Which post. There are so many of them. So… very… many. I’ll just assume it was this one, since it was the most recent that I saw crossing the Phantom tag, but I could probably point out more.
Anyway, my thought as always for these kinds of posts is, “Why oh why can’t people learn the actual definition of gaslighting?” Gaslighting, as defined in the The Gaslighting Recovery Workbook, is “a cruel, deceptive activity put in place by an abuser to make their target doubt themselves and their real-life decisions, start to feel confused, and think they’re going crazy.” The Gaslight Effect also describes a gaslighter as someone “who needs to be right in order to preserve his own sense of self and his sense of having power in the world.”
What this means is that gaslighting is not just telling someone they’re wrong when it turns out that they’re actually right, which seems to be what a lot of people think gaslighting is. I mean, by that definition, then an argument between myself and a coworker about how to do a certain piece of paperwork would be “gaslighting”. Instead, gaslighting is deliberate, done specifically to make someone doubt themselves and place trust in the gaslighter, and usually, long-term and part of a pattern of abuse.
None of that fits with what Raoul is doing in the rooftop scenario in the musical. For one thing, Raoul is not being deceptive; he truly does not believe there is a Phantom; phantoms are ghosts, and the notes, the threatening voice, Carlotta’s sabotage, Buquet dying, all of that are results of a human act. (And, you know, he’s right, there really is no Phantom, he is a man.) For him to be deceptive and to fall more in line with the definition of gaslighting, he’d have to continue insisting there is no Phantom even, say, if both he and Christine witness the Phantom, like say during the Red Death scene, but then he goes to Christine and keeps going, “No Christine, you made it all up, nobody showed up to the masked ball.” But as we see in the musical, that doesn’t happen; once Raoul sees the Phantom with his own eyes, he immediately figures it out (“And so our Phantom’s this man”).
Furthermore, Raoul does not tell Christine there’s no Phantom to make her doubt herself or to acquire power over her. He tells her that because she is literally panicking in that scene. Take a look at her lines with Raoul’s removed:
“He’ll kill me! His eyes will find me there! Those eyes that burn! And if he has to kill a thousand men, The Phantom of the Opera will kill and kill again! My God, who is this man who hunts to kill? I can’t escape from him, I never will! And in this labyrinth, where night is blind the Phantom of the Opera is here, inside my mind.”
Christine is not calm during this scene; she literally dragged Raoul to the rooftop of the opera house and starts telling him things that, to any other person, would seem fantastical. This is completely understandable on Christine’s part, I should say, but if you pretend as an audience member that you never saw the first lair scenes, then you might be like Raoul and think she was just panicking.
I think the post I linked also stated that Raoul is not saying that the Phantom is a man, because he says line, “What you heard was a dream and nothing more” after Christine starts describing her experiences, but the entire context of that scene suggests not:
CHRISTINE: Raoul, I’ve been there - to his world of unending night. To a world where the daylight dissolves into darkness. darkness. Raoul, I’ve seen him! Can I ever forget that sight? Can I ever escape from that face? So distorted, deformed, it was hardly a face, in that darkness. darkness. But his voice filled my spirit with a strange, sweet sound. In that night there was music in my mind. And through music my soul began to soar! And I heard as I’d never heard before.
RAOUL: What you heard was a dream and nothing more.
While Christine is not full-blown panicking in this scene, she’s just come out of her previous state of hysteria (and moreover, is heading into an equally worrisome state of trance). Moreover, she’s still describing equally unbelievable things. We the audience know all this is real, but to Raoul, a deformed man living in “unending night” and Christine apparently hearing angelic voices in her mind or spirit or whatever? It really does sound like a dream, and in the context of Christine running around panicking, it’s like Christine is going stream-of-consciousness style, connecting the murder to superstitions about a ghost to her own dreams.
Finally, as part of the definition above, gaslighting is also usually long-term and part of a pattern of abuse. None of this is shown in the musical either. The rooftop scene is the only time we see Raoul telling Christine the Phantom does not exist; afterwards, he’s fully on board and working to take down the guy. We also don’t see Raoul exhibiting any other classic signs of abuse, such as controlling behavior, isolating her from friends and family, humiliating, judging, criticizing, or dominating her, withholding affection, undermining, trivializing, name-calling, or threatening her, or of course, hitting or hurting her or sexually abusing her. I suppose one can argue that we only see parts of their relationship and maybe he was doing that during the six months that pass between Act 1 and 2, but there’s no textual evidence for or against it, so that can only exist in the realm of headcanons.
So there’s my thoughts not only for that post, but for any post that accuses Raoul of gaslighting, and let this be the end of it.
