From the damsel in distress to the female hero: the wanderings of Christine Daaé in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom Of The Opera and its last film adaptation
Keywords:
Female Hero, Film, Gothic literature, The phantom of the opera,Abstract
The Gothic genre comes to the surface as the rightful source which provided the necessary license to passionately describe the fears, terrors, and horrors that the social revolutions called forth in the name of progress. As an example of this world-wide turmoil, the objective of this article is to analyse the trajectory of the character Christine Daaé in Gaston Leroux’s The phantom of the opera (1911) and in the homonymous cinematographic adaptation of 2004 in order to investigate how the author and narrator manage to subvert Mademoiselle Daaé’s representation by making usage of Gothic elements, such as the frame of a story within a story, the resource of the unspeakable, and the dichotomy of the surface and the profound (SEDGWICK, 1986) along with the symbolism of colour in media transposition. Both the literary piece and the film adaptation illustrate the major turning point in the narrative, regarding Christine Daaé’s character due to the fact that Mademoiselle Daaé outbreaks from the character of the damsel in distress to the female hero, since she lies back on the novel structure she is inserted into, controlling the environment around her, and solving the problems and contradictions of the Gothic novel.
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