A new plot?

[igenlode]

I had an idea for what might be done with the 'musical-Raoul is already married' scenario that I've been potentially thinking about for the Writers Anonymous Break the Cliché Challenge. This goes all the way back to phanwank when I first read Vicomte de Phantom and thought what a missed opportunity the author had had with a really original idea. I could just never think of anything to do with the idea myself.

But I think the necessary second twist might be accomplished by having our protagonist enceinte during Act 2 (the young couple having been performing their marital duty), thus giving an extra emotional dynamic to the conflict and also providing a practical rationale for keeping the narrator on the sidelines. I was going to call her Séverine, but I think we've had too many feminised-male names in my stories (Simone, Gilberte, Albertine, Eustacie, Raymonde -- an easy way to make a character sound 'foreign' is to give her the female version of a name that we think of as male in English). Thinking back to 'Onkel Willy' in the Double Agents de Chagny, I had the idea of naming her Hertha and making her part of a German aristocratic alliance, thus making her a fellow-foreigner with Christine.

Although it now occurs to me that this might present problems in terms of the timeline, given the Franco-Prussian War (which despite its name apparently involved armies from all the German states: https://schoolhistory.co.uk/notes/franco-prussian-war/). Especially if I set this in the movie timeline where the chandelier sets fire to the Opera, which I was tempted to do in order to give Raoul a genuine dilemma between rescuing his pregnant wife or his childhood sweetheart... on the other hand, in the movie timeline we know that the Franco-Prussian War doesn't happen :-P

I think Raoul would want his wife to befriend Christine (especially if gossipy rumours start up, as in canon), so we could have Hertha being the one to talk down a hysterical Christine on the rooftop, thus sidestepping an explicit "All I Ask of You", which obviously wouldn't happen in this scenario.

And the ending would be a Hertha/Christine scene, probably after the de Chagnys have given Christine refuge in their home, with Raoul conveniently passed out from exhaustion/swimming round with a movie-wound in his shoulder, so that it's just the two of them explicitly owning up to the fact that (a) Hertha is in love with her marriage-of-convenience husband (which she hasn't told him) and (b) Christine is as painfully jealous of Hertha's position in his life as his wife is of hers. This scenario can not be R/C, because I just don't think Raoul would allow himself to get that emotionally involved in the first place with someone he can't have outside adultery -- and there is no way he is going to walk out on a woman who is carrying his child. So it's going to be a tragedy for Christine, and a lot of angst for Hertha, neither of whom gets what they want; Hertha has her man, but not his heart, and Christine has nothing, not even an opera house in which to sing. (And the Phantom, as usual, ends up as simply a plot device in the background :-P)

The main potential issue I see with this concept is not making Raoul come across as the oblivious harem recipient who exists to be the beneficiary of beautiful women throwing themseves at him...

From the point of view of the forum challenge, I think you'd probably have an opening chapter ending in the 'break the cliché' twist of 'childhood sweetheart, come out to dinner with me... in order to meet my wife!' Not quite sure how to meet the requirements of a cliché that's recognisable as such by people who don't know the fandom, coupled with a desire to cast a little doubt as to the narrator's identity (I'm thinking maybe first-person for this story, with teasing hints of foreign-ness leading to society disapproval) for those who do know the set-up. I don't want to replay the whole dressing-room scene, and it doesn't make much sense for the wife to witness it anyway. And the first chapter probably wants to be a lot of backstory on the marriage, which doesn't fit too well with the demand for cliché-breaking...

Comments

[erimia]

I like this scenario, really original and angsty. Yes, I also can't see Raoul leaving his wife for Christine or cheating on her. Making her German would be an interisting choice, and would probably add more dramatic tension if we assume that Franco-Prussian War did take place in that universe (probably in the past if we talking musical/book).

[igenlode]

My trouble is that I can't see Raoul's parents going for a pragmatic marital alliance into a German family in the aftermath of the war -- there would be far too much ill-feeling. And they can't very well have been married *before* the war, because the young couple aren't old enough; I'm guessing that they're probably still in their first year of marriage at this point. (A lot of movie-fic seems to like to have Raoul six or seven years older than Christine, presumably because Emmy Rossum is so much younger than the rest of the cast... but I really don't see a fourteen-year-old boy having any kind of meaningful friendship with a seven-year-old child. And I'm assuming the reason *why* Lloyd Webber aged them up to fourteen for the scarf incident was in order to succinctly combine the tensions of adolescence with the inseparable childhood summer of the book canon.)

I wanted to have Raoul and Hertha as having known each other in an unromantic context since they were sixteen or seventeen -- i.e. long enough after the Christine incident for it never to have come up in casual conversation -- simply because their families became acquainted. So he has never been in love with her, but he knows and is comfortable with her as a background part of the social scene, and they have a friendly relationship beyond simply having a foreign bride imported for him as breeding-stock. But that really doesn't work with international tensions simmering in between (and they provide a quite unnecessary complication that I don't want to have to work around).

I'm tempted just to say that it's movie-verse, and thanks to the explicit caption dates in the film we know that the Siege of Paris (and probably the rest of the war) never happened in that universe :-P
The original stage show was apparently set in the 1860s (unless that's just the reviewer's take on the costumes/musical style rather than explicit dating from the original programme notes)...

She could of course be Austrian -- and/or implicitly Jewish (like the financier Levancourt of In Regret, Always, whom a contemporary readership would have instantly pigeonholed by name and profession as a Jew). Hmm, Jewish ancestry might account for a German-sounding name and make her simultaneously eligible as a pragmatic match but also regarded as 'not one of us'.