POTO book: Fairy Tales
In the hopes of spurring myself on to further action, here is something I wrote a few months ago about the place of fairy tales (specifically "Beauty and the Beast" and "Bluebeard") in The Phantom of the Opera. Reading it over, it needs some structural work, and is a bit dry. Do not feel obligated to read it, and if you do, don't feel obligated to give me anything other than your general reaction. Enjoy if you like. I'm keeping this locked, however, as it is part of what I hope will become the book.
The historical path of “Beauty and the Beast” and similar fairy tales should be, and is, the subject of other books. But I start with these tales for several reasons. Most obviously, there are parallels between marriage stories like this one and “Bluebeard” and “Cupid and Psyche” and Phantom, all of which are drawn on to varying degrees in the original and subsequent tellings of Leroux's story.
My other reason for including them in this study is that stories like Phantom (or Dracula or even Pride and Prejudice) are the fairy tales of our time. Though related to folk tales and the oral tradition, all fairy tales were written down. Multiple times. And the time in which they were committed to paper (or film or stage) has always had a major impact on what was included and what the audience was meant to learn, if anything. Phantom parallels “Beauty” not just in certain plot and thematic elements, but in the trajectory those stories have taken from their inception into contemporary depictions. Modern attitudes alter our reception of the “monstrous” within humanity, and both stories have been deeply affected by cultural concerns. In fact, the relatively recent acceptance of the anti-hero and the imperfect as protagonist has moved the stories closer together than they were to begin with.
At heart, the real similarity between the Beast and Erik is their outward monstrosity. Both men are “cursed” into an ugly shape, and both by some trick acquire a young bride who is meant to break the “spell.” But as far as the original stories go, the similarity ends there. In fact, Phantom might be better understood as “Beauty and the Beast” cast in a harshly “modern” light, under which there is no spell and therefore no cure; Beauty kisses the Beast and no Prince appears in his place because Erik's monstrosity is all too human. In Leroux's play between the fantastic (represented both by the Gothic novel Phantom resembles and the operatic world of make believe) and the real (his authorial assertions that it is all true, and his efforts throughout to explain the “magical” happenings as the work of man), the reality of Erik's ultimate condemnation-whatever his redemptive turn at the end-takes over even as the young couple flees North in an attempt to live the fairy tale. Monsters may be worthy of our pity, especially if we created them, but they don't get any breaks.
As an aside, it should be noted that a “magic” mirror also figures prominently in the original “Beauty,” as well as the Disney film. This mirror, unlike the one in Christine's dressing room, shows Beauty what she wants to see-in her case, how her father is doing back home. Erik's mirrors are deceptive and either hide secrets (passages or angels) or present deadly illusions. While this might be read as a turnabout on Beauty's mirror, magic mirrors are common enough and in this case fit in so precisely with the themes of illusion and appearance in Leroux's book that no direct correlation can be proven. I also wish to suggest that the rose which figures so prominently in the advertising (though not the plot) of the Lloyd Webber musical (and in the subsequent movie version) is a nod to the romantic elements borrowed from the fairy tale that are unapparent in the novel. The rose, as a symbol of romantic love and of love's sacrifice, is a prevalent theme in “Beauty and the Beast” stories as well as Kay's Phantom and the 2004 film-but only appear in Leroux as standard fare for successful divas.
There are countless stories of animal husbands from all over the world, with the monster taking various forms. He is a snake, a pig, a bear, or some unspecified beast only vaguely described. However, the first known “beast” in this type of story is only one by rumor: Cupid. “Cupid and Psyche” is a “Beauty and the Beast” tale in the sense that a young girl is married off to a mysterious and supposedly monstrous man whom is later “transformed” (if only in perception) into a princely god. Psyche's jealous sisters, hearing that Psyche lives amidst vast wealth but has a husband who only comes to her at night, convince her that he is a monster and that to make sure, she must light a lamp while he is asleep. Because the story is about “feminine curiosity” (we'll hear more about that later), she gives in. Of course she sees the god of love lying next to her, but her lamp drips three drops of oil on his perfect skin, at which point he wakes up and tells her she's ruined everything. He and the palace disappear, and Psyche must appease her mother-in-law (Venus/Aphrodite) by performing various impossible tasks before being reunited with her husband. While the more familiar Beauty's tale requires less on her part and includes the transformation of the Beast, I include it here because of the similarity of the unseen husband to Christine's Angel of Music, and her destruction of the fragile balance of their relationship through her rather natural curiosity. Christine cannot, of course, journey back into the good graces of a god, but she is required to perform at least the illusion that she is not repulsed.
