A collection of various discussions I've had about the story at various different dates, assembled here for my own reference in case I need to quote them again — it took me some time to track down the excerpt I wanted last time!
My depiction of Raoul in Chapter 2 of "The Choices of Raoul de Chagny" is very heavily based on "Why Does She Love Me?"/the dressing-room scene at this point: it's my defence mechanism against accusations that I'm writing him out of character for plot purposes :-) And the whole fic is saturated with one-line echoes and references to various lyrics in "Love never Dies", right down to the Epilogue.
"You need so much that I haven't given you, I know. I've asked so much and returned so little: and it's you who have paid the price for all the hopes we once had and all the promises I made you... I swear, Christine, that I want it as much as you do — I want our marriage back; I want to give you the husband you've lost, the man for your sake I thought I could be. Just ask, and I swear—"
equals:
"You need so much, it's true, and I've denied you"/"The demands I've made -- All the hopes mislaid -- I'm aware of the price they've exacted"/ "She wants the man I was, Husband and father"/"You need the man you knew, back here beside you: you'll have him back, I vow. Just ask it of me"
It's fun unpicking it again :-D (And of course, Christine's interjections are pure canon at this point, if not quite in the original context or order... with a little nod back to "All I Ask of You", the obvious base reference point for these two!)
The theory that Raoul has probably promised (and failed to deliver) reform before is my own suggestion entirely: but unless he really is an Abusive Drunk, he probably fits the normal behaviour of behaving badly, feeling abysmally guilty about it the next day, apologising, then doing precisely the same thing the next time the same trigger for the coping mechanism (getting drunk) comes up. The question is whether he can actually manage to stay on the wagon this time -- whether the two of them can straighten themselves out enough that he doesn't need to 'cope'. Which is largely a matter of self-esteem: his has taken quite a battering, whether this is considered justifiable by modern fangirls or not...
Basically, they need to sort their marriage out. Which is scarcely earthbreaking news! :-)
The hypothesis I was working on is that my version, at least, of Raoul was suffering principally from a catastrophically corrosive loss of self-esteem: he feels completely worthless (and of course, he's in the classic downward spiral of behaving badly because he feels bad about himself, and then feeling worse about himself in consequence, and behaving worse -- and the self-medication isn't exactly helping in either respect.) So if you can fix that -- give him a chance to redeem himself, and feel wanted (rather than just pitied, which is suicidally intolerable) -- you can probably fix quite a lot of the problems at source. He's not perfect, and never will be; he's only human -- but give him a motive to try, and the basically sweet nature shows up. Despair and feeling trapped is what destroys people.
This whole story was a spin-off from some character musings of mine about Christine's apparent hurt/comfort tendencies (I was amused to discover that the Australian rewrite, while removing various elements on which my construction had depended, actually confirmed my theory that she can't resist a man who cries... :-)
The basic idea was "What if Christine instead of Meg had walked into 'Suicide Hall'?" -- so, yes, it's just an exercise in rearranging the running order of the plot, attributing echoes of some of the lines ("There is no 'now' for us...") to other characters, and exploring the possibilities. The (perverse, because I'm pretty sure it's not what Andrew Lloyd Webber intended) message I got from "Love Never Dies" is that Raoul is miserably unhappy (and making everyone else miserable as a result), that throughout most of the musical Christine is more interested in patching up her marriage than raking up past indiscretions with the Phantom (after she acknowledges what took place, she promptly rejects him; after 'confessing' Gustave's parentage, she tells him that she will now be leaving immediately after the performance), and that, for whatever inexplicable reason, Gustave likes to follow Raoul around like a devoted hound puppy, no matter how often he gets kicked. Which means that the eventual outcome more or less lurches out of nowhere, in an exercise of wish-fulfilment against the thrust of the narrative: presumably why so many people like to call it 'fanfic' ;-p
So if we remove the Phantom from that equation temporarily and have Christine walk in on an earlier drinking bout, we get some real choices to be made. An ocean liner is an odd sort of hermetic world of its own; a poised moment between continents, between possibilities...
It's interesting to compare "Love Never Dies" -- at least on a superficial level -- with the ending of Powell & Pressburger's ballet masterpiece "The Red Shoes", with the heroine forced to choose between her neglectful husband and her obsessive Maestro. (Although in that case, the lady is killed off to spare her the choice...)
