Society Unmasking: The Phantom Of The Opera

Newton, Nahaiti; Stubbs, Eklesia; Hill, Markell; Bokknight, Jaylon; Hursey, Gavin

Dr. Amanda Litfin

ELA 10 - Period 6

03 March 2017 Society Unmasked From physical deformities and mental illnesses, society has oppressed people who differ from normality. In those times, these issues were kept secret and their problems were considered irrelevant. However, with times changing alongside advancements in education, people have socially and morally accepted these flaws, allowing for the proper treatments necessary. Gaston Leroux incorporated symbolism, character depth, and history on the real life Opera House to create The Phantom of the Opera, impacting how we handle modern societal situations and injustices.

The Phantom, Erik,

Leroux uses several objects as symbols as to who and what the Phantom, or Erik, is. The most prominent of them being the Phantom’s mask. As the Persian stated after hearing Erik claim that he had found love, “ his horrible, unparalleled and repulsive ugliness put him without the pale of humanity; and it often seemed to me that, for this reason, he no longer believed that he had any duty toward the human race (Leroux 203).” Erik knows that he was considered a monster due to his deformities, and relied on the mask as an escape from his reality. Erik uses the mask to hide his true self from Christine in the beginning, who eventually learned to love him for his faults. His masked self-was for the general public, because of the torture and discriminations he faced, whereas he only took off his mask to face those he cared for. This use of duality can be seen throughout modern society, where people have more than one “face”, one being how we confront everyday situations and other people, and the other being what’s behind closed

The incident of the chandelier killing, the labyrinth under the opera house.Gaston at the time was a court reporter and had time to actually look into the opera house creating his novel. As stated in the novel “ The catalyst for The Phantom of the Opera by his own account, was a private visit to the usually sealed-off lower depths of the Opera House during which his curiosity and his imagination were piqued by both the preserved traces of the building’s historical and political importance and the palpable sense of secrecy that the underground labyrinth evoked (Roche xiv)” Gatson was present when the chandelier incident happened a lady named Madame Chomette was hit by the seven-ton fixture on May 21, 1896. They at first thought the coincidence was a terrorist attack, but soon later realized the chandelier was released from counterweights that were attached to the disk. As we recalled in the novel Erik made the chandelier fall and murder a woman during a performance. “The chandelier had crashed down upon the head of the wretched woman who had come to the Opera for the first time in her life, the one whom M.Richard had appointed to succeed Mame Giry, the ghost box-keeper, in her functions” (Leroux