Curiously, the version of the tale the young Christine would most likely have heard preserves many of the “Cupid and Psyche” elements (the three drops of candle wax, the disappearing castle, the journey back to her husband) in “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” involves not an invisible prince but a white bear, on whose back the bride rides and who becomes a handsome youth at night. Surely a father who told so many northern stories to his daughter-and to Raoul-would have included this Norwegian version.
In other animal husband tales, the beast (like the bear) sloughs off his animal skin at night or in private to reveal a youth of perfect beauty. Inevitably, curiosity on the part of the bride or one of the couple’s parents results in the spell being revealed (or the skin burned) before the husband has a chance to undo it, thereby leading to a period of exile for either the groom or the bride as they fight their way back to one another. This is the case in “The Serpant”, “The Frog Princess” (with roles reversed) and, without consequence, in “The Pig King”, among others. Unlike the more formalized version of “Beauty and the Beast” we all know, the lesson here seems to be about learning patience rather than showing undue curiosity; perhaps in an effort to encourage young couples (especially brides) to give their new spouses the benefit of the doubt so that they might show their true colors.
When “Beauty and the Beast” became a published story, its lesson was a little more direct. The first version, by Madame de Villeneuve, is a meandering tale which has reached us in the condensed form published soon afterward by Madame de Beaumont (in 1757). In the original, the Beast is quite beastly in the sense that he cannot speak properly but only utter a few words. In Beaumont, he can speak but his curse includes the repression of his intelligence. He repeatedly tells Beauty that he's stupid and witless; however, he is good, and the clear lesson here is that goodness trumps all other matters, including wit, in marriage. (You will notice that between beauty, wit and goodness Erik's gifts consist primarily of wit and little else.) Beaumont's Beauty is also “good” to a ridiculous and self-effacing degree. Indeed, the story reads like a manual for female subjugation, first by the father (Beauty insists on taking his place and shows every indication that she's delighted to be eaten instead of her old dad) and then the husband. The reward, of course, is the husband's transformation into exactly what she wants-though since the storyteller doesn't stick around to tell us what happens after the wedding, it's unclear what that is. Virtue is of the utmost importance, for both partners. In fact, the original story ends not with a kiss but with a baptism; Beaumont's Beauty pours water from a stream onto his forehead. The transformative element here, as in Leroux, is not love (in a romantic or erotic sense) but something closer to compassion. For Beaumont, although the textual spell breaker is Beauty's consent to marry the Beast, there's a decided element of rebirth through virtue in her baptismal choice.
This distinction between erotic and compassionate love is clearly paralleled in Erik's “transformative” moment, which seems to be precipitated more by the mingled tears coursing down Erik's sunken cheeks as the rather chaste and uninspiring kiss on his forehead. Christine stands and cries over and with him, and he cannot keep her away from the boy she really loves. Even Erik recognizes this distinction and releases her from her promise.
Though a big difference between the Beast's and Erik's stories is that the latter's transformation is not physical, I should point out that not all beasts become princes right away. Transformation after the wedding night is a surprising theme that crops up in the original Villeneuve “Beauty and the Beast” as well as an Italian version, “The Pig King.” In both cases, the marriage is consummated before the prince's human form appears, adding a strange element to the relationship that has been, perhaps not surprisingly, left out of most versions.
