Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. HarperCollins Publishers, 2015.
In Coraline, Gaiman tells the story of an adventurous little girl who, when ignored by her parents, seeks adventure and affection elsewhere. Beginning with a little door to nowhere, the story gets increasingly darker as Coraline receives warnings from her various neighbors that even they do not understand. And yet, Coraline crawls through her kitchen door into a magic place where she is loved and entertained at every turn. Everything is perfect… isn’t it?
Stepping into one of Neil Gaiman’s works always feels the same for me. It’s as if I’ve been to this world before —maybe once a long time ago— but now I can’t seem to remember anything about it. It’s sort of like walking through your own house, but everything is turned at a 15 degree angle; I have the peculiar feeling of being both comfortable and on edge. As I discovered Coraline’s little flat and her strange assortment of neighbors, I felt myself return to some place from my childhood, but with a sense of impending doom. Essentially, I went right through the little door.
And how does he do that? As an author, what does Gaiman do to present a story of childhood and manage to shift it into something new and complex? How does he make the magic? He does not merely rely on nostalgia. Works that simply rely on nostalgia prove empty like the dollhouses we all abandoned when we got too old. Instead, Gaiman marries everything we crave from childhood –exploring the damp woods in our rainboots, coming home to a kitchen filled with delicious scents, bonding with a cat that hates everyone else– with all of our anxieties of adulthood –paying rent on time, inheriting the worst traits from your parents, being alone– to tell us anew some story we feel like we’ve known our whole lives.
In this liminal landscape between child and adult, between nostalgia and horror, Gaiman plays with a few different controlling values, which are complicated because of our role as adult readers. In Chapter 6 of Story, Robert McKee states that a controlling value
“identifies the positive or negative charge of the story’s critical value at the last act’s climax, and it identifies the chief reason that this value has changed to its final state” (115).
Two of those values are illustrated in the graph below. In the early chapters of the book, like 1 through 3, the controlling values a separated mainly by age. Basically, what adults value and what children value.
Premise: What would happen if a child had to deal with terrible things all alone?
Purpose 1 (Adult): If you trust and listen to your parents who know what is best for you, you will grow up safe and secure.
Context 1 (Adult): If you put stock in the superstition and fairytales of childhood, you turn away from reality and open yourself up to the dangers of delusion.
Purpose 2 (Child): When you listen to and respect the voices of children, you provide them with a sense of understanding and value, allowing them to grow and learn safely.
Context 2 (Child): When you do not value the voice of children, you foster in them an emptiness and disquiet that can then be filled in dangerous ways.
Although these are the values I originally saw, I think that they can be separated and expanded. There are more sides to the points presented.
Purpose 1: If you trust and listen to your parents who know what is best for you, you will grow up safe and secure.
Context 1: If you ignore the advice of your parents, you open yourself up to the danger and disaster waiting in the unknown.
Purpose 2: If you make a path for yourself and gain your own experience, you will learn and grow on your own, developing into a more complete person.
Context 2: If you blindly follow the status quo, you will remain stagnant and perpetuate the past.
Purpose 3: When you listen to and respect the voices of children, you provide them with a sense of understanding and value, allowing them to grow and learn safely.
Context 3: When you do not value the voice of children, you foster in them an emptiness and disquiet that can then be filled in dangerous ways.
Purpose 4: When you show children the reality of the world around them, you make them stronger and help them grow.
Context 4: When you give too much credit to the fantasies and immaturities of childhood, you limit children and restrict their growth.
This web of values is especially difficult for us as readers because we have been/are on both sides of the fence. We were all kids once; that’s a major part of our identities. We have been with Coraline stomping through puddles and casting suspicious glances at a door to nowhere. However, we are told over and over again by adults and society how we are supposed to be and, as we grow, we get to see the reason in some of those things. For example, we may have hated going to school when we were children, but now we understand that you have to go through it for a reason. We are now Coraline’s parents as they struggle to complete their work and leave that door open — after all, it leads to nowhere. We understand the values of the adults, but we also understand the values of the child. Essentially, we are big fat flies tangled up in this web of values.
Reading on, it does get scary. It gets scary in the ways of your worst nightmare from your childhood, the one that sent you scrambling into your parents’ bed. And yet, this time, it’ll be even scarier as two aspects of your identity may be torn asunder. Pull on your Wellies and get ready to face your Other Mother.