I did do a lot of research for the story, most of which was never actually used -- for example, I can quote the exact telegraphic return address for a wireless telegram sent from a Hamburg-Amerika liner to New York, and its cost, and the location of the Wireless Telegraphy Office on board ship! -- on everything from Uhlan helmets to the precise date on which the White Star Line first ran its service via Cherbourg, and which ships were on that route (it was scheduled to start in spring 1907, but didn't actually make the first sailings until a date too late for the start of the Coney Island season, alas...)
Of course everybody either had servants or *was* a servant: even Madame Valerius keeps a maid... I always picture dealing with servants as being rather like dealing with computer programs: theoretically they will do the work for you, but someone like Célestine is the equivalent of a program with a really bad user interface that you have to fight with to get the desired result! (She was invented as a throw-away character on the spur of the moment to explain away how the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Chagny could have managed to arrive in New York travelling without any servants at all: evidently they had one who walked out immediately the ship docked... But she developed well beyond that original conception.)
Thinking about aristocracy... really, the whole 'Raoul is a stupid stuck-up aristocrat' angle on "Phantom" is completely unfair, because his title is no use to him whatsoever. In fact, if anything it's a disadvantage, as it's a social barrier between him and marrying Christine. (Nor is it actually stated anywhere -- to my recollection -- that Raoul is particularly good-looking: his advantages over the Phantom in the appearance stakes are that he is young and healthy and undeformed. It's revised in "Love Never Dies" to claim that Christine chose "beauty and youth... wealth and fame" -- although this is hardly from the most unbiased of sources! -- but I don't think there's anything in the original "Phantom" that claims he is unusually attractive, well-dressed, etc. And the novel, of course, simply describes him as a fresh-faced innocent with a young moustache ;-)
So far as I can remember, in the book Raoul never once gets to pull rank at the opera house, or in any of the police investigations -- it doesn't help him at all (and a Viscount in the late 19th century is a purely nominal title, with no actual legal privileges; it's a fairly minor title in the scheme of things anyway, which is presumably why he holds it as a cadet member of the family). He is simply an agitated young man in the background, for whom nobody has got time to spare... The only case in which he does exercise authority over the managers (and over his own brother, who nominally outranks him!) is when he gets the doctor to turn everyone else out of Christine's dressing-room; and he does that simply by being the one to have the idea of suggesting that the room is too crowded for her health :-)
I would suspect -- and this is almost entirely hypothetical -- that Raoul de Chagny has probably been taught to be much more proud of his lineage than his title. As I said, it's a minor (probably courtesy, i.e. attached to whoever is the current heir of the Comte de Chagny) title, but we are told that the family line goes back hundreds of years. There have been de Chagnys in France since the thirteenth century...
Note that Raoul travels down to Perros-Guirec sitting up all night in the train and then taking the local diligence (stage-coach): this is not a young man who is accustomed to travelling in grand style! In fact, given that his brother controls the patrimony, short of asking Philippe for an unexplained advance on his monthly allowance, he probably doesn't have that much cash at his disposal. I imagine we're talking about a reasonably large sum of money, but by no means a prohibitively large one.
One has to remember that the French inheritance system was different from the strict primogeniture of the English nobility, where the eldest son inherited everything (especially if there was a family entail). In France property tended to get divided among the surviving children, as is mentioned in Leroux: Raoul and his sisters are described as yielding up the right to manage their portions of the inheritance to Philippe, who hands the girls' share back over to them at the time of their marriage as if it were a dowry rather than something that belonged to them, "comme si le droit d'aînesse [primogeniture] n'avait point cessé d'exister". (Meanwhile Raoul, who is presumably entitled in name to his own portion of their father's estate, having inherited during his minority has been living as a dependent of his brother while Philippe manages the entire estate as a single entity: a situation which probably suits both of them (and the estate) very well, assuming that young Raoul doesn't have many expensive habits while on leave :-D)
I get the impression that Leroux made Raoul a Viscount more with the idea of erecting an extra (social) barrier between his young lovers than with any intention of contrasting him with Erik! The thing he does stress frequently and presumably considers significant is the young man's shyness and 'innocence', qualities which he shares with Christine and with which Erik's history of murder and ingenuity and his omnipresent menace are contrasted. Oddly enough, one would have thought Erik's extreme reluctance to show his face would have counted as 'shyness'.
