“No one ever sees the Angel" : adapting The Phantom of the Opera McMurtry, LG Title “No one ever sees the Angel" : adapting The Phantom of the Opera Authors McMurtry, LG Type Book Section URL This version is available at: http://usir.salford.ac.uk/id/eprint/48439/ Published Date 2018 USIR is a digital collection of the research output of the University of Salford. Where copyright permits, full text material held in the repository is made freely available online and can be read, downloaded and copied for non-commercial private study or research purposes. Please check the manuscript for any further copyright restrictions. For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at:
[email protected]. “No One Ever Sees the Angel”: Adapting The Phantom of the Opera Leslie McMurtry There are many ways that interpretations of The Phantom of the Opera (1910)i lend themselves to the Gothic mode. The plethora of adaptations over the past centuryii, with varying degrees of similarity to the source text, have taken on a life of their own. Criticism of POTO is still relatively underdeveloped; as Ann C. Hall notes, while the novel has been critiqued through its associations (mainly its links to Gothic fiction and its Freudian and Jungian interpretations), these readings tend to “diminish” author Gaston Leroux’s skill and readers’ enjoyment (Hall 2). This chapter will not focus on Freudian or Jungian readings, but instead I hope to explore an element of the Leroux novel and the adaptations that has been overlooked, and in so doing, give some suggestions as to what qualities have contributed to making this story so enduring.