2.2 The excessive pursuit 15

2.3 The inner struggle 17

Chapter Three   Inward and Outward Righteousness 21

3.1 The gifted talent 21

3.2 The perseverance of life 23

3.3 The phantoms’ tragic ending 25

Conclusion 28

Works Cited 30 

 Introduction

Rebecca, written by Daphne Du Maurier, a famous British novelist and playwright, was published in 1938. The fascinating mysterious and romantic plot arrangement with unique Gothic writing style attracts readers’ and critics’ attention for years. She has portrayed Rebecca, a mysterious woman in the work successfully. Rebecca is dead at first and never appears in the work. But she seems still alive and controls the whole Mandalay. The extreme and sad nostalgia as well as the horrible despair has made the book become a popular romantic masterpiece for many years. 

French writer Gaston’s love thriller The Phantom of the Opera is enduring for its soul-stirring plot and poignant love. It was published in 1911 which is between whodunits and absurd novels. It tells a ‘ghost’ story happened in the grandiose Paris Opera from the angle of a reporter which has been adapted into different kinds of films and musical dramas and is the classics of suspense works.

Rebecca and The Phantom of the Opera as thrillers have attracted a lot of attention all the time. There are many researches about these two works. The research on the character Rebecca can be pided into three categories according to the content. First, some scholars regard Rebecca as a degenerate woman, such as Ma Xiaowen’s “Two Evil Flowers in English Works—the comparative study of Rebecca and Bekey”. Ma considers that Rebecca is a dissolute woman in a traditional society (132). Second, some other scholars see Rebecca as an emerging woman who struggles with the patriarchal society, such as Hu Xiaohua’s “The Rereading of Rebecca”, which defines Rebecca as an anti-traditional woman (37). Third, others do research on Rebecca from natural angle such as Yang Yunfei’s “An Eco-Feminist Reading of Daphne du Maurer’s Rebecca” reveals the relationship between women and men. She thought Rebecca’s growth is the product of nature (15).

The Phantom of the Opera is adapted from a musical drama, so there are many researches on the musical talent of the phantom. And the researches on the phantom itself are pided into two categories. In the first category, scholars do comparative analysis on the healthy and pathogenic factors of Eric, such as Tian Yunxia’s “Half Devil, Half Angel”. They both think that Eric is good as well as evil (33). And the second category is about the analyses on Eric’s inward from the angle of love. Chen Xiaotong thinks the love story that behind the fake face mark is great in his research “The Love behind the Fake Face Mark” (92).

From the above summary, we can see that the previous critics mainly focus their research on the works itself instead of the deep influence outside the literature. This paper will comparatively study these two similar characters in two works. As it points out, previous works mainly focused on only one phantom while this paper will study two phantoms to find the similarities and differences between them, and to explore the reasons for their evil characteristics. By comparatively studying these two phantoms, readers could conclude the peculiarities of this kind of characters and treat them in a more proper way.

This paper has 5 parts. Part one is introduction. This part will give a brief introduction of the two books and the author, including the summary of previous studies on these two characters. From part two to part four is the main body which has three chapters. Chapter one and two will discuss the inside and outside reasons for these two characters’ evil characteristics in order to prove that they are not as evil as people thought. Chapter three will describe characters’ inward and outward righteousness directly. Last part is a conclusion, which summaries the phantoms’ evil characteristics misread by the outside and the inside as well as the good characteristics.