The Phantom's Redemption

Those Eyes That Burn by muirin

“The Phantom of the Opera” by Gaston Leroux is a strange case. Not so much because of its content, but because of its background. The novel itself didn’t do overly well and is not read much today, but the story of the Phantom, his love interest, and her heroic lover has been adapted over and over again through all kinds of media. The interesting thing about the original story, though, is that it actually gives the Phantom, its villain, a redemption in the end.

Leroux frames the story as a mystery. Years after everything has happened, he has come to the opera house to find out what happened with that chandelier (which the Phantom drops on the audience after his blackmail demands have not been met). This allows for Leroux, who wrote mysteries before, to tell the story in a way which he was familiar with and which the audience did expect from him. But in its heart, the story of the Phantom is not a mystery - it’s Gothic horror. It has the innocent ingénue as the heroine, the brave (though somewhat flawed) hero, and the horrible, disfigured villain. It has dark hiding places, underground dungeons, and many other pieces of the Gothic horror novel.

That might be why the first half (roughly) of the novel is a little tedious at times. As the reader, you want to know about that Phantom you’ve read about in the title. You want to hear and see more of him, but instead you’re treated to a whodunit with different suspects and red herrings. Then comes the moment when the Phantom is named - not just as the Opera Ghost, which is the moniker he goes by in his blackmail notes, but as Erik. Yes, the Phantom has a name, but just one - must be an artist thing. He even has a background story. And he has a redemption arc of a kind - a redemption arc which a lot of the variations in different media have denied him.

To put the second half of the novel short: Erik kidnaps Christine, the heroine, her fiancé Raoul and the Persian, who has known Erik from before, follow her, but are trapped by Erik. He then uses them as additional pressure points to make Christine stay with him. She agrees (this is a pulpy, early-twentieth-century novel, so what did you expect?) and allows him to kiss her, even kissing him in return (no, despite the French setting, there’s no French kissing, it’s all pretty harmless). Erik, completely floored by the compassion shown to him, realizes the error of his ways and lets Christine (and his other prisoners go). He dies soon afterwards and Christine buries him, as she promised. The End.

Well, not completely the end. Leroux makes use of his ‘I researched this’ format to give the reader more information on Erik after the end of the actual story, detailing how Erik was, indeed, never loved because of his disfigured face and drifted around (despite being from a wealthy background), always in the shadows, always despised and hated. That, so says Leroux, is part of the reason for his actions. He doesn’t excuse Erik’s crimes (he garrottes several people, in addition to unleashing the chandelier, and also blackmails the owners of the opera into paying him or else…), but he points out that Erik wasn’t born evil and that there were reasons for his development outside of his control. For the villain of a pulpy Gothic horror novel, that is actually a surprise. They tend to either die horribly or they are left alive for eventual use in a sequel. Neither happens to Erik - he has a full arc and dies peacefully and ‘from love’ after finally having known compassion and another human’s willing touch.

The novel gives Erik a redemption of a kind, as does the Webber musical (provided you do the only sane thing and ignore “Love Never Dies”), but many other versions of the story do not. Partially, they give Erik much less of a reason for his actions - instead of having him disfigured at birth, which means a lifetime of being an outcast, they put the disfigurement into the story itself, which weakens the premise. Partially, they refuse him the redemption arc by introducing an angry mob to hunt him down or other stuff of that kind - denying him the chance to see the error of his ways and act accordingly.

That’s sad, because, when all’s said and done, “The Phantom of the Opera” is actually a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ kind of story - and the Beast normally does get a redemption. Erik might not turn into a prince and live happily ever after, but the end of the novel gives the impression that, after a lifetime of hurt and loneliness, he find peace. That is a happily ever after, no matter how short the ‘ever after’ is.

One of the biggest problem of many of the versions and rip-offs of Phantom is that they give the Phantom the disfigurement as part of the story. It’s not something which happened in the past - or even at birth, as with Erik -, it’s something which happens right here, in front of the audience. And as a result of this injury, the Phantom snaps. Remember the Christopher Nolan Two-Face? Essentially the same. Injury, horror, complete switch of personality, evilness. And that’s not exactly something you can see as a mitigating factor, because there’s too much of a change for what happened. It makes the Phantom more of a villain than he is already. Which means everything this Phantom does is less easy to explain (not excuse, as Leroux doesn’t excuse Erik’s deeds at all) than with the original. I mean, I see why the idea of showing the Phantom being born, the horrors of being doused in acid or burned or otherwise severely injured, lend themselves to a horror story, especially with a visual medium as TV or movie.

There is always an unmasking scene, though, which will uncover whatever horrid disfigurements the Phantom has - and they’ve often fallen short. Leroux describes the Phantom’s face as death-like. Erik has no nose, his face is gaunt, his eyes are sunken, but have a burning quality (see muirin’s artwork above). It’s a face to shy away from, but also one rarely put on well. Webber’s Phantom actually does only have a half-scarred face, because it turned out that a full mask didn’t work together with the microphone the actor needed to carry - that’s why the Phantom wears a half-mask on stage, but the logo shows a full mask, which only leaves the mouth and chin uncovered (the logo was done well before the wardrobe and makeup).

On the other hand, the Phantom being hunted down by a mob (instead of one or two heroes climbing into his domain to face him) robs the Phantom of the chance to see the error of his ways and change. He’ll be either killed or driven away, instead of finding his inner peace and letting go of what he thinks he has a right to demand - Christine. It turns the Phantom into a regular pulp and Gothic horror villain who has to be destroyed to keep up the status quo. Leroux gave Erik that arc for a reason, showed that his Phantom not only was human (something which some critics didn’t like at all), but also capable of changing and growing. It was surprisingly modern for a novel which saw its first print in book in 1911 (the same year as “Fantomas”) and its release in magazines even before that. Pure evil villains were still a staple then and would continue to be one for quite a while, yet, Leroux went against the standard with his character.

“The Phantom of the Opera” is much more interesting as a movie or a musical than it is as a novel, but it still pays to take a look at the original to see a very unusual handling of the piece’s villain.