But while instances of explicit bestiality have often been scrubbed from the record, the notion of what the Beast represents has altered since Beaumont's time. Marina Warner traces the development of this story (among others) in From the Beast to the Blonde, finding in it a decidedly erotic emphasis. Initially, in a world of arranged marriages where girls were thrust into relationships with men they knew little about, many stories address that fear in various ways. “When women tell fairy stories, they also... contest fear; they turn their eye on the phantasm of the male Other and recognize it, either rendering it transparent and safe, the self reflected as good, or ridding themselves of it (him) by destruction or transformation.”1 In the case of the well-known “Beauty and the Beast” versions (as opposed to other, similar tales which involve trickery-but more on those later) the Beast is tamed and rendered acceptable and harmless, the point being that being a virtuous wife will lead the apparently monstrous husband to respond in kind and shed his barbaric unfamiliarity.
But as arranged marriages became less common and marriage for love more so, the story, instead of disappearing, began to address somewhat different issues. Marriage became less threatening in and of itself and more about the discovery of the “beast” within humanity, and the erotic emphasis the Beast's relationship with Cupid implies. With the onset of modern life and a more romantic and less fearful relationship with Nature, the Beast's wild male sexuality which must be “tamed” within marriage began to represent a kind of purity; instead of a curse, the Beast “suffers” from a more honest portrayal of the wildness in all of us. Beauty's journey is less about compassion and more about understanding and accepting her own desires as located onto the Beast. What was once a stigma (perhaps because it did not jibe well with arrange marriage)--unbridled (and therefore fulfilled) sexuality-became something to be sought in a relationship, to be accepted:
In popular versions, “Beauty and the Beast” offers a lesson in female yielding and its satisfactions. The Beast stirs desire, Beauty responds from some deep inner need which he awakens... The Beast, formerly the stigmatizing envelope of the fallen male, has become a badge of the salvation he offers; Beauty used to grapple with the material and emotional difficulties of matrimony for young women; now she tends to personify female erotic pleasures in matching and mastering a man who is dark and hairy, rough and wild...2
In fact, many would-be “Beauty and the Beast” stories now end without a transformation, for at this point such a transformation might be seen as an inappropriate rejection of the “beast's” inherent nobility. Even if circumstances or society keep Beauty and the Beast apart, presentations like the “Beauty and the Beast” tv show or Edward Scissorhands preserve the Beast's beastliness, for it is no longer a barrier to romantic love, nor an appropriate location for self-hatred. Disney's Beauty has very little reconciliation to accomplish with her lot, while the Beast is pitted against a “true” monster, Gaston. The focus is no longer the woman's acceptance and the man's transformation, but the beast-man's essential goodness.
To a lesser degree, a similar transformation has occurred in the lesser known story of “Bluebeard” which, on top of being explicitly referenced in The Phantom of the Opera by Erik himself, is actually a more appropriate fairy tale model for the Phantom story. The reference comes up when Erik catches on to Christine's ploy to retrieve the “little bag of life and death” which contains the key to the torture chamber in which Raoul and the Persian are trapped (as narrated by the Persian):
“She said, 'I wanted to go into the room I haven't seen and that you've always hidden from me. It's a woman's curiosity,' she added in a tone meant to be playful but which sounded so false that it succeeded only in heightening Erik's suspicions.
“'I don't like curious women,' Erik replied. 'You'd better remember the Bluebeard story and be careful. Come now, give me my pouch. Give me my pouch. Leave that key along, inquisitive girl.'3
This reference was lost on this reader as a teenager, while the “Beauty and the Beast” elements seemed obvious. However, as we will see, Erik's observation is apt and it is telling that Leroux chose to invoke this darker version of the arranged marriage story which is essentially a warning against the beastly husband rather than a reassurance that such things will work out with a little kindness.
Charles Perrault's written version, published in 1697, concerns a demonic fellow quite literally named Bluebeard, whose facial hair is apparently so horrible it makes women flee in terror from him. He throws a party for the friends and family of two sisters, one of whom eventually marries him. Things go well for a short while until Bluebeard announces that he will be going out of town. He gives her the keys to everything in the house but warns her that the small key opens a room she must never unlock.
