The Phantom of the Opera: Chapter 12

Storytime for Grownups

Faith Moore presents Chapter 12 of Gaston Leroux's 'The Phantom of the Opera,' focusing on the dramatic moment Christine reveals the Phantom

Key takeaways

• The climax of the chapter involves Christine tearing off Eric's mask, revealing a face that inspires pure horror.
• Faith analyzes the relationship between Raoul and Christine as 'childish' and chaste compared to the dark, intense connection with Eric.
• The myth of Hades and Persephone is used to illustrate Christine's psychological state of being caught between two worlds.
• Eric is heavily associated with death through imagery such as the 'Red Death' and a 'death's head.'
• Faith announces an upcoming in-person event at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, Tennessee, on October 3rd.

Main topics

• The Phantom of the Opera Chapter 12 reading
• Literary analysis of Gaston Leroux
• Mythological parallels: Hades and Persephone

Notable quotes

I am not an angel nor a genius nor a ghost i am eric

Conclusion

A dramatic blend of gothic literature reading and personal author enga

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) Hello, and welcome to Storytime for Grownups. I'm Faith Moore, and this season we're reading The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Each episode, I'll read a few chapters from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built-in notes. So brew a pot of tea, find a cozy chair, and settle in. It's storytime! you Speaker 1 (0:42) Hello, welcome back. So I think my voice is better, it's sounding better, I think, than it was before. I'm still coughing a lot. This is such a long lingering cough. It's very weird, but it seems to be going around. I now know a lot of people who have the same thing. So I think I'm on the mend. I think I sound better than I did. So we're going to just go with it and cross our fingers and hope that this is... an upward trajectory that we're on and that I don't suddenly lose my voice again. But even if I do, we will soldier on. It will all be okay because there are so many exciting things happening. So first of all, I want to say this is a little strange because I'm actually recording this before the... tea time that we are going to have slash have had on the 30th. So I want to say thank you to everyone for being at tea time, because I know that there will be lots of people there. And when you're listening to this, there will have been people there and we will have had a wonderful time. I'm sure of it. So thank you for coming to tea time. And. I'm realizing that this is the last episode before I will actually get to meet some of you in Tennessee. I am so excited about this. I cannot wait. I've been getting lots and lots of emails from people saying that they will be coming. So I am so excited to meet you. I really seriously cannot wait. So if you've been... thinking about maybe coming and you haven't been sure, there is still time. You just have to go to the website of the Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, Tennessee. It's very easy to do because there is a link to that website in the show notes of this episode. Click that link. You have to... Purchase a copy of my novel, Wooing Jane, from the bookstore if you'd like to come to the event. And that's all you have to do. And then you show up at 5 p.m. on Saturday, October 3rd at the Landmark Booksellers. And I will be there. My brother, Spencer Clavin, will be there. We will talk a bit about the book together. I will read a little bit from the book. We will take your questions. So we are... ready and waiting and very excited to talk to you. And then I will sign your books. So it's going to be a great time. I cannot wait. So please do come if you can and, you know, stick around, get your book signed, talk to me. I want to know that you're there. I want to meet you. I am so excited. I just can't wait. I'm just, I'm just. I keep saying this, I'm just giddy. I'm giddy thinking about it. So please do join me there. The other exciting thing is that people who have pre-ordered their copy of Wooing Jane, my new novel from Amazon, are starting to receive their copies, which is really cool. And I am very, very excited slash slightly nervous for you to read the book. I really hope that you like it. When you read it, if you enjoy it. A really big favor that you could do for me is to leave a positive review about the book on Amazon. So give it five stars and leave a positive review just the way that you do here in your podcast player for the show. So if you read the book and you enjoy the book, I would love it if you would do that. It's the same reason as we do it here. It helps people to find the book. It helps people to decide that they want to buy the book. And that really helps because it just gets the book out there to more people who might want to read it. In the same way that you do with this show, also, if you know people that you think might like the book, this is the perfect time to tell them about it because it's now just available. They can buy it and it will come to them just like buying anything else on Amazon. So the link to the Amazon page for the book is also in the show notes. So if you're not coming to the bookstore and, you know, you're... don't want to do it that way, please go on Amazon and buy it through there. And then please leave a positive review once you've read the book. And also, please feel free, I would love it if you would get in touch with me and email me to tell me what you think of the book, or if you started and you're kind of in the middle of it, I'm, you know... Send me your thoughts. I would love to know. It's a funny thing to write a book alone in your room and then know that people are reading it, but not what they're thinking. So I would love to know what you're thinking as you start to read Wooing Jane. So thank you for doing that