The Phantom of the Opera: The Original Novel

“In Paris, our lives are one masked ball; and the foyer of the ballet is the last place in which two men…would have made the mistake of betraying their grief, however genuine it might be…None will ever be a true Parisian who has not learned to wear a mask of gaiety over his sorrows and one of sadness, boredom or indifference over his inward joy.” However, for Gaston Leroux’ Phantom of the Opera, the mask symbolizes the human striving toward homogeneity and the grotesques we become in our attempt to conceal our uniquenesses. The “some one” society idealizes as “normal” becomes the Phantom’s chorus: “You must make your choice! The wedding mass or the requiem mass!...You must take a resolution and know your own mind! I can’t go on living like this, like a mole in a burrow!...I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else and to take her out on Sundays. I have invented a mask that makes me look like anybody…Love me and you shall see! All I wanted was to be loved for myself.” “I’m sick and tired of having a forest and a torture-chamber in my house and of living like a mountebank, in a house with a false bottom!...I want to have a nice, quiet flat, with ordinary doors and windows and a wife inside it, like anybody else!…you don’t love me…but no matter, you will!...Once, you could not look at my mask because you knew what was behind…And now you don’t mind looking at it and you forget what is behind!...One can get used to everything…if one wishes.” “He asked only to be ‘some one,’ like everybody else. But he was too ugly! And he had to hide his genius or use it to play tricks with, when, with an ordinary face, he would have been one of the most distinguished of mankind! He had a heart that could have held the empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar. Ah, yes, we must needs pity the Opera ghost.” Gaston Leroux’ Phantom of the Opera is a rebellion against the colonialist, heteropatriarchal, monocular perspective that there is one way to be human and invites multiple, equitable potentialities of experiencing a multidimensional world.

Adds more depth after seeing the musical.

Kind of confusing, weird he lives in a theater

Trash