The Phantom of the Opera (Criticism)

Criticism

David Kelly

Kelly is an instructor of literature and creative writing at two schools in Illinois. In this essay, Kelly examines the reasons why The Phantom of the Opera has been more successful in film and on stage than the original novel ever was.

It is something of an adage among film critics that great movies can be made from bad novels but that great novels very seldom yield great movies. When screenwriters try to adapt a great novel, they are almost sure to have their work met with the tired old line, "The book was better." Great books are considered great because readers care about them: screen adapters of these books have to know that their every move is being scrutinized, lest they leave out some important, treasured element. At the same time, those adapting weaker sources might feel free to leave out whole plot lines, move the action to another continent, or tack on a happy ending, all without much fuss being raised.

Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera does, in fact, fit this general rule. The book has never been taken very seriously, having been serialized in newspapers, having been bound into novel form in 1910, and then having withered away from the shelves into the dustbin of obscurity. Most readers of its time dismissed it as just another potboiler churned out by a former journalist who was striving to bring in an income by freelancing, willing to write whatever the public would pay to read. It took the 1925 silent film to bring that book back to life. The film starred Lon Chaney, who was one of the most sought-after stars of its day, and it, along with F. W. Murnau's 1922 vampire film Nosferatu, defined the horror film for decades to come. Throughout the decades, there were various remakes of the Chaney film, and then, in 1986, there came the stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber. As of the early 2000s, the musical had broken records for ticket and soundtrack sales and had played all over the world to sellout crowds. Its version of the story, emphasizing the romantic angle and de-emphasizing the macabre, had defined The Phantom of the Opera for late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century audiences.

Since Leroux's novel had both the horror and the romance that the subsequent adaptations were able to capitalize on so well, it is interesting to ask why they were able to succeed so well with his ideas. The novel is not without its skills, but it also has its weaknesses. The core issue seems to be that its strengths all tend to lend themselves to the visual arts, while its weaknesses all fall in areas where great writing usually shines.

There are many elements of true wit and originality in the novel, twists that show Leroux to be a talented writer, distinguishing him from others who are more willing than able when it comes to producing literature. Of these, one of the strongest elements is the consistency of the narrator's voice. Leroux provides an inquisitive narrator on a quest in this book: he (or, conceivably, she) starts out with the question of whether the legendary opera ghost was real and chases the evidence down to its one deductive conclusion. The triumph of this narrator lies in the lengths that Leroux goes to in order to plausibly give him access to information. The book's Preface gives a list of sources that the narrator is said to have contacted for this inquiry, some thirty years after the fact: names that mean nothing to the reader who has just cracked the book's cover but that establish a sense of honesty. Other narrative techniques include references to printed sources such as police interviews and the journals left by the Persian (whose true name is withheld, simulating a connection to late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century society) and facts about the way the opera house came to be built. As a former journalist, Leroux does a meticulous job of feeding his story through this plausible, objective narrator, one that could possibly have access to the information and, more importantly, the feelings of those who participated, more than a generation earlier. Still, the narrator is the first element that the successful adaptations leave out, and rightfully so.

Although the narrator is skillfully constructed, it turns out to be a hollow accomplishment. The narrator does not really do anything in the novel other than gathering information. He has the same function that a third-person narrator would have, though a third-person narrator could explore people and places without having to explain how the information became available. Though there may have been some benefit to having the story told by a man living in 1910, in order to show the contrast between the modern world and the shadowy world of the past, little is lost in leaving this person out of films and plays. The narrator's main function of shrouding the events with mystery is taken up by light and shadow and set designs.

Which leads to Leroux's other great accomplishment in the novel, his sense of scene. Of the thousands of patrons who sat in the Paris opera house after it was built, he was the one with a sense of mystery who could see the inherent drama that it evoked, presenting culture and refinement built over former prisons. So strong was his sense of scene, in fact, that readers can see the lengths he was willing to go, just to raise the right atmosphere. In Chapter XIII, for instance, he has Christine and Raoul move out of the opera house to talk but places their conversation on the roof, amid a gloomy background of imposing statuary that is just as spooky as anything down below — a setting that makes no sense, given that they are still within range of the phantom's influence. But even that brief change of venue is mild, compared to the way that, in Chapter VI, Leroux has Christine and Raoul travel cross-country to Perros, apparently just to take them to a graveyard at midnight. The book is full of vivid but structurally unnecessary moments, from the appearance of the rat-catcher underground (to tease the audience with an infestation of rats) to the amazing coincidence of Raoul going to Bois de Boulogne on a vague tip, only to see the phantom and Christine drive by in a carriage (apparently added for the visual effect of a carriage at night).

