Excellent meta! This story is one of my favorite of yours, and I'm always happy to revisit it. You're so right about Raoul and Christine being virtuous people in decidedly unvirtuous environment! It's one of my favorite parts of their relationship and it saddens me so much when people interpret it a representation of (oppressively) virtuous 19 century environment. That's not what's going on with them at all.
I definitely agree that the opera house itself is an incredibly important location in the novel, but I don't perceive it separately from Gothic elements. Rather, it's a Gothic element on its own, and an incredibly successful one. I've been recently thinking about it, and about what a dissapointing contrast the use of locations in Dracula makes to it. While it's ostensibly a novel famous for its Gothic settings, in truth they act mostly as cardboard backdrops for the feelings of the characters, while in POTO the opera house plays a much more major role.
Erik would indeed place a lot of value on Christine's "purity". In fact, if he never dared to "make a move" with kidnappings and stuff, I can see him try to remove from her life everyone he'd perceive as threatening it, through murder or other means, and pushing a celibate lifestyle on her. Which, if Raoul never showed up in her life, may have ended up with her becoming an "old maid" (and probably a nervous wreck because of all these violent and faux-supernatural things happening around her.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2024-11-19 09:16 pm (UTC)I definitely agree that the opera house itself is an incredibly important location in the novel, but I don't perceive it separately from Gothic elements. Rather, it's a Gothic element on its own, and an incredibly successful one. I've been recently thinking about it, and about what a dissapointing contrast the use of locations in Dracula makes to it. While it's ostensibly a novel famous for its Gothic settings, in truth they act mostly as cardboard backdrops for the feelings of the characters, while in POTO the opera house plays a much more major role.
Erik would indeed place a lot of value on Christine's "purity". In fact, if he never dared to "make a move" with kidnappings and stuff, I can see him try to remove from her life everyone he'd perceive as threatening it, through murder or other means, and pushing a celibate lifestyle on her. Which, if Raoul never showed up in her life, may have ended up with her becoming an "old maid" (and probably a nervous wreck because of all these violent and faux-supernatural things happening around her.)