The wife agrees, and Bluebeard sets off on his trip. But she cannot resist, and when she opens the forbidden room she is confronted with an abattoir containing the corpses of several women Bluebeard has married and murdered in succession. In her fright she drops the key, which lands on the bloody floor, but no matter what she does she cannot wash the key clean. It is by this sign that Bluebeard, upon his return, knows that she has disobeyed him and sentences her to death. It is only by delaying him until her brothers come to her rescue that the woman escapes the fate of Bluebeard's previous wives; the ending sees her taking possession of Bluebeard's entire estate and marrying anew.
Other versions flesh out Bluebeard's evil ways and introduce cleverer heroines; for instance, some (“Fitcher's Bride,” “Silver Nose”) involve a succession of brides (usually sisters), the last of whom has the presence of mind not to take the key (or egg, in some) into the room and is able to put her sisters back together and trick Bluebeard into letting them all go. No mention is ever made in these stories about why parents would send successive daughters off to marry the same man, though that may just speak to a possible theme of the dangers of childbirth and low survival rate of mothers. What all such stories have in common are “a forbidden chamber, an agent of prohibition who also metes out punishments, and a figure who violates the prohibition.”4
In Marina Warner's study of the “Bluebeard” story, she points out that in Medieval times a beard's relationship to both the Devil and the goat implied lust, and that in Perrault's time beards were not in fashion and so implied outsider status to the villain. In fact, many illustrations and retellings include Middle Eastern elements, curious when one takes into account both the Persian's status as hero and Erik's ambiguous “foreign” qualities despite his efforts to present an outward appearance of banal middle-class Frenchness. Even more curious is the Calvino version of the story, “Silver Nose,” in which the titular character has no nose (the silver one is fake) and is, in fact, the Devil. Instead of a bloody room he keeps a door to Hell in his house, and the first two sisters are found out because by opening the door, they singe the flower he has put in their hair. Both “deformities” are relevant to Phantom, and the forbidden room could be either the torture chamber or, indeed, Erik's face.
Like Erik, much of the criticism and moralizing around “Bluebeard” has centered on the feminine fault of curiosity: “folklorists have shown surprising interpretive confidence in reading Perrault's 'Bluebeard' as a story about a woman's marital disobedience or sexual infidelity rather than about her husband's murderous violence.”5 The bloodied key isn't difficult to read as a sexual metaphor, and Erik's jealousy of Raoul certainly has that element. What's interesting is that Leroux's story does not carry a moral about “feminine curiosity”; there is no sense that Christine ought to be punished for seeking the truth about her captor's face or her fiance's fate. Erik finds fault, of course, but the text is far more concerned with his monstrousness (and eventual redemption) than her curiosity.
In the end, Phantom's fairy tale antecedents include both “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard.” “Beauty” includes the compassionate response to the monster's fate, and the redemptive element that is partially included in the Phantom story. “Bluebeard,” however, more accurately addresses Erik's barbaric behavior and ends, like Phantom, with the villain's death and the bride's rescue from an inappropriate union. And both stories, like Phantom, have morphed into explorations of changing attitudes towards sex and marriage: “the heroines of twentieth-century stories about marriage to a beast no longer reject him: they are shown welcoming the discoveries the union brings them.”6 While not every version of Phantom follows or even moves towards this trajectory, this is a theme we will be revisiting in the course of this book.
Overall, Leroux's choice to draw upon fairy tales in a book edged by “verifiable” evidence that it's all true is interesting. Phantom is balanced between these impulses: on the one hand, Leroux's narrator goes to great lengths to convince the reader that it's all possible, and on the other he presents us with a fantastic tale, all set within the opera house where illusion is the whole point but where we can see the workings backstage. Every main character is a listener or teller of tales, and on top of that fulfills their own fairy tale archetype. Leroux dispels the “magic” of the events surrounding the Opera by locating it “rationally” in a phantom who is a man. At first glance this implies there is no magic-but it also asserts that these things do happen, they just have an explanation. In the end, the effect is to recast the fantastic into a form acceptable to modern sophistication; the gamble is an assumption that it doesn't reduce the magic at all to explain it, if the explanation involves a mysterious masked genius whose very existence smacks of the fantastic, however reasonably one uncovers his secrets.
