
Phantom ~the Paradise, probably as a consequence, was both unusually distinctive and
too ironic in its tone and mixing of styles to be a major commercial hit, though it has
since become a cult film for some (Perry, 62). It is perhaps not surprising, then, that
no widely circulated adaptations of The Phantom ~the Opera were attempted until the
CBS television film of 1983 and Ken Hill's 1984 revival of his brief 1976 stage at-
tempt at the Newcastle Theater. Moreover, when the TV production was produced
by Robert Halmi and directed by Robert Markowitz to feature the Austrian actor
Maximilian Schell (an Academy Award winner in 1962; Osborne, 258-61), it may
have seemed as if its makers were determined to turn the clock of adaptations back
to 1962 or even 1943. Following the ratings success in America (and successful the-
atrical releases elsewhere) of a series of two-hour filmed "classics" produced for tele-
vision by Norman Rosemont and beginning with The Count ~Monte Cristo (1974; see
Rosemont), Halmi and his associates set out to produce an equally well-mounted,
"classically" familiar Phantom with roughly the same conventionalized romanticism,
old- European atmosphere, and "high" culture that had helped the Rosemont pro-
ductions arouse fairly wide middle-class interest and had also added to the similar
success of a TV adaptation of Dracula (also 1974; see Curtis) with Jack Palance, at the
time another aging former star of theatrical motion pictures. Though filming was
done for this Phantom ofthe Opera in Hungary to take advantage oflower production
costs, "a convenient warren of tunnels under a brewery" (Perry, 61), and the moder-
ately used theater at Kecskemet (presented in the film as the Budapest Opera
House, the real version of which was never used), the aim was generally to expand
upon the production design of the Hammer film on a less seemingly pinched scale
and to partly approximate the noted color-schemes and economically achieved rich-
ness of the Universal remake with Claude Rains, all the while keeping roughly the
balance between "low" horror and "high" elegance in both those films and so distin-
guishing this one from black-and-white "B" monster pictures and making it far
closer to the Jack Palance than to the Bela lugosi Dracula (see Markowitz).
For the "baby boomers" born in the late 1940s, we must remember, now just past
literal adolescence and coming to dominate more of the adult market for TV adver-
tisers along with some older viewers (the combination for which this production was
targeted), the angst about true self-fulfillment half-revealed and abjected in Phantom
of the Paradise was increasingly arousing a nostalgia that harkened back even before
World War II and to past "high culture" rather than "low." Landon Jones writing in
1979-80 described this nostalgia, in fact, as "a haven for anxiety and a means of
reaffirming stable identities badly shaken during the passage from adolescence" in
this very uneasy age-group (Jones, 241). As a result, while setting the story just be-
fore World War I, the time at which Leroux's novel appeared rather than his 188os
backdrop, this version opts firmly to repeat the now well-established focus on an
abused and lovelorn professional musician (here an opera conductor) who was once
set afire by a heater during a physical quarrel with a critic only to attempt to douse
the fire with a pan ofliquid that turned out to be acid and disfigured his face (Perry,
61; Nexus). It seems as if this production unabashedly sought to telescope the period
of its setting, the long-accepted 1943 and 1962 film stories, and its own 1980s nos-
talgia for high culture into one safe, unthreatening time-frame before all of the
twentieth century's major wars, hoping to achieve an escape for its audience that
would bury their own anxieties behind those of a generalized "other time" that
seemed neither too close nor extremely far away. In the process, the Leroux tale was
again changed quite thoroughly by screenwriter Sherman Yellen, so much that the
original novel and its author are not even mentioned in this film's credits
(Markowitz; Perry, 62).
At the same time, the anxieties of the most targeted cultural groups in this version,
including their vague fellow-feeling for arrested adolescents, do come forcefully into
play in the changes Yellen made in the burned-by-acid formula. This time it is not the
theft of his own music that drives the title character to attack a critic or professional
rival. Now conductor "Sandor Korvin," with a central European name appropriate to
Hungary and Schell's Germanic accent, is enraged because his talented and beautiful
wife, Anna (played by Jane Seymour), commits suicide after her singing debut is con-
demned in the press by the critic in question at the behest of"a powerful impresario
[who is also] a spurned lover" (Perry, 61; Nexus). Once he has been disfigured as se-
verely as he is and has "crawl[ed] away to lick his wounds in the bowels of the opera
house" (Nexus), Korvin remains largely hidden, as well as shrouded in mournful black,
until young "Maria Gianelli" (also Jane Seymour, this time playing an Italian outsider
from the "home of opera") auditions to sing for the Budapest company. The deeply
scarred phantom-conductor now "sets out on his terrifying plan to destroy his ene-
mies [still left after his wife's death] and make sure that the [new] girl has the success
denied his wife," whom she so clearly reembodies in his obsessively vengeful and
backward-looking view of the world (Perry, 61). The creative younger people wrongly
abused by the larger "system" and its means of publicity are still being played with, as
they have been since 1943, especially in Phantom of the Paradise. But now Yellen has
added the longing for the dead (and sometimes murdered) love-object redirected to-
wards a younger look-alike that goes back in the Gothic-monster film tradition at
least to Universal's The Mummy of 1932 (Twitchell, 260). Additionally, the quest tore-
store the old love somehow, which makes the dead wife something of a mother-
figure and the new girl a daughter-figure in the bargain (with subliminally incestuous
overtones in both directions), is here enacted by a scarred avenger whose mask, amaz-
ingly, has scars of its own. Perhaps the most original feature of this otherwise imita-
tive Phantom is how much the cover Korvin chooses for his face is deliberately a
"paper-mache monstrosity" full of wrinkles, protuberances, and seams (see figure 7-4
Figure 74: Maximilian Schell and Jane Seymour in the 1983 Phantom on CBS-TV
and Nexus) that he quite openly shows to young Maria while striving to become her
mentor, teacher, and father-figure, on the one hand (as he had been with Anna), and
vaguely her aspiring lover-husband, on the other.
Such a mask most immediately recalls the roots of this version in The Mummy, to
be sure, but it also helps establish a particular kind of arrested adolescence in the
title figure of the 1983 Phantom cif the Opera. Here the most standard entrances into
full adulthood, marriage and a socially respected occupation, have been unnaturally
reversed and taken away by psychological and other reactions to institutionally sanc-
tioned cultural pressures at least partly displayed in the public media (in this version
newspaper reviews). The main male aspirant in this upheaval has consequently re-
verted to an adolescent condition where he hides his strongest passions in his own
sequestered space and harbors a quasi-maternal (here wife-based) image of the "girl
of his dreams" that he longs to have fulfilled by a young woman, an actual late
teenager as things turn out. To her, moreover, he is very willing to present himself as
a facially marred (if not acid-burned) quasi suitor, an adolescent role in itself sus-
pended between the positions of the father-mentor and the suppliant would-be
lover. The just-recently teenage, as well as older, viewers of this film in January of
1983 (Perry, 61) had to recognize at least dimly this betwixt-and-between condition,
perhaps as what they too clearly remembered or feared returning to or felt them-
selves vaguely living through, even when they had supposedly moved beyond it. The
combination in the audience of sympathy for and judgments against the phantom in
this case comes from his facing mature love and status (all bound up with some "high
culture") as unfairly withdrawn by oppressive social forces and yet his reacting to
that reversion to adolescence by obsessively, even violently, staying in that state (a
"low culture" by comparison) as viewers would like to feel they have not done and
will not do.
By 1983, it should be noted, an additional cultural change had quite clearly come
to affect the baby-boom generation and even some older people swept into the trend.
As the 1980s began, "America had twice as many divorced persons within its borders
as in 1970 and a divorce rate of 5.1 per thousand marriages, one of the highest divorce
rates in the world"; the "idea that the normal destiny of a man or woman [was] to live
within one family ha[d] been broken" over the previous decade, and "baby boomers"
in particular felt threatened with the increased prospect of being "emotional tran-
sients" moving from one love-object to another, as adolescents have always done, pos-
sibly until death (Jones, 184, 187-88). This transition is surely one reason behind
Yellen's introduction of a lost love into The Phantom ofthe Opera for the first time in the
history of the story, even though that plot device in other "Gothic" films was over half
a century old. There may be no legal divorce presented here, but the springboard of
the plot is the sudden breakup of the Korvin marriage by the choice of the wife after
she has placed supreme importance on critical approval for her professional, rather
than domestic, life-a reminder that "the rise in divorce [in the 1970s statistically]
paralleled the increase in women working" (Jones, 184). The phantom's regression to
a revived adolescence in this version thus embodies and calls up the worrisome "emo-
tional transience" of a much wider early-'8os viewing population, along with anxi-
eties about more professional women, even as this film helps its audience do some of
what it would prefer in this situation: blame such losses and changes on wider cultural
pressures, at once inevitable and unfair, more than personal decisions (though these
remain). Ultimately, of course, there is yet another ideological compromise
THE UNDERGROUNDS OF Tl!E PHANTOM OF Tl/E OPERA
attempted in this screenplay The phantom here is "valued up'' for continuing to love
Anna so much, especially since she was his spouse "till death do us part," and simulta-
neously "valued down," though understood, for obsessively transferring his affections
towards Maria, a younger incarnation of his wife in love with someone else (Michael
York's Raoul, now a young-middle-aged British conductor), however "natural" such a
transference has come to seem in the early 1980s.
This way the anxious viewers of 1983, subliminally troubled about this whole issue
but equally longing for an earlier time when it need not be faced as much, can use the
new Phantom to both "deal with" this genuine cultural transformation and displace it
onto a longing for genuine marriage in the past that "we" are wrong, if we are too like
the phantom, to direct elsewhere, while we nevertheless do so more and more. Max-
imilian Schell's Korvin abjects this conundrum for the audience of that moment, I
would argue, even as he also provides a focal point for their ongoing fear of being
robbed of their lives by the "system" and their combined fellow-feeling and anger to-
ward those who react by too clearly remaining adolescents, the "emotional transients"
that all of us are in danger of becoming as Western culture keeps changing. However
much this Phantom tries to and does swing back towards the 1962 version and beyond,
it still intensifies the sense, just beginning in the Hammer film and forcefully accel-
erating in Phantom cifthe Paradise, that the members of the audience are turning into ar-
rested adolescents, figuratively if not literally; almost no matter how distant they are
from their actual teenage years. The intensification, if anything, is even greater than
in de Palma's picture because the 1983 Phantom is so unabashedly escapist and nostal-
gic. In those very ways, it exposes the growing link between the regressiveness of baby
boomers harkening back through history and that same generation's suspension in a
cultural adolescence that it feared it could not, and perhaps still cannot, leave behind.
In this respect, the Markowitz-Yellen production acts out a clearly later stage, com-
pared to those of 1962 and 1974, by which their increasing adolescence is both con-
fronted and avoided by most members of the film-viewing public in the West. It
demonstrably shows that, by the time Ken Hill reproduced his Phantom and Lloyd
Webber began working on his musical version, we in the Western middle class had
progressed from consigning arrested adolescence to the doubts underlying the ideolo-
gies of early-1960s professionalism (focused on Herbert Lorn) to half-facing the per-
sistence of that arrest in our mixed feelings at being controlled by corporate simulation
even while resisting it (reenacted by both William Lindsey and Paul Williams) to re-
alizing that the increased instability of the middle-class family may be forcing us tore-
peat adolescent longing throughout our lives (as Schell's Korvin unquestionably does
until he dies amid the ruins of the chandelier that the phantom himself now cuts down
again, as he had not since 1943). The obfuscation of all this, granted, has remained just
as persistent as its figurative revelation in these uneven adaptations. But there can be
no question that they set an increasingly unsettled stage for the striking emphasis on
and appeal to adolescence that has helped make the Lloyd Webber Phantom cifthe Opera
a major popular indicator of our cultural state of mind.
THE MUSICAL AS THE PHANTOM OF THE ADOLESCENT GENERATION
Indeed, despite its more immediate sources and its several explicit returns to Leroux's
novel (from the 20,000 francs paid monthly to the phantom to his composing of a
"Don Juan Triumphant"), the 1986 musical retains several traces of these previous
adaptations that so increasingly emphasized adolescent ways of life. Like Professor
Petrie in the Hammer movie, Lloyd Webber's "Opera ghost" longs to see his own
work take the stage under his name and control ("my theater") and not the corpora-
tion's (Perry, 147, 157-58). The above-ground denizens of the Opera in this version
regard his attempted dominance as everything from "outrage" and "lunacy" to the
presumptuous intrusion of "someone with a puerile brain" (Perry, 157, 148), thereby
trying to reduce him to pre-adult status as much as they can in the face of his quasi-
"magical" powers over the Opera building. Concurrently, as in Phantom tif the Paradise,
the appearance of any work at this Opera risks being transformed into hollowed-out
simulations targeted only to the "seats get[ing] sold," as the new managers admit
when they lose all control of their theater, but can still attribute increased attendance,
to inaccurate "gossip" and "publicity" as much as to the phantom (Perry, 148). Ler-
oux's suggestions about a world of endless simulacra are brought back again by Lloyd
Webber and company, though not to the degree they are by de Palma, and that is es-
pecially so in the "Masquerade" production number at the start of act two that adapts
the original masked ball into a glittering spectacle of multiple disguises, dances, and
groupings of singers (Perry, no--21). There the lyrics periodically echo the book's
sense of Paris as a masked ball all the time when "every face" we see leads to "another
mask behind you" and the "paper faces on parade" serve a larger objective for every-
one of"hid[ing] your face, I so the world will I never find you" (Perry, 155-56).
Within this swirl of"Seething shadows, I breathing lies" (Perry, 155), all consum-
mations that might move in a clear adult direction are postponed, as when a briefly
masked Christine, fearful of the phantom, resists pledging herself firmly to a Raoul
and instead "goes from man to man'' in a frenetic dance, "almost coquettish'' and "al-
most jittery," as adolescently betwixt and between as we ever see her in this version
(Perry, 156). Moreover, such links between sheer simulation and being held in ado-
lescence, sporadic though they are this time, are intensified by a more pervasive
sense, reminiscent of the 1983 film, that families are always already broken up, a
basic given for several characters in this version. Mothers, fathers, siblings, and other
relations here are all pointedly dead, gone, and longed for (as in parts of the book,
but with renewed emphasis), so much so that the phantom's final confession about
his mother's "fear and loathing" in his infancy (Perry, 165) calls the audience back to
Christine's solo "Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again." This is the piece she
sings at her father's grave in the middle of the second act while the phantom perches
on top of it (Perry, 160) in a scene that raises the question of who the primary
"other" of the opposite sex will be-for her or him-in a world where both are ado-
lescently suspended between the memories of absent parents and risky new choices
among exogamous counterparts that have not yet been made.
Partly as a consequence of these echoes, then, and partly as an outgrowth of other
eclectic ingredients that pull it both towards and away from adolescent fashions of
the 1980s, the Lloyd Webber Phantom enacts a progression in which the central fe-
male and male characters are both re-suspended in adolescent states again and again
no matter how much (or how little) they try to move beyond such conditions. Chris-
tine's first major advancement to an adult lead in the story, her sudden elevation to
singing "Elissa, ~een of Carthage" in the fake opera "Hannibal by Chalumeau," po-
sitions her mainly to perform this musical's first major solo, "Think of Me," suppos-
edly to the absent Hannibal (Perry, 142-43). This song, in addition being one more
200 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF TilE OPERA
lament for a missing other in the show, is an urging that the listener remember
happy past encounters between one-time lovers. It immediately prompts Raoul in
the audience to shift the context, casting off the singer's maturity, and to recall
Christine as his former companion in childhood, "the gawkish girl I that once you
were" (Perry; 144). Later, after these two have met again and felt a sexual attraction,
Raoul is often tempted to reverse his sense of her having matured from that past. As
late as their duet "All I Ask of You'' near the end of act one, he is calling on her to
"Let me be I your freedom," rather than his assisting her to escape the phantom's
thrall. Raoul will be the one "to guard you I and to guide you" and be "your shelter"
and "your light" (Perry; 153--54, my emphasis) in place of both her father and the
phantom, the latter of whom has already shrunk her independent adulthood back to
the state of a pubescent fantasizer of the "man and mystery" he has tried to incar-
nate as the mirror of her "mind" (Perry; 146).
All these male attempts to keep Christine adolescent are even echoed in this pro-
duction among the managers and senior members of the Opera company. To her el-
ders she is nearly always the upstart "chorus girl" or the "ingenue" even after she has
sung very adult leads as a substitute for Carlotta, and this status is confirmed even
during the climactic staging of"Don Juan Triumphant'' after the phantom has forced
the Opera, under threat of"worse things than a shattered chandelier" (Perry; 157),
to give Christine the central female role. He has cast her as the blatantly adolescent
"Aminta," who is attracted by "Don Juan" (finally played by the phantom himself)
because she is newly driven, he hopes, by her "deepest urge" that "till now has been
silent" but can soon be led "Past the Point of No Return" (Perry, 162-63). If Chris-
tine is going to escape this transitional state, her growth will come much later than
this "Don Juan.'' As much as Raoul tries to jolt her onward in the final scene by cry-
ing to her "this thing [the phantom] is not your father" (Perry, 161), she is last seen
rowing off with the Vicomte across the underground lake, at the phantom's behest,
singing a reprise of the same "All I Ask of You" in which she has already been turned
into a dependent, yet also post-pubescent, child, particularly in the penultimate
words she now repeats: "say the word I and I will follow you ... " (Perry, 167).
Certainly this perpetual adolescence can be explained in part by continuing cul-
tural attempts to reduce women to virtual but still sexual children, even in the later
twentieth century; despite the sexual and feminist revolutions that have critiqued
that very tendency since the 1960s. But the Lloyd Webber Phantom keeps us from
resting on that problem alone~ and thus makes adolescence a more universal condi-
tion embracing both genders~by giving us also a male title character whose adoles-
cence is so arrested that he really does not change from the beginning to the end of
the play Every effort this phantom makes to assert adult control and dominance
never leads to fulfillment or growth beyond his point of departure. He never makes
"The Music of the Night" with Christine, the staging of"Don Juan Triumphant" is
never finished, any prisoners he takes are soon released, and all the quasi-Gothic ac-
couterments he has gathered to himself leave him only with pieces of antiquated,
imitated, incomplete life, as he admits when he looks at his mask off his face at the
very end and sings a reprise of "Masquerade,'' placing the emphasis on "Hide your
face, I so the world will I never find you" (Perry; 167). The kiss that seems to change
his mind, at least about killing Raoul and forcing Christine into an underground
"marriage,'' is really only a recognition of his arrested adolescence. At most it is a
sense that the "kind of life" he had "known'' is shared by others ("you are not /
alone"), not a passage to a more adult state of being. The phantom's final choice to
disappear in a magic trick on a rigged chair continues his onanistic retreat from
above-ground life with his wrapping of himself in his cloak (almost like a rewoven
cocoon) and his playful use of the legerdemain that he learned as a young carnival
magician (see Perry, 157, where his history in the novel is partly restored). He ends
the play in a "low culture" position, class, and existence that he never entirely leaves,
for all of his efforts to become a major force in "high culture." Ultimately continual
aspiration for this phantom (be it amorous, class, monetary, or musical) is synony-
mous with perpetual adolescence at every point. Any quest for identity here, as in
the phantom's concluding reprise of"Masquerade," is but a continual putting on of
masks, all in an adolescent existence of always unsatisfied desire and acquisition.
This drive in an individual eventually just folds itself up, stops, and in these ways
conceals itself from the many above-ground practitioners of the same process, which
is now clearly abjected into the Gothic "depths" of the cultural world as this show
renders them. The more we identify with the phantom and Christine, which this
version invites us to do even in the face of the former's crimes and childish petu-
lance, the more we half-consciously realize that our quest is their quest and that this
constantly sublimated fact, for all the eroticism in this production, is what primarily
attracts us and haunts us in these characters throughout this version and the final
decades of the twentieth century,
The appeal of this Phantom to teenagers of the 1980s alongside older baby-
boomers and even some of their seniors, we must admit, comes partly from its many
different echoes of recent popular culture. But its wider power for audiences arises
from its half-concealing/ half-revealing enactment of the highly adolescent cultural
state in which the dominant post-teenage groups among Western middle-class play-
goers have been living for a quarter of a century, building up to it in previous decades
but being very much there-and in a holding pattern-by the time of this play's
opening. The baby-boom cohort of people at the heart of this Phantom's public, after
all, was "raised as [the] generation of idealism and hope" through the post-World
War II era and prosperous 1950s only to become by the 1980s a "generation of un-
certainty" feeling very betwixt-and-between like adolescents, "unsure about what
their expectations really are, unsure about their role in society, unsure about mar-
riage and family, unsure even about reproducing themselves," however far they have
come since their teenage years (Jones, 1-2). Even as their largely successful post- De-
pression and postwar parents held out the promise of upward mobility for them, at
least in the white middle classes (by far the largest group in the 1980s Phantom audi-
ence), the "boomers" were directed to achieve those ends in an "education system
that seemed designed not to facilitate passage into adulthood but to delay it" by urg-
ing them not to look backwards very thoroughly but to find their "shared history"
among their own "music ... rituals, language, and values" (Jones 68-69), to such an
extent that they, like Lloyd Webber's phantom, fashion an "underworld" of their
own cultural symbols adapted only from pieces of older constructs. Graduation from
school was therefore anything but a passage into assured adulthood with final "steps
up." The Vietnam War draft of the 1960s to the early 1970s kept young men, not
just fearful of premature death, but "dodging from deferment to deferment like chil-
dren playing hide and seek," much in the way the 1986 phantom perpetually evades
the above-ground "system," and thus "delaying decisions about marriage and family
and career" in a far more protracted way than in previous generations (Jones, 94).
Moreover, the promise of social advancement seemingly held out by corporate

