The Phantom of the Opera (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

It is unlikely that Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera would be read today if it were not for the ways that other artists have adapted it to visual media. When Leroux's story first appeared as a newspaper serial in 1909, it was popular enough to be carried in papers in France, Great Britain, and the United States, but the subsequent release as a novel was only modestly successful. It was considered just another thrill story by a competent writer who churned out entertainment stories for a living. The book fell out of print quickly. In 1925, however, while looking for a film vehicle to match the success that he had just had with Lon Chaney in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, film producer Carl Laemmle purchased the rights to The Phantom of the Opera. The film took great liberties with Leroux's story, but it was a great success, a groundbreaking horror film, and its following continued over the decades and stirred interest in the novel that spawned it.

Modern audiences are familiar with the story of the phantom through the immensely popular stage musical, written by Andrew Lloyd Weber. That play opened in London in October of 1986 and as of 2004 had not yet closed, making it as of that year the second-longest running musical in the history of the theater (after Weber's own Cats).

One reason that the novel is so seldom discussed on its own terms is that its story is, in the words of Leonard Wolf, who edited a contemporary, annotated edition, a "strange sort of masterpiece." Wolf points out the conventions of gothic fiction, such as the perils faced by the young, beautiful heroine, pursued "from one cold, dark, dank, and macabre place to another by a tall, dark stranger who is infinitely more interesting than the good-looking and (often) wealthy or titled young hero who rescues her." While many readers have dismissed the book as a hack job, Wolf credits Leroux with weaving "a tapestry of myth that frequently feels both complex and moving."

In his 2002 study titled The Undergrounds of "The Phantom of the Opera": Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and Its Progeny, Jerrold E. Hogle shows that it is in fact possible to give serious critical consideration to the phantom's story. Heavy on psychological and sociological interpretation, Hogle's book observes aspects of the story that have never been noted before. His discussion of the underground catacombs, for example, is common of the tone of the whole book: "As both the principle creditor and himself a debtor in this novel, Leroux's phantom 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." It is notable that, while taking Leroux's work seriously, still the majority of Hogle's book is concerned with adaptations, from the silent film to the stage musical.

Compare & Contrast

• 1880: Transportation within Paris is by horse carriage; for cross-country trips, the locomotive is available.
  1910: In the year following the first flight across the English Channel by Louis Blériot, Parisians realize that the age of aviation has arrived. Automobiles are common on Parisian streets.
  Today: Paris's streets, designed in the 1870s, are choked with automobile traffic. For travel on the continent, the TGV, or bullet train, travels at speeds often exceeding 186 miles per hour.
• 1880: Paris is the artistic center of the world, home to impressionist painters such as Alfred Sisley, Auguste Renoir, Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne.
  1910: Paris is the home of the influential and challenging Cubist artistic movement, promoted by painters such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
  Today: The best-known Parisian artists, such as Jean-Marc Bustamante and Sophie Calle, are photographers.
• 1880: The Garnier Opera building is less than five years old and is revered as an architectural triumph.
  1910: At the advent of the age of Modernism, the Garnier Opera building is seen as an ornate and almost gothic structure.
  Today: The Garnier Opera building is considered to be one of Paris's most important cultural landmarks.
• 1880: Interior light is provided by open gas flames, lanterns, or candles.
  1910: Large gathering places such as the opera are lit with incandescent lighting.
  Today: Lighting of stage productions such as operas has become an art form in and of itself.