Coraline, which proves to be a liminal text in a variety of ways, also exists in the conjunction of genres. In fact, most texts stray from the restrictions of genre, as Gallop points out in The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters (10). Coraline is, technically, children’s literature and operates within that genre. Children’s literature is known to have a simpler diction and sentence structure than other texts. I think the sentence structure and role of language in Coraline plays a huge role in the understanding and meaning of the text; the sentences read as we would expect Coraline to speak. However, the language surprises us in places. Coraline also operates in the genre of horror. Coraline describes munching on beetles and gooey, unreformed sac monsters in her simple, child-like way. This juxtaposition of images of horror through the lens of a child magnifies the horror of what we are seeing and hearing through Coraline. The ways that Gaiman mixes the genres of children’s literature and horror in order to highlight the most nuanced aspects of each.
When Coraline first enters this new and mysterious place she realizes that everything seems familiar. Everything but picture hanging on the wall. This picture was slightly different than the one back home. On page 25, Gaiman states
“She stared at the picture hanging on the wall: no, it wasn’t exactly the same. The picture they had in their own hallway showed a boy in old-fashioned clothes staring at some bubbles. But now the expression on his face was different – he was looking at the bubbles as if he was planning to do something very nasty indeed to them. And there was something peculiar about his eyes.”
Here, you can see the shift from standard children’s lit into horror. Like Coraline, we are asking “what’s going on here?” It feels especially eerie, wrong even. As readers, our perception of childhood is heavily clouded by Disney’s presentation of childhood. We’ve grown accustomed to singing birds and princesses with tiny waists who get saved by broad-shouldered princes. Clearly, Coraline isn’t on that bandwagon. Gaiman harkens back to the blend of childhood appeal and horror of Grimm fairy-tales. Coraline faces centipede monsters and sewing needles that get a little too close to her eyes for comfort.
I think of Coraline as another fairy tale with a Moral. After all, it begins with “Once upon a time.” The narrator tells us a story, a fable, so that we, tiny scared children, can learn that bravery is not the absence of fear, but doing the thing anyway while fully aware that we are afraid.
Throughout the text, I was interested in the concept of bravery. How can you be brave? This was fully explained in the story of Coraline’s father standing in the bees so that she could run away. According to him, what he did was not brave, it was merely what he had to do. There was no other option. Time and time again, Coraline steps into situations even though she is scared. She confronts the Other Mother, searches for the souls of the ghosts in twisted locations, and leads the hand to its demise. Reaching into that amniotic sac for the soul marble? Brave. Very brave.
When reading Coraline, it can be interesting to look at the role of cultural codes in the text. How do the adults behave? How is Coraline depicted? How much of the narrative is guided by how children are supposed to act or be? Silverman argues that cultural codes
“speak the familiar ‘truths’ of the existing cultural order, repeat what has ‘always been already read, seen, done, experienced'” (242).
Within the text, Coraline’s parents play an active role in silencing and dismissing their daughter. There are various points in the text where the narrative voice describes the titular character’s dialogue as “said quietly” (2). Coraline, then, becomes an archetype of childhood. Although she is established through language to be quiet and polite, her actions reveal some of her more nuanced qualities. For example, we perceive Coraline as a curious child because she
“set off to explore for [the hole], so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly” (3).
Coraline’s mother, on the other hand, is characterized in mostly negative ways. She is someone who “[makes Coraline] come back inside for dinner” and “[doesn’t] really mind what [she does], as long as [she doesn’t] make a mess” (4). With Coraline’s mother as a frame of reference, we as readers associate all adults with her behavior and actions. Adults make their children follow rules, such as eating dinner and not making messes, but have no genuine interest in them.
Gaiman takes these roles established by the cultural code and plays with them by adding the Other Mother as a foil of motherhood. Although she is interested and humoring in the ways Coraline’s mother isn’t, she is malicious and self-serving in the ways that Coraline’s mother is loving and nurturing.
The Other Mother serves as a foil to reveal that Coraline’s mother and actual life really aren’t that bad. Neat, but what else is there?
When she first hears the cat speak, Coraline describes it as
“a voice not unlike the one inside her head, but male.”
The cat’s voice here can be read as Coraline’s conscience or gut-feeling. (Little did you know your gut had a voice.) I think this further nuances the child/adult relationship I mentioned earlier. If the Narrator is a parent telling a bedtime story, here you can see the narrative voice slip into the character’s own head. After all, many of our consciences sound irritably like our parents’.
The Narrator reads as a parent telling a bed-time story and they interpellate us to become a child again and nestle under our covers. My groupmate Sofia remarked that
“[she] felt [herself] regressing slowly into a child with every page [she] turned.”