America and Europe in the 1960s, '70s, and '8os was felt by this generation to be
constantly deferred for them, almost no matter what financial position they at-
tained. The "disproportionate number of young workers in the economy" by the
1970s made it impossible to reduce the unemployment rate even when demand was
rising. In addition, "aggressive demand-side policies" quickly "heated up inflation"
into the early 1980s, making virtually everything so much more expensive relative to
wage increases that "the boom generation continued to decline (in purchasing power]
relative to the older generation" (Jones, 158-59), particularly, it seemed, when are-
cession struck America and then Europe from 1981 to 1983-84. The entrapment of
the Lloyd Webber phantom in an "underworld" from which he fruitlessly seeks to
ascend surely reflects this wide and deep frustration by 1984 of beholding the daz-
zle oflong-promised media riches "out and up there," resplendently put on stage in
this Phantom, yet watching it still recede the closer one gets, even when one is more
and more successful, because costs always rise as fast or faster than income. The
Crawford "Opera ghost" incarnates that suspension of progress in his 1980s and
highly adolescent way of being a class-climber and marriage-seeker on the promise
of 20,000 francs a month that we never see him collect even once. There could
hardly be a more emphatic symbolic image of the link between arrested adolescence
and the perpetually deferred economic, social, and marital completion of the desired
"self" strongly felt and feared by much of the baby-boom middle class in the West as
it was reaching middle age. Because "baby boomers" cannot be satisfied "simply with
an affluent society" and must additionally long for "one that will fulfill the expecta-
tions that their self-confidence and sophistication" make them want, no ultimate
success can ever be reached-the goal is always above and beyond-and so one un-
derside of this generation, as with Lloyd Webber's phantom, is a persistent (if not
always conscious) state of "frustration and anxiety" (Jones, 330).
This cultural impasse came about in stages, of course, just like the succession of
Phantom adaptations that reenacted parts of it, starting in the 1960s. In an early '6os
still pumped with confidence by the economic explosions of the 'sos, the promise
for the baby boomer was accepted unquestioningly enough that the middle-class and
rising professional manager could be the cultural ideal that such a figure often is in
the Hammer Gothic films. At the same time, the fear of self-alienation and disap-
pointment at the hands of the corporation in which the manager serves was at least
starting to rear its head as part of a conflicted ideology of middle-class identity, as
we see in the Hammer Phantom. By the early-to-mid 1970s, it had become clearer to
the baby-boom group that it was now the "Media Generation" raised "on television,
records, and movies" and their digitized offshoots more than any previous cohort
(Jones, II9); hence the world of Phantom rjthe Paradise in 1974 is that of records and
television at every level and location (even that of a "live" concert), while the whole
production is blatantly a film that frequently calls attention to itself as such. Inside
this mindset, once its participants were conscious of it, the "fun-house mirror re-
flection of reality inevitably distort[ed] more than it inform[ed]," as de Palma's film
constantly shows, amid the many facades of"alternate reality" that it offered (Jones,
I2I). Consequently "many baby boomers had trouble fitting the chaotic events of
their adolescence into an understandable context," much as Winslow Leach clearly
has, as corporate-based media depictions and music increasingly left out much of
that experience so as to sanitize it, conscript it, co-opt it, and keep larger "economic
realities" completely out of consciousness (Jones, 121). These realizations were

eventually bound up with even darker fears as the baby-boomer middle class became
more conscious of the increased family breakups that working women, greater self-
involvement, corporate control of domestic locations, and the incessant quest for
advancement in an inflationary time had helped to bring on as the 1980s began.
Now, as this generation faced these changes by almost not facing them in the nostal-
gic 1983 Phantom so concerned with "emotional transience" between love-objects, the
long-anticipated arrival of the "New Man" that the baby boomers had been
promised they would become was more universally felt to be a delusion or at least an
ever-distant prospect. What was left by 1984-86, for the vast group that maintained
the ideological orientation of "climbers" even while feeling all this, was to contem-
plate both the goals of economic grandeur and the apparent "failures" to achieve
them fully in a still stratified society. That is precisely what the Ken Hill musical and
especially the Lloyd Webber Phantom allow us to do while also imagining that we are
beholding a safely older and much more "romantic" story (provided we can afford it)
able to accommodate in one "popular opera" many of the contradictions behind the
deeply troubled forms of entertainment in middle-class Western culture.
We should not delude ourselves, I hasten to add, that the primary conscious in-
tention of the composers and producers of Lloyd Webber's Phantom was or still is
this kind of revelation. From what we have seen of its genesis and the sources it
chooses to blend, it clearly sets out to be, on its immediate surface, a reassuring (be-
cause "romantic") mix of ideologies in relatively little contention with each other.
Here middle-class aspirations for social climbing, rich accouterments, high-class
"production values," seemingly unrepressed sexual longing, sanitized "Gothic" shiv-
ers, and transitions from adolescence into "acceptable" kinds of marriage all seem
to be pleasurably worked through with music that, unlike Ken Hill's, steers a nice
middle course between soft-rock, romantic musical-comedy, and opera. Yet, espe-
cially in how it uses echoes of the novel more than its predecessors on film, the
Lloyd Webber Phantom manifests its more sublimated baby-boomer concerns any-
how, in the several ways we have noted, even while attempting to cover them up
with great financial success.
Several wags, including some critics, in England and America have suggested
that this Phantom of the Opera is quite personal to Andrew Lloyd Webber's life; in
this show more than others, they have claimed, he plays out his own scenario as a
sort of ugly duckling who wins the love of a beautiful younger woman by writing
music for her and reaping enormous rewards, especially when he uses proceeds
from Phantom to buy a home for Sarah Brightman and himself in "London's most
prestigious" Eaton Square to go with the estate at Sydmonton, now even more
well-appointed itself (Walsh, 204-205). But if any of that is true, I would argue,
it is only in the sense that Lloyd Webber's adaptation and his many decisions
about it reflect the conditions of his own generation (he was born in 1948) where,
even if there is great success, there is a also a sense of perpetual incompleteness
and a feared danger of non-attainment, as we can see in the composer's own brief
statements of frustration, once the mixed reviews for his Phantom appeared, at not
achieving full musical respectability for some critics even after he had moved in his
career from rock music towards opera (Walsh, 205-206). This dark, nagging side
of baby-boom aspiration is as much the cry of longing in the 1986 Phantom as any
other, and that is hardly surprising, we can now say, given the development of such
conflicted attitudes over several decades and across several Phantoms if the Opera
since I 9 6o. As forgotten as some parts of Leroux's novel are in the kinds of Gothic
sublimation that the Lloyd Webber version displays in its highly successful quest
for box-office gold, the main transformation in the story from 1962 to 1986 is the
turning of the original suggestions about class-climbing in the tale towards the
hopes and fears of the dominant middle-class group in the late twentieth century,
the enactors of a culture of adolescence who may still be wondering if they will
ever completely "grow up."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Different Phantoms
for Different Problems
SOME ADAPTATIONS SINCE THE MUSICAL
By 1990, Kim Newman was writing in the Monthly Film Bulletin that "several compet-
ing Phantom-related projects" had recently reached or would soon be reaching the
film or television "screen" -and even the stage, it turned out-obviously "to cash in
on the stage success of Andrew Lloyd Webber's romantic musical" (Newman, 173).
The production of such "knock-offs" has been prolific indeed. They have generally
had far less commercial and even critical success compared to the London-and-
Broadway production, but the title itself has turned out to be built-in insurance for
almost any project, at least up to a point, as when the 1989 "quickie" film starring
Robert Englund ("Freddy Kruger" in the Nightmare on Elm Street films) cost $2.8 mil-
lion, yet had pre-showing commitments of $5.8 million before gathering in a weak
$2 million over its opening weekend (Variety, Nov. 8, 1989). One direction this flurry
has taken has also been back to the musical stage, where several different Phantoms
have been presented throughout the 1990s, including revivals of Ken Hill's version
(Hill, iii), all as substitutes for the Lloyd Webber play, in areas outside central Lon-
don, New York, or Los Angeles. These versions sometimes appear in deceptive ads
to be the reigning musical itself-using the logo of a mask just different enough from
the one in posters for the Lloyd Webber show-so that audiences seem to be getting
the "real thing" as parts of musical-series subscriptions, when in fact they are not. I
saw just that in May 1993 when the Southern Arizona Light Opera Company (or
SALOC) ended its season with a musical advertised just as The Phantom if the Opera
but with music by Tom Sivak and lyrics by Cheri Coons and the librettist, David H.
Bell, as I discovered only by attending the actual production (see Stockley). Popular
novelists have even extended this fad beyond just Susan Kay's Phantom in 1991, as in
Sam Siciliano's The Angel ifthe Opera: Sherlock Holmes Meets the Phantom ofthe Opera (1994).
Such an onslaught can be explained by incessant and imitative quests for profit, of
course; yet there remains the question of why there are so many attempts at and re-
maining desires for this story in some form, as opposed to the similar but substan-
tially different versions ("Phantoms with a twist") into which such popular narratives
are often recast. It is as if the ideological anxieties underlying the Lloyd Webber
Phantom's own commercialism-the fears that no mask or acquisition or performance
of any self is ever enough-demand continued quests for more versions, beyond just
the landmark musical, that can both address and conceal the middle-class longings
to which the 1986 variation has appealed so effectively
There is not sufficient space here for me to discuss all the Phantom adaptations over
the last decade and a half But there are some of them, despite their uneven quality
that have enough distinctive features and have drawn enough audience interest to
have taken significant steps of their own in dealing with the cultural needs that the
Western middle class has been addressing with this tale. These steps are taken usu-
ally at the level of each version, again, where the immediately apparent intention is at
least somewhat shaken by elements that erupt from psychological or social concerns
deeper than the particular treatment may have set out to face directly Each adapta-
tion also makes its own, and generally conflicting, suggestions about how "high" and
"low" culture should (or should not) be set against each other. Still, what emerges in
these particular cases, ranging from 1987 to 1999, is not so much the ideology of self-
hood that we have just seen building across three decades in the previous chapter. In-
stead, while the anxieties of a cultural adolescence certainly continue to be felt at least
subliminally in these versions (seeing as the baby-boom generation continues to have
considerable market dominance), the underlying cultural quandaries acted out in
these recent Phantoms are much more varied and precisely focused as we move from
version to version. From the later 1980s through the 90s, The Phantom ofthe Opera is re-
vised mostly to deal with very particular cultural, and resulting psychological, feelings
of uncertainty that stem from various but specific consequences of baby-boom mid-
dle-class desires, doubts, and disappointments. Each recent transformation, at least in
the examples I will now discuss, is therefore quite different from the others in the
culturally based suggestions aroused by its most distinctive plot choices, character
traits, and other symbolic devices. The Phantom tale proves able to abject a very wide
range of cultural anomalies and middle-class anxieties about them, and at no time has
that been more true than in the final years of the twentieth century
FROM THE ''ANIMATED CLASSIC" TO