I'm not sure that Raoul's being 'stuck up' is backed by canon either. Again, in the book he has passed out of a naval training vessel (where the cadets would have been treated with very little favouritism) and completed a voyage around the world as a junior officer, where he would have been sharing cramped quarters with a large number of other men and carrying out relatively hard manual exercise: he travels on the common stagecoach and visits Madame Valerius (who addresses him as "monsieur Raoul", not "M. le Vicomte" or even "M. de Chagny") in the bedroom of her cramped little house without seeming out of place or ill-at-ease in such environments.
I've a feeling that the problem most badfic writers have with Raoul's aristocracy is their assumption that being born into the nobility meant you were infinitely rich and could do anything you wanted, as opposed to the poor plebs who were busy having their faces ground into the dust.
Being an aristocrat didn't give you more life choices: it severely restricted them. Theoretically at least it bound you to a moral code that required you to behave 'like a gentleman' even when thoroughly inconvenient: you couldn't demean yourself by laying a hand on your inferiors (no punching that footman in the face, Raoul!), you had to respect women (even your hideously interfering mother-in-law, whom Joe Baker in the backstreet would simply have chucked into the gutter), you had to pay up your gambling debts (debts of honour!) or be shamed in the eyes of everyone who mattered, and you were supposed to be courteous and punctilious in all your dealings. You couldn't practise a trade or a craft, or any other activity unbefitting your rank; you certainly couldn't earn any money by it even if, say, you were a talented actor or musician in private performance. The number of people you could marry was extremely limited, and might well be influenced by financial considerations rather than your own preference. And you required a considerably higher income just to keep your head above water and keep up appearances: inheriting a large country estate meant you had to pay the wages of a lot of people, while income from fixed tenancies was distinctly non-inflation-proof.
Obviously I'm not claiming that the nobility were all to be pitied for their lamentable position, but I am saying that aristocratic birth was restrictive rather than enabling -- you certainly couldn't go round doing whatever you liked. Raoul, for example, was very conscious that he wasn't supposed to be listening at dressing-room doors, whereas Joseph Buquet would probably have done so without suffering the slightest scruple :-)
Ironically (given the number of music-hating Badfic-Raouls) childhood experience of music is in fact one thing that all three of them canonically have in common; it's also great fun to do together! And while Gustave's musical precocity is demonstrated by the fact that he can detect and supply the missing part of a simple three-part round, Raoul is able to keep his end up thanks to prior experience (and a secret line of communication with Christine :-p)
It's a very different relationship to anything she would have had with Erik, not least because they have been married for ten years, in other words their entire adult lifespan. That's a lot of time to share with somebody: a lot of joint memories, and by no means all of them bad. (Raoul's viewpoint on his marriage in Chapter 2 is seriously skewed by hindsight: we get Christine's take on several of the same events -- the autograph-hunters at the Tuileries, for example -- and see that she is remembering them with fond amusement, where his current misery can read only humiliation in retrospect. See too their conflicting memories of the Italian tour...)
Also, she's not coming to it out of a broken relationship: this is a Christine who can still believe in "one love, one lifetime" -- the Christine who married her childhood sweetheart and made it work (with a lot of hard labour involved), rather than the one who worked at her marriage and lost it anyway.
It's not just childhood friendship, that is: though since they had that as well, it's a relationship that really has defined nearly their entire existence! At least as I've written it -- with this conclusion in view, but fighting furiously to keep it strictly within stated canon -- it has been a marriage that began very happily and despite years of deterioration has continued to show periodic glimmers of revival right up to the start of the story: enough to keep Christine at least clinging on to the hope that there is something there to revive, if she can just get through to her husband somehow... (though Raoul I think had given up, on himself and on everything else).
The ten years -- Ten Long Years! -- have not been entirely wasted, in other words, and they may in time be able to remember the better bits fondly. And Raoul, who has spent most of the story regressing back towards a happier place, will now be able to go forwards, as it were, and develop the ten-years-older-and-wiser self that he might otherwise have had (though I suspect there will always be a touch of shared childhood in there :-)
We get to see more of how Gustave and Raoul's relationship develops in the Epilogue: I was rather sorry to lose the exchange when Raoul finds himself in the position of having to explain that no, 'a true de Chagny' doesn't tell tall stories even to intrusive reporters, however tempting this might be! But that event didn't find its way into the plot as it eventually turned out. I did, happily, manage to work another snatch of random Raoul/Gustave dialogue in...
