Fans of Vicomte Raoul de Chagny

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)

When people write High School AU fanfic, Erik is always cast as the sensitive loner and Raoul as the 'jock' with seamless self-confidence who bullies him; from Raoul's point of view, a more realistic rendition would be to cast *him* as the wimpy kid who doesn't know how to handle his crush on that girl from the other side of the tracks who hangs around with all the wrong people. The boy who messes up every time he tries to talk to her and gets generally ignored and laughed at, and who finds threatening notes left on his locker from one of the 'seniors' with a reputation for beating people up in dark corridors and creeping out the younger girls.( Read more... )

It's interesting that Raoul in the book is actually dismayed by Christine's uninspired singing -- thus proving that (a) he isn't just some fashionable fribble attending the opera as part of a society ritual but actually cares about music and takes an interest, and (b) he is attracted to her for herself and not for her talent, and thus Erik's contribution has absolutely nothing to do with it :-p

If Christine couldn't sing, Erik would have had no interest in her whatsoever, but she would still be Raoul's long-lost sweetheart.

I think my favourite line in Leroux, for no very good reason, is the one that turns out, when I look it up, not only not to be in de Mattos, but not to be in any of the English translations at all (because it was cut from the serialised text before the novel's publication) -- which does at least explain why I could only remember it in French and was looking it up to find out what the English version was!

It's the one brief line Mon Dieu! fit le vicomte... et il s'assit.
https://fdelopera.tumblr.com/post/102057039068/welcome-to-the-30th-installment-of-15-weeks-of

(Leroux-Raoul's reaction to Christine telling him that she loves him: "Oh my God"... and he collapses at the knees :-D)

Some of the elements of Erik's character in Leroux are really very reminiscent of Tolkien's subsequent creation of Gollum; the tendency to weep and cringe and refer to oneself in the third person, to giggle in a nasty way, and of course to be consumed by longing for the unattainable within full view, to the extent of commiting murder to get it ;-p
And there's that scene where he paddles away across the lake with only his two eyes visible, which is an almost palpable echo of the subsequent scene in "The Lord of the Rings" where Gollum is spotted in the dusk paddling along after Frodo's boat.

I wonder if Tolkien ever did read "The Phantom of the Opera"? I'm sure there wasn't any direct influence involved (Gollum was created for "The Hobbit", which draws its imagery largely from fairy-tales), but "The Hobbit" was actually written only about twenty years later -- because "Phantom" is a historical novel, one tends to forget that it was written in quite a different era from that in which it was set.

He would have been about twenty and up at Oxford when it first came out, and not really in the right demographic to take an interest in that sort of thing -- by the time the film was made and the story acquired popular traction in the English-speaking world, he was busy making translations from Middle English and probably not an aficionado of Lon Chaney horror movies ;-D So I feel the odds are that he probably never read Leroux...

I've just noticed a detail that never struck me before about Raoul's rush to Christine's dressing-room after the success of her gala performance. Not only does he have the nerve to take it upon himself to suggest that the room is too crowded and that all 'ces messieurs' (including his own elder brother and the managers of the theatre) ought to be asked to leave, but apparently he actually has her in his arms at the moment when she awakes.

We are told that Raoul arrives in the dressing-room immediately on the heels of the doctor who has been called to attend to Christine, and that Ainsi, le médecin et l’amoureux se trouvèrent dans le même moment aux côtés de Christine, qui reçut les premiers soins de l’un et ouvrit les yeux dans les bras de l’autre; thus the doctor and the lover were at Christine's side at the same time, and she received first aid from the one and opened her eyes in the arms of the other.

Echoes of Raoul's own subsequent awakening at Perros-Guirec, where Christine rushes to revive him after his frozen night, and the first thing he sees when opening his eyes is her worried face bending over him ;-)

When Christine turns her head, perceives Raoul and trembles (which, with hindsight, we know to be due to the fact that she dreads the reaction of The Voice to this inopportune meeting, which she has been trying so dutifully to avoid), apparently she is actually in his embrace at the time... although since he immediately drops to one knee and kisses her hand, I feel that he had probably laid her down in the interim!