THE PHANTOM OF ABORTION AND THE CRISIS IN THE FAMILY
Several of these adaptations, admittedly, are derivative and minor at best, yet even
some of these contain dimensions that reveal cultural quandaries distinctive to the
late 1980s and the 1990s. In 1987, for example, Emerald City Productions released
an animated Phantom ofthe Opera film targeted at younger audiences as part of a series
of established "Classics" now that the Lloyd Webber musical had firmly reestab-
lished such a status for this story This version is remarkably accurate to the original
novel, often more than the musical itself, except with the phantom's real face (here
closest to Lon Chaney's) and the chosen ending (this time adapted from the 1943
film). Even so, many of the social and psychological dynamics underlying Leroux's
characters are removed from this rather stiffly drawn retelling so that it can insist on
a sharp distinction between the sympathetic and the malevolent qualities in the
phantom himself, the latter of which are consistently self-centered and anti-social,
just the qualities from which children-who may initially identify with the phan-
tom-need to be trained away
The resulting simplicity is disrupted by only one major factor in which this pro-
duction is unique: its disconnected and thus finally inconsistent characterization of
DIFFERENT PHANTOMS FOR DIFFERENT PROBLEMS 207
Christine. Animated with an extreme rigidity of expression for most of the film, this
rising opera star begins as an almost imperiously dedicated professional singer. With
the Carlotta character completely absent, Christine is now both the prima donna
and the aspiring ingenue, determined that very little (including Raoul at first) will
get in her way We are therefore stunned when she suddenly turns into the helpless
damsel in distress (complete with "save me!") once she is taken to Erik's lair and only
slightly less surprised when she becomes weepingly maternal with the phantom, fi-
nally getting him to withdraw his threats by turning him back into a child anxious to
please the mother so she won't "cry anymore" (see Guest). What young viewers are
faced with here are the discontinuous images of womanhood in the Western culture
of the late 1980s, when there was no viable argument against women having the
power and independence of their own careers yet there remained widespread long-
ings for the traditional feminine features of reliance on male strength and maternal
solicitude-especially when the context was the supposed needs of children. As
much as this adaptation may have wanted to use Leroux's tale to help young people
draw firm moral distinctions, it, like the culture it reflects and addresses, it is ulti-
mately at odds with itself on the nature of womanhood.
Another minor adaptation, though, exposes a quite different quandary by being
equally derivative for the most part, albeit for a more adolescent audience. Though
possibly inspired by the use of a mall in George Romero's Dawn ofthe Dead (1978), this
film is mainly a "teen slasher" take on the phantom story in the tradition of John Car-
penter's Halloween (1979) and its many successors. It is Phantom ofthe Mall, subtitled Eric's
Revenge (1988), in which the disfigured, angry youth of the title hides out in the duct
system of a large suburban shopping mall under construction to stalk his former teen
lover, "Melody" (now a store employee), and to stab as many of the mall's builders as
he can, targeting primarily the project's chief contractor and the corrupt city mayor,
the adult villains of the piece. What gives this predictable blood-fest its only unusual
feature is the Gothic "primal crime" from the past that causes this Eric's anger, finally
revealed in the R-rated flashback that obligingly adds sex to the draw of this film's vi-
olence. It turns out that Eric and Melody were enjoying a bedroom tryst in the for-
mer's suburban home (with all parents completely absent, as they are throughout this
film), when the house was set afire, leaving Eric burned beyond recognition after he
heroically lowered Melody to safety The fire, moreover, was part of an organized con-
spiracy to have a whole suburban neighborhood condemned so that the mall could be
built-the very mall against which Eric now seeks understandable revenge and which
he nearly destroys in the process of bringing it all down upon himself (see Friedman).
Within its slasher mode, we discover, this film is addressing the middle-class Ameri-
can, and even teen, fear that the suburban American dream, including its dream house
and the future of family life there, is facing destruction at the hands of the very mar-
keting schemes (the malls) and the corporate-city relationships on which the existence
of suburbia has come to depend by the late 1980s. The somewhat sympathetic, yet still
horrifying Eric in this case abjects conflicted anxieties over the potential disappearance
of"owning your own home" and the death of the "nuclear family" in the face of an ex-
panding mall-centered economy that is becoming the substitute home for teens even
as it attractively shores up the financial viability of suburban life. If this version shows
that the Phantom is almost too adaptable, even to a trend from Halloween to Scream 3
(1998), it also shows that it can still symbolize deeply fundamental conflicts inside our
dominant ideologies and feelings about ourselves.
That is certainly the case when we look at the more truly important adaptations
since the musical. Even wider concerns about the nuclear family, as it happens, are
the keys to the character motivations-and especially the sharp alterations to both
the novel and the musical-in one of the more sumptuous versions that most im-
mediately followed Eric's Revenge: a far less teen-oriented Phantom if the Opera film that
tried to bring the newly popular story back to television under the rubric of what was
now the mini-series in prime time. Qtite conventionally directed by England's Tony
Richardson (an Academy Award winner for his inventive Tom jones of 1963; Osborne,
274-75), this four-hour, two-episode production, which debuted in 1989, gave the
gracefully sad and always masked title character to British actor Charles Dance,
newly prominent internationally after his major role in Granada Television's mini-
series of The jewel in the Crown (1984). But it headlined an aging Burt Lancaster as
"Gerard Carriere," the newly dismissed former manager of the Paris Opera, still
anxiously there, who turns out to have once illegitimately fathered the facially de-
formed "Erik Carriere," now the "Opera ghost," whom he has long watched over, fi-
nanced, and protected without ever revealing his paternity
Such a major change in the story, among several others less flagrant, is actually not
original with this film in the strictest sense. Arthur Kopit, this version's scenarist and
a prolific playwright for the stage (Davis-Jacobs, 9), had already written a "book" to
go with songs by Maury Yes ton for a theatrical musical called simply Phantom that had
briefly debuted in Texas in 1987 but been virtually eclipsed by the Lloyd Webber
show that was on its way from England to America right at this time. Phantom, it
turns out, has since been revived in the 1990s and gone on to reasonable success as
a substitute for its spectacular competitor in both major-city theaters and more
modest venues, given how much less expensive it has been to mount and tour and
how well circulated its shorter original-cast recording has turned to be, especially
after Yeston won the Original Music Score Tony Award for a Broadway version of
Titanic, also the Tony winner for Best Musical of 1996 (Davis-Jacobs, 10). Back in
1988-89, however, Richardson, Saban-Scherick Productions, and NBC television
all concurred in dropping the Yeston songs (Nexus), still not memorable enough to
this day for audiences to hum as they leave the theater. The Kopit script with nearly
all its dialogue, on the other hand, was expanded for the mini-series so thoroughly
that the off-and-on attention paid to Erik's mysterious parentage in the stage Phan-
tom becomes the primary dramatic thrust in the TV version of 1989, particularly
when it adds and builds up the imposing presence of Burt Lancaster.
The emphasis is so slanted this way that the exact look of the phantom's visage,
always a major issue before and fleetingly hinted (from what I have seen) in the stage
version of Kopit's work, is never displayed for the viewing audience in this film,
though we do see the extreme shock of a few characters when they behold him fully
unmasked off camera (see Richardson). Instead, Charles Dance constantly wears a
beige-colored, form-fitting cover on most of his head over which other masks are
placed for his various disguises and subterfuges in the above-ground world of Paris
at the last turn of the century (see Richardson, Nexus, and Davis-Jacobs, 5). That de-
cision, which could make his deformity even more unsightly just because we have to
imagine it, places unusual emphasis on the phantom's piercing but beseeching eyes
and their constant longing for the restoration of a lost, even Edenic, family past,
which he tries to re-create in his subterranean world this time by growing a large and
verdant garden fueled by underground water and counterfeited light, to which he
leads the new Christine (Teri Polo) as though she and he had been transfigured into
Adam and Eve (see Richardson). The audience's quest becomes less of a search for
what is behind the mask, then, and more of a curiosity as to what in this phantom's
psychological and even biological past makes him desire and attempt to woo Chris-
tine, over all young women, in the very backward-looking way that he does.
As the key revelations unfold in this version, Polo's Christine turns out to be the
living embodiment of a Gothic portrait that Dance's Erik has kept locked away in his
deep lair for as long as he can remember. While Christine ends up having no bio-
logical relation to it, this picture is revealed to be an image of Erik's ballerina-
mother, the once-famous "Belladova," who passionately loved Gerard Carriere two
decades ago but found him married and unable to secure a divorce in Catholic
France. The resulting "low culture" pregnancy was so threatening to both their "high
culture" reputations and careers that Belladova first attempted a chemical abortion
on her own. It not only failed in its purpose but directly caused the horrific defor-
mity of the infant boy, whom Belladova then raised in the depths of the Opera, never
mentioning Carriere and encouraging Erik's prodigious musical talents built on
echoes from the Opera stage~until such confinement increased the weakness she
carried over from the painful abortion-process, and she died while Erik was young,
leaving his unknown manager-father to see to his needs in clandestine ways that
leave this phantom wondering what sort of "race of being" he is (see Richardson).
Dim memories of all this come to a crisis at the outset of this film when, first, Erik
secretly views Christine entering the Opera after she has been discovered as a street-
singer (and love-object) by Comte Phillippe de Chigny (Adam Storke, here given
Leroux's name for Raoul's older brother) and, second, Carriere, known to Erik
vaguely as a supportive patron who keeps the phantom's secrets, is relieved of his
managerial duties and pay by the new Opera directors and so is forced to withdraw
his earlier support of his son while keeping the deeper truth to himself Nearly all of
the phantom's really aggressive actions and disguises now stem from that combina-
tion of viewing the restored mother and needing the increasingly absent (because
unknown) father who has been pulled away and hidden within a vast corporate
world. Now Arthur Kopit's Erik will do almost anything to help make low-culture
Christine a high-class artist of the Opera as his mother was; to draw Christine un-
derground, where he hopes he can re-merge, musically and otherwise, with the fig-
ure he has most desired in a manufactured Eden; and to battle for greater power in
the institution of the Opera, the phantom's substitute parent, particularly when it
denies him the monetary and other support to which he has grown accustomed.
The jolt here to the most established traditions of this story, I need hardly say,
comes both from the abortion, a startling new departure, and the present-but-ab-
sent father, an issue as far back as Leroux but here connected to a more explicit dis-
solution of the family: The Freudian and Gothic pattern of infantile mother-seeking
and aggression as regression is certainly revived again, partly as it has been by Lloyd
Webber, but in this adaptation it serves to both disguise and confront the growing
American and European conflict over the sanctity of the traditional family after
1980 that often focused on what a woman's responsibility is in the bearing of chil-
dren (the "abortion debate") and what a father's responsibility is now that a record
number of Western households no longer have one living at home or even provid-
ing support (the debate over the single parent or what should be done with the ab-
sence or "unfitness" of both mother and father). The Roev. Wade decision of the U.S.
Supreme Court that legalized abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy was
handed down in 1973, and state-level and congressional debates about an Equal
Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, often associated with (among other
things) a "woman's right to choose," lasted well into the 1980s before the amend-
ment was halted in the U.S. House of Representatives and some state legislatures
(Berry, 70-120). Over the 1970s and '8os, meanwhile, legal abortions alone in-
creased by 720 percent, while the number of recorded fatherless homes with di-
vorced or single mothers rose 146 percent (Gold, 73). Virtually no one, and certainly
not television viewers in 1989, could escape questions about where one stood on the
consequences, causes, and solutions to this growing problem. The predominant an-
swers in polls may have tilted mostly towards "freedom to choose" but "make absen-
tee fathers pay financially at least" -views generally upheld in the Kopit- Richardson
Phantom-yet these expressions were often reluctant outcomes of a deeply internal,
culture-wide quandary over whether "family values," religious principle, and social
order itself could survive the greater freedom to abort children and whether the
proper social gendering of boys and girls (whatever that was) could be achieved
without fathers and mothers in the home.
The Kopit Erik of the Phantom play and the 1989 mini-series Gothically incar-
nates and abjects this entire quandary, in all its irresolution, by being simultaneously
aborted and delivered, deformed and graceful, fathered and fatherless, thoroughly
unnatural and "back-to-nature," inclined to seek fatherly phallic power in a corpo-
ration while virtually abasing himself before the maternal image, and prone to shift-
ing identities in his parentless condition from mask to mask to mask almost
endlessly: Each new mask just keeps covering another until his death in the last
scene, where even there, at bottom, the audience can see only reactions to an invis-
ible malformation. In few versions since the novel has the phantom been so fully a
"casting off" of the contradictions that really underlie a culture determined to ob-
scure their primacy. This series of paradoxes is a fictionalized symptom of where
much of the viewing culture positioned itself ideologically in 1989 on the shifting
and much-contested status of mothers and fathers, the solidity or recoverability of
the traditional family structure, and what all of these might mean for the wholeness
of human identities.
''Above ground," of course, where the phantom must finally confess his motives in
the 1989 film-for-TV, there is the comforting reassurance that the true mother and
father are clearly known to Erik and everyone by the end of the story: His quest for
Christine and Eden has at least been accomplished in a death that restores him to
the state of his long-lost mother under the approving eyes of his repentant and now
fully acknowledging father, who at last chooses to take some responsibility for all key
events and errors with the patented resolve of a Burt Lancaster. This ending is as
much the compromise solution to family problems sought by most Western viewers
then and now as can be logically offered (and sanctioned by NBC) under these cir-
cumstances. But with the full "deformity" of the phantom left unseen and the entire
story of the attempted abortion and the absent father "made public" on film, these
nuclear-family issues continue to haunt us unresolved within the glumly attempted
sublimation of them that this mini-series offers. There may be a jarring, even objec-
tionable set of changes in Kopit's adaptation of a "classic book," which is far less re-
spected here than in the Lloyd Webber musical, just as reviewers saw at the time (see
Leeper). Yet the most insistent alterations do speak to certain focused confusions
DIFFERENT PHANTOMS FOR DIFFERENT PROBLEMS 2II
about families and identity by which the culture underlying and addressed by this
film remains burdened and undecided in ways quite particular to the late 1980s and
the 1990s.
THE "FREDDY KRUGER" PHANTOM OF PLASTIC iDENTITY
As we have already noted, though, there was another 1989 Phantom if the Opera: the
theatrical film with Robert ("Freddy Kruger") Englund that was directed by Dwight
H. Little and scripted by Duke Sandefur after an earlier treatment by Gerry 0' Hara
(Newman, 172) barely "inspired by the novel by Gaston Leroux" (Sandefur 1989, r).
Here the cultural roots of anxiety are substantially different ones, even when they
impinge on a renewed desire for the absent father. Especially since 21st Century Pro-
ductions obviously set out to unite the Nightmare on Elm Street market with adolescent
fans seeking a Phantom if the Opera available in local theaters, Englund's appearance as
the title character is just Kruger-like enough that this film's "Opera ghost" at least
partly continues the main role Freddy plays as the Nightmare movies up to this point.
In most of those, he is the extremely pimply-faced conduit, already dead yet still
haunting the depths of adolescent psyches as a bum who plays on the bourgeois
"fear" of a growing "underclass" (Edmundson, 54), who leads dreaming teens ( usu-
ally girls) into their most pressing nightmare fantasies of a particular moment.
These start with the fear he embodies of permanently acned ugliness and then draws
each "host" deeper into lurid worries about sex becoming violence, lovers becoming
predators, anger becoming murder, and the ever-growing body either shifting its
shape or being forcibly turned into boundless overflows of putrefaction. The pres-
ence of such pre-conscious fears in the young female mind is blatantly reemployed
in this Phantom, which makes the whole nineteenth-century Gothic tale inside it the
dream of a 1980s "Christine Day" (Jill Schoelen). This Christine is hit on the head
by a sandbag while auditioning to sing on Broadway; ala Mark Twain's Connecticut
Yankee, and is wafted back into being the understudy to the female lead in an 1889
London Opera production of Gounod's Faust.
It is in this quasi-unconscious dream-life that Schoelen's Christine finds her as-
pirations encumbered by the pull of an obscure and older male singing-teacher. Ini-
tially masked and always formally dressed to look like "any well-heeled patron of the
opera," this socially ascending Kruger-figure draws her even deeper into a candlelit
dream-underground where potential rape looms and rotting flesh-gobs abound,
both on the phantom's unmasked face and in his collection of pieces flayed from
bodies he has killed (Sandefur 1988,27, 68-69). In addition, when Christine awak-
ens to escape from the dream-phantom, who finally tries to pull her into the hellish
flames of his now fully burning lair, she is taken home by a shadowy producer (also
Robert Englund) who finally reveals himself as "the Phantom reborn," her uncon-
scious nightmare come fully alive and consciously present, even turning out to be
"Erik Destler," the composer of the music with which she initially auditioned (New-
man, 173). This ending is no surprise to Nightmare on Elm Street viewers, who have
often seen Freddy Kruger and what he suggests suddenly reappear in the waking
world. But it does intensify this film's nightmare sense that the late adolescent girl
is perpetually menaced by a psychological fear of actual or potential change in the
body; here rising up from the adolescent dreams of much older generations too, that
2I2 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
might as easily lead to putrefaction, imposed sex, and a descent in class as to the
grown identity of the professional, popular, independent, and class-climbing singer.
Here, surely, is a distinct dimension now added to that moment in the Lloyd Web-
ber musical when the "phantom of the Opera" is acknowledged by Christine as
"there-/ inside my mind" (Perry, 145).
Much as Sandefur's screenplay builds on these allusions to a particular series of
films, it does use them to reestablish the incestuous attraction of Christine towards
the father, even in a restored grave-scene. This film now updates that longing, to the
point of exposing a conflict in its script's assumptions similar to that in the animated
version. Once she is back in the 188os, Jill Schoelen's character finds herself confid-
ing in the handsome "Richard" (Alex Hyde-White), the Raoul-figure of this version
just mature enough to exude both "inherited wealth" and "entrepreneurial spirit"
(Sandefur 1989, 18). She tells him that her dead father has sent an "Angel to teach
me," so much so that she feels "my father's love moving through me" almost sexually
in the phantom's voice and music. These are reminders to her that her father "is the
only one who really loved me" -as opposed to the Freudian mother, it seems-and "I
have to have it again," no matter what (Sandefur 1988, 38~39). This insatiable crav-
ing is not mainly the longing for the absent familial and economic father in the Kopit
script, but rather a resurgent desire to imbibe the phallic father's quasi-seminal
power. Here, this is the only way a woman on her own, it is feared, can gain sufficient
inheritance and entrepreneurial panache to be either a self-sufficient performer or
the equal of a Richard, certainly in the Victorian era but also in the late 1980s, the pe-
riod in which this Christine really lives.
Granted, this suggestion only declares itself here and there in this version, possi-
bly to counter the sternness of the animated Christine with a newer quest for a
clearly male power, which could be more workable for Schoelen's character socially
in the face of still-conflicted cultural views on the independence of women. At the
same time, such an indication that this Christine, sadly, may need infusions of male
force to become fully herself is here juxtaposed with the much older warning pre-
sent in the novel: that an adolescent woman should avoid seeking her father in love-
objects lest she be wasting her sexuality on a body in decay (very much decaying in
this film) instead of one burgeoning with potent fecundity. One result is a hesitation
in attitudes that this 1989 Phantom leaves strikingly unresolved at the end.
Richard/Raoul finally dies this time in Erik Destler's immolation of the dream-
underground, and Christine wakens to find herself seeking the support and nearly
the arms of another death-ridden father-figure, all the while loathing him and her
simultaneous attraction to him. The long-standing interdiction against lover-fathers
is now placed in question by the modern female search for fatherly power, love, and
support, yet the same prohibition is also sustained enough to leave the figure of
woman strongly pulled both toward and away from craving the father in this Phantom
ofthe Opera, as in the wider culture whose indecisions it abjects.
By far the most radical change in the story proposed by this Phantom, however, is
the way it gruesomely links the new Erik's apparent diseases of the skin to sugges-
tions of plastic surgery and much that it has come to symbolize in recent years about
the options for identity in adolescents and their elders. Our first sustained view of
the phantom below ground here has the camera reveal his face, before Christine ever
sees it, as "a terrible mesh of tendons, muscle, bone, and sutures" -a skull, to be sure,
but with layers of appropriated body tissue artificially attached to it (Sandefur 1988,
13). This Erik keeps resewing that "mesh," as a "seamstress" might, using additional
flesh acquired from people he has brutally murdered above ground so as to continue
fashioning a multicolored "patchwork face" of skin both "festering" and new (Sande-
fur 1988, 13). The total effect suggests racial impurity and thus recalls Frankenstein's
creature and the mummy in older Gothic films, while also seeming more graphically
intense in Robert Englund's use of latex-foam makeup and a needle and thread. En-
glund's phantom is forced into this unending reconstruction, we are shown in a
flashback inserted in the final script (Sandefur 1989, 65-66), because he has made
a Faustian and Swan-like bargain with a Devil visualized as a "pockmarked" dwarf
That agreement has enabled him to rise from playing a piano in a bordello-a set-
ting to which he now returns to have sex with whores whom he always calls "Chris-
tine" (Sandefur 1988, 40)-to a high-culture level of music in which he can regard
himself as "compos[ing] with the great ones" (Sandefur 1989, 66). The price for this
ascent, clearly an invasion of the "upper" by the "under" class of Freddy Kruger, has
been Erik's hell of being reduced to a skull and constantly having to scavenge for
murdered skin to cover it up so as to maintain the visual illusion of his upscale posi-
tion, one that he now hopes to sustain even more by persuading Christine to "accept
me as I am" (Sandefur 1988, 70). Gothically exaggerated though it is, the viewer
cannot help but connect the early "sewing scene," and then this whole sequence,
with the late-twentieth-century explosion in cosmetic surgery This is the way many
middle- and upper-class people in the West have often sought to maintain illusory
youth (another arrested adolescence) and even to facilitate social climbing, keeping
the deathly and low-culture skull away from direct public view as long as possible
while claiming they want to be accepted for what they truly are. Such pursuits, we
might say, only intensify and specify the current middle-class tendency to seek im-
proved selfhood in the periodic refashioning of the face, usually without surgery, all
of which we rarely want to admit to ourselves and prefer to "throw off" as "low cul-
ture" onto such grotesquely mythic figures as the Englund phantom.
As David Skal has reminded us, "Standard and Poor's Industry Surveys reported in 1988
that the industry of elective surgical alteration was a $300 million business, growing
at a rate of ro percent a year" (Skal, 320). Moreover, this rapid "growth of cosmetic
surgery" almost exactly "paralleled the unprecedented plasticity of the human body
as depicted in motion picture special effects of the 1970s and 8os," since "latex
foam" came into common film-studio use in the early- to mid-1970s and "expanded
the capabilities of the special effects artist" to craft multiple transfigurations of the
human form (Skal, 320, 312). These parallel and connected tendencies, we can now
see, offer "a promise of personal transformation" to "a public basically unsure and
fearful about the actual prospects of change in a supposedly classless and mobile so-
ciety" that has not really eliminated class distinctions or been able to offer a clear
prospect nor find continuity in the mobility spawned by increasingly frequent
changes in occupation (Skal, 318-19). The opportunities for continual change, as a
consequence, are both titillating and exhilarating, on the one hand, and psychologi-
cally scary, even viscerally horrifying when the body might be affected, on the other,
particularly because these incessant shifts now seem impossible to predict, limit, or
control. The horror-film industry, including its definitely Gothic aspect, has for
some time helped us confront and distance this fearfully inconsistent state of cul-
tural being, with the Nightmare on Elm Street pictures allowing adolescents to partici-
pate in that duplicitous process by facing ideological exaggerations of what their own
deepest psyches are thought to contain. The Englund- Little-Sandefur Phantom ofthe
Opera offers us a deliberately gory extension of this effort in which the excitement
and terror of being prone to perpetual change in the world of today can seem neatly
split into the haunted aspirations of the emergent professional young woman (the
change that may be good) and the would-be high-culture but really low-culture self-
surgery of the criminalized social climber (which may be quite bad). Either of these
really does not exist without the other, this picture suggests, and yet it also searches
for some hope, quite stridently; that at least illusory separations between the two can
finally be seen, however much they actually rest on a fraying cultural fabric that has
to keep sewing itself back together as it progresses into an uncertain future.
SUSAN KAY's PHANTOM OF SAFE-AND TRANSCENDENT-SEX
Even so, the Robert Englund Phantom has only fragmentary things to say about the
issue that Lloyd Webber and Harold Prince raised quite intentionally in their musi-
cal: cultural uncertainty over what constitutes "normal, healthy sexuality" As "Erik
Destler" shifts back and forth between frequenting prostitutes and pleading with the
higher-class Christine to validate his social ascent with her love, he simply keeps dif-
ferent aspects of sexual desire in distinct camps, repeating the age-old Western pat-
tern of the male appetite torn between the degraded whore and the worshipped
virgin. The Lloyd Webber "Opera ghost," who runs his hands sensuously but not too
aggressively over Christine's standing body as he tries to lure her toward "The Music
of the Night," seems, at least some of the time, to be unrepressed sexuality somewhat
like Ken Hill's phantom, emerging from preconscious depths to attract us all towards
it, since it/he is already "there-/ inside our minds." It is this quality; very much op-
posed to the largely shameful view of sex in both of the 1989 Phantom films, that is in-
tensified by Susan Kay in her 1991 prose romance Phantom, still the most important,
though not the only; renovelization of the original book to emerge from the spate of
adaptations after 1986. In this version, it is not just that Erik ultimately has sexual in-
tercourse with Christine, perhaps what some viewers of the Lloyd Webber show
wanted to have happen. It is more that the soaring voice and sheer presence of Kay's
phantom, from the start, with no physical contact involved as yet, arouse "answering
pulses all over my body," as Christine describes her feelings underground on hearing him
sing while she lies alone in the maternal bedroom (Kay; 464). He so arouses her, she
later recalls, that "my hand traveledforther andforther [down] until it reached a place I never knew
existed" to the point at which a" crescendo" floods her "entire body with extraordinary sensation"
in enough of a (clearly masturbatory) orgasm that she fears having to tell Raoul that
"the knowledge I have begun to crave is notyoursto give" (Kay; 464-65). We now need to assess
what it means for her audience in the early 1990s that Kay is one of the very few
adapters to carry the story this far after the Lloyd Webber musical has edged in this
direction. Is Kay's choice simply a Freudian wish-fulfillment brought to conscious-
ness at last, now that nineteenth-century repression has long been labeled unhealthy?
Or are more complex needs in the reader being fulfilled by this newer novel beyond
an indulgence in bodice-ripping sex typical of some popular romances, the genre
within which this Phantom has been quite successfully marketed?
I believe that there are such needs being addressed here-again in a timely way-
and that they are revealed in the seemingly paradoxical game that Susan Kay plays
with her readers. This novel depends on enough familiarity with the Phantom cifthe
Opera tradition, at least by way of the musical, that the reader is initially most excited
to find nearly all the details of Erik's past exactly as they are sketched near the end
of the original book We now feel taken right into the phantom's earlier days with a
devotion to Leroux so extreme that all of these older episodes are filled out with eye-
witness accounts similar to the kinds he claims to report. The speakers are either
Erik himself or his mother ("Madeleine"), his stonemason-teacher in Italy ("Gio-
vanni"), the Persian (here called "Nadir"), and Raoul, except when the novel falls
into a "Counterpoint" between the perspectives of Erik and Christine (the latter set
off in italics) as they react separately and differently to their growing relationship at
the Paris Opera in 1881 (Kay, 391-496). Consquently, Kay's late swerve into an ex-
plicit sexual chemistry between these two, felt far more by this Christine than by
Leroux's, seems to violate a sort of contract that Kay has established with those who
have come to this book expecting an expansion of the original tale. Certainly this
version does develop Raoul's worry in the original that Christine may feel a "love ...
of the most delicious kind" for the phantom, the "kind one does not admit even to
oneself!" (again Leroux 1959, 243, somewhat repeated in Kay, 443-44, and noted
verbatim in her "Afterword," 530-31). But Leroux, as we have seen, makes this mo-
ment partly a jealous exaggeration by Raoul and partly an indicator of the Freudian
level in his text within which Christine and Erik are both seeking quasi-sexual re-
unions with the father and the mother. Even though Kay continues these sugges-
tions, so much as to repeat the total resemblance in Kopit's version between
Christine and a portrait of the phantom's mother (Kay, 452), Leroux stops short of
such an extension by remaining with Freud in the original novel and rendering such
longings there as having to be repressed, interdicted, and sublimated, never enacted,
in the psychology and social mores of the middle-class ideology that both dominates
his world-view and is exposed to his critique. Kay manifestly chooses a different
course in the very process of claiming to "get to the bottom" of the original phan-
tom's nature and appeal as Leroux's book presents them. She clearly feels a strong
need, keyed to her anticipated readership, to have a deep and overpowering sexual-
ity conquer all impediments.
As she constructs her book, in fact, Kay addresses this need throughout Phantom
and not just near its end. Erik's mother, though repelled by her son's inexplicable
skull-face once he is born, describes it in surprisingly phallic terms. His skin, what
little there is, she says, is a "thin, transparent membrane grotesquely riddled with lit-
tle blue pulsating veins" that rises to a focal point only in "malformed lips" and a
"gaping hole" for a nose, as in the head of a newborn but also as in an erect penis
(Kay, 8). It is not really incongruous, then, that Madeleine soon feels a "strange
music" in his infant cry "that brought tears rushing to my eyes, softly seducing my
body so that my breast ached with a primitive and overwhelming urge to hold him
close" (Kay, 8), a definite forecasting of Christine's orgasmic reaction to Erik later.
Even the very young phantom's precociously "sentient" gaze, albeit with recessed
eyes, conveys an unusually "powerful consciousness," even a genius, with a sexual at-
traction in it at all times (Kay, 8), especially when that intensity of thought seems in-
separable from the "manipulati(ve] voice" that keeps emerging from his phallic face
(Kay, 28). That sound is so viscerally stirring that it seems "incestuous" to Madeleine
(Kay, 8) and later a "primitive allure" that arouses the desires of Giovanni's daugh-
ter once Erik has grown to be what he never seems in Leroux, "massively boned and
2!6 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
muscular, almost inhumanly strong" (Kay, r68, 176). Giovanni says about him what
several characters in this novel tend to see in some fashion: "The sensuality of power
radiated from his every gesture, but he remained entirely unaware of his extraordi-
nary ability to attract" (Kay, r68)-at least until Christine responds passionately to
that ability, particularly after she has taken off the mask that harkens back to the very
first one his mother gave him.
This phantom is an out-and-out "sex god" even with, indeed partly because of,
his deathly appearance. He is a striking unity between eros and thanatos far beyond the
conflicted repression of both in Freud's sense of them. He appears to incarnate a
transcendent state where mental and artistic brilliance, quasi-divine authority, a pas-
sion for creative transformation through prowess in engineering, and an innate,
supreme sexuality combine together to make his cadaverous ugliness the merest en-
trance to a higher and deeper level of being that is purely, rather than ironically, sub-
lime in uniting the spiritual and the physical, death and life, in what seems the most
desirable of all human conditions. The anger and vengefulness this Erik has devel-
oped because he is rejected or exploited so early drop away entirely in his own nar-
ration the instant Christine first embraces him completely: '"Take me!' she
whispered. 'Teach me ... ' [as though she were coming to the ultimate master at last.
Thus she] kicked away the crutches ofhate that had sustained me so long," Kay's Erik
concludes, "and made me stand with helpless wonder while her hands ... sought my
face and drew it down to hers" (Kay, 495~96).
As romantically overwrought, idealistic, and even anti- Freudian as this transfor-
mation of Leroux may be, it is just the fictional construction to deal with the post-
AIDS anxieties that arose throughout the West by the mid~r980s as fearful answers
to the earlier sexual revolution that was still being valued as late as the Lloyd Webber
musical. By the start of the 1990s, in the wake of increased publicity and more re-
ported cases of HIV, sex had become widely associated with transmitted diseases,
love as death in disguise, the need for "safe" forms of protection, renewed calls for ab-
stinence and monogamy, and a reactionary fear of homosexuality, even though it is
truer that AIDS, which can infect anyone, is merely known to have entered America
and Europe through their gay populations (Shilts, 147, 438~39). Sex was "dirty" again
even while it remained more openly discussed than it was in the 1950s, as Kay cer-
tainly knew, and widespread cultural energy was therefore being focused on specify-
ing ways to differentiate "good" (or safe) from "bad" (or disease-bearing) sex. These
two supposed conditions became rapidly divided for many between those of "high
culture" (now again the heterosexual nuclear family of the middle to upper classes,
generally free from AIDS) and what became the repositories of "low culture": hard-
drug consumers with their infected needles, homeless people, counterculture gays,
promiscuous rock groupies, "alternative family structures," and low-income "minor-
ity" or foreign-born groups, among others (Patton, 127, 129; Watney, 203~206).
The phantom of the Opera in Leroux's original, Kay surely realized at some level,
was a most fertile symbol for incarnating and abjecting the problem of differentiating
between these states while such cultural lines were being forcefully drawn in revised
ways. Leroux, we should recall from chapter three, made his phantom a "cast down" lo-
cation into which multiple forms of"bad sex" at his time could be projected by mid-
dle-class readers, even while Erik himself was a figure expressing the most
conventionally heterosexual, along with class-climbing, desires. Thus already a mixture
of "bad" and "good" sex as well as "low" and "high" culture, the original Erik for Kay
was the character onto whom she could best "throw off" the always threatened min-
gling of these tendencies in the early 1990s that her readers now feared anew In the
resulting symbolic sleight-of-hand, the new Erik's facial surface and many of his early
surroundings and associates seem to be Gothic locations of "bad sex" (from the dis-
eased to the racially other and foreign) without question. Concurrently; though, the
difficulty of separating "good sex" from all of this is resolved by a clever recasting of
these elements. In this version they finally turn out to be only superficial covers,
metaphoric masks that go along with Erik's literal ones. Beneath and beyond these lies
a transcendently natural and ultimate sexuality; united with genius, that deals with the
problematic confusion of "high" and "low" sex and culture by leaping beyond them to
a sublime-but really sublimating-level at which confusions and distinctions suppos-
edly disappear because it was primally there before them all, even at birth. In a version
of what Mark Edmundson has called "facile transcendence" or "easy Romanticism"
(Edmundson, xv and uo), it is the aim of Susan Kay's Phantom to hold out this ideo-
logical resolution unashamedly; thereby fulfilling a major function of romance.
There are some exacting prices for this resolution as Kay's novel works toward it,
however. For one thing, Christine, if she is to reach the desired contact with sublime
sexuality; must interpret her own conflicted passion for Erik as "the love <ifa child qfraid
to grow up" (Kay; 482) and the phantom himself as a figure of"inherentauthority,'' a dark
angel ... guardian, friend, andfother," who should rightly be obeyed ... without question" when
he gives anyone "a direct command" (Kay; 420, 449, 453). For Kay, in other words,
Christine must infantilize herself quite consciously to realize how much she should
submit to an adult sexuality far beyond her ken, and then she must accept the pa-
ternalistic "authority" of her male initiator into those mysteries because of a
supreme phallic power that such a deep level grants him whether he knows it or not.
To be sure, Erik does speak of her as his "teacher" when at last she pulls him "forward
with unbelievable strength into her embrace" (Kay, 496), given that his own life has
offered him little real experience for the fulfillment of his innate sexual power. But
nothing in this Phantom denies its suggestion that women in Christine's position
should assume the attitude that she does on her side; in fact, that intimation is only
confirmed by the novel's final chapter, supposedly narrated by Raoul in 1897 after
Christine has died (Kay; 499-529). There he describes the splendid success as a
concert pianist of her and Erik's son, "Charles" -named after Erik's father, so full of
sexual power in the eyes of Madeleine (Kay; n) -whose genius is now matched with
such conventional good looks that it is easy for "crowds" of women to wax rhapsodic
about him in "overt admiration" (Kay, 501). The primal sexual power has fulfilled it-
self in an unbroken line between men, from the older to the younger Charles
through Erik, while Christine is reduced to a now-deceased instrument of that vital
passage. This ideology of giving way to a primal sexuality remains attached to a long-
standing male supremacy that is assumed as a gift of nature rather than a seizure of
cultural power. As much as it romantically seems to resolve resurgent quandaries
about sex in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, this book raises unresolved questions
about gender politics as they are still being played out in Western culture, at least for
the large readership of popular romance.
There is also another disquieting challenge to the dominant belief-system in the
Kay Phantom, one that reemphasizes some suggestions in the 1986 musical but espe-
cially brings forward the cultural fears most important in Phantom <ifthe Paradise. During
their most extended journey together through nighttime Paris inside a carriage, Kay's
2!8 THE UNDERGROUNDS OF THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA
Erik echoes and extends with Christine that moment in the original book when Ler-
oux's narrator sees all Parisian life as a perpetual masked ball. Whatever Christine ad-
mires outside their brougham in the parklands of the Bois de Boulogne, the phantom
maintains '"It's all a sham ... The entire park wears a mask. What you see is not real nature,"' at
which point Christine answers, '"perhaps it is not reality that I want to see"' and Erik extends
his hand to her for their first "physical contact'' right after asking "Youre not opposed to decep-
tion if the senses, then?" (Kay, 457-58). The possibility of all perceived "nature" in the
modern civilized world as already simulations of simulacra (or Gothic ghosts of coun-
terfeits) is here raised directly by the "authoritative" phantom, much as it is in Lloyd
Webber's "Masquerade" and de Palma's technoworld of "Death Records," and it is
then confirmed even more in what follows. Christine's hope of passing beyond the
conventionally "real" to a somehow truer level, in this novel the transcendent state of
deep sexuality, invites primarily a more underground "deception of the senses," in
which that sexuality will be intimated in an illusion-filled performance (the orgasmic
one in Kay, 463-65) by a phantom whose phallic face is the means by which a transper-
sonal passion will be communicated through him as if "through a glass darkly:" Even
the ultimate condition here is identified as a "deception of the senses" and thus possi-
bly an illusion simply accepted as better than other illusions. Only if that is the case can
the phantom's face be set aside by Christine, later Raoul, and finally the reader as
somehow less real than those overriding "deep sexual" drives and everything that can
be attached to them in a cultural sublimation. The attempted separation between the
masklike and the genuine in this novel turns out to be as questionable as the gender
politics in Kay's assumptions. This romance, as escapist as it finally is, is still dogged by
those fears of sheer simulation in the late twentieth century that are understandable
intensifications of Leroux's Gothic fears in 1910 that Western urban culture might be
turning more and more into a world of groundless and endless signs of signs.
THE MOST LINGERING FEARS OF THE I990S IN