The historical path of “Beauty and the Beast” and similar fairy tales should be, and is, the subject of other books. But I start with these tales for several reasons. Most obviously, there are parallels between marriage stories like this one and “Bluebeard” and “Cupid and Psyche” and Phantom, all of which are drawn on to varying degrees in the original and subsequent tellings of Leroux's story.
My other reason for including them in this study is that stories like Phantom (or Dracula or even Pride and Prejudice) are the fairy tales of our time. Though related to folk tales and the oral tradition, all fairy tales were written down. Multiple times. And the time in which they were committed to paper (or film or stage) has always had a major impact on what was included and what the audience was meant to learn, if anything. Phantom parallels “Beauty” not just in certain plot and thematic elements, but in the trajectory those stories have taken from their inception into contemporary depictions. Modern attitudes alter our reception of the “monstrous” within humanity, and both stories have been deeply affected by cultural concerns. In fact, the relatively recent acceptance of the anti-hero and the imperfect as protagonist has moved the stories closer together than they were to begin with.
At heart, the real similarity between the Beast and Erik is their outward monstrosity. Both men are “cursed” into an ugly shape, and both by some trick acquire a young bride who is meant to break the “spell.” But as far as the original stories go, the similarity ends there. In fact, Phantom might be better understood as “Beauty and the Beast” cast in a harshly “modern” light, under which there is no spell and therefore no cure; Beauty kisses the Beast and no Prince appears in his place because Erik's monstrosity is all too human. In Leroux's play between the fantastic (represented both by the Gothic novel Phantom resembles and the operatic world of make believe) and the real (his authorial assertions that it is all true, and his efforts throughout to explain the “magical” happenings as the work of man), the reality of Erik's ultimate condemnation-whatever his redemptive turn at the end-takes over even as the young couple flees North in an attempt to live the fairy tale. Monsters may be worthy of our pity, especially if we created them, but they don't get any breaks.
As an aside, it should be noted that a “magic” mirror also figures prominently in the original “Beauty,” as well as the Disney film. This mirror, unlike the one in Christine's dressing room, shows Beauty what she wants to see-in her case, how her father is doing back home. Erik's mirrors are deceptive and either hide secrets (passages or angels) or present deadly illusions. While this might be read as a turnabout on Beauty's mirror, magic mirrors are common enough and in this case fit in so precisely with the themes of illusion and appearance in Leroux's book that no direct correlation can be proven. I also wish to suggest that the rose which figures so prominently in the advertising (though not the plot) of the Lloyd Webber musical (and in the subsequent movie version) is a nod to the romantic elements borrowed from the fairy tale that are unapparent in the novel. The rose, as a symbol of romantic love and of love's sacrifice, is a prevalent theme in “Beauty and the Beast” stories as well as Kay's Phantom and the 2004 film-but only appear in Leroux as standard fare for successful divas.
There are countless stories of animal husbands from all over the world, with the monster taking various forms. He is a snake, a pig, a bear, or some unspecified beast only vaguely described. However, the first known “beast” in this type of story is only one by rumor: Cupid. “Cupid and Psyche” is a “Beauty and the Beast” tale in the sense that a young girl is married off to a mysterious and supposedly monstrous man whom is later “transformed” (if only in perception) into a princely god. Psyche's jealous sisters, hearing that Psyche lives amidst vast wealth but has a husband who only comes to her at night, convince her that he is a monster and that to make sure, she must light a lamp while he is asleep. Because the story is about “feminine curiosity” (we'll hear more about that later), she gives in. Of course she sees the god of love lying next to her, but her lamp drips three drops of oil on his perfect skin, at which point he wakes up and tells her she's ruined everything. He and the palace disappear, and Psyche must appease her mother-in-law (Venus/Aphrodite) by performing various impossible tasks before being reunited with her husband. While the more familiar Beauty's tale requires less on her part and includes the transformation of the Beast, I include it here because of the similarity of the unseen husband to Christine's Angel of Music, and her destruction of the fragile balance of their relationship through her rather natural curiosity. Christine cannot, of course, journey back into the good graces of a god, but she is required to perform at least the illusion that she is not repulsed.
