This era is the backdrop for Gaston Leroux’s early life and for The Phantom of the Opera. While this was attempted through a repression of sexual desires and engaging in intercourse only in moderation, it also entailed a necessity to understand these desires fully, and indeed much of the scientific inquiry of the time was to that end. Sexuality may have been terrifying, but the Victorians responded by seeking total control over it. Freud himself, the originator of the idea of psychosexual development, emerged from this era, beginning his research into the human mind around the same year in which The Phantom of the Opera is set. Academicians demonstrated a fascination with the sexual that at times seems like a perverse fixation. However, in this same era, there was a drastic increase in prostitution, homosexuality, and other forms of what society deemed sexual deviance. This dichotomy made the idea of sex and the idea of procreation completely divorced from each other, associating sex not with the creation of new life but instead with death and decay. The former were idolized by the cult of domesticity in works such as Coventry Patmore’s poem “The Angel in the House”, and the latter were demonized in works such as Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula. Sex was therefore something extremely dangerous, and chastity and virginity were highly valued.Īs evidenced by the strong entrenchment of what Freud called the Madonna-whore complex, there was no middle ground between the two, particularly for women, who were either seen as chaste maternal figures or sexualized monsters. While the belief in “spermatorrhea” – too frequent seminal emissions leading to impotency – which lead to the portrayal of female sexuality as a life-draining rather than life giving force has since been abandoned, Victorians in the latter half of the nineteenth century were also aware of sexually transmitted diseases, most notably syphilis, which medicine of the time could do little to treat (Copley 85-86). It has been said that Victorian morality feared sex, and to a certain extent this is true, however this fear was founded on science, only some of it faulty. Outwardly, people of this time had very stringent morals, especially when it came to sex, which was in many ways a strictly taboo subject.
In a time full of such dualisms and contradictions, one would expect that views on sexuality would be likewise schizophrenic, and indeed they were. It is in this era, in approximately the year 1880, that The Phantom of the Opera takes place, some thirty years prior to its publication. That these two ideas were held simultaneously demonstrates the duality of the age, and sets the stage for the cultural identity crisis that Western society would face at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand, it was the end of the old ways, on the other, the beginning of the new (Hall 5-6). The former sees it as an era coming to a close, the latter as a time of artistic and social rejuvenation. The two terms denote two contrasting ideas of the time period. Leroux, born in 1868, came of age in the late Victorian period, a time known in France as both the fin de siècle – the end of the century – and la belle époque – the beautiful era. The original novel, titled Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, was written by French journalist and detective fiction author Gaston Leroux and published in 1910. This essay shall explore these changing interpretations and how they reflect societal values with regards to chaste and sexual relationships between men and women. Though always centered around more or less the same three principal characters – Erik the Opera Ghost, Christine Daaé and Raoul de Chagney – or their approximates, each successive adaptation reinterprets these characters and the themes they represent within the context of the time period. In the century since its original publication, the story of The Phantom of the Opera has been adapted into numerous films, plays and novels, becoming a cultural icon, if not within its native French culture, then certainly in the imagination of the English-speaking world. So I thought I'd share.Įvolving Views of Chastity and Sexuality in The Phantom of the Opera Even before I received my grade, I was quite proud of it. At fourteen pages, it is the longest paper I have ever written, and also the one which I enjoyed writing the most. For my final, I wrote a paper and did a presentation on The Phantom of the Opera. Bookwrm17This past semester, I took a class called "Making Sense of Monsters and Masks" which focused on themes of masking and monstrousness in francophone literature.