Though Leroux was brilliant at producing frightening visual effects in this book, his execution was not always so impressive. Readers have difficulty seeing the statue of Apollo's Lyre, the carriage, or the gravestone that Raoul was apparently found spread out on in the morning. One of the most chilling sights to come from the book, the appearance of a masked death-head at a costume ball (which was itself openly appropriated from Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Masque of the Red Death") is glided over in two paragraphs of dense narrative, muting its power and making readers wonder what it was they have just seen and why. This very image plays an impressive role in both the movie and the play, capitalized on by storytellers who understood the value of the scary images that Leroux seems to have conjured up by the dozens without restraint.

As a writer, Leroux was weakest in handling characterization. He just seems to have had no interest in the inner workings of the human beings. The other characters in the novel do not prove to be much more substantial than the narrator. The book's male lead, Raoul, is so lacking in personality that Leroux brings in the Persian at the end to take over the traditional chores of the hero, such as finding and confronting the monster. Christine is a little more complex, but her complexity results from her being tricked by the phantom into associating him with a guardian angel: it is not until the screen and stage adaptations that her dual attraction and revulsion are acknowledged. As for the phantom himself, Erik: in the abstract, he could be considered a complex character, with his hatred for humanity clouded by his love for Christine, his beautifully artistic soul defied by the shadows that he is forced to live in. The problem is that, having established these elements of character, Leroux does not follow through with them. At any given moment he brings Erik's sense of love, anger, or compassion to the fore, depending on whether Leroux wants the action to move toward murder, kidnapping, or, in the end, sudden forgiveness.

The problem is that Leroux's writing is all elements and no details. He is like a land developer who can see a field built up into blocks of houses, but he does not know what particular houses should go where, much less what should go in them. This is why adaptations of his book work better than the book itself. His horror-story elements are visual and, therefore, work more effectively when played out visually, but that is only half of the explanation: his work was so unrefined that anybody who took the time to rework it, to pay closer attention to the implied meaning behind the phantom's mask, the falling chandelier, the rooftop encounter, the caverns of forgotten laborers and the rest would almost have to produce an impressive artistic work. In fact, the characters from The Phantom of the Opera were appropriated by several writers over the course of the twentieth century, who cast them into their own fiction. The fact that the most popular forms of this story have been a movie and a play has something to do with Gaston Leroux's sense of the visual and his sense of the broader movements that make characters, but it has even more to do with the fact that he seems to have left the telling of his story undone.

Source: David Kelly, Critical Essay on The Phantom of the Opera, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2005.

Contemporary Authors Online

In the following essay, the author discusses the critical reception of Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera and his contribution to the fields of detective and horror fiction.

Several motion picture adaptations (the first in 1925) and stage adaptations have kept French author Gaston Leroux's original novel Le Fantome de l'Opera (The Phantom of the Opera) alive in the minds of readers throughout the world for over eight decades. Published in 1996, The Essential "Phantom of the Opera": The Definitive Annotated Edition of Gaston Leroux's Classic Novel, edited by Leonard Wolf is merely one of numerous, more recent editions published in the United States since the first English translation appeared in 1911. Through the book and its offspring in other media, this story of a disfigured singer who haunts the labyrinthine opera house in Paris and his love for the young and beautiful Christine has become a part of modern culture, a legend that has taken on a life of its own. The Phantom "is a figure of power and poignance, horror and mystery," explained Richard Corliss in Time magazine." He dwells in the fetid cellar of the subconscious; from those depths rises the music of passions we hardly dare attend. He is the Id aching for the Ideal, loathsomeness wanting to be loved, unknown fear reaching up to touch or break our hearts." Corliss added, "He is kin to Pygmalion, Cyrano, Quasimodo, Dracula, the Elephant Man and King Kong — artists isolated in their genius, Beasts pining for a Beauty."