and for supporting me in this way. This book is really special to me. It means a lot to me. So thank you for supporting that and supporting the work that I do by picking up a copy of the book. If you haven't done it already, there's lots of time. Just scroll into the show notes and pick up your copy. Okay, that's enough of that. We should get into this episode. So this is actually kind of a long chapter. We're reading one chapter today. It's chapter 12 and it's a long one. So let's get to it. Last time we read chapters 10 and 11. So let's remind ourselves of what happened there. I've got some questions. We'll chat for a bit and then we'll get to this chapter. So here is the recap. Okay, so where we left off, the day after the masked ball, Raul goes to visit Madame Valerius, and he's startled to find Christine there looking totally fine. She tells him that there's no such thing as the angel of music. Raul tells Madame Valerius that Christine is under the influence of some bad man who has been seducing her. This makes Madame Valerius very upset, but Christine says this is all none of Raul's business. The only man whose business it would be is her husband's, and she will never marry. But Raul notices that she is now wearing a golden band that looks like a wedding ring, but Christine says it was just a present. Raoul tells her that he knows the name of the man whose spell she's under, and it's Eric. This makes Christine very upset, and she tells him he must forget that name for his own safety. Christine is so upset that Raoul agrees to never visit her in her dressing room again unless she calls for him, and she promises to call for him the next day. She does call for him the next day, and he goes to visit her, and he tells her that his expedition to the North Pole will be leaving in three weeks, and that he may not survive it. She tells him that she also may not survive. Raoul asks her to promise to wait for him, and she says that she can't do that, but that while he is here, they should pretend to be engaged. Raoul agrees to this, and they are both very happy with this plan. So for the next few days, they play at being engaged. Eventually, Raoul tells Christine that he doesn't want to leave. He wants to stay with her and marry her. This makes Christine very upset, and she disappears for two days. After that, she appears in the opera and sings beautifully again. Raoul comes to her. dressing room and tells her he'll follow the rules of their agreement. He won't act like they're really engaged for life. So Christine takes Raul all over the opera house and she shows him all the hidden nooks and crannies and they have a lovely time. But Christine is still wearing that gold band. At one point, they find a trap door and Raul asks her to show him what is under the opera house. And she becomes upset and she tells him that the trap doors and what's under them belong to him, meaning to Eric. While they are looking at it, one of the trap doors closes, but Raoul doesn't see who did it. He realizes that Eric lives below the opera house, and he wants to go down there and confront him, but Christine stops him. Raoul promises to protect Christine from Eric, and while she feels this is impossible, she is touched that he would want to do that. Eventually, Christine becomes very nervous, and she says that they must go up as high as possible, and she leads him to the roof, but neither of them notice that they are being followed by a strange shadow. Okay, I'm going to read three comments today. The first one comes from Danya Ivory. She says, instead of being annoyed with Raul and Christine, I sympathize with them because they do seem to be so young. We wanted Raul to take on the perceived villain and be our hero, but he is just a young boy in love and also scared. I feel like Christine is scared also and feels like there is no way out. When Raul said, I can take you away from him, and she said, can you really? It's almost like she has no hope, like she feels trapped. And the second one comes from our online community, The Drawing Room, and this person goes by the handle at Maria. She says, Eric lives underground, where traditionally hell is. And I also thought of Hades for some reason. Christine is living above the Hades domain, like Persephone. The whole scene where she is exploring the opera house is just her reliving her childhood and being young. The opera house contrasts so much with the underground where only death lingers. And this last one also comes from the drawing room. This person goes by the handle at just Ellen, I guess. She says, Speaker 1 (9:12) of being in love with Christine. Okay, so I absolutely love that Maria brought up Hades and Persephone here, because I think that is a wonderful way to get into talking about these chapters, because I think what we're getting now is this sense that Christine is sort of torn. There's something really alluring and appealing to her, it seems like, about the ghost and whatever she's doing when she's with him. There's something really appealing to her about that. But there's also something really scary about it. There's something really appealing to her about the innocence and the simplicity of Raoul and about this kind of childish play acting that they're doing about being engaged. But there's also something kind of fake and sort of superficial about it, too. You know, like we talked about before, we haven't had even a little glimpse at things from Christine's perspective. She hasn't been our point of view character at any point. So everything that we're learning about her is coming to us directly either through Raoul's eyes or through the narrator's descriptions, which means that all we can do is guess at what's going on with her via the way that she's acting. And what it seems like... to me at least, what it seems like at this point is that she's torn. She wants whatever Eric is offering, but it scares