Analysis Of The Other Mother And Coraline

In this essay, I will be analyzing and comparing two research articles; The Other Mother: Neil Gaiman’s Postfeminist Fairytales by Elizabeth Parsons, Naarah Sawers, and Kate McInally and Good Mother/Bad Mother: Cultural Motherhood from “Hansel and Gretel” to “Coraline,” by Emily Culp, that delve greater into Coraline and how motherhood is portrayed in the book. The novel tells the story of a young girl named Coraline Jones; she is a quirky, imaginative girl who genuinely loves adventure. Her real parents are quite inattentive; they are mostly too distracted by their work to pay much attention to Coraline. This leads to her to discovering an alternate reality with a different set of parents, appropriately called other mother and father, who

371) The article talks about how Gaiman uses the double dealing Other mother as stepping stone for the protagonist, Coraline, to bring into perspective their existence and identity. Material feminism; which is the “politics that attempt to overturn male dominance through attention to improving women’s material conditions” (Parsons, Sawers, McInally, 2009, p. 372) is a key factor in this article and how it is manifested throughout the text. It is first evident in the beginning of Coraline when the household and work responsibilities of the real mother and father are explained to be duties that are shared; “Both of her parents work, doings things on computers...” (Gaiman, 2002, p. 21) and, “Coraline’s fathers stopped working and made them all dinner.” (Gaiman, 2002, p. 23) Also, Coraline’s mother does not follow the dated idea that having a child means giving up who you are as a person and having to sacrifice all semblance of your previous identity. Parsons, Sawers, and McInally (2009) describe this as embodying the “era of apparent choice and empowerment,” (p. 372) and that their choices are creating a rift in the mother-daughter relationship by introducing a “specter of a

This article is about “split mothers” (Culp, 2010, p. 03) and societies view of what a good mother is versus what a bad mother is. Culp (2010, p. 03) explains this as “mother-worship and mother-blaming” The articles looks at the split mother theory through different lenses, from early modern England, and Victorian England, to Anglo-American culture. After looking through motherhood in all of these eras and cultures; Culp finds that no matter what era it is, there are a set of guidelines that mothers must conform to in order to be considered an appropriate and good mother. The chapter in the article that I will be focusing on is Chapter III: Coraline: Is There Hope for Motherkind? this chapter details how Gaiman’s novel makes it possible for there to be an in-between mother, a mother that is not necessarily considered great but also not deemed to be awful; but one that is attainable and