#hogle

In...making the line between bourgeois 'right' and 'wrong' so difficult to draw - and hence in crafting Erik as both a half-sympathetic and an abhorrent character - Leroux allows us, even today, both to confront and to keep abjected at arm's length the mythic process of middle-class self-construction in Europe and America

Erik the Opéra ghost is an 'other' who is really normal to an extreme within rising middle-class ideology, definitely not working class, completely dead, communistic, hermaphroditic, homosexual, or Jewish even as overtones of these 'others' are abjected onto him...Erik is clearly an interplay among many 'different' beings 'othered' by the dominant middle class at his time; then a revelation that these otherings may be more projections by class-climbing people (including the author) than realities endemic to any aberrant condition; then a demonstration of how such projectsion create 'abjected' others that obscure their ideological roots and purposes; then an exposure of how the bourgeois 'normalcy' that gains its ideological distinction from such objections is intimately and continuously connected with what it throws off...and then a suggestion that this entire complex of culturally motivated self-constructions-by-abjection...is what must be abjected most and made most anomalous...so that the supposed 'high-cultured' selfhood that is fashioned in this process can sublimate its roots symbolically and effectively.

Whether they are disguised behind this orientalism or alluded to mroe directly, it is not simply the truths or history of the Commune that are abjected in Le Fantôme de l'Opéra; instead Leroux's Opéra ghost both conceals and echoes the middle-class use of the Commune as the 'abnormal' monstrosity against which the bourgeois Republic fashioned its supposed normality, all of which shows that it was deeply bound up with exactly what it tried most to dissociate from itself. That is why the original phantom is both a partial re-enactor of a hollowed-out Commune and the most nakedly acquisitive of bourgeois social climbers. The bourgeoisie of this era in France depends upon recasting pieces of the Commune that it has emptied of their original ideological content, and additionally it relies, through the Commune, on an undergrounded monstrocity connected to threats from the past...to bury the most extreme drives of bourgeois acquisition from view

For Kristeva what we primarily 'throw off' and 'throw under,'..so that we can seem to have coherent adult identities that gain acceptance within the most standard ideologies of middle-class selfhood, is a primordial state of total betwixt-and- betweeness, our condition at birth in which we are half-inside and half-outside the mother's body and thus both half-alive and half-dead as we long both to return to and to leave behind the state of our being prior to birth...this heterogeneity so basic to us yet cast off by us is actually cultural and intersubjective as much as it is visceral, personal and mental, quite vividly so in texts ranging from Frankenstein and the American-Gothic tales of Edgar Allan Poe and Gilman...Such Gothic figurations thereby act out Slavoj Zizek's definition of the 'sublime object' created by capitalist ideology: the simultaneous embodiment and concealment of a 'traumatic social division' or set of class 'antagonism[s]' at the heart of Western culture

The reasons for the Gothic's particular revival at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century surely include what [Jack] Halberstam sees as a pervasive cultural drive to 'condense various racial and sexual threats to nation, capitalist, and the bourgeoisie [all] in one body'...That era, not entirely unlike our more recent fin de siecle with its more diffuse revivals of the Gothic from Rocky Horror cults to The X-Files, was a time of potentially collapsing biological, sexual, racial, class, national, and even interplanetary boundaries.