The Phantom in the Opera

Abstract

Spectres have always haunted literary texts, from antiquity to postmodern times: with their dangerous, uncanny, disquieting presence, they have voiced the anxieties and fears of different historical moments, from their appearance on the stage of revenge tragedies in the Elizabethan age, to their representation of deep irrational desires in Gothic literature, up to their embodiment of the repressed and of the sense of displacement in post-war times and to their association with the deconstruction of traditional narrative patterns. In contemporary literature ghosts contribute to the dismantling of patriarchal and colonial prerogatives leading both fictional characters and readers to achieve an awareness of the marginalisation (racial, sexual, and social) induced by the Western system. By allowing the repressed to resurface and come to light, their disturbing ‘presence’ opens a space of interrogation, offering an alternative vision of reality, as discussed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (1994). Spectrality thus becomes a form of criticism as the spectre’s gaze tends to reveal what is secret or forgotten. It can therefore be associated with the gaze of a critic, who returns to a text in order to investigate its obscure zones further and provide new readings.