quit calling Raoul de Chagny āsafeā and āboringā
Thereās no accounting for personal taste, but when I catch commentary on this show laying blame on the work itself for āteachingā audiences that the badboy Erik Phantom is sexy and glamorous, I really think that's unfair in general. I say it's doubly unfair to then specifically claim that The Phantom of the Opera musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber made Raoul boring. Some of us like the romantic duet.
And some of us are unironically entertained by just how much this character is a lover not a fighter:
That was stage-musical Raoul's big plan: Go to the Evil Lair and tell the Evil Man that he isn't being very nice right now. I love Raoul. I love him so much I could cry.
Simplifying Raoul's Characterisation for the Stage
Erik gets the music of the night reprised-bars about his abusive mother, Christine gets a whole big song about her dead father, but Raoul's book-origin characteristics fall a lot by the wayside.
Is he a patron of the arts because his older brother is having dalliances with the principal dancer? Apparently not, this Chagny is simply rich and likes art. Does he dress like a soldier during the maskerade because he technically has a real job despite being a whole entire Viscount who doesn't need to do anything useful to make a living? Don't think about it too much. Oh hey isn't Christine DaaĆ© a working-class commoner, so isn't that going to be a source of conflict in her relationship with Raoul? Hasn't she internalized that she isn't good enough for her aristocrat bestie who's too happy with his life to understand her depression and griefāMaybe that's why the ugly middle-aged theater kid starts to seem like a suitable relationship to her? Because Raoul doesn't ever forget what a huge class difference between them there is? no prablem
With so much pared down from his original characterization, stage-musical Raoul still achieves becoming a distillation of the romantic hero. Heās the one who gets the Meet Cute to establish that he and Christine have been friends since childhood. He gets to do something of a Grovel for not really listening to her before about the weird stuff she's been going through.
Those are Romance Genre leading-man touchpoint tropes: the Meet Cute, and the Grovel.
Again, no accounting for personal taste, but this show signals pretty heavily who the endgame must be.
Even when Andrew Lloyd Webber appears to have more deeply sympathized with the composer-for-brunette-opera-girlfriend for some reason...
...the story structure still honors Raoul's role in the narrative, there is as much care and emotion put into Raoul's songs as any other in the musical, and our attentions are deliberately diverted to this character when it's necessary.
And while stage-musical Raoul obviously wants to be this angelically safe person (ālet me be your shelter, let me be your light / I'm here, with you beside you to guard you and to guide youā) there was some point that nonviolence is not safe actually. Overcommitment to nonviolence can get a person into this position:
That's thematically interesting. And he's meant to be there to motivate Christine's character development at that crucial moment. I think that's refreshing to have a Dude in Distress because the Plot Said So, for once.
In Momentary Defense of Team Erik
This is not to say I don't sympathize with (gender-neutral) Girlies Whose Type Is The Bad Boy in a gothic fiction story. The gothic genre is the natural habitat for such batty bats.
After the surface-level but fair-enough observations that badboy character did badthing plot, I do find a discouraging lack of interrogation or openness to the perspective of the audience or readership of lasses (and the like 2 or 3 trans dudes active in the tags) who like that āwrong manā Erik character a lot. In a society dedicated to controlling something as personal as desire, I start to think that harboring (and especially voicing) desires for āthe wrong manā from the fiction is far more emancipatory and subversive than 99% of the criticism you bats catch.
(But I still personally favor the golden retriever in human form. He has literally retrieved things and I am easily amused.)
Book-Accurate Raoul de Chagny kinda Sucks As A Person & I Like Him Even Better That Way
The Phantom of the Opera was published in 1910 and is very much a product of its time. Not that I was alive then in 1910, but we 21st-century readers can guess there was the lack of pervasive conversations about the Nice Guy (derogatory) and the Bad Boy (derogatory) both being figures of patriarchal oppression.
There wasn't really the language to describe even something like sexual harrassment that targeted women in the workplace, even though I recall (and now cannot properly cite) reading excerpts of journal entries from a late Victorian-era factory manager who wrote that he did not want to behave in such ungentlemanly ways to his employees but that his peers in the field would mete out some social punishment if he didn't. This tells me that there had to be conversations and then government policy to tell some men in managerial positions that it is completely all right to not sexually harass your subordinates. It should have been all right the whole time to not do that.
We can wonder what other gender inequality was still ongoing up to the year 1910 that can get in the way of how to perform and receive and experience opposite-sex attraction and heterosexual relationships in a mutually fulfilling human connection way, and how that is reflected in the fictions.
Raoul de Chagny in the book becomes an interesting character because of how he is a product of this time. The narration insists that Raoul is āpure as a virgin who has never left her mother's houseā but we in the 21st-century have more emancipated ideas of what a red flag in a heterosexual young man is...and an impulsive short temper, jealousy, possessiveness, and insecurity are a few of them. Raoul has all those traits.
I personally think those make Raoul a more interesting character, but I will observe that the stage-musical version that made a himbo Ken Doll out of him is the version that I find most frequently accused of making this character āsafeā and āboringā.
Regard the source material. This espĆØce de jaloux had to become boring in order to be anything near safe for audiences in the late 20th-century and early 21st-century.
The sympathy and respect that Raoul harbors for Erik before ever even meeting him, that coexists so easily with Raoul's homicidal jealousy, is...yeah really weird and I don't know what to do with it. I leave this to the Raoul/Erik ship experts.
Meanwhile, I think stage-musical Erik gets to be sexy, glamorous, complicated, interesting, sympathetic and dangerous ā precisely because he's not tethered by the stale genre restrictions of a romantic hero.
As I keep on saying, I Like Raoul as a character. But I do think his relative lack of popularity is not because the Dark Gothic Romance Girlies Don't Know What's Good For Them (and it's somehow Andrew Lloyd Webber's fault for making patriarchal propagandaāCome off it! Gaston Leroux made patriarchal propaganda! You make patriarchal propaganda!). I think it's more because Raoul de Chagny, seen at moonrise without eyeglasses, imposes instructions on how to follow the patriarchal ideal.
I like stage-musical Raoul's vibeāand I like book-accurate Raoul being a naĆÆve spoiled brat who is still very sensitive to other peopleās feelings, and whose unsung character development subplot is that he works against his own class interests. Working against his internalized misogyny is a different can of worms, but getting rescued by his girlfriend is a humbling experience; it's not impossible to imagine that he gets less 21 Year Old Boy Without A Headboard energy after the end of that story.
I think this character has a lot going for him in the details.
In broad strokes, though, I understand that to some audiences and readers Raoul's vibe is this:
So it's actually not doing as big of a feminism at it seems, to say or imply that somebody is a bad silly person for not liking the same character that I like. Desire is subjective and can be complicated, and fiction is the right place for the psychic life to be complicated and symbolic and weird and naughty.
So I'm on Team Raoul, and I say moralists had better leave the Erik fans alone to enjoy themselves. It's just a grand fun show.