And I confess to having taken enormous satisfaction in writing "his son"/"their son" throughout the Epilogue, having been extremely careful to refer solely to "her son" until the vital point in Chapter Five :-)
The way that Gustave is (canonically) attached to Raoul suggests that his 'father' has had more influence over the way the boy has turned out than he perhaps realises, in which case definitely more than he actively intended at the time. Christine certainly sees a lot of similarities, which she attributes to conscious imitation on Gustave's part.
In the Epilogue Meg finally has her chance to perform the 'something glorious' that Erik was busy writing... I rather suspect, from the description, that the Phantom has just invented Lloyd Webber :-D Or the Broadway equivalent of "Chu Chin Chow", anyway (insanely successful early musical that held the West End box office records for about sixty years, and ran and ran).
Raoul, of course, is not in any position actually to know whether Meg is in a liaison with her Pygmalion or not: he is making assumptions based on a not entirely unprejudiced view of past precedent... But if she has any choice in the matter, she will be, sooner or later.
Christine doesn't regret 'giving up a chance at fame' in the slightest; she has fame (notoriety, even), and I think it's quite clear in canon that the only reason she ever accepted the offer to sing in America was for her husband's sake. (In fact, she suggests throwing over the whole thing on the night they arrive, if it's only going to make matters worse between them: "if it would ease your troubled mind...") So it's not much of a sacrifice -- she is very happy to do it :-D
It's not exactly a coincidence that Erik doesn't feature in this story... I worked out right back at the beginning that the only way to achieve a happy ending -- plausibly -- for "Love Never Dies" was to keep the two sets of characters as far away from one another as possible; so long as Christine never comes into contact with the Phantom, they both have a chance of sorting out their problems independently. At this stage, we are still looking at the Christine who hasn't seen him for ten years and who associates him with areas of her past she'd rather not think about: whose immediate reaction to seeing him is "How dare you come back and invade my life?" Left to her own devices, the Phantom's return is not exactly her top priority... although I was a little shocked as just how hostile and paranoid she got: that was supposed to be a nice fluffy moment, but Christine jumped to the instant conclusion that he'd found out about Gustave and was going to try to take 'his son', threatening to derail my entire plot until I could calm her down.
I thought South America ought to be far enough away :-) And looking at banana boat itineraries, there wasn't all that much choice: Fyffes ran to Surinam, so that's where Christine ended up! Their ships were traditionally named after South American rivers ("Bayano", "Carare", "Patia") so I christened mine after the Rio Arauca: the "Prins Willem", on the other hand, really did run the Paramaribo-New York mail route in the year 1907 :-D (And the KWIM mail steamers really did have black funnel markings...)
"Love Never Dies" claims both (and in the same scene) that Christine's scheduled appearance is her "first concert in years" and that her art has been paying off Raoul's gambling debts; if she hasn't been singing, she hasn't been earning. Moreover, if she hasn't been singing, her voice wouldn't be in good shape -- and even if we hypothesise that she has been giving private lessons, say, I feel that as a teacher she would have needed more of an established stage career to attract pupils than the abbreviated success we see in the musical: you might go to hear the latest unknown sensation, but you wouldn't send your daughter to take lessons from her!
So as I was more interested in the psychology of Raoul finding himself financially dependent on his wife, I went with the version of the reporter who has her as the breadwinner of the household, and agreed to write off "first concert in years" as confusion in the rumour mill, parochialism implying "concert in an English-speaking country", or "performance in anything other than straight opera", or some such :-) In fact, when the revisions were made for the Australian production, they had Christine being invited over to America with a genuine contract to sing at the Manhattan Opera House, which really wouldn't be offered to anyone other than a currently-active international star performer! And in all the lyrics, the emphasis is on "sing for me again" rather than "sing in public again" -- so, since I had to guess which statement Lloyd Webber really meant, I decided on the version where Christine is a famous singer who gets a rather odd job offer, rather than one where she hasn't sung since her marriage to Oppressive Raoul, but has to get hurriedly back into world-class form to pay off newly-acquired debts after he suddenly takes up gambling. For some reason, I didn't find that last chain of logic terribly convincing.
So my Christine has been performing regularly: not least, "last year in Vienna" (and at some point in Paris after the revised premiere of "Madama Butterfly"). This is just "another op'ning of another show" so far as the character is concerned -- and not one that she's terribly happy about...