THE PHANTOMS OF MICHAEL jACKSON AND FREDERICK FORSYTH
Since the early 1990s, in any event, the surge in new Phantom ofthe Opera adaptations
has abated considerably, though not completely: With most of the efforts after 1986
failing to earn the profits their makers projected, the continued craving for this story
has been amply filled instead by reprintings of Leroux's book (including Leonard
Wolf's annotated translation of 1996), the many videocassettes of the most promi-
nent Phantom films, the various "other" stage Phantoms (including Hill's and Kopit and
Yeston's), and the Lloyd Webber show extending its London and Broadway runs for
well over a decade as road companies also tour it around the world and negotiations
progress towards a film version (Welkos, 84). There is no evidence that the cultural
needs both satisfied and disguised by Leroux's story have lessened to any degree in
recent years, even though there have been spans of time since 1910 (1914-24,
1932-40, 1945-60, 1963-72) when retellings of this tale have seemed less necessary
or attractive. What has happened over the last decade or so, as I have just shown, is
a proliferation of Phantoms, encompassing new adaptations and reissued older ver-
sions, that use the story to target very specific Western fears-or particular tangles
of related anxieties-in ways that allow them to be both acknowledged and abjected
into "horrors" placed beneath nostalgic "high culture" as though they were just as
alien from us and our time as they are uncannily familiar to us, even part of our
"foundations." The range of present concerns that these versions seem able to chan-
nel is astounding. This story now allows transformations of its Gothic features to
embody, on one level, middle-class feelings of threat to the suburban American
neighborhood from the businesses it needs the most and, on another level, emotions
in unresolved conflict over the greater legality of abortion and wider changes
throughout the American family, to describe just two examples. Yet as they treat
such various focal-points of underlying cultural confusion, these adaptations, being
"Phantoms of the Opera" with or without an actual Opera, all reveal the growing con-
nections these problems have with the ongoing Western quandary over what is
"high" or "low" culture and how difficult it remains for us to construct these classi-
fications even while we still do so on many social and domestic fronts.
What this last decade and a half of revisions has shown most forcefully, however,
precisely in their attempts to abject the anomalies causing the pain, is how adapta-
tions of this story are attracted to symbolizing the most undecidable paradoxes in
our culture, in part because the point of division between "high" and "low" for the
aspiring middle-class audience has been so impossible to establish since Leroux's
novel. Judging at least by their recurrence in recent Phantoms of the Opera, the most
nagging such anomalies in the 1990s are these: the problem of easily blurred gender
definitions alongside the baby-boomer anxiety over identities and communities in
constant flux alongside the uncertainty over standards for what constitutes a family
or a definite race alongside our inability to see the difference between images and
their "realities," all alongside new questions about whether sexuality may really mean
death if we are reluctant to insist on precise moral separations that define where
"good sex" ends and "bad sex" begins. The more cameras or narratives in these re-
cently adapted Phantoms move from sanctioned "high" public spaces into "low" un-
derground worlds, even if the latter are not literally beneath the earth's surface, the
more the distinctions we seek to establish in all these different realms blur and the
more we confront and conceal our own desires to simultaneously embrace and con-
demn these subliminal fluidities so basic to our lives today
Even so, if we further consider what is bedeviling the Western middle class most
by the very end of the 1990s and the start of the twenty-first century, we do not have
to seek far beyond the paradoxes that 1990s Phantoms have already faced and ab-
jected. Two particular ideological tangles, I would argue, face us more than others in
addition to the ones already discussed. One of them is how we will resolve, or if we
will continue, the persistent "othering" of groups of people in the West based some-
times on race but lately more on sexual orientation, the area of fluid possibilities
about which we are most tempted to remain inflexible, even as we see sporadic ex-
pansions of tolerance for other than "normal" sexualities. The 1980s and '90s have
been decades unusual for the number of well-known people "exposed" in the West-
ern press as somehow sexually deviant and at the same time still fascinating as a con-
sequence; witness the suggestions of bisexuality in the most recent biography of
"he-man" Burt Lancaster now that he has died (see Fishgall, 296-301). This ten-
dency raises a further question: where and how may we (or should we) draw a line
between what is properly "private" and what is rightly "public" knowledge in a world
of increasing press coverage of celebrities and more technology-driven forms of self-
expression and the surveillance of others? Is the distinction between public and pri-
vate fading right along with the clear separation of the signifier from the signified?
At the same time, though, we also wonder what to make of our complex attitudes
toward human "success" in a late twentieth century of increased prosperity for the
middle class, particularly as measured by stock exchanges in the West, the beneficia-
ries of rapid technological change in what is now widely called the age of cyberspace
and the internet. We clearly feel quite ambivalent about "masters" of extremely suc-
cessful corporate businesses in the 1990s ranging from "the Donald" Trump of the
"Trump Tower" named for him in New York City to Bill Gates, founder and chair
of Microsoft, an inventor-executive both widely revered and forced to defend his
large computer-and-web-based enterprises from accusations of unfair monopolistic
practices. Why is there so much eagerness to find hidden evil in such figures even as
they are idolized and emulated, with the positions they occupy having become goals
pursued, but also questioned, by middle-class men and women as the twenty-first
century begins? Just now both of these conflicted sets of attitudes hover unresolved
alongside and even intermixed with the ongoing quandaries about gender, commu-
nity, and family identities that early 1990s Phantoms cfthe Opera have addressed.
Not surprisingly, versions of the Phantom have arisen in the late 1990s to deal pre-
ciselywith these two lingering issues, with some of the others still very much in play
The attempted resolutions suggested in these cases may or may not provide more
workable cultural solutions than other Phantoms have, but they still show how various
forms of fiction based squarely on Leroux's Fantome and its progeny remain essential
in our culture to middle-class ways of defining ourselves and to the ways we craft our
"otherings" to compose those definitions. Our ongoing indecisions and fears about
race, sexual "deviance," and public vs. private, for example, are strikingly confronted
and disguised in the most Phantom-based music video of the 1990s: Michael jackson's
"Ghosts" (released in 1996), a 38-minute nco-Gothic film crafted to extend the suc-
cess of the equally Gothic Thriller video (1982) that had helped make an interna-
tional sensation out of its African American star and choreographer after his years
as the singing-dancing child prodigy of the Jackson Five had receded into the past.
By the time of Ghosts, now in his thirties, Jackson had agreed very publicly to an ex-
pensive out-of-court settlement of a 1993 lawsuit alleging a sexual relationship be-
tween himself and a boy of thirteen, and earlier allegations about the post-pubescent
entertainer as already "a monster, this crazy person who's bizarre and weird" (Jack-
son's own words in a 1999 interview), had intensified enough to turn the former
"king of pop" into a pariah (Bernhard, IO, 51), unable with Ghosts and other pieces to
gain the wide distribution and publicity he had enjoyed with Thriller, particularly in
the United States.
Ghosts is consequently about the condition of being singled out by a sort of lynch
mob, this kind more middle class than the one in the 1925 Phantom, that has pre-
formed fears about a supposed "monster's" influence on the many early-pubescent
children (most of them boys) that the group includes as it seeks its target. Jackson
here plays a mysterious "Maestro" living reclusively (and thus phantomlike) in a
Gothic mansion on an estate called "Someplace Else," rather than the elaborate
"Neverland" that is Jackson's actual California home (Bernhard, 52). He is sought
out there by an anxious middlebrow crowd from "Normal Valley" and accused by its
leader, the middle-aged white "Mayor," of being "weird" and "perverted" enough to
deserve being run out of town (see Jackson). That scenario in itself, given Jackson's
public history, surely raises problems for likely viewers about how racial the mostly
white crowd's motivations are, how prejudices about sexual orientation may under-
Figure 8.1: The faces of Michael Jackson over time
lie its surface claims, and how much right the "Normals" have to demand public rev-
elations, let alone exile, from a quite visibly private person.
There can be little question of how personal this response to press coverage is, since
Jackson not only stars in and choreographs Ghosts himselfbut serves as co-producer with
two others and co-"conceiver" of the storyline with no less than Stephen King (see the
final credits in Jackson), another pop artist who has felt assaulted by journalists and by
fans who have turned on him (as in King's novel Misery). It is equally true that The
Phantom cifthe Opera is not the only source of this production's imagery and events; a
major influence remains the Frankensteinian Thriller itself, since the latter's contem-
porary array of dancing zombies is repeated in the new gallery of dancing ghosts, at-
tired in old aristocratic finery often tattered and torn, that Jackson's Maestro calls
forth from walls, fireplaces, and portraits in his mansion, through very advanced dig-
ital effects, to show both how powerful and how ultimately harmless (except for just
"scaring you") his supernatural wizardry, really of the computer age, actually is (see
Jackson). But Ghosts turns quite sharply towards even Leroux's Fant6me in the disturb-
ing suggestions raised by Jackson's face-or rather his many faces or masks. When the
crowd first sees him on entering the mansion, he is a spectral figure in Gothic shad-
ows, cloaked entirely in black, with a skull-mask for a face in the Lon Chaney tradi-
tion. Soon he draws aside that mask to reveal Jackson's own face of 1996, but this
whole use of layered coverings reminds us how much this "real" face is but the latest
in Michael Jackson's life and career, over which plastic surgery has made many
changes in that visage (figure 8.1) which have finally arrived at the delicately sculpted
and cross-racial androgyny that we see now. Given what we observe in the close-ups
of Jackson in Ghosts, David J. Skal has accurately described this progression as the slow
transformation of Michael's "face into a kind of living skull," so much so that the re-
sulting "bone-white skin, cutaway nose, and tendril like hair" have come to resemble
features of the "Phantom of the Opera," now almost as much Leroux's original as
Chaney's variation (Skal, 318). Moreover, Jackson's 1996 face in this film turns out to
be but one among several other masks, as the crowd realizes when he suddenly seems
to flip off all his skin to reveal the naked skeleton underneath, as in the original Fan-
tome and the old danse macabre, now with a new emphasis on the danse. This animated
body of bones then proceeds to break-dance and moon-walk as vigorously as there-
animated ghosts, primarily as a computer image programmed to parallel Jackson's
own patented moves as he dances them off camera (which the film reveals under the
credits at the end; see Jackson). In no other adaptation has Leroux's phantom as a
skeleton been taken so far and linked so thoroughly to layerings of the self that are
only images on top of images.
One suggestion in the dancing skeleton of Ghosts is the elemental universality; as
well as eventual death, of all human beings at bottom, even if they seem "weird" or
"normal" on the surface. Every character in this video, it is implied, from the visit-
ing adults and children to the reanimated cadavers to Michael Jackson himself, is
fundamentally the skeleton we see before us, making us "brothers and sisters to the
bone," dead or alive, much more than we are standard individuals on one side and
aberrant beings on the other. This vivid defense and denial of Jackson's "otherness"
even takes two further steps after the skeleton's extended dance number. First, the
bony simulacrum shape-shifts into an oversized, ghoulish zombie-version of the
Maestro that now towers over the bigoted Mayor in particular. Then, just as this
image seems to differentiate the grotesque "other" most completely from the "nor-
mal" incarnate-as though it were the Mayor's worst nightmare, the truth behind
his suspicions-the ghoul-skeleton reduces itself to a bluish film that shoots into
the mouth of the Mayor to inhabit his paunchy body, which then dances as the
skeleton has and only as Michael Jackson can move. The cast-list and rehearsal
footage at the end of the film soon reveal that the Mayor has been played by Jack-
son all along (one of his five different characters in this piece) in extremely heavy
padding and makeup that is finally shown to have been carefully layered on by a
host of behind-the-scenes technicians (see Jackson). Even the Mayor, it seems,
contains within himsel£ not just the elemental skeleton, but the capacity and even
tendency to move and perform much as a Michael Jackson can, thereby manifest-
ing how much the targeted "other" is in fact a part of the normal "self" In its own
way; Ghosts makes a crucial point suggested by Le Fantome de !'Opera: that the many
anomalies embodied by "the other" are actually basic to those "normal" members of
the rising middle class who need some grotesque to be the monstrous place into
which they can abject what they will not accept as part of themselves, even though
it is still fundamentally there. It is by these means that the Michael Jackson of this
music video finally questions the absolute otherness projected on him by "Normal
Valley" and then suggests that what scares us in horror settings like his haunted
house is really harmless and even fun, as all the children seem to recognize, because
it is really the possibilities of ourselves, our imaginations, our artistry; and even our
technologies rather than anything truly alien.
To be sure, the question of whether pederasty really occurred or can be justified
within this context is completely avoided by this attempted resolution of very deep
cultural conflicts. Jackson, with his large creative team, is more concerned with turn-
ing the public wish that he be seen as a genuine grotesque, deserving of being pro-
fessionally or even physically dead, into a symbol of his creative powers, on the one
hand, and his ultimate, even typical, humanity; on the other-very like the goals of
the original phantom of the Opera, whose unique talents and appearance are insep-
arable from his quest to be the most "normal" of the rising bourgeoisie. At the same
time, though, this video's apparent resolution of cultural fears is deeply troubled on
several levels. Jackson, we have to conclude, at least in Ghosts, tries to take his stand
too many ways and too inconsistently His own appearance by this time points to an
elemental, even skeletal, humanity that is undeniably and deliberately ambiguous in
its sexuality, its gender, its childlike adulthood, its race, its death-in-life, and its very
public assertion of a right to privacy; this is a multiplicity very like the original phan-
tom's that is even augmented by a similar vision of identity as a series of artificial
masks covering a simulacrum of death. Yet here that ambiguity is unambiguously of-
fered as the mark of a universal humanity that is "normal" at its core, indeed as nor-
mal as an uncorrupted child. Jackson's shape-shifting and magical Maestro does not
admit to an anomalous condition like Erik's, which seeks to sublimate itself in a mid-
dle-class normality not yet attained while being rooted in this foundation of mingled
differences. Nor does this new character and its performer offer a "Someplace Else"
of pleasurable multiplicities, perhaps an advance on the one in Rocky Horror, that de-
fiantly celebrates its jouissance as a liberation from the excessive constraints of homo-
phobia, racism, gender stereotypes, or constructs of "maturity" that too thoroughly
forget the child or adolescent still in us. These prejudices are bigoted in this video
not because they impede a better alternative to conventional normality but because
they refuse to see that what is "other" is already inside what is standard and is there-
fore harmless, permanently scary only if we think there is a fundamental difference
in ways of life between "Normal Valley" and "Someplace Else." Jackson and his
quasi-Gothic world in Ghosts want to have their difference and pretend it is notre-
ally different at all. In this way; perhaps, Jackson can still be a "king" of conventional
pop culture (being inside rather than outside it) and a critic of all too common prej-
udices and invasions of privacy (being outside instead of inside those).
Established tendencies in mainstream popular culture, then, are as much reaf-

