![]() ![]() ![]() On this level, both novels are extensions of the very French tradition of Beauty and the Beast stories, which themselves extend the Greco-Roman pattern of Death and the Maiden tales (such as the story of Persephone and Pluto), in which a quasi-father figure steals a young woman from a more exogamous marriage to someone closer to her own age, then threatens her with a grotesquely regressive love and a kind of death in a resplendent, but dark underworld of which he is the outcast ruler. This relationship clearly recalls the love of Hugo’s grotesque bell-ringer, Quasimodo, for the singing street-gypsy, La Esmeralda, who (like Leroux’s Christine) both pities and fears her abductor, especially after he provides her sanctuary in his remote rooms near the bells of the equally real Notre Dame cathedral. ![]() After all, there is the basic situation in Le Fantôme: the highly musical ‘Erik’, masking a horrifying visage and living deep within the real Paris Opera of which he knows the most inner workings, falls in love with and eventually captures Christine Daaé, a young singer from the country, whom he tries to keep in his sequestered quarters. The Phantom of the Opera, especially in Gaston Leroux’s original French novel (1910), has long been deeply influenced by Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831), known in most versions as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. ![]()
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