Curiously, the version of the tale the young Christine would most likely have heard preserves many of the “Cupid and Psyche” elements (the three drops of candle wax, the disappearing castle, the journey back to her husband) in “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” involves not an invisible prince but a white bear, on whose back the bride rides and who becomes a handsome youth at night. Surely a father who told so many northern stories to his daughter-and to Raoul-would have included this Norwegian version.
In other animal husband tales, the beast (like the bear) sloughs off his animal skin at night or in private to reveal a youth of perfect beauty. Inevitably, curiosity on the part of the bride or one of the couple’s parents results in the spell being revealed (or the skin burned) before the husband has a chance to undo it, thereby leading to a period of exile for either the groom or the bride as they fight their way back to one another. This is the case in “The Serpant”, “The Frog Princess” (with roles reversed) and, without consequence, in “The Pig King”, among others. Unlike the more formalized version of “Beauty and the Beast” we all know, the lesson here seems to be about learning patience rather than showing undue curiosity; perhaps in an effort to encourage young couples (especially brides) to give their new spouses the benefit of the doubt so that they might show their true colors.
When “Beauty and the Beast” became a published story, its lesson was a little more direct. The first version, by Madame de Villeneuve, is a meandering tale which has reached us in the condensed form published soon afterward by Madame de Beaumont (in 1757). In the original, the Beast is quite beastly in the sense that he cannot speak properly but only utter a few words. In Beaumont, he can speak but his curse includes the repression of his intelligence. He repeatedly tells Beauty that he's stupid and witless; however, he is good, and the clear lesson here is that goodness trumps all other matters, including wit, in marriage. (You will notice that between beauty, wit and goodness Erik's gifts consist primarily of wit and little else.) Beaumont's Beauty is also “good” to a ridiculous and self-effacing degree. Indeed, the story reads like a manual for female subjugation, first by the father (Beauty insists on taking his place and shows every indication that she's delighted to be eaten instead of her old dad) and then the husband. The reward, of course, is the husband's transformation into exactly what she wants-though since the storyteller doesn't stick around to tell us what happens after the wedding, it's unclear what that is. Virtue is of the utmost importance, for both partners. In fact, the original story ends not with a kiss but with a baptism; Beaumont's Beauty pours water from a stream onto his forehead. The transformative element here, as in Leroux, is not love (in a romantic or erotic sense) but something closer to compassion. For Beaumont, although the textual spell breaker is Beauty's consent to marry the Beast, there's a decided element of rebirth through virtue in her baptismal choice.
This distinction between erotic and compassionate love is clearly paralleled in Erik's “transformative” moment, which seems to be precipitated more by the mingled tears coursing down Erik's sunken cheeks as the rather chaste and uninspiring kiss on his forehead. Christine stands and cries over and with him, and he cannot keep her away from the boy she really loves. Even Erik recognizes this distinction and releases her from her promise.
Though a big difference between the Beast's and Erik's stories is that the latter's transformation is not physical, I should point out that not all beasts become princes right away. Transformation after the wedding night is a surprising theme that crops up in the original Villeneuve “Beauty and the Beast” as well as an Italian version, “The Pig King.” In both cases, the marriage is consummated before the prince's human form appears, adding a strange element to the relationship that has been, perhaps not surprisingly, left out of most versions.
