Yet more stuff archived here for reference so that I don't have to keep searching through unhelpfully-named messages in order to locate my own analysis again...
I'd always taken it absolutely for granted that this scene represented clever Christine *refusing* to play the Phantom's game, refusing his devil's bargain ("spend your life with me or send your lover to his grave") and finding a third way that saves all of them. The Phantom demands that she give him a Yes or No answer, and she does neither: she tells him he's human and says 'you poor creature, have a kiss'. She does *not* consent to marry him, and she gets precisely the result she was (presumably) hoping for -- she shocks him back into reality from his power-mad high and shows him that what he is doing is abominable, and he lets her go.
I don't think that Christine in the musical ever does decide to spend the rest of her life underground in order to save Raoul; I think that her kiss is an attempt to find a third option beyond the two that the Phantom offered ("love me and he lives, refuse and he dies"). In the novel, of course, the threat and the situation are both somewhat different...
But I always assumed that what she is trying to do in the musical is to show the Phantom that "he is not alone" — that his face is not an insurmountable barrier to contact with humanity as he claims to believe. I don't believe that her kiss is supposed to be an acceptance of his bargain or a signal that she will marry him: there are easier and more reliable ways of telling him that! The kiss appears to be a rejection of both choices and an attempt to win his sympathy by demonstrating empathy — it's the classic 'communicate with your kidnapper and force him to see you as a human being so that he will find it harder to kill or torture you' tactic.
She isn't accepting his proposal (which she would have done with words of hatred and resentment); she is showing him that it is possible for someone to display enough pity to bestow a kiss of her own free will and without blackmail even upon someone who looks like him, and therefore that his face does not make him irredeemable.
I always assumed it was obvious...
Erik says "Will you marry me? Yes or No?"
Christine says "You poor thing, have a kiss" -- which is neither Yes nor No, but is greater sweetness and pity than he would have got from the Yes answer.
And the result is that he then shows pity and humanity to her by sparing Raoul, which I imagine is what she hoped for but presumably could not possibly be certain of.
I've never seen the final lair scene as Christine's choice to stay with Erik -- it never even occurred to me that anyone would make that assumption until a fan mentioned it as a casual belief a few months back. Erik says "Make your choice", but Christine *refuses* to play that game. She *doesn't* choose: if she wanted to say Yes she would say it with tears and loathing, as she does at the start of the scene. If she wanted to say No she would hurl it at him.
What wise, clear-sighted Christine does is to evade the question altogether: her response is neither to accept the trap or to give her tormentor an excuse to take his revenge. Erik says "Yes or No?" Christine says "Oh, you poor thing -- here, have a kiss."
And it works. By showing him that he is part of humanity, she gets him to see her as someone whose happiness he cares about, and not as a possession.
It's the classic kidnap gambit, really: instil empathy in your captors and get them to see you as a person. It's ideal. Under the impossible circumstances it's *brilliant* -- and it's very Christine. She forgives her enemies, and in so doing she wins freedom by her own resourcefulness.
I always rather admired musical-Christine's cleverness in the final act -- if you notice, she *doesn't* accept the terms of the Phantom's 'choice'. Leroux-Christine does; she turns the scorpion to signify that she agrees to marry Erik in order to stop him blowing up the Opera House, and then promises not to kill herself in order to save Raoul's life even though she knows they can't be together. But musical-Christine refuses to choose the grasshopper *or* the scorpion: she avoids the Yes/No choice that the Phantom places before her, and she shortcircuits it (and him!) by kissing him instead :-p
She doesn't agree to marry him (given the state of relations between them at that point, she would probably have flung any consent furiously into his face) and she doesn't trigger retribution by refusing. Instead she shows him pity -- she shows him that he is not alone, that he is not an exile from the human race, and that his existence doesn't have to be the way it is. Christine says neither Yes nor No, because, as the Phantom has pointed out, that's a choice she cannot win. She says "You poor thing, have a kiss"... and in so doing (though she cannot have known that this would work; she can only have hoped to break him free from his monomaniac focus, throw him off guard and win a breathing space to think again) she pulls him free from his downward spiral into madness and saves them all.
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