Christine Daaé from The Phantom of the Opera
For years now I've been meaning to write a big, juicy meta on the character of Christine Daaé: opera singer, orphan girl, and object of obsessive desire.
As the female lead of Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera, she plays an extremely passive role, one that's only mildly mitigated in Andrew Lloyd Webber's famous musical and various other filmic adaptations.
More than that, she's constantly abused by the fandom, which often seems more interested in treating her as an empty vessel upon which they can project themselves in order to enjoy the attentions of a brilliant, tortured, violent man, rather than a fully-formed character in her own right (and who are ultimately infuriated that she chooses to abandon him).
There are several extremely bad hot takes regarding this dynamic (here's an horrific one, though thankfully it comes with a rebuttal) and even more recently there was some controversy in the Star Wars fandom over a comic in which a deranged Imperial nurse becomes besotted with Vader, indulging in wild fantasies of them ruling the galaxy together, and considering herself The Only One Who Understands Him.
She ends up dead at his hands, and a lot of readers considered this a deliberate mockery of romantic female fantasies. Look, it got overwrought and silly and more than a little weird, but all you need to know for the purposes of this post is that one panel depicted the woman imagining herself removing Vader's helmet in an image highly reminiscent of the scene in which Christine removes the Phantom's mask. In response to this, certain Phantom/Star Wars fans decided to call the nameless nurse "Daaé" in honour of Christine.
This is a very dubious distinction considering these women have nothing in common besides a single scene of similar iconography, but it serves to underline what a lot of fans actually get out of these stories - the kind I usually refer to as "beauty and the beast narratives", but which have also been called "loving the monster", "death and the maiden" or just plain old "all girls want a bad boy". They are tales in which A Pure Innocent Girl becomes the Saviour of a Dark and Dangerous Man.
Think The Phantom of the Opera, Disney's Beauty and the Beast, the BBC's Robin Hood (in which Marian was caught between Robin and Guy of Gisbourne), the elaborate head-canons that Avatar: The Last Airbender's fandom came up with for Zuko and Katara, the myth of Hades and Persephone, and of course, whatever the hell fandom believes is happening between Kylo Ren and Rey in the Star Wars sequels.
There are thousands of variations on this theme, with male protagonists ranging from fundamentally good-hearted men who are a bit rough around the edges, to full-blown mass-murdering psychopaths, but ultimately there are three distinct interpretations that readers/viewers derive from this subgenre of romantic fiction.
For some, they're didactic tales about how women should reject their own dark sides and choose the right man over the wrong one. For others, they're self-insert wish-fulfilment stories in which they can indulge their secret desires and successfully tame the beast (or go wild themselves).
But for me, there's a third option that's often overlooked: empowering stories of women who successfully free themselves from a man's control and manipulation. This is Rey rejecting Kylo's nihilistic offer to rule the galaxy, Sarah telling Jareth: "you have no power over me," and Christine finding a way to end her stalker's reign of terror.
That so many readers/viewers want to take these choices away from the heroines, instead forcing them into relationships with men they're clearly desperate to escape, is... well, it's my problem because people can do whatever they want in fan-fiction.
But it remains a constant source of frustration for me, as it so often involves looking at each woman in the context of what she's doing for or to the male characters, rather than what he is inflicting on her, and what she ultimately chooses to do about it.
Let's not kid ourselves here; Christine is hardly a feminist icon, role model, or even hugely three-dimensional character. Rather, she's is a quintessential Gothic heroine: vulnerable in mind and body, beset upon by dark forces, susceptible to psychological manipulation, and almost entirely acted upon throughout the story.
And yet despite all this, she's a precious female character to a lot of people - including myself. So buckle up, this is going to be a long one...