But while instances of explicit bestiality have often been scrubbed from the record, the notion of what the Beast represents has altered since Beaumont's time. Marina Warner traces the development of this story (among others) in From the Beast to the Blonde, finding in it a decidedly erotic emphasis. Initially, in a world of arranged marriages where girls were thrust into relationships with men they knew little about, many stories address that fear in various ways. “When women tell fairy stories, they also... contest fear; they turn their eye on the phantasm of the male Other and recognize it, either rendering it transparent and safe, the self reflected as good, or ridding themselves of it (him) by destruction or transformation.”1 In the case of the well-known “Beauty and the Beast” versions (as opposed to other, similar tales which involve trickery-but more on those later) the Beast is tamed and rendered acceptable and harmless, the point being that being a virtuous wife will lead the apparently monstrous husband to respond in kind and shed his barbaric unfamiliarity.
But as arranged marriages became less common and marriage for love more so, the story, instead of disappearing, began to address somewhat different issues. Marriage became less threatening in and of itself and more about the discovery of the “beast” within humanity, and the erotic emphasis the Beast's relationship with Cupid implies. With the onset of modern life and a more romantic and less fearful relationship with Nature, the Beast's wild male sexuality which must be “tamed” within marriage began to represent a kind of purity; instead of a curse, the Beast “suffers” from a more honest portrayal of the wildness in all of us. Beauty's journey is less about compassion and more about understanding and accepting her own desires as located onto the Beast. What was once a stigma (perhaps because it did not jibe well with arrange marriage)--unbridled (and therefore fulfilled) sexuality-became something to be sought in a relationship, to be accepted:
In popular versions, “Beauty and the Beast” offers a lesson in female yielding and its satisfactions. The Beast stirs desire, Beauty responds from some deep inner need which he awakens... The Beast, formerly the stigmatizing envelope of the fallen male, has become a badge of the salvation he offers; Beauty used to grapple with the material and emotional difficulties of matrimony for young women; now she tends to personify female erotic pleasures in matching and mastering a man who is dark and hairy, rough and wild...2
In fact, many would-be “Beauty and the Beast” stories now end without a transformation, for at this point such a transformation might be seen as an inappropriate rejection of the “beast's” inherent nobility. Even if circumstances or society keep Beauty and the Beast apart, presentations like the “Beauty and the Beast” tv show or Edward Scissorhands preserve the Beast's beastliness, for it is no longer a barrier to romantic love, nor an appropriate location for self-hatred. Disney's Beauty has very little reconciliation to accomplish with her lot, while the Beast is pitted against a “true” monster, Gaston. The focus is no longer the woman's acceptance and the man's transformation, but the beast-man's essential goodness.
To a lesser degree, a similar transformation has occurred in the lesser known story of “Bluebeard” which, on top of being explicitly referenced in The Phantom of the Opera by Erik himself, is actually a more appropriate fairy tale model for the Phantom story. The reference comes up when Erik catches on to Christine's ploy to retrieve the “little bag of life and death” which contains the key to the torture chamber in which Raoul and the Persian are trapped (as narrated by the Persian):
“She said, 'I wanted to go into the room I haven't seen and that you've always hidden from me. It's a woman's curiosity,' she added in a tone meant to be playful but which sounded so false that it succeeded only in heightening Erik's suspicions.
“'I don't like curious women,' Erik replied. 'You'd better remember the Bluebeard story and be careful. Come now, give me my pouch. Give me my pouch. Leave that key along, inquisitive girl.'3
This reference was lost on this reader as a teenager, while the “Beauty and the Beast” elements seemed obvious. However, as we will see, Erik's observation is apt and it is telling that Leroux chose to invoke this darker version of the arranged marriage story which is essentially a warning against the beastly husband rather than a reassurance that such things will work out with a little kindness.
Charles Perrault's written version, published in 1697, concerns a demonic fellow quite literally named Bluebeard, whose facial hair is apparently so horrible it makes women flee in terror from him. He throws a party for the friends and family of two sisters, one of whom eventually marries him. Things go well for a short while until Bluebeard announces that he will be going out of town. He gives her the keys to everything in the house but warns her that the small key opens a room she must never unlock.
