![]() I therefore want to begin with these partially forgotten aspects of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra. These conflicts and the struggles within them are especially visible in the most important early features of Leroux’s book, which the adaptations vaguely echo even while working to bury those original “horrors” from sight. The Phantom, I would argue, has survived as it has partly because its deepest “undergrounds” contain conflicts among class-based attitudes and ideologies that are vitally important to the self-fashioning of the urban middle class in the modern Western world. Understanding the cultural roots and primary functions of this story-the main objective in this study-means, first of all, bringing these elements and their foundations to light. Nearly all the famous adaptations of the novel, Gaston Leroux’s Le Fantôme de l’Opéra (1910), have skewed or altered key aspects of it to the point of obscuring them altogether. The original foundations of The Phantom of the Opera have become more mysterious with time. This book should interest all students of the history of Western culture, as well as those especially fascinated by Gothic fiction, opera, musical theatre, and film. The Phantom of the Opera - in varying ways over time - turns out like the 'Gothic' tradition it extends, to be deeply connected to Western self-fashioning in the face of conflicted attitudes about class, gender, race, religious beliefs, Freudian psychology, economic and international tensions, and especially the shifting and permeable boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture. Using extensive historical and textual evidence and drawing on perspectives from several theories of cultural study, this book argues that we need this tale told and reconfigured because it provides us ways to both confront and disguise how we have fashioned our senses of identity in the Western middle class. It proposes answers to the question, 'why do we keep needing this story told and retold in the Western world?' by revealing the history of deep cultural tensions that underlie the novel and each major adaptation. ![]() This is the most comprehensive analytical study ever done of The Phantom of the Opera in its many different versions from the original Gaston Leroux novel to the present day.
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