firmed in Ghosts as they are put in question by the resistance to prejudice that this
film clearly advocates as a return to childlike innocence. The need for social change
intimated in the angry register of this film is sublimated and dissipated by its
stronger suggestion that the current social order is acceptable so long as we all be-
come suddenly more aware of our underlying similarities. This distancing of social
conflict, moreover, is intensified by another dimension that Ghosts reworks from the
Phantom tradition: the emphasis in Leroux, de Palma's Paradise, Lloyd Webber's "Mas-
querade," and Kay's novel that every sign or image is only a figure for another one,
even at the level of death and other "grounds" for perception and interpretation. As
elemental as the dancing skeleton seems, it is finally celebrated as a computer simu-
lation, not just of the old danse macabre, but of an already resimulated Michael Jackson
transferred from one medium of representation (photography of him dancing) to
another (computer cyberspace). In addition, this supposed "bottom line" in the fig-
ure of the Maestro is just one more mask among masks, and that layering of surfaces
is part of what we see "fed" into the body of the Mayor, who turns out to be Jack-
son-a whole series of facial images (see figure 8.1 again)-under multiple layers
upon layers of fabricated flesh. The reason this Maestro's Gothic world is scary only
up to a point, he can therefore claim, is that it is all only images that contain no
threat of the death or harm they just seem to suggest.
The ghosts called forth from the mansion's many surfaces are thus not harbingers
of real danger, but only ghosts of the ghosts of older Gothic counterfeits, the prod-
ucts of special visual effects that can ultimately delight without consequence because
their reality is unreal. Social conflict is now dissipated by the universally simulated
quality of everything that permits no figure in this film to be a true threat to any
other. On the dark side of this hyperreality, though, such an equalizing power in the
image, the command of which seems always in the hands of the Maestro, means that
all the characters on the screen are "ghosts" rather than just the figures seemingly
raised from the dead, since the leader of the ghouls (Michael Jackson) has been so
easily able to displace his condition into the leader of Normal Valley (also Michael
Jackson). Even the apparently "true" Jackson under his first skull-mask is also just a
ghost of himsel£ as much because his face has been repeatedly sculpted into a near-
skull, a private choice, as because he is a public figure on celluloid that can be pho-
tographically transformed into many of the others in the same production. The
unity of life and death in the mere image is not so unthreatening when viewed this
way The death that the "normal" crowd seeks to escape, as in Poe's "Masque," enters
anyway It is now the death of the individual behind the image that takes the person's
place in a world increasingly composed of simulations alone. While it seemingly
aims to solve the cultural prejudices and conflicts from which it was spawned, if only
by neutralizing them in supposed images of normality; Ghosts finally leaves culture
dangerously unaffected by asserting no distance between the harmonizing image
and conflicted reality, just as there seems to be no difference between simulations in
public and private throughout the Western world of the 1990s.
In any event, the other 1990s anxieties about the undersides of economic success
and social ascent have since found themselves played out and dissipated to a similar
degree in Frederick Forsyth's novel The Phantom ifManhattan (1999). Ostensibly this
"sequel" exists, according to its "Preface," to rescue the Phantom of Lloyd Webber (a
friend of Forsyth's; Howell, 62) from those aspects of Leroux's book that keep Le Fan-
tome de L'Opera from being the real Beauty-and-the- Beast story; the "truly tragic tale
of obsessive but unrequited love," that has made the musical so romantic for so many
audiences (Forsyth, xiii, xxv). Though this approach pays some homage to the orig-
inal novel by organizing its new version journalistically as a series of recorded testi-
monies by the title character and other eyewitnesses, it offers what might have
happened if the phantom-here named "Erik Mulheim" (intensifying Leroux's sug-
gestions of the Germanic)-vanished from the Paris Opera as he does at the end of
Lloyd Webber's play and was spirited out of Paris by Madame Giry; here his protec-
tor and helper ever since she freed him from a cage in which he had been kept as a
circus freak (Forsyth, s-8, 13-14). Instead of expiring as in Leroux, this Erik begins
an entire new life by being stowed away on a "tramp steamer ... bound for the New
World" (14), apparently in 1893, a year that seems preferable to Forsyth, given some
details in the 1910 original, rather than the early 188os that Leroux quite clearly sug-
gests (see Forsyth, xxii). Eventually Forsyth's Erik, still bearing the Lloyd Webber
face "distorted down one side" (6), swims ashore "at Gravesend Bay. Coney Island,"
not far from New York City. to find himself at home among other equally deformed
outcasts who have congregated by the sea to be "gutters and cleaners of fish"
(19-20). All this while Erik is unaware that his one sexual encounter with Christine
after the underground kiss in the musical-an extension of Kay's Phantom that alters
the versions of both Leroux and Lloyd Webber (to the latter's surprise; Howell,
62)-has produced a son named "Pierre" and remained a secret to all the world, ex-
cept to Raoul, who has married Christine and helped raise Pierre despite his impo-
tence from a street accident (Forsyth, 92-93), and to Madame Giry; who has
witnessed that accident and gives up the truth only when she writes a confession to
the long-absent Erik on her Paris deathbed in 1906 (14-16, 90-95). As much of a
soap-opera love story as these added elements make The Phantom cifManhattan, how-
ever, they pale in importance compared to what clearly interests Forsyth much more
distinctly in this novel: the progression of his transplanted Franco-Germanic
"Opera Ghost" from immigrant fish-cleaner to carnival-ride builder on Coney Is-
land to successful amusement-park entrepreneur to skillful stock-market investor
with his park earnings to secretive Wall Street tycoon, the mastermind of the "E. M.
Corporation" housed at the top of an "E. M. Tower" built in 1903 to command the
Manhattan skyline (Forsyth, 22-28) much as Donald Trump and the Trump Tower
have done in New York by the end of the 1990s.
Forsyth has taken the arrested adolescence of Lloyd Webber's phantom, tapped
into the baby-boom desire for endless economic advancement that underlies it, and
allowed it to get past the impasse of arrest into a fantasy of rapid financial ascent that
also epitomizes the advances of many middle-class American families across the
twentieth century; who did frequently rise from working-class immigrant status in
the 1890s to great stock-market success and corporate power by 1999, exactly a cen-
tury later. Some readers may find only tenuous links between the knowledge of car-
nival fun-houses and the incipient capitalism of 2o,ooo francs a month in the
Leroux and Lloyd Webber phantoms, on the one hand, and the phenomenal busi-
ness acumen of Forsyth's Erik that can turn amusement-park attractions into a fi-
nancial empire in only ten years, on the other, all in a shorter time than it took even
Walt Disney to do so. But just as Leroux and Lloyd Webber addressed definite mid-
dle-class hopes and fears of their particular times with their versions, so Forsyth cre-
ates a symbolic focal-point and scapegoat for an end-of-the-twentieth-century
retrospective by largely bourgeois readers that helps them reflect on what the classic
"American Dream" really has meant, even when it seems achieved, now that the cen-
tury is ending.
Cultural questions that have lingered subliminally about that ideology for a long
time now return from repression even while they are displaced onto a continuation
of what is already "classic" -and quite corporately successful in the Universal films
and the Lloyd Webber musical. Has the goal of success so commonly held out a cen-
tury ago truly been realized, or have there been dark subtexts (such as the phan-
tom's) that have kept complete satisfaction for the middle class as distant as it
seemed in the mid-r98os? Is the apparent resurgence and expansion in the 1990s
of the success supposedly sought through the American dream a process about
which its beneficiaries should feel guilty in any way? Are there "skeletons in the
closet" of that dream's most successful pursuers or exemplars, as in the cases of Don-
ald Trump and perhaps Bill Gates? Are there losses at the personal level, as divorce
continues to be commonplace, that stem from the frenetic and sometimes deceptive
marketing and deal-making, often by corporate magnates through their more pub-
lic representatives, that seem required to achieve the dream in an increasingly
merger-based, stock-market-driven, and computerized world? Is the self now alien-
ated into its marketable images or accouterments and thus too far away from its
emotional center or roots in the historical past? Does that past still haunt us, both
with our links to lower-class immigrant ancestry or occupations (including carnival)
and with the religious moralities of previous centuries, ranging from American Pu-
ritanism's fear of success divorced from obedience to a truer and higher authority to
the more broadly Christian warning-most famously intoned by Charles Dickens's
A Christmas Carol (r853) and its many adaptations-against worshipping Mammon
and capital as ends in themselves instead of also believing in God, the nuclear fam-
ily, and our duty to help others less fortunate than ourselves? There is every cultural
reason for an altered Phantom of 1999 to play upon these still nagging concerns as the
Western middle class looks back over its own progression towards one of its major
ideological goals at the turn of a century and wonders how it should now define it-
self and what it should "other" in doing so, the main problem that Phantoms of the
Opera have always existed to address and disguise.
To a great extent, the story in The Phantom ofManhattan seems designed to offer fic-
tive answers to all the above questions. First, the felt incompleteness of the 1980s in
Lloyd Webber's phantom is still present, perhaps even more consciously Forsyth's
still reclusive and deformed Erik of 1906, the last half of which is the main time of
the novel, remains quite deeply dissatisfied as he gazes at Manhattan from his cor-
porate tower, in part because he has adopted Mammon as his "Master," though this
pursuit of wealth is clearly a substitute for still wanting "to make a woman love me
as a man" beyond a single moment (Forsyth, 29). He also feels some guilt for riding
and then helping lead the wave of a booming "economy" that he admits has been "ex-
panding at a lunatic rate" in the r890s (or is it the 1990s?) while he has become very
distant, not just from Coney Island, from what lies right below E. M. Tower on the
Lower East Side: "a vast teeming cauldron of every race and creed living cheek by
jowl in poverty, violence, vice and crime" less than two miles from where the "super-
rich have their mansions," a collective "other" that describes the multicultural masses
of large 1990s cities as well as the huge influx of immigrants to New York in the
1890s and early 1900s (Forsyth, 26). In addition, this giant of modern business does
retain the "skeleton" of his own circus-freak and Paris Opera past, a morass of dif-
ferent social levels that class-climbers usually come from and deny, as he discovers
most when he finally receives Giry's letter and discovers that Pierre de Chigny has
turned out to be his own son just as his dream of union with Christine (like Jay
Gatsby's dream of Daisy) has remained as attractive as it once was (Forsyth, 88-95).
No corporate success, finally, as even the most extreme pursuer of middle-class
ideals has to admit, can truly substitute for the fulfillment in love and family that
corporate life can keep so out of sight and mind, since this fulfillment is part of the
very ideal that the middle class pursues by way of corporate success. Forsyth's phan-
tom must therefore turn backward, personally and socially, even as he attempts to
advance his social position and power. He must occupy-and thereby abject-a con-
flicted position that is likely to be that of most of Forsyth's readers in 1999, torn as
they are too by the ideological contradiction both linking and dividing success and
family that has bedeviled rising-middle-class men, and now women more and more,
throughout the twentieth century.
This Erik's main way of dealing with that conflict is to imitate and outdo the
other corporate magnates of his day ("the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers" and so on) as a
philanthropist by financing, behind a front man, the building of a "Manhattan
Opera House" (which really was attempted by the first Oscar Hammerstein) to rival
the Metropolitan that these others support so visibly, thus maintaining his towering
status with cultural capital they way they have (Forsyth, 28-29). Perhaps this is
based on the model of Donald Trump again, who has recently helped build a high-
class East-Coast showplace called the "Taj Mahal." Using this device, however,
Forsythe's Erik also tries to satisfy his sexual and familial longings. He has his agents
invite to headline his new theater the very Christine de Chagny who has by now be-
come an international opera star, hoping that she will bring her son too, as she in fact
does along with his tutor, Father Joseph Kilfoyle (who dreams of talking directly to
God when he prays at St. Paul's Cathedral on 123-30), and her chief servant, Meg
Giry, the former Paris Opera dancer and daughter of the phantom's old protector.
Although this arrival, the ceremonies, and the opera opening connected with them
give Forsyth a rich opportunity to produce his own kind of "faction" (a la Leroux)
using the sort of real-life historical names and details that he has added to such nov-
els as The Day cifthejackal and The Odessa File (see Howell, 62-63, and Forsyth, xx-xxi,
50-55, 76-87, 140-54), his big-business phantom cannot use his new Opera tore-
confront Christine directly, much less reveal his paternity to Pierre, who still believes
Raoul to be his father as nearly everyone does. The new Opera is an extension of
Trump-like acquisition behind which the old phantom must remain hidden so as to
maintain the mysterious power of E. M., the layered corporate structure that is his
only accepted public face by now, and to keep concealing the source of the grand
building's funds (as the original novel suggests in its "burial" of carnival), which re-
main the stock proceeds from leveraged acquisitions and amusement-park earnings
from Coney Island.
Thus alienated from any direct self-expression because of the many surfaces,
business discourses, and modes of exchange by which he is manifested as successful
in Western terms, this phantom must make his crucial contact by going back to
Coney Island, somewhat back to his Paris days, and nearly back to the quasi- Persian
chamber of twisting mirrors that he designed beneath the Paris Opera. To confront
Christine, he sends a music-box monkey that plays Lloyd Webber's "Masquerade"
from the old days to her Manhattan hotel and uses that to lure her to his slightly re-
vised fun-house of mirrors at Steeplechase Park, Coney Island. There "Taffy Jones,"
the Park's off-season security worker who recounts this part of the story, overhears
Christine's sympathetic refusal of Erik's new suit to her but also her pledge to give
him Pierre after five years if the phantom can "win" the boy when the lad is eighteen
and old enough to "choose" for himself (Forsyth, ns-18). This clearly regressive and
Gothic sequence confirms the inescapability of all the past layers of class and indus-
try on which corporate acquisition is really based. It then takes the phantom's quest
to a new impasse of, again, no ultimate satisfaction, but now he is given added long-
ings for the future, ones which he, still the ascendant class-climber, may pursue by
entering a different kind of competition, this one on the level of the family alone and
not the corporation. With Forsyth's phantom thus embodying and abjecting this en-
tire set of hesitations and desires, a complexity basic to middle-class readers of 1999,
this sequel mainly to lloyd Webber's play almost leaves us in the position that many
of us already occupy: facing choices among life options that are all part of one ideo-
logical vision, yet none of which we can have completely unless we reject one option
for another. As simple and even hackneyed in fiction as it is, this hesitation is what
we often fear most in and for ourselves behind our desires for success. It is thus aptly
incarnated by Forsyth within the new phantom, Christine, Raoul, and Pierre, now in
reaction to the 1990s, an era of fluid families often difficult to fit into the old nu-
clear mold.
Having come this far in reflecting his culture's half-hidden concerns about the
price of our financial progress, however, Forsyth cheats in my view; especially in con-
cluding his book, by borrowing a device from the 1962 Hammer Studios Phantom.
There the masked composer's most destructive tendencies are shunted off onto that
newly added character of a malignant dwarf-assistant, who then becomes most of
the evil threat from which the phantom, now heroic by contrast, strives to rescue
Christine in the end. Forsyth opts for a similar ploy by attaching Erik Mulheim early
in his Coney Island days to another outcast called "Darius," a seventeen-year-old
former "pleasure-boy in a house of sodomy" on "the Barbary Coast," who, though
"physically unscarred" and thus more publicly presentable than Erik, has "a bone-
pale face and blank expressionless eyes," not to mention" a price on his head," as well
as a penchant for taking hashish and worshipping unswervingly at the altar of Mam-
mon in his mind, all presumably as a result of his early displacement from "Malta"
into a childhood of sexual abuse (far more publicly discussed in the 1990s than a
century ago; Forsyth, 21, 43-49). It is into this quite Gothic character, shockingly
granted no compassion for the abuse from any Forsyth narrator, that all the most
"unacceptable" qualities of the latest Erik the phantom are gradually poured as the
novel proceeds, particularly since this is the figure whom Erik uses most as the cold,
unflappable negotiating front for all his business dealings while he continues to hide
his superficially more repellant face. Darius in European history is most famously
the name of three kings of Persia between 521 and 331 B.C. (Traupman, 71-72), so,
with Leroux's figure of the "Persian" completely eliminated as he is by Lloyd Web-
ber too (for reasons Forsyth notes in his Preface, xxiv-xxvi), this deathly-looking
"catamite" becomes the locus of everything "othered" as Oriental in this version,
which now includes the Malta near southern Russia. He thereby serves as the cul-
ture-crossing repository for any connections of older phantoms to sexual deviance,
blurred genders, illegal substances, physical violence, and anything like the worship
of Satan. Most important here, though, is the way Darius becomes the compressed
epitome of the darkest elements in modern corporate business; according to his
drug-induced trance-dialogue with Mammon, "it is I" (as a plural pronoun), not E.
M., "who conduct the great takeovers ... destroy the weak and the helpless ... raise
the rents in the slum tenements [like Baron Haussmann] ... suborn and bribe the
city officials ... [and] sign the purchase orders for great stakes of shares and blocks
of stock in the rising industries across the country" (Forsyth, 45).
All that we most fear today in public speculations about corporate giants from
Trump to Gates and beyond is channeled fully and only into Darius, who strikingly
resembles the glassy-eyed automaton Cesare in the 1919 Cabinet if Dr. Caligari and
more recently the Maestro played by Michael Jackson in Ghosts, especially when Dar-
ius is described in his later pursuit of Erik, Christine, and Pierre with phrases such
as "his face still white as a skull" and "his jet-black hair flying in the wind as he ran"
like Jackson's long, straightened black tendrils in 1996 (Forsyth, 157). With the sug-
gestions of earlier pederasty also attached to him, it is as if Darius were everything
that "Normal Valley" wants to attach to a phantomlike Jackson, as well as a great
many of the additional "othered" horrors abjected onto the original Erik of Leroux's
novel. What the phantom of the Opera himself has often been before (though more
sympathetically because he is more a mixture of conditions), Darius becomes in The
Phantom cifManhattan as a one-sided symbol of unambiguous evil. He is finally even re-
vealed as such by God himself to Father Kilfoyle during the latter's "ecstasy" in St.
Paul's, where Darius is mentioned to the old priest as a far greater threat to Pierre
than his real father, seeing as Darius wants the inheritance of the fortune that now
may go to Erik's son and "Darius has no love at all" of the sort than can finally "re-
deem" Erik as he channels his best affections towards Pierre (Forsyth, 128-30).
Forsyth even juxtaposes the priest's vision of talking to God with Darius' colloquy
with Mammon to establish these two characters, increasingly throwbacks to older
religious encounters between the Angel and the Devil, as symbols of very traditional,
and now resurgent, religious poles pulling the new phantom and his son between
them. somehow at a level beyond those of the family or the corporate world.
Hence it is Darius who resolves the impasse in the choice Christine has given Erik
by attempting to assassinate Pierre at the novel's climax in Battery Park, only to hit
Christine fatally in the back before he is shot dead by the phantom, who now fully
rejects his influence and all his dark connections and is therefore able to embrace
Pierre as fully and deservedly his own, even in the eyes of God (Forsyth, 168-72). In
this way, the "assassin" element associated by Leroux with both himself and his
phantom at times is cast off onto Darius as a very separate figure, one even linked to
the original Arab meaning of" assassin" as "hashish -eater" by this character being far
more the orientalized drug addict, using hashish itsel£ than Forsyth's Erik turns out
to be. Moreover, now that Darius is entirely gone with everything he scapegoats and
there is not even mother Christine to force difficult choices between work and fam-
ily, Erik and Pierre in this Phantom are free to become purely male business partners.
Ultimately Erik retires from the business to a peaceful decline forgiven of every past
sin. Both magnates have become philanthropists more completely by then, after all,
even letting the Manhattan Opera House be demolished, while they have healed any
breach between high finance and religion by donating corporate money profusely
"across a wide range of social issues," particularly to an "institution for the correc-
tion of disfigurement" (Forsyth, 176-77).
Because of one extreme and convenient scapegoating and the elimination of a

woman's interference with a financial inheritance between men, all social problems
prompting guilt among the middle classes connected to corporate business, includ-
ing those of the poor minorities and the handicapped, seem to be solved as this novel
ends by the even greater success of a business that has become both socially respon-
sible and increasingly profitable. Frederick Forsyth, we should acknowledge, is
something of a social conservative, as he admits in a post- Phantom interview for the
London Sunday Times. For him a slight redirection of the private corporate mentality;
relatively uncontrolled by the government, is preferable to a rampantly spreading in-
ternet market or the legal incorporation of Britain into the larger European com-
munity that may mean an "elected dictatorship" instead of benign local control (see
Howell, 63). The resolution of his Phantom novel allows for that kind of hope as it
makes its Erik and E. M. Corporation the avatars of independent business reform as
the twenty-first century begins and leaves the phantom as abjecting scapegoat (in
the form of Darius) religiously condemned, physically dead, and psychologically
buried, trusting perhaps that such symbolic figures will no longer be needed in a fu-
ture of genuine, albeit fantasized, balance between corporate success and private
family life. Never has the phantom of the Opera, from Leroux's to Lloyd Webber's
to Michael Jackson's, been let off quite this easily in the over ninety-year history of
this very malleable story
These last two reproductions of The Phantom, we should realize, strikingly pose
a problem that is somewhat true in all the versions, despite the different cultural
quandaries they have treated and disguised over time, especially in the many ver-
sions since Lloyd Webber's musical. On the one hand, figures based on the orig-
inal phantom, in these cases as in most others, can be lightening rods for many
eclectic and conflicted feelings in an audience beset by unresolved ideological
quandaries in Western culture at a given time. Hence Jackson's Maestro can be a
focusing image for anomalous attitudes regarding racial difference and sexual ori-
entation, and Forsyth's Erik Mulheim can, at least some of the time, embody the
unresolved, yet necessary choices faced by the middle class in its current eco-
nomic state as its underlying contradictions rise momentarily into consciousness
at the end of the twentieth century. On the other hand, as in other versions but
perhaps more forcefully, these late 1990s Phantoms can retract these suggestions
quickly and can sublimate them by masking them completely from view behind
assertions of comfort that the sublimated fluidities do not offer. The Jackson
video can claim that the fear of phantoms is only of technological images easily
transmuted into others and never substantially real, while Forsyth's Phantom of
Manhattan can resurrect long-standing Christian images of the Angel and Devil to
abject anomalous crossings of boundaries only into Satanic repositories outside
of corporatized phantoms that can be easily reformed to diffuse social conflict.
Such choices of awareness have always been there ever since Gaston Leroux wrote
his novel as both a protective "honnete homme" and a socially critical "assassin,"
offering us a sublimating cultural scapegoat that both opens our eyes and closes
them to the social othering that we do in the middle-class process of fashioning
our identities. As we look ahead to additional Phantoms in the twenty-first cen-
tury, we have to assume that similar choices and symbolic slights of hand will be
offered to us. It will remain up to us to decide what to emphasize in any versions
of The Phantom of the Opera, since all of them so far have left us poised between an
increased cultural awareness and an entertaining ignorance. The most recent of
these especially have posed the ongoing challenge: what will we see or refuse to
see in a story whose "cultural work" is always both to shock and to protect us at
the same time?
EPILOGUE
The Phantom's Lasting Significance