The wife agrees, and Bluebeard sets off on his trip. But she cannot resist, and when she opens the forbidden room she is confronted with an abattoir containing the corpses of several women Bluebeard has married and murdered in succession. In her fright she drops the key, which lands on the bloody floor, but no matter what she does she cannot wash the key clean. It is by this sign that Bluebeard, upon his return, knows that she has disobeyed him and sentences her to death. It is only by delaying him until her brothers come to her rescue that the woman escapes the fate of Bluebeard's previous wives; the ending sees her taking possession of Bluebeard's entire estate and marrying anew.
Other versions flesh out Bluebeard's evil ways and introduce cleverer heroines; for instance, some (“Fitcher's Bride,” “Silver Nose”) involve a succession of brides (usually sisters), the last of whom has the presence of mind not to take the key (or egg, in some) into the room and is able to put her sisters back together and trick Bluebeard into letting them all go. No mention is ever made in these stories about why parents would send successive daughters off to marry the same man, though that may just speak to a possible theme of the dangers of childbirth and low survival rate of mothers. What all such stories have in common are “a forbidden chamber, an agent of prohibition who also metes out punishments, and a figure who violates the prohibition.”4
In Marina Warner's study of the “Bluebeard” story, she points out that in Medieval times a beard's relationship to both the Devil and the goat implied lust, and that in Perrault's time beards were not in fashion and so implied outsider status to the villain. In fact, many illustrations and retellings include Middle Eastern elements, curious when one takes into account both the Persian's status as hero and Erik's ambiguous “foreign” qualities despite his efforts to present an outward appearance of banal middle-class Frenchness. Even more curious is the Calvino version of the story, “Silver Nose,” in which the titular character has no nose (the silver one is fake) and is, in fact, the Devil. Instead of a bloody room he keeps a door to Hell in his house, and the first two sisters are found out because by opening the door, they singe the flower he has put in their hair. Both “deformities” are relevant to Phantom, and the forbidden room could be either the torture chamber or, indeed, Erik's face.
Like Erik, much of the criticism and moralizing around “Bluebeard” has centered on the feminine fault of curiosity: “folklorists have shown surprising interpretive confidence in reading Perrault's 'Bluebeard' as a story about a woman's marital disobedience or sexual infidelity rather than about her husband's murderous violence.”5 The bloodied key isn't difficult to read as a sexual metaphor, and Erik's jealousy of Raoul certainly has that element. What's interesting is that Leroux's story does not carry a moral about “feminine curiosity”; there is no sense that Christine ought to be punished for seeking the truth about her captor's face or her fiance's fate. Erik finds fault, of course, but the text is far more concerned with his monstrousness (and eventual redemption) than her curiosity.
In the end, Phantom's fairy tale antecedents include both “Beauty and the Beast” and “Bluebeard.” “Beauty” includes the compassionate response to the monster's fate, and the redemptive element that is partially included in the Phantom story. “Bluebeard,” however, more accurately addresses Erik's barbaric behavior and ends, like Phantom, with the villain's death and the bride's rescue from an inappropriate union. And both stories, like Phantom, have morphed into explorations of changing attitudes towards sex and marriage: “the heroines of twentieth-century stories about marriage to a beast no longer reject him: they are shown welcoming the discoveries the union brings them.”6 While not every version of Phantom follows or even moves towards this trajectory, this is a theme we will be revisiting in the course of this book.
Overall, Leroux's choice to draw upon fairy tales in a book edged by “verifiable” evidence that it's all true is interesting. Phantom is balanced between these impulses: on the one hand, Leroux's narrator goes to great lengths to convince the reader that it's all possible, and on the other he presents us with a fantastic tale, all set within the opera house where illusion is the whole point but where we can see the workings backstage. Every main character is a listener or teller of tales, and on top of that fulfills their own fairy tale archetype. Leroux dispels the “magic” of the events surrounding the Opera by locating it “rationally” in a phantom who is a man. At first glance this implies there is no magic-but it also asserts that these things do happen, they just have an explanation. In the end, the effect is to recast the fantastic into a form acceptable to modern sophistication; the gamble is an assumption that it doesn't reduce the magic at all to explain it, if the explanation involves a mysterious masked genius whose very existence smacks of the fantastic, however reasonably one uncovers his secrets.