The male perspective

[igenlode]

I wonder if the reason why so many fans complain that they find Raoul dislikable in the Leroux novel is that this is the experience of being in love for the first time being depicted from the male perspective by an actual male author, whereas what they are used to seeing in romance novels is the male viewpoint as imagined by women? (And why is the fandom so overwhelmingly female and romance-oriented, anyway? The novel wasn't written to appeal to lovelorn ladies -- Leroux was a thriller/mystery writer...)

It also occurs to me that female romance novels normally feature experienced and/or older men as the love-interest rather than very young and inexperienced ones, whom women presumably don't find attractive -- the plot is generally 'woman heals heart of man who has learnt to distrust her sex' or 'woman wins true love from seductive rover', not 'boy falls head over heels in love with someone his own age'. Of course, when you are writing obligatory sex scenes you pretty much need to have a practised male protagonist (unless it is Erik the Masterful Virgin :p)

Comments

[stefanie_bean]

Excellent points, especially about Raoul *not* being the ideal romance-novel main male character. "Taming the beast" in various romances is a power fantasy. Suzy McKee Charnas - author of the published POTO short story, "Beauty and the Opera, Or the Phantom Beast" - spells it out in her essay, "The Beast's Embrace." (https://web.archive.org/web/20211203031340/http://www.suzymckeecharnas.com/essays/the-beasts-embrace.htm)

Since Raoul's love is messy, complicated, confusing (including to him), and not always the most dignified, there's no power fantasy aspect to "taming" him.

Also, you half-answered the question in "Raoul is Not an American High School Jock" (https://vicomte-de-chagny.dreamwidth.org/18596.html). Fannishness is supposed to hate "the jocks;" Raoul is "a jock," and thus we are "supposed to" hate Raoul.

Another thought: one common fanfic assumption is that if there's relationship writing in a story, that story "has to" follow the standard romance-novel tropes. POTO clearly doesn't, and while romance-writing may be one possible transformative-work interpretation, there's room for many others.

[igenlode]

Charnas -- I thought that sounded familar!
https://www.phantomlibrary.com/beauty-and-the-opera-or-the-phantom
(Not a story, I have to say, that sounded as if it would ever appeal to me, but then I'm simply not *interested* in endless Phantom-angst analysis and Christine hating herself for (of course) loving him...)

A very powerful essay, and she is right in that the Beast turning back into a boring ordinary human usually comes as a let-down, not least because that effectively turns him into a total stranger rather than the character with whom we had gradually become familiar. Hmm, it really ought to be *possible* to construct a story that avoids this undesirable effect... maybe by starting off with the audience getting to know him in his natural form before his Beasthood, so that we experience the transformation as being as much of an outrage as he does? But then the storyline tends to be that he became a Beast as retribution for not being a terribly nice human in the first place :-(

Also an intriguing concept that women don't *want* their Beast to be 'fixed', because then they might have rivals; they want to be his only option :-O

And her analysis of the proverbial teenage love for horses makes a lot more sense than the trite Freudian claim that 'girls just want something big between their legs'. Although interestingly, in some of the older pony-books that I've read, there are significant numbers of competitive *boys* attending the riding school/pony club, and not necessarily as antagonists to the plucky heroine either; the cast have friendships and quarrels equally between the sexes. The love of a Boy and his Horse used to be quite a common trope (The Black Stallion, The Red Pony, My Friend Flicka, Black Hunting Whip, and of course Black Beauty); I'm not sure when love of horses became feminised. Of course once the sex ratio becomes massively skewed in favour of the girls in any context the boys just opt out...

Since Raoul's love is messy, complicated, confusing (including to him), and not always the most dignified, there's no power fantasy aspect to "taming" him.

Confusing *especially* to him, I think -- and certainly undignified ;-)
And there is no power fantasy aspect to handling someone who is already throwing himself at you, and whom you can always out-argue; Raoul isn't trying to order Christine around (the only time he attempts to use 'authority' on her, it is to try to get her to promise not to disappear suddenly again, and since she isn't in a position to promise anything of the sort she takes the counter-offensive of pointing out that he has no social or legal authority over her whatsoever, which is all too true!)
I mean, Christine *has* tamed Raoul pretty much from the start; he pursues in vain, she leaves him repeatedly at a loss and then calls him back on her conditions and only at her bidding (to Perros, to the masquerade, to her dressing-room, to her dressing-room again after he oversteps the mark and she walks out on him). Whatever his nominal social position -- which might theoretically make him a good 'catch', if it didn't also throw up a barrier between them -- she is definitely in the driving seat of that relationship.

Of course Erik is also throwing himself at her, but he is actually dangerous both in potentia and in practice -- Raoul has no control over what Christine does, but Erik can and does both threaten, blackmail and physically restrain her to his will.

[igenlode]

Fannishness is supposed to hate "the jocks;" Raoul is "a jock," and thus we are "supposed to" hate Raoul.

That one does seem a bit convoluted, given that canon Raoul *isn't* 'a jock' in the first place, so you first have to impose a paradigm that doesn't (as I was complaining) in any obvious way apply, and then proceed from that to the further confusing identification of 'people who read fanfiction' with 'losers'...
(I'm not all that fluent in "American high school", which is a culture/dialect that doesn't really exist here, possibly because we don't have an arrangement whereby you can be forced to repeat a year's school until you pass, and thus don't have a set-up where the stupidest boys in class are bigger and stronger than everyone else(?))

Another thought: one common fanfic assumption is that if there's relationship writing in a story, that story "has to" follow the standard romance-novel tropes. POTO clearly doesn't, and while romance-writing may be one possible transformative-work interpretation, there's room for many others.

I think basically the issue is that Raoul does *not* exist in order to be the heroine's designated Love Object :-p
POTO is about as much a romance-novel as The Four Feathers is. Falling in love is a major part of that protagonist's motivation -- "in a novel often referred to as a Boy’s Own adventure, our hero isn’t a combatant at all" -- but the story is in no imaginable shape or form a piece of romantic fiction.

In a romance novel, the love-interest character is presumably carefully curated to appeal to a female audience and to represent the deepest desires of the heroine; Raoul is simply Leroux's amateur detective, provided for the purposes of maintaining suspense :-p