Abstract
This paper reviews Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in the context of the social and cultural changes of the metropolis Paris at the end of the 19th century. The Phantom of the Opera, a success in the literary world and widely proliferated in its musical and film renditions afterward, is considered and interpreted mainly in the literary and artistic tradition. In this paper, however, this work will be considered from an urban sociological perspective, especially from that of Walter Benjamin, who developed the theory of the urban culture, focusing on the dreaming collectives at the end of the 19th century. Leroux’s novel can be regarded as an exemplary social form of the collective dreams of the period expressed in arts, architectures, popular stories and films and other popular arts. Given the premise that the dream images in the novel, so-called kitsch, reflect the fears and desires of the bourgeois middle class that were pathologized in the figure of the ghost, this paper reveals the cultural, social and transnational implications of the Ghost-Image in relation to the rapidly changing borders of the 19th century metropolis.
Highlights
This paper reviews Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in the context of the social and cultural changes of the metropolis Paris at the end of the 19th century
Despite the criminal acts of the ghost that lead the narrative in The Phantom of the Opera, a conspicuous detective-figure does not appear; the character of the Persian seems to take on the role of the detective implicitly
The opera house, in which the high bourgeois cultural goods had been performed, already showed a certain gap in the cultural preference of the modern city at the time in which other modern-style music had begun to appear. This cultural change is suggested in the plot of the novel, where art finds its supreme practice only through a decaying, older generation, namely the father of Christine and the ugly ghost
Summary
Walter Benjamin lauded The Phantom of the Opera (1911) as “one of the great novels of the nineteenth century” and said that Gaston Leroux (1868–1927) “has brought the genre to its apotheosis” ([1], p. 447). Cross-reading of the two authors’ text will be offered here focusing on the “collective dreaming” of the fin de siècle, where social and cultural borders have started to be entangled and kitsch images—unoriginal, readily available for consumption, and exhibiting a deep relation to technical reproduction, ranging from popular art and propaganda to metropolitan architecture and film—have been engendered from the abyss of the blurred borders. Thereby, this exploration does not begin from the assumption that any entities exist behind the collective dreaming, but from the thesis: “the Image is an encounter” This paper will reconstruct the semantic of the ghost-Image on metropolitan borders in the cultural, social and transnational context with the assumption that it is related to the way Parisians come to terms with the drastic contemporary changes of the metropolis
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