Loving and Its Risks in Phantom of The Opera by Gaston Leroux

“So do you end your days with me, or do you send him to his grave” a deep question asked by the phantom from the book, Phantom of the Opera. The book was published in the 8th of January, 1910. It was the most famous work of Gaston Leroux. It is a novel about a charismatic man with a devilish deformed face, but a voice like an angel where he terrorized actors in L’Opera Garnier but adores and stalks dear Christine Daéa. With a book that has taught a lot of lessons, it also shows the reality of what love is nowadays. When there is negativity overpowering in a person’s relationship, an unavoidable behaviour happens. This behaviour is very common, Toxic Love in a relationship is an inevitable behaviour in which two people damage each other emotionally and physically. Studies shows toxic love can affect one’s person health physically and mentally.

According to Kendra (2018), there are 6 types of basic emotions, one of it is anger. It is a powerful emotion characterized by feelings of hostility, agitation, and frustration towards others. A good representation of anger in a human form is Phantom. Through his murderous acts because of his addiction and attachment to Christine Daea, he was in a psychological state that his response to his anger is to kill people. He seeks attention but does not get the attention he wants from Christine Daea. Since killing became his habit due to a traumatic experience from his childhood, he became a murderer. He kills people during curtain call for the best of Christine and the whole play. Raoul, Christine’s lover tries to save her but ends up being one of Phantom’s victim in murder. In the latter part of the story Phantom realizes that Christine doesn’t truly love him and he slowly lets go of her and murder lessens in the Opera. It can be aligned with reality through the issues that pop up today. Such as a lover killing whoever tries to be involve with his relationship.

Jealousy is another face of anger which can be considered an emotion. It is an emotion because it preserves social bonds. It is a complex mixture of grief and enmity of anger fear and lose of aggression depression and envy. Jealousy is unhealthy in a relationship because it can turn to partner abuse. The Phantom is emotionally attached to Christine Daea that he is jealous that she is in love with another man. This love made phantom be controlling to Christine’s life, that he has a fear of losing her. It affects Christine Daea by lowering her self-confidence giving her a fear of what Phantom might do to her or to others. In today’s society jealousy is unavoidable because of natural causes such as lack of trust.

Addiction is a strong, anxious attachment to a partner or the need to have such attachment. This may be both conscious and unconscious to one person, unconscious in a way that they think it is just love, and conscious in a way he knows that he is addicted to her but he still continues. It is an intense attachment emotionally combining physical attraction, passiveness, and control. Phantom never notices that he is addicted to Christine, he only sees this as love. As phantom possessed these factors, he became a bad lover. In relation to reality these are also the common factors that affect a relationship.

The story shows how toxic the love Phantom gives to Christine Daea. The dominant emotion in toxic love is insecurity and anxiety. Typically when one person gone through a toxic relationship it sends a person to a relationship trauma. But in the story Raoul never leaves Christine’s side so that she will not feel the trauma. In today’s time toxic love is very common to younger generation, where people in this generation are not yet prepared to be involved in a relationship and they make foolish decisions.

To conclude everything, the story shows that toxic love involves many aspects like jealousy, murder and addiction. It damages the relationship physically and emotionally leading to relationship trauma.