All the business about Christine Daae "the Soprano of the Century" -- and being brought all the way from Paris to sing just one night -- definitely gives the impression that Lloyd Webber was presenting the character as someone who would be famous even to ordinary Americans, rather than someone whose voice is special specifically to the Phantom. Also, having the crowd at the docks comparing her to Caruso just isn't consistent with the very brief stage career presented in POTO, where she is little more than Carlotta's understudy who is acclaimed for a couple of performances when the prima donna is incapacitated. On the other hand, the crowd comments about "she ain't got it no more... not like the old days" would seem to point more to a Christine who hasn't sung in public for some time...
I basically came to the conclusion that there is no reliable conclusion on this one, and that I had to jump one way or the other: the canon is internally inconsistent within "Love Never Dies", never mind with "Phantom".
Once I had to wrestle with it myself I really got the impression that Lloyd Webber didn't think much of his plot through very carefully; those who complain that it strongly resembles a fangirl fantasy circa 2004 are all too close to the bone. The only reason I cut it as much slack as I do is that I liked the music... and I identified with Raoul's situation, however contrived. So, like Erik's fangirls, I set out to Fix It: unlike the fangirls, however, I felt obliged to make my solution at least plausible.
Little blond Gustave -- from the original show -- doesn't even look vaguely like the Phantom: and resemblances are hard enough to find at that age. Of course he likes dark and gruesome things -- he's a small boy, for heaven's sake. He will have a fascination with scabs and wounds, crawling things under stones, ingenious methods of torture, Early Christian martyrs, and unpleasant bodily functions (and if the Phantom had had even a modicum of contact with small boys, he'd have known that...) Note that Raoul didn't get nightmares from the story of the ankou -- which Gustave will probably love, if his mother ever lets him hear it :-)
And of course he's musical: his mother and grandfather were both exceptionally talented. I think that's about all that canon gives us... the temper was entirely my own invention -- corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative -- and I've hypothesised a mechanical aptitude, although the only hint at that is his fascination with the toy he gets given. Which is rather the point of toys, and the reaction you'd expect from a child with a new present!
None of this is remotely enough to produce Christine's apparent conviction that her son is the result of a one-night stand, so I had to assume that there must be something else that was obvious to her but not to us (a birthmark in an unmentionable place? ;-p)
But frankly, on the available evidence it seems to me that there is a significant chance that Christine is simply interpreting perfectly normal behaviour and convincing herself in the light of what she most fears. Which would be one big whopping irony, to put it mildly.
I didn't write the story that way, but believe me, I was tempted...
The canon situation with Gustave's paternity is basically that Erik is Gustave's father -- because the author says so. While one can argue a good case that under the stated circumstances it would be perfectly possible for Raoul to have fathered the boy, this falls into AU twist territory as it is clearly not the intention in canon. Also, given the outcome of the plot, it would be even more cruel to the characters :-( It would work in the context of my story (in which I provided a reason for Christine effectively to lie and say that she was certain of Gustave's paternity when she wasn't), where Raoul actually finds it psychologically helpful to believe that Gustave isn't his when trying to form a relationship with him -- but in the context where he has lost his entire family to another man, to then reveal (to the readers if not to the characters) that the whole thing is based on a misapprehension would be a twist too sadistic to stomach, even for me.
The problem is that Lloyd Webber has provided no mechanism other than this authorial fiat to explain his plot stipulation! The Phantom suspects that Gustave may be his (and has a powerful motive to want to believe it), but we are given to understand that Christine knows who is the father of her child... with no explanation as to how.
The other problem is that Raoul really doesn't seem to have the slightest suspicion: as people have been saying since the musical came out, a far more in-character explanation for everything that has happened would have been for him to have chivalrously married his childhood sweetheart in the knowledge that she was pregnant by another man and in need of protection, only to find that in the long term he couldn't live with the situation -- or the boy -- after all. But while one can explain away his reaction in "Devil Take the Hindmost" as faking it to save face, or as denying long-running suspicions when challenged on them by a rival, it does appear to me that the actual canon intention on this point is that the idea had genuinely never crossed his mind. It doesn't read like defensive lying (after all, it's Raoul who brings up Gustave's existence as a point in his own favour in the first place!) -- it's not pat enough or articulate enough. He simply is taken completely by surprise. (And he complains about everything else to Christine -- hard to think that he wouldn't get in a few little digs about someone who annoys him as much as Gustave does...)
And he evidently doesn't have the slightest suspicion about the state or otherwise of Christine's virginity, either... The simplest explanation for which is that he simply isn't qualified to judge, not having any real idea himself what to expect.
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