Another thing Leroux-Raoul gets accused of is of trying to 'tie Christine down' and 'stifle her voice' by marrying her (whereas Erik's love is presumably setting her free from convention so that she can soar into song). A lot of this seems to be based on the scene where she tells him angrily that she is "mistress of her own actions" ( Read more... )
In the context of Christine's statement, what Raoul is actually asking of her at this point is to consent to the promise that Madame Valerius has repeatedly begged of her during this scene, namely never to leave the old lady again (and go off to visit the Angel of Music). Christine has so far evaded this, not least presumably because she knows she is going to *have* to go back to Erik when he summons her. When Raoul chimes in, it is in a quasi-paternal tone ("we shall ask no questions if you will engage to put yourself under our protection") which understandably gets Christine's back right up: he literally has no right to associate himself with her mother like that as her protector. He is no relative of hers at all, and the law gives him no authority where she is concerned. Hence the outburst about husbands, since Christine has no surviving male relatives!( Read more... )

The narrator of "The Phantom of the Opera" claims as supporting 'evidence' for his story that he found the initials RC among those left on the wall of the Communards' dungeon where Erik imprisoned Raoul. But unless Raoul was a very quick worker (and if we are to believe Erik's story, the young man was at best semi-conscious when he was taken to be chained up in the dungeon: le parfum de Mazenderan l'avait rendu mou comme une chiffe) he simply didn't have time to make any such carving.

Erik tells the Persian that, having made certain Raoul was in a place where no-one could hear any cries for help, he returned to the side of Christine, who was waiting for him. Then they go through all the forehead kissing business and weep together, and as a sign of his changed intentions towards her Erik goes off to fetch Raoul on the spot. Raoul can't have been in the dungeon for any longer than the time of that tearful interview (and was presumably still fairly groggy from 'le parfum de Mazenderan' when he was removed from it!)

He could just about have managed to draw his initials faintly on the wall with some rough object, I suppose. He certainly couldn't have managed the sort of carving you see on the walls of the Tower of London. I've tried adding my own initials to the parapet of a slate bridge alongside hundreds of others, and was seriously impressed by the time and workmanship displayed by the Victorians in contrast to our own efforts, which would have washed/brushed away in a couple of days -- and that was soft slate. Even the relatively plain WWII initials represented some soldier sitting down with his pocket-knife and an hour or so to spare on a sunny afternoon, rather than simply scratching over and over again with a bit of stone.

Given that the dungeon walls were underground and not exposed to any weathering, I suppose a rough whitish scratch might have survived thirty years for the narrator to find it -- though it's hard to imagine that it would be visible alongside carvings made by prisoners with endless days on their hands. But under the circumstances, to be honest, it's hard to imagine Raoul quietly sitting down and setting out to write his name on the walls immediately after he'd been chained up in the depths of the Opera (quite possibly without light, unless Erik was feeling generous). It's the sort of thing you do when you're reconciled to a long imprisonment and are looking for occupation, not in the first moments of desperation, with the woman you've risked your life to rescue being subjected to unknown degradations at the hands of your mutual captor...

Frankly, I think Leroux had lost track of the timeline. Not for the first time :-p

This is the story I vaguely remembered but couldn't track down again when discussing authors who liked to write about Raoul 'suffering beautifully' -- not a particularly common trope.

Puzzle Pieces by lourdesmont

It's an epic if somewhat amateurish saga that is typical of its era of the fandom -- the difference is that it was an R/C story amidst a sea of fiction about E/C's tortured relationship. I'm not sure I can honestly include it as a fic rec (for the same reasons that it never made it into my favourites or my R/C community), but it is a landmark of its day.

(Although having just been writing and researching the train service from Paris to Lyon and Dijon, I can't help finding myself now wincing at chapter 3, in which our protagonists travel cross-country on a sleeper service for three days in order to reach Lyon -- I came across a similar episode in a "Frozen" story where the characters spend days on a nonstop train journey from the North of England to London, a trip that could be made in a matter of hours as early as 1848. I think US authors tend to mentally picture 19th century European railways on the scale of the American continent.)

I was thinking about the 'Gothic' Erik-represents-adult-sexuality, Raoul-represents-safe-platonic-love analysis, and -- although it doesn't really bear one way or the other on the argument -- it struck me that while Christine famously allows Erik to kiss her as his redemptive moment (and enchants him by not dying in the process), there is actually a much earlier kiss in the book. Christine actually asks Raoul to kiss her -- she makes the first move, when he would have held back -- which is of course an extremely transgressive liberated adult act in the context of the world they live in. Thus demonstrating yet again that she is the stronger character out of the two of them.

Christine with a spine, indeed.