I think that the main purpose of this is to remind us what it was like to be children. So much of the way we define childhood comes from our adult projections of what childhood was, but, since they’re projections and based on memories, they can often be inaccurate. In The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters, Gallops says to
“Read not what should be on the page, but what is”(8).
As we deal with children, whether we are raising them or supporting them, we need to be aware of the genre of childhood that we are projecting onto them and their lives. Childhood is filled with different threads and influences, making it deeply subjective.
The way that we perceive this message has a lot to do with the authenticity of the narrator. As Seitz demonstrates in “A Rhetoric of Reading,” an authentic narrator is more likely to produce a submissive reader. We don’t like to be lied to. We don’t like to be lectured at much either. Enrico, one of my other groupmates, stated that he didn’t really like the narrator. He felt like the narrator was to haughty or so clearly the Adult in the situation that it was patronizing.
The processes that we apply to Coraline, and any text we read, can be applied in many other capacities. For me, the best thing about learning is using it as a bridge to reach new thoughts and ideas. Like, yeah I know how to do this; what if I used it to try to do that? First, I translated the concepts of controlling values and genre onto film. Listen, I’ve watched an embarrassing number of Murder, She Wrote episodes. And by an embarrassing amount, I mean all of them. When you add up everything from Murder, She Wrote to Scooby-Doo, you assemble a pretty comprehensive understanding of the mystery genre. Therefore, when I watch other things in the mystery genre, I can use what I know to help me figure things out. Figuring things out is definitely my read for. I love to get all the pieces and figure out how they fit together. So here I am with my knowledge of the mystery genre, prancing along like Nancy Drew without the lemon squares, but just as annoying. I saw Happy Death Day when it first came out. Essentially, this sorority girl is reliving her birthday Groundhog Day style and keeps getting killed. You shouldn’t go see it; it’s not great. When I watched it, I had to figure out who was killing her. Because of my understanding of genre, I could pick up the pieces. I could see the clues that were leading you to each suspect, especially the one that isn’t the most obvious, but the twist killer. Except that he wasn’t the killer! Because I was so focused on figuring it out and seeing the clues that I wasn’t supposed to see, I missed it!
Learning about genre and the rules it represents helps you to fit the puzzle pieces together. It gives you foresight to see what’s going to happen. However, if you get lost in the genre, if you get lost in figuring things out, if you Nancy Drew yourself into a corner, you can miss things. So what do you do? Well, do both. Be aware of the genre, of the rules, of what should be happening. But also be aware of all the details. Be open to the possibilities and the way the genre can change or even be inverted.
In The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters, Gallops notes that
“Worse still, we don’t just treat books this way; all too often this is how we greet people”(16).
I also noticed that I can apply these techniques to classrooms as well. As a student, I like to –you guessed it– figure it out. I like to follow all the steps the professor is leading us through in my head and see if I can get to the right spot with as little guidance as possible. There’s nothing wrong with this — except that it still seems to be a little Nancy Drew-ish. (Should I be concerned about that? Is there someone I can talk to? Am I wearing too many plaid skirts and turtleneck sweaters?) In my How Writers Read class, I was quite the resistive reader. I felt like I couldn’t ask my questions and I couldn’t figure it out. I would read the things we were assigned and think I understood them. Then, I would go to class and my professor would make me more confused.
Ok so what was up? When reading the texts, I could figure them out. I could piece them together and use my learning as a bridge and get them. Cool. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a good place to start. Then, my professor would take us beyond that. He would ask us questions I couldn’t answer. This process frustrated me because I couldn’t figure it out. But really, I was letting my understanding be the final step, when it needed to be the bridge. I wanted to know. I wanted to do the right thing and say the right thing so that my professor would think I was Good and Smart. In reality, his questions were helping me be that way. And I appreciate that he was willing to keep asking me questions even when I was snarky and resistant. (Or maybe he was just more stubborn than I was.)
“Coraline” Blog 1 – October 2, 2017
https://groupfourhwr.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/coraline-lets-go-through-the-little-door/
“Kindred” Blog 4 – October 26, 2017
https://groupfourhwr.wordpress.com/2017/10/26/kindred-who-are-we/
“The Shack” Blog 3 – November 7, 2017
https://groupfourhwr.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/the-shack-behavior-in-a-christian-cage/
“Caged Bird” Blog 2 – November 16, 2017
https://groupfourhwr.wordpress.com/2017/11/16/caged-bird-poetry-and-memory/
Group Four 