Undoing the undead

Nicholas Valenzuela Arizona Daily Wildcat UA professor Jerrold Hogle gives his speech on "The Real Horrors Of The Phantom Of the Opera" in Gallagher Theatre yesterday. Hogle's speech is part of the UA Speaker Series which is held every Wednesday from 12:15 to 12:50 p.m. in Gallagher Theatre. Next week's speaker is George H. Davis who will speak on "From Zion to Bryce and Beyond."

Gothic novels, their pages rife with half-human monsters, thrill us while they terrify.

Jerrold Hogle, UA professor of English and faculty chairman, yesterday linked such fascination with monsters directly to their resemblance to more shameful aspects of humankind.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 100 in Gallagher Theatre yesterday, Hogle described the Phantom of Gaston Leroux's original novel LeFantóme del'Opéra in symbolic terms in a lecture entitled "The Real Horrors of the Phantom of the Opera."

All Gothic works have elements in common, Hogle said. Usually the story is set at an antiquated site, like a decaying mansion, which hides secrets involving crime or hideous death. These long-buried secrets come alive embodied in monstrous form, said Hogle - as the undead.

Ghouls, he said, often serve a higher purpose than merely scaring the pants off of readers.

They often symbolize the struggle of a person or society to shed ugly or shameful qualities, said Hogle. These shames manifest themselves in the form of an "other," that we only recognize as a part of ourselves when it has crept in too close to fend off.

The Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera symbolizes the attempt of 19th century Parisian aristocracy to forget the "low-brow" ingredients which contribute to "high-brow" culture, Hogle said.

"Low" culture includes foreign or plebeian traditions such as carnivals. The Phantom himself is a reminder of the low-brow traditions which linger even in the most elite cultural events, such as opera. The bright costumes of Parisian opera, for example, were borrowed from the fancy dress of peasants at carnivals.

"The Phantom haunts the opera with its association with the supposedly low-class, mixed-class carnival," Hogle said.

The Phantom is a "class-crosser." He occupies the fifth cellar of the Paris opera house - he is cast to subterranean depths, yet is present at the very foundation of Parisian high culture, said Hogle. The phantom attempts to be an aristocrat, buying a seat in the opera house and dressing in a fine tuxedo and cape. He dresses in oriental costume at a time when Chinese culture was considered inferior. The Phantom can sing in six octaves, imitating a woman or a man.

"The Phantom is the embodiment of many mixed identities," Hogle said. "The high culture world wants to pretend it has moved above and beyond - and it has guilty reason for wanting to pretend. He (the Phantom) is haunting Paris culture with all they think they have pushed aside."

Hogle said such guilt arose from the horrors visited upon the peasant classes during the construction of the Paris opera house. Leroux uses the Phantom to serve as a shameful reminder of the peasant houses that were burned to the ground when this monument to high culture was erected in the 1860s.

Graveyards were dug up and the "bones distributed helter-skelter in the catacombs of Paris" during the construction of the opera house, Hogle said. "For him (Leroux), this (the opera house) is the supreme center of Paris high culture, which hid a lot of secrets from which it tried to divorce itself."

The Phantom is the embodiment of the trampled peasantry and the ghosts of the dead disturbed for the sake of elite society.

In Leroux's novel, the Phantom's true face is a bare skull. In the first film adaptation of Leroux's book, "You see the death coming through the face, even the skull coming through the face," said Hogle. "The face is death."

The Phantom's skull-face thus serves the classic Gothic theme of monster as undead. His gruesome visage also has ties to 19th century racist and ethnocentric cultural views. In Leroux's time, a widely recognized metaphor involved comparison of the skull of a New Zealand cannibal with a sketching of Shakespeare's head. The cannibal skull literally had a low brow and represented all that was considered culturally inferior in 19th century Parisian society, said Hogle.

Shakespeare, of course, was shown with a high brow and was the epitome of high culture, he said.

At the end of the drama, the heroine Christine develops an extreme erotic attraction to the Phantom while he is acting the part of Othello, the black hero of a Shakespearean drama. Christine's attraction is distinctly cross-racial and therefore horrendous by the tenets of 19th century Parisian culture, Hogle said. In the throes of her desire for him, the heroine rips off the Phantom's mask - and looks into the face of death.

Christine's attraction to that which society has rejected - and her resulting terror at the true nature of the beast - mirrors the thrill we experience when faced with the ghouls of Gothic literature.

Hogle's speech appeared to engage both students and faculty in attendance and several people who had watched or read versions of The Phantom of the Opera declared they were inspired to look at it again with new insight.

"I enjoyed the speech a lot," said linguistics junior Keziah Conrad. "I had read The Phantom of the Opera , but I never thought of it as something you could take seriously."

Carol Bender, director of the undergraduate biology research program declared she was on her way to the bookstore to pick up a copy of the Leroux's novel. She said as a scientist, she doesn't have much opportunity to analyze literature.

"It was a lot of fun to come in and look at a different world and a different perspective and a new take on the Phantom of the Opera.."

Hogle's speech was part of this fall's Building Academic Community Speaker Series - a weekly program presented by UA's faculty fellows.

Sarah Spivack can be reached via e-mail at Sarah.Spivack@wildcat.arizona.edu.