Episode 10: “Coraline” (Part 2)
Scary Gender Expressions and Scarier Mothers
Welcome back to part two of Paranormal Pajama Party’s discussion on the children’s horror movie Coraline. Catch up on last week’s episode here.
Tonight, we’re drawing on the works of Judith Butler, Barbara Creed, and Sigmund Freud to explore Coraline’s themes of gender, power, and the uncanny.
If you thought we were done with Freud last week, I’ve got terrible news for you. This week, our pajama party jumps straight into the Oedipal complex. Classic.
Coraline’s Oedipus complex
To establish her own identity, Coraline needs to navigate and ultimately overcome the menacing maternal figure of the Other Mother. The forbidding Other Mother embodies aspects of the “archaic mother”, a horror trope identified by feminist cultural critic Barbara Creed. This particular archaic mother seeks to maintain control over Coraline by trapping her in a perfect – and perfectly dangerous – world.
Coraline’s Oedipal journey also involves identification with a father figure, which some academics theorise is symbolised in her relationship with the Cat (who is male, despite everything I just told you about cats).
Why Wybie?
Speaking of men where you didn’t expect them, we’re also talking about the Wybie problem tonight. The movie’s introduction of a male character, Wybie, who doesn’t appear in the book, raises questions about the need for a male presence in a female-driven story. This choice robs Coraline of important discoveries and moments of bravery, and once or twice reduces her to a damsel in distress.
Was the decision to add Wybie to the screenplay a cynical cash grab? An attempt to add gender diversity to the cast? Or is it reflective of a lack of confidence in a female protagonist’s ability to carry the movie on her own? I don’t know, but I don’t like it.
Gender roles in “Coraline”
Gender and its expression is a major theme of the film version of Coraline. In the Other World, Coraline encounters a perfect 1950s housewife version of the Other Mother. Her performance of the archetypal feminine ideal, complete with cooking, decorating, and un-smearable lipstick, lures Coraline into a false sense of security. The Other World presents a stark contrast to the messy real world, where Coraline’s parents and neighbours defy traditional gender roles, or at least Coraline’s childish expectations of how gender should be performed.
The Other Mother isn’t really a tradwife, of course – she’s actually an all-powerful world-building creature of control, and that may be what makes her so frightening to a patriarchal audience.
Scary mommies of horror
She joins a long list of scary mommies in horror media. From Mrs Bates in Psycho to Carrie White’s religious zealot mother in Carrie, maternal figures regularly pop up in terrifying roles. Gender studies scholars might say that this fear stems from men’s subconscious fears of a female creator who doesn’t need a male god to be powerful, and, ultimately, our fear of death. The archaic mother wants us back in the empty, dark womb where we started, but we can’t go back there, so the only alternative is death.
And there’s nothing more unsettling than the idea that the safest person in the world, who loves you unconditionally, might turn out to be a monster all along.
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Sources
La Belle Dame sans Merci: A Ballad by John Keats | Poetry Foundation
Selick, H. (Director). (2009). Coraline [Streamed]. Focus Features.
Cothren, C. (2022). Monsters “dress down”: Gender divides in Frankenstein and Coraline. English Journal, 112(2), 48-54.
Goss, J. (2009). The Mother with the Button Eyes: An Exploration of the Story Construct of the “Other-mother.” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, 19(1), 69–72.
Parsons, E., Sawers, N., & McInally, K. (2008). The other mother: Neil gaiman’s postfeminist fairytales. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 33(4), 371-389.
Curtis, J. (2016). Why were you born?: An analysis of the anti-feminist implications of the film adaptation of coraline: [1]. Gender Forum, (57), 1.
Mandelo, L. (2013, October 16). Doing Damage to the Text: Gender in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline(s). Reactor.
Muller, V. (2012). Same old ‘other’ mother’?: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline. Outskirts: feminisms along the edge, 26.
Rudd, D. An Eye for an I: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Questions of Identity. Child Lit Educ 39, 159–168 (2008).
Barbara Creed, Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection, Screen, Volume 27, Issue 1, January/February 1986, Pages 44–71.