her. And she wants what Raul is offering, but that also scares her because if she actually goes with Raul, she will lose what Eric is offering. And we now have this sort of metaphor for these. two choices, which is the underground part of the opera house and the above ground part. You know, we learned last time that Eric, so the opera ghost, the angel of music, whatever you want to call him, Eric, he lives underground. Under the opera house, right? We don't really know what that means, but Christine tells us that the cellars, the places below the opera house itself, the cellars are Eric's domain. Christine says that everything that is underground belongs to him, and for whatever reason, Eric is now ensconced in his underground world working on something. Here's what Christine says. She says, He has shut himself up. He is working. And then Raoul says, oh, really? He's working, is he? She says, yes. He can't open and shut the trap doors and work at the same time. And then it says, she shivered. What's he working at? Oh, something terrible. But it's all the better for us. When he's working at that, he sees nothing. He does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time. He becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trap doors. Okay, so Eric... lives underground. He's like a living dead man. He goes to the masquerade ball dressed as Red Death. His face often looks like a death's head. He sometimes has a hand that looks like a skeleton hand. So Eric is being associated with death here, very clearly, I think. In the myth of Hades and Persephone, Hades is the king of the underworld. The underworld is the land of the dead, and that's his domain. And Persephone is the beautiful young maiden from the world of the living with whom he falls in love. You probably know this myth already, but basically he abducts her, takes her to his underground kingdom, and tries to force her to be his queen, but her mother rescues her, except that because she has eaten six... pomegranate seeds in the world of the dead. She must stay there for six months of the year, and she can come up to the world of the living for the other six months. So Persephone is a character who straddles both worlds, right? The world of the living and the world of the dead. And in the world of the living, Hades doesn't really have much power. He can come for her, he can abduct her, but he's got to take her back to the underworld if he wants to have her for his own. So I think this is a really great analogy that Maria is making, because we have Christine kind of straddling Eric's world, which we really don't know anything about, right? We haven't even really met Eric yet. We've caught these little glimpses of him in his various forms. He seems to have lots of different voices and personalities and things, and we've caught that, but we don't actually know who he is and we don't know what he wants, but we know that he lives underground and we know he's associated with death, okay? So Christine seems to have one foot in that world. but to also really be drawn to the upper world, the world of the living, the place where there is youth and innocence and life as represented by Raoul. But of course, even that isn't quite real because it's not the actual world that they're living in together. It's just the upper part of the opera house. Christine seems tied somehow. to the physical location of the opera house. And there's a way in which that's been true for everything in this book, except for that one chapter in Peros Guirec. The opera house is like a world unto itself, and Christine is trapped in it somehow, and she can't get out. And maybe she doesn't even want to get out. We don't know. Raoul! wants to get out of it. It's not his world at all, but Christine can't or maybe doesn't want to. And Raul is kind of confused when Christine says that they should get some fresh air, and then she just takes him to the stage. Here's what it says. Raul thought that she would propose a stroll in the country, far from that building, which he detested as a prison, whose jailer he could feel walking within the walls, the jailer Eric. But she took him to the stage and made him sit on the wooden curb of a well in the doubtful peace and coolness of a first scene set for the evening's performance. Okay, and then later it says, it was as though the real sky, the real flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time, and she condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theater. Okay, so again, it's like Eric has some kind of supernatural hold on her. He's allowed her to leave his domain for some period of time, but she isn't really free. She's still beholden to him in some way. She's still his. somehow. And she has to stay in his world, the world of the opera house, even though he's let her come out of his domain for the time being. And I think it's hard to tell at this point what Christine actually wants. I think Dania is right. There are moments where it seems like Christine really wants to escape, but she feels that she can't for some reason, or that there's no way to get free of Eric's clutches or something. You know, when Raoul says, I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it, and you shall not think of... him anymore. Christine says, is it possible? But is she saying, is it possible that you could get me away from him? Or is she saying, is it possible that you could make it so I don't think of him anymore? Meaning, does she unequivocally want to get away from Eric? Or is she really powerfully drawn to him, but also recognizes that he's dangerous in some way? Is the thing that she wishes Raoul could do for her is to somehow break her own obsession with Eric? Or is it that she wishes he could rescue her from some kind of hold that he has on her that she doesn't actually want at all? It's not really clear. But Christine is wearing Eric's ring. And no matter