Leroux's classic novel was first serialized in France and Britain before being published in book form. It was based in part on actual events. Leroux had visited the Paris Opera House several times while working as a drama critic and was familiar with its architecture and history. Begun in 1861, the Opera was finished in 1879 and was comprised of seventeen stories with mazes of corridors and stairways, private suites for then-Emperor Napoleon III, stables for horses, dressing rooms for 500 performers, storage cellars for costumes, and an under-ground lake on its lowest level. The atmosphere of the building was made more mysterious by rumors that a ghost or strange being haunted its depths and had been responsible for several unexplained deaths. Leroux worked many of these details into his novel, including how the opera house's main chandelier had fallen upon an audience in 1896.

Influenced by Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre Dame, Leroux created for his book a horribly disfigured central character named Erik. Erik is a wonderful musician with a beautiful voice, but he is so ugly that from birth his mother required him to wear a mask. He builds a home for himself on the underground lake beneath the Opera and prowls its corridors unseen, leaving notes signed "O. G." (for Opera Ghost) instructing the management on how the theater is to be run.

To his underground residence the Phantom brings young Christine Daae, a beautiful under-study he has fallen in love with and whose career he is advancing. But Christine is in love with Raoul, a young nobleman she has known since she was a child, and is terrified of the Ghost. Eventually, however, she begins to understand Erik's longing and comes to pity him. In Leroux's final scenes, writes Drake Douglas in Horror!, "when Erik speaks of the wonder of being looked upon without fear by a beautiful woman, of actually feeling the warmth of a woman's kiss on his horrible face, surely then we cannot feel too much fear and hatred for this monster who had the misfortune to be born with a great heart and a terrible ugliness."

The Phantom of the Opera was not an over-whelmingly successful novel in a critical sense. At the time of its original publication, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review noted it as an interesting "ghost story but when the phantom ceases to be a phantom, and things begin to be accounted for, one's interest sensibly weakens." Even so, the New York Times Book Review contributor positively remarked on the novel's description of the Opera House and found the book "effective" and stated that "its style is picturesque and vivid." And although at times almost "ridiculous," a Nation reviewer concluded that the story is "ingenious" and "despite the incredibility of the whole situation, M. Leroux succeeds in piquing the reader's curiosity, and [the novel contains some] 'breathless suspense.'"

Despite the novel's reception among critics, the Phantom's story has transcended its evaluations. Each new adaptation of the book, from the 1925 classic silent movie starring Lon Chaney to the award-winning 1986 musical created by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe, has intrigued the public and lured them back to redis-cover the original novel.

Leroux may forever be remembered as the creator of The Phantom of the Opera, but in his day, he was recognized as an innovative creator of detective and horror fiction. The only child of well-to-do shop owners, he acquired a taste for literature at an early age. Although sent to Paris to study law as a young man, he preferred to spend his time writing stories and verse; his first published work consisted of a sequence of sonnets about Parisian actresses. At the age of twenty-one, he inherited nearly one million francs from his father, but Parisian night life — drinking and gambling — quickly reduced his inheritance. Within six months he was penniless, and turned to his writing as a means of support. He became a court reporter on the staff of L'Echo de Paris, combining his legal training with his writing skills.

Tired of simply reporting court cases, Leroux launched a career as an investigative reporter by trying to solve a case before the verdict came in. "He was convinced the accused man was innocent, and the reason he was being kept under such tight security before his court appearance in the town of Bourges was to protect some incompetent officials," explained Peter Haining in his introduction to the Dorset Press edition of The Phantom of the Opera. Passing himself off as a prison inspector, Leroux obtained access to the prisoner and interviewed him. Haining quoted Leroux from a 1925 interview: "I got my paper to publish a full report which completely exonerated the prisoner — and as a result the Prefect of Police was disgraced and the Prison Director was sent packing! Curiously, it was my newspaper colleagues who were the most annoyed. I had interviewed an accused man in prison before his trial — it was something that had never been heard of before in law reporting!"

This case established Leroux's reputation as a reporter, and led to many other interviews with influential figures, including the Duc d'Orleans, pretender to the throne of France, and the Swedish Antarctic explorer Nils Nordenskjold. It also led to a job with Le Matin, a major daily newspaper, and assignment as a roving reporter. Over the next fifteen years, Leroux became famous for his adventurous reporting from crisis spots throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia. A master of disguise, he covered the Russian Revolution of 1905 and posed as an Arab while reporting on European imperialism in Morocco — an assignment that could have cost him his life.