AN ASSESSMENT OF ITS CULTURAL fUNCTIONS
Given all that has been said, we can now suggest some very pointed answers to the
questions that originally prompted this study: Why has The Phantom ofthe Opera be-
come on ongoing popular myth, even with the many changes in it since the novel?
Why does it keep returning as it does, extreme variations and all? What does it mean
to us in the Western middle class most fundamentally and pervasively as we look
back over its entire history? Why have we needed it-and why do we keep needing
it? To be sure, there are some fairly obvious answers that need no study to explain
them. This tale, from the start, repeats age-old mythic patterns in which a young
woman on the verge of maturity must confront a dark, cave-dwelling, sexually
charged, and paternalistic "wolf" -figure in a sort of rite of passage, as in the stories
of Pluto and Persephone, Psyche and Cupid, Death and the Maiden, Beauty and the
Beast, and even Little Red Riding Hood (see Wolfi996, 4). On that level, thenar-
rative of Christine and the phantom continues a Western cultural motif in which the
late adolescent female confronts the "wrong sexual choice" and has to work through
her attraction to and rejection of it. Its basis in this scheme, alongside its equal debt
to tales of the son attracted to a version of the reabsorbing mother (the anima), is one
reason why this story has always been affiliated with Freudian thinking. There the
daughter-figure (or the son) must be preconsciously drawn toward, then consciously
warned away from, a lover who is the bestial/incestuous father (or the phallic
mother) so that the questor can make a more exogamous object-choice.
In this connection, The Phantom also fulfills our cultural passion for journeys into
primordial or unconscious depths (most of them hellish) in which we can imagine
ourselves "tested" by or even indulging in our most forbidden impulses and drives,
from the wildly sexual to the excessively dominating, before we will ourselves to rise
up victorious over temptation in an emergence from darkness into the light of cul-
turally sanctioned behavior, including viable sublimations of those deeper drives.
With all of this certainly involved in every version, The Phantom of the Opera undeni-
ably adds the excitement that comes from our entering a glittering world of upper-
class splendor, tradition, and celebrity-and particularly from our going backstage
there to discover deeply hidden secrets that shake the security of that world, which
we both ardently crave and angrily envy to the point of wanting to see it prosperous
and threatened all at once. Meanwhile, too, every Phantom can help us remember and
psychologically rework those moments when each of us has felt "too ugly" or "the
wrong age" or otherwise "outcast" in approaching a potential love-object. After all,
these moments usually include a tendency to punish ourselves for these thoughts as
much as we long to see them carried out. The power of this story does indeed come
partly from how it arouses and reenacts these long-standing patterns, tendencies, or
feelings in ways that help us gain mastery over them by playing them out in a Gothic
"other place" that is quasi-antiquated, exotic, and insistently fictional while not
being too far beyond daily life.
But there are several different stories that combine most or all of these elements
too; Trilby and Dracula are cases in point. To understand what The Phantom if the Opera
particularly does for us in our culture beyond these things, I hope I have shown, we
should concentrate on how it plays distinctively with our middle-class efforts in
modern times to construct what a bourgeois identity is in relation to what we take
to be "high culture" and what we consign to "low culture." Leroux's original novel
and most of its progeny help us act out and reflect on a process of composing the
"self" during times when levels of social being in Western culture have become more
intermingled and less clearly hierarchical than they seem to be in our sense of a wan-
ing past still symbolized by old artifacts or fake recastings of them. Through The
Phantom, on the one hand, we can reestablish a "higher" vs. "lower" leveling of cul-
tural life that allows us to place most desiderata of middle-class aspiration at the
well-appointed ground level of the Paris Opera (a supreme monument to the bour-
geois possession of what was once aristocratic). At the same time, this tale helps us
"abject" to a buried world all those elements possibly connected to middle-class life
(from class- and gender-crossing to the immanence of death to mixtures of genius
and "degeneracy" or Anglo and "Oriental" and much more) that we are always striv-
ing to separate from the class identity we are fabricating. The "Erik" of Leroux and
even of his partial imitators is therefore constructed to be a repository of all these
"othered" elements, albeit different ones at different times in different versions
across the twentieth century These are presented, especially in the novel, as projec-
tions onto him from a bourgeois desire, a longing that he therefore pursues himself,
more often than they turn out to be endemic to him from the beginning of his life.
One function that this story performs for us, then, is to be a sublimated Gothic rep-
etition of the process of middle-class self-composition that we need the aid of fic-
tion to keep achieving, since that construct is a fiction.
Because the real foundations of our social and even personal beings are more
anomalous than we want them to be, moreover, it is the wide range of the anomalies
that we fear as basic to us that is abjected onto the phantom and therefore comes to
motivate his desires for love and self-expression. He is an anamorphic "othering" of
the othernesses-in-ourselves onto whom we abject many of our contradictions. That
way we can recognize them, even long for them, and yet can seem not to have them
ourselves and hence to be in position to condemn them in the end. This is one rea-
son we need him, for example, to be degenerate/evolved, carnivalesquejurban, and
Oriental/Occidental in Leroux; an embodiment of hidden corporate power and an
out-of-fashion entrepreneur in the Chaney silent film; a European victim of the sys-
tem and a semi-fascist murderer in 1943; an alienated non-professional and an aspir-
ing creator in the Hammer production of the early 1960s; a post-I960s
counterculture rebel and an agent of a corporation in Phantom ifthe Paradise; or a resur-
gent Freudian father and a never-satisfied baby boomer held in an arrested adoles-
THE PHANTOMS LASTING SIGNIFICANCE 235
cence throughout the Lloyd Webber musical. In differing ways during different times
this last century, we are preconsciously or sometimes consciously torn between these
conditions of being or contradictory ideologies about them. We need a blatantly fic-
tionalized location in which to both place and face these irresolvables pulling at us as
conditions possible for us in our cultural unconscious. That "othering" permits us to
articulate our quandaries about those options and yet to make all such contradictions
seem monstrously or spectrally removed from us, as a Gothic "abject" figure canal-
ways make them while it situates them deep within us at the same time.
Even in the most simplistic adaptations, it is never that the phantom simply em-
bodies only the "worst" sides of being to be rejected by the middle class in the dom-
inant ideology of an era. Instead, he is used to harbor the indistinctions and
blurrings of what is ideologically "good" and bad inextricably mixed in various as-
pects oflife. In addition, he can present all these as being simultaneously "beneath"
our high-culture aspirations, too "low" for them, and at the foundations of them
from which they are really inseparable. These are the overriding cultural reasons why
the phantom of the Opera is always both attractive and revolting, though sometimes
to different degrees in one direction or the other. He is what we most want to re-
contact-the cultural, desire-ridden, always multifaceted, and even biological roots
of ourselves (since we are born into the inevitability of death or some disfigure-
ment) -but he is also the confusion of mingled contraries that we most want to rise
above and sublimate, however pretentious and self-deceptive we are when we claim
to do so. We cannot fully be what we have generally become ideologically without
this fictional enactment and disguise to assist us, yet this construction is also a place
where we at least half-recognize what we are doing in a Gothically sublimated way.
Gothic fictions since the eighteenth century, we should remember, have served as
ways to help us deal with the alienated condition-increasingly a "culture of death"
for Jean Baudrillard-in which we construct ourselves by way of signifiers produced
and marketed outside of us. These already spectral, at least partly false, and often an-
tiquated signs are the anamorphoses or distortion mirrors by which we come to see
ourselves as what we claim to be. But they simultaneously provide us with locations
in which this otherness-from-ourselves already in process can be projected away
from us into them. The resulting specters can then haunt us with the features of our
alienation while allowing us to pretend that this side of our being is outside of us,
even as less problematic sides are still somehow "within." Like some but not all
Gothic tales, quite modern constructs in the end, The Phantom of the Opera shows us
both the effects or aims of this process and the process itself in a hyperbolic dis-
placement of it. In doing so, it enables us to take numerous contradictions that swirl
in and around our social and personal situations, including our production of our-
selves only through mirroring "others," and place those away from us in an under-
world/underground/unconscious that seems to be entirely different from our
conscious lives and yet is dimly recognized, and even desired, as underlying our con-
ceptions of our being. Here is why such constructions have found common cause
with the ideologies of psychoanalysis over the last century or so, especially in The
Phantom ofthe Opera and similar fictions. Those ideologies allow the contradictions we
would escape to appear inside us only as unconscious urges or confusions that can be
overcome as "other" when recognized as such, rather than directly confronting us as
the "undergrounds" of our social condition. We need The Phantom to keep perform-
ing this evasion and to see it being performed "through a glass darkly."
We also need it to help us deal with how our self-constructions are affected by pro-
found changes in the history of Western culture over the past century: That fact ac-
counts for both the persistence of the tale and the frequent revisions that adaptations
have made to the original story: Leroux's novel, from what we have seen, appeared at a
time when the public assurances of middle-class cohesion in France's Third Republic
and much of the West were threatened by growing disputes between nations, Euro-
pean racial politics, shifting constructions of gender, debates over the concepts of psy-
choanalysis, the unexpected or dark consequences of Western imperialism, the
vestiges of carnival remaining after it was banned from central Paris, the lingering ef-
fects of the 1870 Siege and the Paris Commune, the late stages of "decadent" writing
and art, the rampant increase in middle-class debt, and other disturbing trends as well.
There was an especially pronounced need for middle-class "popular" writers and read-
ers to deal with all these destabilizers of established high/low distinctions and so to
shore up middle-class consciousness by abjecting forms of these anomalies in an "oth-
ered" underground that was also a repository for basic middle-class longings and the
Freudian reconstructions of them, as Erik's lair certainly is. The time of World War I
soon after this point brought many other conflicts to the surface in European and
American culture that the features of the Phantom story could do little to reshape or dis-
place. By the mid-1920s, however, a postwar period of apparently restored prosperity
in the West found its own middle-class sense of security threatened by several condi-
tions of that moment. These included the after-effects of the war in deformities and
madness, a resurgence of urban crime, a fear of increased control by corporations over
individual lives, the rising (if internally conflicted) labor movement, debates over the
status of women before and after they gained the vote, the crossing of class boundaries
in film-studio marketing, and a great deal more. Once again there was a Phantom I!{the
Opera, with understandably different elements now mixed in with Leroux's, to shape,
displace, and abject these prospects so endemic yet partly contradictory to the bour-
geois aspirations of that "roaring" decade.
The Phantom arises again, we find, at those points in Western cultural history that
at least structurally parallel the conflicted conditions underlying and permeating the
novel of 1910. At such points, an apparent (if illusory) economy seems to offer a se-
curity and supremacy to the rising middle class, epitomized in the Opera or versions
of it, yet deep-seated conflicts in that economy and how people are alienated within
it are noticeably rising from beneath its surface, for some as "low culture," to
threaten the promises that it seems to be keeping (and the profits it is generating)
in its surface manifestations. These are certainly the general conditions, with dis-
tinctive features, that pertained in 1942-43, the time of Universal's sound-and-
color Phantom. The American national effort to "market" World War II as defending
a post- Depression country of much "high culture" certainly lay behind the resplen-
dent mounting of this film. But the many conflicts that arose in crafting a story for
this version also exposed the fears barely below that surface about wartime killing
and maiming, possibly excessive police or government control, the resurgence of the
independent professional woman, the mixed status of fathers, a consequent revival
of Freudian analysis, the apparent inseparability of European haute culture from fas-
cism, and the sometimes extreme subordination of individual desires and work to
the collective purposes of the state.
The 1950s after World War II brought threats to the middle-class stemming
from the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, not the sorts of issues that a Phantom
THE PHANTOM'S LASTING SIGNIFICANCE 237
<ifthe Opera could reshape or sequester. Hence another revival had to wait for the early
1960s, by which point the supposed Western prosperity produced out of the post-
war baby boom seemed to reach a zenith again-only to be subliminally unsettled by
new conflicts over how to delimit fluidity across the classes, a post-I950s return of
women to the workforce, the explosion of "mass cultural" entertainment, and the
corporate control over personal creations that we have seen rising to consciousness
in the Phantom film from Hammer Studios. Every major version of The Phantom <if the
Opera I can think of with significant public appeal has become culturally necessary or
inviting only at times when an ostensible success that seems to embrace the whole
middle class is haunted by a series of sublimated struggles and potential countercur-
rents that are only just outside the purview of everyday bourgeois awareness. In cer-
tain ways the Lloyd Webber Phantom is the supreme example. It was written and
staged after the recession of the early 1980s was clearly giving way to renewed fi-
nancial upswings while that resurgence was still troubled by middle-aged baby-
boomer fears, like the composer's own, that they were perpetually stuck in an
inflationary state of unfulfilled aspiration which they could never admit consciously;
or at least above ground.
The Phantom <ifthe Opera, then, is as persistent and changeable as it is because it both
reenacts and assists bourgeois identity-construction under a thin Gothic disguise
and gives mythlike (hence fictively explanatory) form to our fears at those modern
moments when economic prosperity is both publicly visible and subliminally en-
dangered on many fronts, so much so as to threaten the permanence desired in the
dominant self-image of the middle class. From the Leroux original on, in fact, ver-
sions of The Phantom show a remarkable capacity for finding symbolic means to abject
and thus obscurely expose many modern encounters between middle-class aims and
the interconnections criss-crossing middle-class life that may undercut those aims
and so are often suppressed by them. The original novel is consequently able to treat
anti-proletarian, counter-Jewish, and Orientalist racism as based simultaneously on
fears of the "great unwashed" or non-Aryan "other," corruptions in Gentile middle-
class beliefs, and revelations of the "real France" under the glitter of the belle
epoque; the 1943 film can reveal how propagandistic public efforts to gloss over a
distant World War II kept bumping up against indicators of it and widespread de-
pression about it; Phantom <ifthe Paradise in 1974 can show how the co-opting of 1960s
rebellion by corporate re-recordings and skewed marketings of it in the 1970s could
barely hide the gross inconsistencies in this whole "marriage" of different values;
Ken Hill's East End Phantom can let the lower middle class attack the pretensions of
their supposed "betters" on the West End while paradoxically adapting higher-class
forms to express a supposedly universal need for love; and the several I980s-'9os
variations in the wake of Lloyd Webber can find quite specific, albeit abjective, ways
for middle-class cultural production to obscure but still symbolize its sublimated
guilts-again in a prosperous decade-about mixed messages to working women, the
rise in abortions and fatherless homes, the destruction of neighborhoods by their
malls, the relation of plastic surgery to perpetually unstable identities, the unfin-
ished quest for a clear line between "good sex" and "bad sex" in the wake of AIDS,
conflicting attitudes about 1990s rags-to-riches tycoons, and the unresolved
quandary over leaving different races distinct in the West or blurring their differ-
ences in the direction of a highly unstable unity that leaves middle-class culture in-
definite and baby boomers still in a state of incomplete self-realization. The
continuation and transformation of The Phantom of the Opera, we have to say, stems
greatly from its recurrent and intimate participation in the way Western, largely
white, rising-middle-class culture has kept shaping itself and abjecting its anomalies
all across the twentieth century at those times when this tale could effectively give
mythic shape to changing tensions between multiple, conflicting, and coterminous
tendencies. The Phantom story, far from being just a dark Freudian fantasy (though it
is that too), has been a very significant participant in the shaping and interpretation
of history as the middle class has kept trying to fashion it while constructing its own
sense of itself over the last one hundred years.
All this while, in the Leroux novel as much as Phantom ofthe Paradise and Michael jack-
sons "Ghosts," The Phantom ofthe Opera has been helping us deal with the growing indis-
tinction in our culture between "fiction" and "reality." True, Gothic texts have always
made claims that they baste the "realistic" and "fantastic" together. Yet when Leroux
published his greatest Gothic novel, his narratorj"editor" was much more deliberate
than many predecessors, except for Bram Stoker, in attempting quite explicitly to
produce a reportage Jantastique. We have come to realize, particularly in chapter four
above, that this beginning of The Phantom does not result just from a stylistic prefer-
ence or a borrowing of the Gothic pure and simple. Those options in writing were
and are still bound up, as ghosts of earlier counterfeit forms, with the burgeoning
tendency as the modern world develops for "reality" to become signs of something
else at every level, a world of interpretations of interpretations where any "truth"
turns out to be constructed in an ideologically inflected and already symbolic system.
With early capitalism turning into the industrial production of simulacra and these
movements giving way to the post-industrial world of audiovisual and computerized
hyperreality, The Phantom ofthe Opera has incorporated or even anticipated these stages
in the original story and its variations. Part of what it has always been about is the
invasion of"standard" above-ground culture by an underground of duplicative and
artificial imitations that may be more primal as the "underwriter" of what we take as
the "real world," most of which is an artificial Opera anyway in nearly all versions of
The Phantom.
Each form of this story therefore includes at least verbal or visual (or sometimes
musical) suggestions of the cultural state of increasing simulation at its own time.
The 1943 Claude Rains picture, with its sophisticated color-scheme openly boasting
of its achievement within a wartime economy, is as frank in its own way about re-
placing deeper reality with the merest image as the 1989 Robert Englund film is
about every human face, at the deepest level, possibly being an artificial construction
out of pieces sewn together from other such faces. The animated film from 1987 and
the Jackson video from 1996, to be sure, may bring us closer than some earlier ver-
sions, excepting Phantom of the Paradise, to the real as entirely images of other images,
possibly because that is the world we face as the twentieth century gives way to the
twenty-first. Even so, the phantom in all these tales is, in addition to everything else
we have found him to be, a symbol for a threat spanning this last century: that mod-
ern cultural life will blur the fictive and the real in the construction of middle-class
identity so completely that the distinction will finally disappear, if it has not already;
except as a nostalgic hope for its resurrection or as a signifier of the death behind all
signs. The phantom threatens perpetually to be a phantasm of other phantasms,
since that possibility is yet another of the many cultural anomalies he abjects in
being constructed again and again as the masked image of the "Opera ghost."
THE PHANTOM'S LASTING SIGNIFICANCE 239
In the end, though, what do we do with these discoveries now that we have drawn
out many (though certainly not all) of the deepest "undergrounds" behind and
within the numerous versions of The Phantom ofthe Operai' One temptation may be to
choose despair because of a fear that we may never escape methods of identity-
construction that "throw down" as "low culture" whatever anomalies we want to ab-
ject so that we can seem to have full access to "high culture." Such is the paralysis
feared by Mark Edmundson as too often the effect of present-day Gothic writing
and films that simply "suggest that we're our own worst enemy and propose no co-
gent defense" (Edmundson, 62). But the continual energy and creativity in the way
we mythologically shape and half-repress ourselves using The Phantom belie the need
to stop where we are with it, as though we were indeed the perpetual adolescents
that William Finley, Paul Williams, Peter Staker, Maximillian Schell, Michael Craw-
ford, Derek Rydall, Robert Englund, and Michael Jackson all seem to be in their re-
cent phantom guises. From what we now know, we can begin again from the
recognition that The Phantom of the Opera is a telling and complex symptom of the
larger middle-class production of ourselves in Western culture for the last hundred
years. Since we have used this device in various forms to both mirror our "selves"
back to us and pretend that parts of us can be abjected underground, we can employ
our self-consciousness about this cultural process to choose a different ideology of
construction that accepts our anomalous interconnections more, our ranging across
what we call "high" and "low" as most of us do every day, so that the many forms of
"othering" that this process of self-fashioning usually includes (racial, sexual, gen-
der-based, class-based, etc.) fade from prominence as newer ideological schemes for
defining ourselves rise up to take their place. We may even find a way in this process
to reconstitute the difference between simulation and reality just as most of us keep
saying we long to do.
Granted, we are so heavily influenced by the socially based forms in which we
think, including The Phantom ofthe Opera and its myriad ingredients, that such a trans-
formation is sure to be difficult. But our more educated awareness of how we fash-
ion ourselves, prompted by our sharpened sense of how The Phantom has developed as
a means of self-fashioning that has "worked culturally" with us and upon us, can lead
us to acknowledge the choice we have between accepting or rejecting long-estab-
lished ideologies of middle-class life and the fictions they generate. We may con-
struct newer alternatives from some of the fragments of older constructs, yet that
endeavor need not trap us in all that those fabrications have assumed. Of course in
this process our cultural need for The Phantom ofthe Opera in the forms we have known
it, as well as for other forms of Gothic, may disappear altogether. Still, if that hap-
pens, it will be our reading and viewing of this story that have partly led us to such a
point. From its beginnings, this tale has combined some reinforcement and a self-
critique of bourgeois belief-systems working to fulfill themselves, partly by ac-
knowledging their abjected undersides, at least in the novel and some adaptations.
We can adapt and extend that double game to build a less conflicted social world.
Then Leroux's Erik can stop being a multifaceted "skeleton in our closets" haunting
us with all our "otherings" and be more of what the novel makes him at the end: a
relic of a past way oflife that no longer haunts us with the "undergrounds" we once
created in order to "be ourselves."
Notes
CHAPTER ONE
I. It is not that the skull-face is never mentioned in the two most famous adaptations.
Actually; the phantom's face is described that way early in both productions, but only in
a recalled sighting of him that is not accurate to the face when the audience finally sees
it. Such an image is talked about (or really written out for viewers) in the seventh scene
of the 1925 silent film. That is partly because Lon Chaney's makeup did attempt a cross
between the original Erik's skull and the silent star's own face (MacQ!:!een 1989b, 35;
Blake 1995, 63) and at least one script draft, among the many done for this film, did in-
clude dialogue for Christine about his having the face of death (Clawson, 289). Yet
Chaney's phantom in the released picture, when finally unmasked, turns out to have
the only somewhat cadaverous face of a pop-eyed homicidal maniac (Julian; Perry,
50-55). More recently, in the Lloyd Webber Phantom, a skull is suggested in the sung
dialogue of act I, scene 7, but here that sense is even more inaccurate to the "Opera
ghost's" actual face, which in this version has gnarled distensions and cutaway skin on
only one side (Perry; 147, 87). Very few theatrical or cinematic versions, except when
the phantom wears a skull mask in some cases, physically duplicate the exposed face of
Erik in Leroux's original novel. See chapters five through eight below.
2. The rare exceptions are the 1976-84 British musical play by Ken Hill and the 1991
romance Phantom by Susan Kay, both discussed below in chapters seven and eight.
3. Twitchell draws his basic sense of "Beauty and the Beast" from the unashamedly
Freudian account of that older tale in Bettelheim, 303-10.
4. Throughout this study, my terms referring to "levels" of culture are indebted to the
definitions and distinctions in Gans, esp. 5-16 and 91-160.
5. Leroux's choice of "Erik" may well hearken back to Victor Hugo, as Le Fantome often
does generally. "Erik" is one alias of the dwarfish and villainous tide character in
Hugo's Hans of Iceland (1823, English translation r825). A murderous interloper in the
political conflicts of Norway and Denmark in 1699, Hugo's "little thickset man" (in-
troduced on p. 26 of Hugo 1925) features a "ferocious" visage "with the spitefulness
of a monkey" in it (26), often produces "from beneath his robe a human skull formed
into a drinking cup" (84), lives deep under ground in "the grotto of Walderhog"
( 140), is told by his countryman that people will someday "come from all quarters to
look at your skeleton ... in a glass case" (208), and is finally consumed in a prison fire
that reduces his remains to "two skulls," his own and the one he has turned into a cup
(220). All of these extremes do reappear in Leroux's phantom and are even associated
by Hugo with a being so extremely Nordic that Hans is grotesquely "other" even to
Danes and Norwegians, much as "Erik" is to the French in Leroux's Fantome.
6. Sjoqvist has offered an attractive argument that Leroux's Christine replays several as-
pects of the real-life Swedish opera singer Christine Nilsson, born Kristina Jonasdotter
(1843- 1921). Nilsson sang at the Paris Opera prior to the building of the Palais Garnier,
and among her triumphs was the role of Marguerite in Gounod's Faust. She is even used
by name as a character who sings this very role near the beginning of Edith Wharton's
novel TheAgeifinnocence (1920).
7 Though they often distinguish the "real" from the "unreal" dimensions in his work, a
number of French critics have celebrated and discussed Leroux's ongoing penchant
for thisfantastique actuelle. See especially Rollin 1970; Gilbert Sigaux's "Preface" toLer-
oux 1970a, vii-x; Lamy; 18-22 (which uses the phrase "fantasique actuelle," with the
aid ofPhilomene Farre, on 19); Limat; Ducos; and Francis Lacassin's "Preface" toLer-
oux 1984, 7-16.
8. I refer in these kinds of citations, with my translations, to the actual newspapers as
they have been preserved in the collections of the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Leroux's
Dreyfus retrial articles of 1899, however, are also reprinted together, along with oth-
ers, in Leroux 1985.
9. The clearest previous assertion of this ancestry is in Wolf 1996, 2, but that briefly
stated claim only scratches the surface ofLe Fant6me's very deep and extensive "Gothic"
roots.
IO. For first calling my attention to the significance of Don Juan as a breaker of his word,
I am indebted to ]. Douglas Canfield, "The Classical Treatment of Don Juan." My
thanks to Professor Canfield for an advance copy of this essay
II. The foregoing definitions of the "sublime" are most indebted to Freud 1975, 129-36;
Sperry; 33-49: and Hertz, r-20 and 217-39.
CHAPTER Two
I. Kiell's exhaustive collection of contemporary reviews of Freud contains only one

