The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and Its Progeny

Jerrold E. Hogle. The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in Leroux's Novel and Its Progeny. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. 262. $90.00.

It is a delight to note that Jerrold E. Hogle, a familiar name to anyone working in the field of Gothic Studies, has published a book on Gaston Leroux's Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, which appeared in 1910 and which, Hogle persuasively argues, has survived "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" (3). The Phantom of the Opera has been something of a step-child of Gothic fiction, more familiar as a creepy silent film (1925, starring Lon Chancy) or a Hammer Horror (1962, starring Herbert Lom), even before the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical version swept the West End stage and insured that the limpid voice of Michael Crawford would sound for many the only authentic cry of the subterranean sublime.

Hogle goes back to the original text and places it contextually in the Gothic lineage to which it so obviously belongs. He makes useful connections to Balzac's Sarassine, Hugo's Notre Dame de Pans, and other tides of nineteenth-century Gothic, such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Dracula. Hogle is not superficial in tracing these connections. Quite the reverse: he looks deeply into the structure and meaning of earlier Gothic in order to tease out connections that are subtle and often compelling. He works similarly with other cultural motifs, seeing the phantom as a recreation of the deeply anti-Semitic figure of Svengali from George DuMaurier's Trilby (1894), and explaining how the Phantom represents an oxymoronic relation of French political tensions, both exploiting the capitalism rampant in the Opera enterprise and attacking the elitism of upper class Parisians who frequent the opera. As Hogle argues, the Phantom himself is "on a border he is helping to dissolve, pulled between attitudes and postures . . . between historical, political, and ideological positions that were actively engaged in struggles with each other during Leroux's lifetime" (26).

In the first half of this study, Hogle offers a multi-layered interpretation of the tale and attempts to make substantial claims about the relative...