Because of these escapades, Leroux became known as a reporter "who could get a story out of even the most unlikely situation," wrote Haining. For example, in an attempt to interview British Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain during the Boer War, Leroux slipped into the minister's private study without permission. When he was discovered by a secretary and ejected, Leroux composed an article titled "How I Failed to See Chamberlain," which, according to Haining, "delighted French readers and was widely hailed as 'a masterpiece of good humour and wit.'" Eventually, however, Leroux tired of the traveling and hazards that his journalism demanded and turned to writing fiction and plays. Much of his work drew on his experiences as a reporter, and "right from the start," declared Haining, "he proved himself an ingenious storyteller with a flair for pace and excitement."

Leroux's first success as a novelist came with the 1908 publication of The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which introduced his amateur detective hero, Joseph Rouletabille. Like the author himself, Rouletabille is a mentally sharp reporter whose reasoning ability far outpaces that of the police officers he meets. With his assistant Sainclair, Rouletabille solves one of the first "locked-room" mysteries, in which a crime is committed in a place no one could have entered or left. Leroux also wrote mysteries in which the least-likely character is cast as the culprit and is credited with introducing this plot device to the genre.

The Mystery of the Yellow Room was translated into English and established Leroux as a major figure in the field of mystery writing. "The Mystery of the Yellow Room," wrote Howard Haycraft in 1941 in Murder for Pleasure, "is generally recognized, on the strength of its central puzzle, as one of the classic examples of the genre. For sheer plot manipulation and ratiocination — no simpler word will describe the quality of its Gallic logic — it has seldom been surpassed. It remains, after a generation of imitation, the most brilliant of all 'locked room' novels."

The sequel to the The Mystery of the Yellow Room — The Perfume of the Lady in Black — featured the second appearance of Rouletabille and confirmed his reputation as an amateur sleuth who out-thought professional detectives. Although popular, The Perfume of the Lady in Black did not receive the acclaim that had greeted The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Rupert Ranney wrote in Bookman: "The Perfume of the Lady in Black is no better than its predecessor, and it is no worse, which implies neither high praise nor serious disparagement. The faults and merits of one book are the faults and merits of the other." Other adventures of Rouletabille failed to duplicate the success of the first volume. Leroux later penned another series of detective novels starring a magician named Cheri-Bibi.

The creator of Rouletabille, Cheri-Bibi, and numerous other intriguing characters, Leroux continued to be a prolific writer of fiction until his death in 1927. Although his creation The Phantom of the Opera currently overshadows his other works, Gaston Leroux is still remembered in the fields of detective and horror fiction for his unique contributions to these genres.

Source: Contemporary Authors Online, "Gaston Leroux," in Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003.

What Do I Read Next?

• In his entertaining 1993 novel The Canary Trainer, Nicholas Meyer, writing as Sherlock Holmes's confidant Dr. Watson, has Holmes interact with characters from Leroux's novel, as he tries to capture the opera ghost.
• There are many comparisons to be made between the story of the phantom and Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, which also deals with an outcast from society. In Shelley's novel, though, the philosophical questions of what it means to be human are much more significant.
• The costume ball with the mysterious death's head figure in attendance is an almost exact copy of the scene Edgar Allan Poe used in his short story "The Masque of the Red Death." This story is available in most anthologies of Poe's works, including the one published by the Library of America.
• Readers who enjoy Leroux's style might want to read more of his writings. His 1907 detective novel The Mystery of the Yellow Room, which was one of his most popular works during his lifetime, is available in a 2002 release from Indypublish.com. Also, a number of his macabre stories were collected in The Gaston Leroux Bedside Companion: Weird Stories by the Author of the "Phantom of the Opera," but as of 2004 this collection was out of print.
• This novel is closely associated with Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Like Leroux's Erik, Hugo's Quasimodo is a deformed genius who occupies the hidden spaces of a grand Parisian building, pining for the beautiful woman whom he loves. Hugo's novel was available as of 2004 in a Tor Classics edition.
• Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is similar to the tale of the phantom in that it takes place in the late Victorian era and in mostly urban settings, mostly at night.