piece in French: the Swiss psychologist Theodore Flournoy's response to the original
Interpretation if Dreams that appeared in a 1903 issue of Archives de psychology. There
Flournoy, by then quite respected for his own case-history of a patient recounted in
From India to the Planet Mars (1900), sees a dream's "fulfillment of a latent desire" in
Freud as based, much as Janet would argue, on "unsatisfied tendencies striving to
come to the forefront" from "needs" now sequestered in "the obscure cellars of the
adult personality" (Kiell, 165). The location of such processes in deep "cellars"
throughout Le Fant6me could well have reflected such a French account of Freud as
much as any other source.
2. The clearest accounts of the Imaginary to which I am indebted here are in Lacan 1977.
192-99, and Lacan 1988, 123-38.
3- This text has already been used quite helpfully in the analysis of Gothic works, and I
am beholden to some of these previous uses. See, for examples, Halberstam; Hogle
1988; Hurley; Rajan; and Williams 1995, 74-79.
4. For studies of the different contradictions that are abjected in these last three Gothic
figures, see Hogle 1998a: Hogle 1988; Halberstam; Hurley; and Hogle 1998b.
5. The constructed nature of this dichotomy; with its long history; is still discussed best
by Raymond Williams, especially 35-54 and 289-306.
6. My analysis of Perrault's "Bluebeard" here is greatly indebted to the reading of this
story as pre-Gothic in Anne Williams 1995, 38-48.
7 The best study of the white "Angel in the House" figure in the nineteenth century; the
one named after a sequence of poems with that title (published 1854-62) by Coven-
try Patmore in England, is still the account in Gilbert and Gubar, 16-32, 342-47, and
613-21. See also the half-chapter on "the cult of the Household Nun" in Dijkstra,
II-24.
Nons 243
8. Abundant evidence of this irony appears in the Balzac biography by Maurois, 19-28,
163-64, 186-89, 271-75, 502-r6.
CHAPTER THREE
r. The likeness of Leroux's phantom to Parisian anarchists or publicized murderers of

the time (especially in newspaper accounts) can be seen in the examples from the
r890s in Huegner, 426-33-
2. I agree with Bakhtin, 30I-3r, that the novel is the most supremely "dialogic" and "het-
eroglossic" form of fictional writing, terms that apply well to both Notre Dame de Paris
and Le Fant6me de !'Opera. Within this general description, though, these novels have
quite different emphases, despite the strong influence of the first on the second. Le
Fant6me is more of a parodic and heteroglossic ironizer of the texts it recalls, Notre Dame
among them, particularly when it conflates in one central figure different class-based
aspirations and qualities (including different class discourses) that in Hugo's novel
are much more divided among different characters and classes.
3. Here I am indebted to Rene Girard's sense of scapegoating, especially his notion of
"the monstrous double," in Violence and the Scared, 143-68.
4. This buried interconnection with the "other" is brought into Le Fant6me even in one of
its briefest references to the "Jewish question": its allusion to the opera La]uivre (The
]ewess, 1835) by Jacques- Francois Halevy and Eugene Scribe, which is performed at the
Opera Garnier during the disturbance in Box Five that reveals the hidden presence
of Erik to one of the Opera's retiring Directors (Leroux 1959, 86-87). In La]uivre it-
self, the "hidden truth" revealed at the climax of the plot is the fact that the murdered
heroine-ingenue, apparently the daughter of a Jewish goldsmith and thus a heretic (a
part sung by Christine, it would seem, in Leroux 1959, 209). was really the lost child
of the very Cardinal Brogni who has harassed and condemned Jews throughout the
opera. The "othered" object of hegemonic persecution, like Leroux's Erik, turns out
to be intimately connected to the persecutor. By the r88os, the decade of Le Fant6me's
events, it so happens, La]uivre had been performed over five hundred times by France's
national Opera (see Wolfi996, 74-75, n. 8).
5. By his own admission, Zizek's sense of the unrepresentable "kernel" or "Real" as
chaotic social "antagonism" is indebted to Laclau and Mouffe.
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Index
Abel, Sam, 30 Baudelaire, Charles, 72-4, 98-9, 123

abjection (Kristeva), 36, SI-2, s8, 6o, "Counterfeit Money," II9-2I
64-65, 68, 74, 75, 78-9, 8o, 81, 83, Les Fleurs du mal, 72-3, 98
84, 85, 87-8, 91-4, 96, 97-8, 99, "Les Sept Viellards," 73
IOI-2, !03-7, III-13, II5, II7-I9, "Le Squelette laboreur," 72--73
120-3, 130-- I, 135-6, 143, 147-8, Baudrillard, Jean
151-2, 154, 159-60, I64, 178-9, I80, concept of the counterfeit, w8-9,
187, 195, 206, 2IO, 212, 216-17, 227, II3--14
228, 229-30, 234-6, 2379 Symbolic Exchange and Death, w8-9, 127-8
Abraham, Nicholas Beaumarchais, Pierre Augustin Caron de, 31
concept of"the phantom," I00-1 "Beauty and the Beast,'' 10-II, 81, 138, 225,
adolescence, 14, 174-6, 176-7, 178-83, 241
198-204, 188, 190, 191-4, 195-8 Bell, David H., 205
Adorno, Theodor, 35, 38, IOI Benjamin, Walter, 71, 99
AIDS, 216-18, 237 Bergman, Ingrid, 161
Aiken, Susan Hardy, 17 Bettelheim, Bruno, 241
Ali Baba etles 40 voleurs (opera), 85 Bidout, Marie, 61
Allain-Targe, Henri, 96 Bizet, Georges, 179-80
"Angel in the House" (Patmore) Bjornson, Maria, 174
Christine as, 58, 129-30, 148 Bluebeard, 56-8
origins of concept, 242 Perrault's story of, 57, 242
anti-Semitism, 23-3, 139 use in Le Fant6me de !'Opera, 57-8, 87
explanation of, 92-4 Bodker, Henrik, 192-3
French history of, 27, 88-90 Bou.ffe Parisiens, 77
Association of Motion Picture Producers Bourdieu, Pierre, 6o
(AMPP), 149 concept of habitus, 6o, 68, 79
Bourget, Paul, 74
Bakhtin, Mikhail M., 243 Breen, Joseph, 157, 162
hal masque (Paris Opera) Brightman, Sarah, 176, 181, 182, 203
history of, 80 Brockden Brown, Charles
Leroux's use of, 76, I05, 126 Wieland, 103
reuses of, 126 Bronte, Charlotte
Baldick, Chris, 29 jane Eyre, I03
Balzac, Honore de, 45, 46, 59, 61, 62, 243 Browning, Tod
Sarrasine, 45-6, 52, 59-60 Dracula (1931), 153-4, 156
Barrymore, John, 162 Burke, Edmund, I04, I2I
Barthes, Roland
SjZ,45 Caillois, Roger, 27
Bataille, Georges, 50, 52, 53 Canfield, Douglas, 242
carnivalesque, the, II-12, IS, 37, s6, 86, 88, face o£ 6, 123, I25
II3, II4-15, 147, 234 Death and the Maiden (story pattern), II,
definition o£ I40, 243 233
history in Paris of, 5, 76-84, 95, 96, Il4 de Bolla, Peter, I2I
Carpenter, John Debussy, Claude, IS
Halloween, 207 decadence, 48-9, 6o, 73-5, 76, 87, 98, 123,
Carre, Ben, I4I 236
Casablanca, I 56 Delaisi, Francis, II7
Castle, Terry; 105 Delibes, Leo, 21
Cayatte, Jeanne, 62 degeneration, theory o£ 68-9, 73-s, 76, 84,
Chaney, Lon, I53-4 87, 96, 123, 157, 234
carnivalesque background of in Hunchback Demming, Barbara, I70
cifNotre Dame, I40 de Palma, Brian
makeup techniques o£ 138, 241 Carrie (I976 film), 188
other films o£ 137, 140 Phantom cifthe Filmore, I 94
in Phantom cifthe Opera, xi, 135, 137-44, 151, Derrida, Jacques, II9
153-4, I56, 157, 158, 206 devolution, I6, 37, 68-9, 75
standard characterizations o£ 137-8 Dickens, Charles, 24
Chaney, Lon Jr., 156 Christmas Carol, A, 226
Chaplin, Charles, 162 Dijkstra, Bram, 242
Charcot, Jean- Martin, 43, 53, 55. 59, 90 Disney, Walt, 225
Chopin, Frederic Fran-;ois, 167-8 Donizetti, Gaetano, I79
Clawson, Elliot, I37, 138, 140-I, 146, 165 Don Juan, 34-s, 242
Clement, Catherine, 52 "Don Juan effect" (Felman), 35
Clery, E. ]., II o Leroux's use o£ 34-s, I20, I25
Commune, Paris, 94-102, I41, 169, 236 Dreyfus, Alfred, I4I
in Fant6me de !'Opera, 25-6, 27, 69, 94-5, "Affair o£" 27-8, 88-90, 157
96-8, roo, 122, 179 Leroux's writings on, 84, 88, 242
history o£ 2S-6, 94-7 retrial o£ 84, 88
political use o£ 46 Ducos, Fran-;ois, 242
Compere, Daniel, 27, 32 Du Maurier, George
Coombs Popular Phrenology, 69-70 Svengali (character), 22-4, 80-1, 84,
Coons, Sheri, 20S I38-40
counterfeit, the, 96-7, II3-23, 191-4, 199 Trilby, 22, So, I38, 234
definition of, 38 Duportal, Armand, 9S
use in Fant6me de !'Opera, 32-6, 37-8, 107, Durbin, Deanna, ISS
126, 128, 130-1
use in Gothic, 32, 103-13, II3-23, 126, Eddy, Nelson, 155. I6o, I63, I67
130-I, 159, 171, 218, 224, 238 Edmundson, Mark, 2I7, 239
Crawford, Broderick, ISS "Elder, John" (see Hinds, Anthony) 183
Crawford, Michael, I74. I82-3, 202 Ellenburger, Henri, 43
Ellis, Havelock, I4
Dance, Charles, 208 Englund, Robert, 205, 2II, 213, 2I4, 239
danse macabre, s-6, 74. 123-4, 126, I27, 222, Equal Rights Amendment, 210
224 Everest, Wesley, ISO
Darwin, Charles evolution (concept of), r6, 70
Origin cifSpecies, The, r6, 70
sense of" reversion," I 6 Fangoria (magazine), I77
Death, 123-31 Fant6me de !'Opera, Le (1910 novel), xi, 3, 4, 5,
as absence of meaning, 123, 125-9 I56, I60-1, 169, I76-7, 2I8-I9, 222,
changing concepts of, s-6, 42, 47, I23-3I 224-5.230,234,238,243
death o£ 123, 126, 127--9 adolescence in, 14
INDEX 257
anti-German attitudes in, 2I, 37, 52, 83, Flynn, Errol, 162
II7 Forsyth, Frederick, ix
birth as death in, 4-8, 9-ro, 24, 29, 50, his conservatism, 230
51, 52, 63, 67, roo, ro5, 130 Day qf the jackal, The, 22 7
castration (symbolic) in, 52 Odessa File, The, 22 7
crossings of boundaries in, 6, 69, 74, 87, use of American history, 225-6
96, 97, 99-ro2, ro4, II5, II7-I9, I20, use of Christian norms, 229, 230
122, 123, 130 use of scapegoat, 225-6. 228-9, 230
debt in, II5-23, 127, 130-r see Phantom qfManhattan
dream-qualities in, 41-6, 55, 59, 6o Foster, Susanna, 157, r6o, 162, 164-6
Erik's skull-face in, 17, 50, 69, 73, 93-4, Frayn, Michael, 187
II2, 123, 124-5, 127-8, 241 Freud, Sigmund, ro, r6, 29, 37, 41-6, 50, 54,
foreignness in, I2, 51-2, 53, 63, 67, 82, 83, 55, 59, 86-7. 88, roo, ro4, r65, 215,
84-94, 96, II6, II7, 129 236,242
gender blurring in, 12-14, r6, 17, 24, 29, in France, 9, 37, 43-4, 46-54, 78
37, 45, 52, 82, 84, 122, 123 Interpretation qfDreams, The, 9, 41, 43, 45,
"hell" in, 22, 34, 39, 73, I25 242
incest suggested in, ro-n, 37, 52, 55-6, Fussell, Paul, 170
63, 86, 88, 91, roo, 129
monkey (devolution) in, I2, r6-r8, 24, Gambetta, Leon, 95
37, 52, 68, 69, 74-5, 82, II6 Gance, Abel, 157
political history in, 25-6, 65, 75, ror Gans, Herbert ]., 241
racial politics in, I2, r8-20, 20-24, 37, Garnier, Charles, 7, I5
52. 68, 69, 73, 74. 82, 83, 84-94, 96, Gates, Bill, 220, 226, 229
97, ror-2, ro5, II6, I23, 130 Gautier, Theophile, 85-6
reality as artifice in, 32-6, ro5, 107, rrr, ghost, 104
II4-23, 238 of the counterfeit, ro3-13, II3-23
regression to childhood in, 9-ro, 14-16, as film image, 135
17, 24, 29, 37, 52, 64, 68, 69, 90 Phantom as, IIO, 123
reportage in, 26-8, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 99, Gilbert, Sandra M., 242
ro5, I3I, 238 Gilman, Sander, 43
sexual deviance suggested in, ro-rr, 29, Girard, Rene, 243
37, 84, 86-8, 91, 96, roi-2, rr6, 122, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 13
123, 130 Goldstein, Jan, 90
underground levels in, 3, 7, 9, ro, I2, 14, Golitzen, Alexander, r67
I6, 17-18, 21, 24, 25, 29-30, 32, 34. Goodman, John B., 167
35.36, 37, 38, 39.41,42,43, 50, 54. Gothic, the, r6, 24, 36, 39, 63, ro3-7, II7.
55, 57-8, 58-9, 59-60. 6r, 63-6, 67, 123, I25-6, 130-1, 137, 146, 152,
73, 75, 76, 79, 82-3, 88, 92, 94, 96, 153-4, 159, 169-71, 177, 207, 222
97, 99, III, II3, II5, II8, 120, 122-3, history of, xii, 28-30, 38, 46, 8o, 91,
I25, !26, 129-31, 166, 238-9, 242 ro3-13, 121-2
voice in, 17, 24, 49-51, 52, 84, 125 relationship to opera, 30-2, 38, ro6-7,
woman's position in, 5I, 52, 53, 55-8, ro5, rr6- 17, 130, 136
129-30 Gounod, Charles Fraw;ois, 178
Fellman, Shoshana, 35 Faust, II, 12, 13, 22, 167, 176, I80, 2II, 242
Finley, William, r88, 239 Grand Guignol, Theatre du, 29, 75, 178
Fisher, Terence Greene, Howard, 167
Hammer Films of, r83 Gubar, Susan, 242
see Phantom qfthe Opera (r962) Guiraud, Ernest, 21
Flaubert, Gustave, 86
Flotow, Friedrich von Halberstam, Judith, 30, 242
Marta, r67 Hall, Mordaunt, 136
Halmi, Robert, 194 Jackson, Rosemary, 27

Hammer Studios, 173, 183-8, 202 Jacoby, John, rss, rs6-7, r6o
Handel, Georg Friedrich, 30 James, Henry
Harley, Steve, r82 Turn ofthe Screw, The, !03, ro6
Harris, Ruth, 68-9 Janet, Pierre, 43, 53, 54, 55, 59, 242
Hart, Charles, 173 Janson, H. W, 17
Haussman, Baron Georges Eugene, 71-2, Jones, Landon, 195
73, 76, 95, 96, 99, IIS Julian, Rupert, 137, 138, 140
Heine, Heinrich, 24
Hertz, Neil, ror, 242 Kahane, Martine, 85
"highbrow"j"lowbrow", 69-70, 74-5, 76, Kalmus, Natalie, 167
83, 97, II4, 146-7, 155-6, 167-8, 170, Kant, Immanuel, 47
177-9, 189, 191, 194--5, 20!, 234, 236, Karloff, Boris, I54, rs8
239 Kay, Susan
Hill, Ken Phantom (novel), 13, 176, 205, 214-18,
East End orientation of, 178-9 225, 241
his Phantom ofthe Opera, 20, 173, 178-9, relationship to AIDS crisis, 216-18
r82, r83, 185, 194, 203, 205, 214, 237, use of sexuality, 9, I76, 214-18
241 using and changing Leroux, 2r6-r8
as source for Lloyd Webber, 177-8 Kerry, Norman, 153
Hinds, Anthony, 183 Kessler, Joan, 46
Hitchcock, Alfred Kiell, Norman, 242
Spellbound, I 6 r Kincaid, James, IS
Hitler, Adolf, 84, rs6 King, Stephen, 221-2
HIV/AIDS, 216-18, 237 Kopit, Arthur, 208, 2I2
Hoffenstein, Samuel, 157, r6o, 169 Kristeva, Julia, 5I, 52, 53, 55, 92, !04, II2
Hogle, Jerrold E., ro8, 242 Powers ofHorror, 51-2
Hollywood Reporter, The, ISS, r6o Strangers to Ourselves, 24
Huebner, Steven, 243
Hugenots, Les (Mayerbeer), 77 Lacan, Jacques, 47, 49-50, 52, 53, 55, 242
Hugo, Victor Lacassin, Francis, 242
Hans de Island, 241 Laemmle, Carl Jr., 153
Notre Dame de Paris, 5, 80-3, 94, 243 Laemmle, Carl Sr., 137, 144, 149, 153-4
Humbert, Senator, II7 Lafranc, Marie, 62
Hunchback ofNotre Dame, The Lambroso, Cesare, 68, 75
1923 film, 137, 140, I46, I 55 Lamy, Jean-Claude, 242
1939 film, 155 Lancaster, Burt, 208, 210, 219
see Hugo, Victor Laughton, Charles, 155
Hurley, Kelly, 242 Le Braz, Anatole, 124
Legend ofDeath, The, I24
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW or Leibniz, Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von, 19,
"Wobblies"), rso 8s
International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Leroux, Dominique, 6r
Employees and Motion Picture Leroux, Gaston, xi, 98-9, II4, n6, 229
Machine Dreyfus writings, 242
Operators (IATSE or IA), 149 life of, r8, 27, 6r-6, 98-9, roo-r, I22,
127, 135, 137
Jackson, Michael Mystery ofthe Yellow Room, The, 2I, 42-3,
accusations of pederasty, 220, 223 61-3
Ghosts, 220-4, 229, 230, 238, 239 Perfume ofthe Lady in Black, The, 2I, 42-3,
Thriller, 220, 221 62
transformations of, 222-4 see Fant6me de l'Opera
INDEX 2S9
Lewis, Matthew G. Newman, Kim, 205

The Monk, So, 103 New York Daily News, ISS-6
Lissagaray, Prosper- Olivier New York Times, I36, ISS
History of the Commune, 94-5 Nightmare on Elm Street (film series), 2I3
Little, Dwight H., 2II, 2I4 "Freddy Kruger" in, 205, 211, 213
Lloyd Webber, Andrew, I73-4, 214 Nilsson, Christine (Kristina Jonasdotter),
Aspects ofLove, I81 241 .. -2
jesus Christ Superstar, I73. 181 Nodier, Charles, 44, 6I, 104
life reflected in Phantom, 18I, 203 Smarra, 44-5, 52, s9-60
Requiem, I8I, I82 Nordau, Max
Lorn, Herbert, I83, 185, 187, 198 Degeneration, 6 8
Longinus, Dionysius Cassius
On the Sublime, 38-9 Offenbach, Jacques, 178, I79, ISO
Lubin, Arthur, 157, I60, I62 O'Hara, Gerry, 2II
Lugosi, Bela, 154, 194 Olivier, Lawrence
Luther, Martin, 77 Hamlet (I948), 161
O'Neill, Eugene, I62
MacDonald, Jeannette, I55 O'Neill, Oona, I62
Mackintosh, Cameron, ISO, I82 Opera, Paris (I875) (Palais Garnier), 3, 48,
Markowitz, Robert, I94. 198 59, 6o, 62, 6s, 87. 115-6
Marx, Karl, 96 design of, 4, I5, IS--19, 7I-2, 110, 116
Kapital, Das, n 9 earlier form of, 9, 26, 71
Massenet, Jules history of, II--12, 2I-2, 2S, 7I-2, 7S,
Roi de Lahore, I 9, 8 5 76-8, 82, ss. 9S. ro6, ns, 234. 241-2
Maurois, Andre, 243 as "National Academy of Music," I9, 22
Mayerbeer, Giacomo opera, 49. 53. 76, n--80, 101, 153 .... 4. 173
Les Hugenots, 77 general history of, 21--2, 39
McLuhan, Marshal, II4 relationship to Gothic, 30-2
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 140,153,155 orientalism
Modern Screen, I67 concept of, 61, 84, 85, 96, 234
Mohr, Hal, 167 connection to sexual deviance, 86
Moliere (Jean Baptiste Poquelin) Leroux's use of, 18-20, 52, 96
Don]uan, 34-5 Paris Opera's use of, 146
Monleon, Jose, 104
Monthly Film Bulletin, 205 Palance, Jack
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Dracula (I974), 194
of America (MPPDA), 149, 157 Paris, city of, 85, 86
Motion Picture Section (of the U.S. catacombs of, 72, 95, I79
Department of Labor), I49 Haussmann's redesign of, 7I-2, 73, 96,
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, I79 99, 115
Don Giovanni, 22, 34-5, 69, I8o Paris Morgue, the, 75-6
Marriage ofFigaro, The, 3I Patmore, Coventry, 242
Mummy, The (1932 film), I95-7 see "Angel in the House"
Munch, Edvard, 47. 49 Perrault, Charles, 57, 242
Musee Grevin (Paris), 76 Phantom (1991 re-novelization), I3, I76, 205,
Musset, Alfred de, 24 214-18, 224, 225, 24I
Mutual Alliance of Studio Employees fear of AIDS in, 216-18
(MASE), I49 male supremacy in, 216
sexuality in, 9, I76, 214-18
Napoleon, 7I, 85 see Kay, Susan
Napoleon III, 7I Phantom, The (1996 film), 4
Neubauer, John, I76-7 Phantom cfHollywood (TV: 1974), 188
Phantom ofthe Mall (1988 film), 207 Phantom of the Opera, The (1962 film), 173,
Phantom ifManhattan, The (1999, Forsyth), xi 183-8, 190, 194, 198, 199, 202, 228,
character changes in, 224-5, 226-9 234
Christian icons in, 229, 230 character changes in, 183-6
class climbing in, 226-7 cultural agenda of, 185-7
Donald Trump echoed in, 225, 226, 227, Hammer styling of, 183, 185, 186
229 social critique in, 185, 188
history of New York in, 226 PhantomoftheOpera, The (1983 TV-film),
scapegoating in, 225-6, 228-9 173, 194-8
woman's position in, 230 adolescence in, 195-8
Phantom of the Opera, The (general baby-boomer anxieties in, 194-8
concept) character changes in, 195-7
basic plot of, xi, 3-4 culture of divorce reflected in, 197-8
cultural functions of, xii, 36, 38, 39, Phantom if the Opera, The (1986 musical), xi, 4,
135-6, 171, 173-6, 218-20, 230-J, 7, 9. 173-6, 194-8, 198-204, 205-6,
233-9 218, 224, 235. 241
historical need for, 107, 136, 206, 218, adolescence in, 174-6, 176-7, 178-83,
235-7 198-204
previous models for, 3, II, 57, 81, 233-4, baby-boomer obsessions in, 202-4
241 groundless simulation in, 199, 202-3
Phantom ifthe Opera, The (1910 novel) influence of, 205-6, 224-5, 227-8
see Fant6me de /'Opera mixed sources of, 176-83, 203
Phantom ofthe Opera, The (1925 film), xi, 3, 4, 7, musical nostalgia in, 173-4, 182-3
154-5, 158, 160, 167, 168-9, 173, 174, position of woman in, 176, 199-200
220,222,234,241 relation to earlier versions, 173-4,
changes during the making of, 136-44, 177-82, 198-9, 202-3
148-9 sexual revolution in, 174-6, 182-3
character changes in, 20, 137-44 Phantom ofthe Opera, The (r987 cartoon),
connections to other films, 138-40, 206-7, 238
153-4 Phantom ifthe Opera, The (1989 mini-series),
corporate interests behind, 144-8 208-rr, 214
labor politics reflected in, 148-52 abortion reflected in, 209-II
1930 re-release of, 153-5 character changes in, 208-9
old world vs. new in, 144, 147-8, 151-2 crisis of family values in, 209- II
range of audiences for, 137, 140, 144-8, musical source of, 208
151 Phantom if the Opera, The (1989 film), 214, 238
scapegoating in, 137, 147-8, 151-2 Nightmare on Elm Street roots of, 211-14
woman's position in, 143, 148, 151 plastic surgery in, 212-13
Phantom if the Opera (I 943 film), I 73, I 94, position of woman in, 211-12
206, 234, 237, 238 Phantom ifthe Opera, The (1991 musical), 205
changes in title character, 156-60, I6I, Phantom ofthe Paradise (1974 film), 173,
r68-9 r88-94, 195, 198, 199, 202-3, 218,
conflicted scapegoating in, rs6-6o, 169 224, 234, 237, 238
Freudian psychology in, 160-6 adolescence in, r88, 190, 191-4
music used in, 153-4, 167-8, 171 corporate alienation in, r88, 190-4
pity and fear in, 157-9 reality as image in, r88, 191-4
production history of, 155-60, 166-7 recording business in, r88, 190-2
reunion of film styles in, 153-60 Philbin, Mary, 141, 147, 148, 154
wartime disguised in, 156, 157, 161, Pierce, Jack, 158
163-4, 166-71 Poe, Edgar Allen, 29, 62, 72, 74, 99, 105-6
woman's position in, 160-6 "Fall of the House of Usher, The," 103,
105, 128
INDEX 26I
"Ligeia," 105-6 Sandefur, Duke, 2II, 2!2, 2I4

"Masque of the Red Death, The," 5, 126, Schell, Maximilian, I73, I94, I95, I98, 239
224 Schoelen, Jill, 2II, 212
"Murders in the Rue Morgue, The," I6 Schumann, Robert, 77
"Purloined Letter, The," 35 Schwartz, Vanessa, 76
Poizot, Michel, 52-3, 55 Second Empire (France's), 7I, 75, 76, 95
Angel's Cry, The, 49-50 Sedgwick, Edward, I37
Polan, Dana, I62, 170 Seymour, Jane, I73, I95
Polidori, John Shakespeare, William, 24, 29, 69-70,
Vampyre, The, 44 !09-IO
Pouget, Emile, n8 Hamlet, 108-9, IIO, II2
Prince, Harold, I73-4, I8I, 2I4 Shelley, Mary
psychoanalysis, 65, IOO, 161, 176-7, 235 Frankenstein, xi, 28, 52, 63, 103, 105, 107,
history of, 37, 43-4, 47 III, I54. I63, I81
limitiations of, 53-4, 64 Siciliano, Sam
social construction of, xii, 46, 54-60, 78, Angel cfthe Opera, The, 205
!04 Sigaux, Gilbert, 242
Punter, David, 103 Sivak, Tom, 205
Sjoqvist, Anna Karin Josefina, 241-2
Radcliffe, Ann, 30, IOS Skal, David, 2I3, 222
Mysteries ofUdolpho, The, 103 Southern Arizona Light Opera Company
Rains, Claude (SALOC), 205
in Casablanca, I 56 Sperry, Stuart, 242
in Phantom cfthe Opera (I943), I56-7, 160, Stallybrass, Peter, 78-9
I6I, I68-9, I85 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 99
in WolfMan, The, I56 Dr. jekyll and Mr. Hyde, xi, I6-I7, 28, 52,
Randon, Gabriel ("Jehan Rictus"), 74 68, I03, 104
Rajan, Tilottama, 242 Stilgoe, Richard, I73
Real, the (Lacan/ ZiZek concept), 47-9, 52, Stoker, Bram, I4, 238
s6, s8, 64, 93-4. I06-7, I08, I29 Dracula (novel), xi, 4, I4, IS, 20, 28, 52,
Rice, Tim, 173 68, 88, 91, 103, !04, I06, !07, III,
Richard, Cliff, 182 113--4, II9, I20, I47, I94, 234
Richardson, Tony, 208 Straker, Peter, r8o, 239
RKO Studios, ISS Studio Basic Agreement (I926), 149, 151
Rocky Horror Picture Show, The (I975), 223 sublimation, xii, 9, 44, 47, 53, 64, 93, 04,
basis in stage original, 180-1 IOI-2, 104, I23-3I, 136, 143, ISO-I,
source for Lloyd Webber, I80-2 166, I67-8, 170-1, I77, 201. 203-4,
Rocky Horror Show, The (stage original), 2!0-II, 214, 2I8, 223-4, 233-9
I80-I definitions of, 38-9, 76, 93
Roev. Wade (I973), 209-10 relation to debt, II5-23
Rollin, Jean, 242 sublime, 38-9, 5I, 104, II2, I2I-3, 125, 2I7,
Romero, George 242
Dawn cfthe Dead, 207 Sue, Eugene
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, I69 Lejuif-Errant, 8o
Rosemont, Norman, 194 Sunday Times (London), 230
Count cfMonte Cristo, The (I974), I94 Svengali (Warner Bros.), I62
Russell, Ken, 182
Rydal!, Derek, 239 Taylor, Eric, I57. I6o, 169
Tchaikovsky, Petr Ilich, I67-8
Said, Edward, I8 Third Republic (France's), 22, 54, 75, 76, 83,
Orienta/ism, r8 86, 95. 96-8, 122, 236
Saint-Saens, (Charles) Camille, 2I Thomson, David, I40
Todorov, Tzvetan, 27 Cabinet ifDr. Caligari, The, 138, 149-50,

Torok, Maria, 100 154. 229
Trump, Donald, 220, 225, 226, 227. 229 Whale, James
Turkle, Sherry, 43, 46 Bride ojFrankensein, The, I 54
Twain, Mark, 2II Frankenstein, 154, r63, r85
21st Century Productions, 2II Wharton, Edith
Twitchell, James, 10, r6o, r8r, 241 Age if Innocence, The, 242
White, Allan, 78-9
uncanny, the, 45, 51, 52, 65, 86-7, 104, 122, Wicke, Jennifer, 106
150, !63 Wilde, Oscar
unconscwus and decadence, 74, 75
political, 37, 78, 99. 101, 126 Picture ifDorian Gray, The, 103, 104, 106,
psychoanalytic, 9. r6, 37. 38, 39, 41, 42, III, 177, 191
51, 67, 92, IOO-I, 130, I6I, r66, 233, trial for homosexuality, 75
235 Wilder, Billy
Universal Studios, Inc., 137. 143-4, 145-8, Sunset Boulevard, r88
149, 151-2, 153-5, 157. 160, 162, 168, Wilkinson, Calm, r82
169, 174 Williams, Anne, 30, 242
Williams, Paul, r88, 190, 198, 239
Verdi, Giuseppe, 19-20 Williams, Raymond, 242
Verdier, Philippe, 17 Wolf, Leonard, 218, 242
WolfMan, The (1941 film), 156, 157
Waggner, George, 167 World War I, 21, II7, 138-40, I5I, I57,
Wagner, Richard 236
French relations to, 21-2 World War II, 47. 154, 157. 159, 166-71, 236,
Lohengrin, 22 237
Walpole, Horace, 30, 104-5, 107. 108. I2I,
130 Yellen, Sherman, 195, 198
CastleojOtranto, The, 28--9,30,103,105, Yeston, Maury, 208
108, 109-13, II6, 123
interest in opera, 30 Zane, Billy, 4
Mysterious Mother, The, 108 Zizek, Slovoj, 47. 52, 53, 55, 104
Walsh, Michael, 182 on anti-Semitism, 92-4
Wandering Jew, 90 on Phantom if the Opera, 47-49, 64
Ward, Edward, 167 on "the Real," 47-9, 52, 243
Warner Brothers, 156, r62 Zola, Emile, 88--90, 157
Wehling, Peggy, 154 Downfall, The, 90
Weine, Robert "]'accuse," 88

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The Undergrounds of

The Phantom qfthe Opera

First published 2002 by PALGRAVE'"

ISBN 978-1-349-63410-1 ISBN 978-1-137-11288-0 (eBook)

P~623.E6 F235 2002

Design by Letra Libre, Inc.

First edition: May 2002

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

One The Original Fantome's Mysteries: An Introduction 3

Five Universal's Silent Film: The Recast Scapegoat, the Qlest

Universal Studios. Courtesy of University Studio

The phenomenally successful Andrew Lloyd Webber stage-musical version of The

The Original Fantome' s Mysteries

THE "GHOST" OF DEATH AND BIRTH AS DEATH

THE DEEP REALM OF TilE MOTHER

Figure 1.4: James Ensor's Skeleton Painter, 1896.

THE RESTORATION OF THE MATERNAL FLUID

THE @ASI INCEST OF MOTHER-SON AND FATHER-DAUGHTER

THE BLURRING OF DISTINCTIONS

The phantom's threat to already tenuous hierarchies of high classjlow class,

The Pull of Childhood

The Human Animal and the Possibility of Devolution to "the Monkey"

The Occidental Oriental

Figure 1.5: The Paris Opera, ca. 1900

different stage-levels of the Opera. First he is the specter. encountered backstage by

The Races of"the Other" and the "Foreigner Among Us"

master-student relationship. Several of Erik's gambits, especially with the Opera

THE FRENCH POLITICS IN LEROUX's PHANTOM

THE BETWIXT-AND-BETWEEN STYLE OF THE NOVEL

espionage, say) turns out to be an effect of description at least as often as it seems to

THE ROOTS OF THE NOVEL IN "GOTHIC" FICTION

characters or by allusions in the narrative. Leroux's phantom as a quintessential

LEROUX'S "REALITY'' AS SIGN, COUNTERFEIT, AND SIMULATION

What is more difficult to understand immediately in Leroux's novel, however, both

A number of questions, surely; are prompted by the episodes in Leroux's Fantome

The Psychoanalytic Veneer in the Novel

THE FREUDIAN DREAM-LEVEL AND ITS ACTUAL SOURCES

THE APPLICATION OF RECENT "FRENCH FREUDS":

Figure 2.!: Edvard Munch's The Scream, r893

pre-psychoanalytic writing, the era of Freud or Leroux themselves, or the French

HowLE FANTOME REVEALS THE

Valerius, themselves class-climbing transplants from Scandinavia to Paris. It is in

THE AMBIVALENCE OF GASTON LEROUX

Leroux's Sublimations of Cultural Politics

THE IDEOLOGICAL ROLE OF THE SKULL,

The "burial" of inconsistent, unsociable, and thus "unconscious" longings in Leroux's

As a "degenerate," in other words, Leroux's phantom is able to enact, in a symbolic

Figure 3.1: Illustration from Coombs' Popular Phrenology, r865

Bechant comme des labourers (Digging like laborers,]

Although Baudelaire's speaker is addressing, on one level, the skeletal "emblems" he

THE NATURE, ABJECTION, AND RESURGENCE OF CARNIVAL

"' ~ .... ~· ... -· .

Figure 3.2: "The Sponge," drawn by H. G. Ibels, 1899

pathetic assistance or as doomed to be always aberrant and drifting vagabonds in

THE REMNANTS OF THE COMMUNE

Je suis Ia plaie et le couteau! [I am the wound and the knife!)

keep at arm's length the mythic process of middle-class self-construction, so much

The Ghost of the Counterfeit

THE GOTHIC AS A SITE FOR

or ghostliness of their Gothic reincarnations (see Moretti, I04-108). Just as Jose

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GOTHIC

"Gothic revival" architecture) were clearly re-presentations of earlier representa-

FROM THE GHOST OF THE COUNTERFEIT