Tears have been like rain enough—
Like diamonds, rivers, stars—
So much
That I can’t help
Question the pain
That made a poet say
Tears are Rain.
What was the trigger
That once produced
Rain?
What was the wrong that reduced
A wordsmith to rain?
My tears are bees,
stinging in my eyes;
They’re poison, scorching;
fire,
Burning;
Knives, carving.
My heart
Complains of tears
like water,
But it’s wrong.
I've learned
Eyes are subtle volcanoes
Waiting,
dormant,
beside the nose;
Tears are magma,
flowing,
flaring;
That while eyes tear,
They’re tearing
Down your cheeks—
with pain begot
from pain.
I think, though,
I forgot those
Tears that are
“like rain.”
Sometimes,
they are the same,
But rather rain is more like crying:
Our pain is fluid;
our happy, dying;
Yet through the sad,
I think—I know—
That when they’re gone,
I grow.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Drunk Thoughts On Love On A Winter Night
I’d just pounded back
A double and coke
When you asked me how I felt about love.
I was uncomfortably tipsy;
You were already drunk—
You spoke with a slur—
And weighed against me on the couch.
I poured another drink
When you asked me again,
But I couldn’t answer just there and
then,
Because I didn’t know.
I didn’t know then
How I felt about love
Or even if I felt Love.
I didn’t know love until many years
later—
You asked me once again
In memory how I felt
But I still couldn’t answer
Because you’re no longer here.
I remember that night, though,
At my now-ex-boyfriend’s party
In his slummy urban shack.
We spent the night
Losing ourselves to the night’s ice
grace.
Remember when the snow fell
So hard on the tarmac
We moved inside from the fire
We’d set in the rusty trash can?
Remember that busted couch
Where we first traded names?
You laughed at mine for being
Too old for a younger guy.
I remember.
I remember you thought
You were too old for a younger guy like
me—
I said I didn’t think
You were.
How did I feel about love
That first night?
I wondered then if I was too young.
I was in school, after all,
And there was distance
In both space and mind.
But maybe I was making excuses.
With your warmth beside me
The warmth of rum inside me,
We dozed and slumped together,
Your gelled hair crunched in my hands.
You fell asleep and left me
Alone
To think,
To feel,
And wonder
Whether love is real,
Whether what I felt was love,
And whether that was true.
Monday, February 3, 2014
Uno
Uno is a game that I enjoy playing with friends, but it is complete crap to try to play it one-on-one with anyone. Even though the title Uno suggests a smaller group (perhaps consistingof a single individual *pause for weak laughter*), playing against a single partner is terrible. The game is meant to be played among friends (note the plural). In this photograph I have attempted to visualize the way I feel about the game and connect it to the way I feel about the concepts of "love" and "loneliness."
To some who have seen the above picture, the cards read "Love." The idea of love as a game is well known, but does not seem to be a particularly nice idea among romantics. In truth, however, Love can be very much like an Uno game. Despite a nature to have feelings toward more than a single person, the socially correct portrayal of love, at least in a majority of Americans, is that "true love" (whatever that may be) should take place between two single individuals (of course, it's more complicated than that, but I'm trying to be as simple as possible). By forcing Love to take place between two, you make the "game" (like Uno) much harder. It's easy for onee partner to be in control for a long amount of time, but then, in an instant, power can change hands. In a two-player Uno match--and in Love--the two participants are both struggling toward a common goal, and there may be swearing, there may be fun, there may be close misses, and you'll probably think it's over two or three times before it actually is, but then--it ends.
The other crowd of people who look at this photograph (excluding those individuals who just "...see a pile of Uno cards. What am I supposed to be looking at? This is dumb")--they often see the word "Lone." Loneliness can come at any point of a person's life. It can come before a relationship, and after a relationship, but I've noticed that people often neglect to think about the loneliness that can exist within a relationship. When coupled, it's easy for a person's ties to their friends and family--their other loves--to become weakened and severed. In Uno, I think the theme of loneliness is best represented in its name. Uno--meaning "one," of course--suggests singularity and exclusion. The point of the game is to be the only person without cards in your hand, which separates you, physically, from your friends in a probably incredibly insignificant, yet symbolically okay enough for me kind of way.
Anyway: Here's my picture of a bunch of cards.
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Monday, December 16, 2013
The Cat’s Meow: Coraline’s Self-Identification Through Her Animal Double
Introduction
In the early 1900s, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure delivered lectures to his students at the University of Geneva. In his General Linguistics course, de Saussure focused on language (langage) as a system of signs and ideas. De Saussure theorized that langage could be broken down into two main ideas; the first component of langage—the langue—refers to the abstract or theoretical form of a language, while the second component—the parole—identifies the way that the abstract is used in practice. This theoretical-versus-practical binary carries down into the linguist’s identification of a single linguistic unit: the signe or “sign.” The sign is a double entity made up of the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié).
De Saussure’s langage and the concept of the sign both reflect a notion of duality: without one half, the other half cannot exist. These dual halves oppose and reflect each other and yet, must coexist so that the product—in de Saussure’s case, linguistic communication—can also exist. In his own theoretical ways, Carl Jung identified a similar binary in the human psyche: the shadow, or “shadow aspect.” This shadow serves to complete a person’s identity: the shadow inhabits and consists of the darkness of Man—his animalism, his anger, his fear—without which no individual is complete. In Saussurian terms, the individual body is the signifié—a body serving the purpose of a concept. Without a shadow serving the role of the signifiant, however, the material body is incomplete and meaningless.
The struggle for meaning is a recurring trope in behavioral psychology, and so these ideas of self-identification can often be found in fields that reflect psychological understanding. In the field of young adult literature, for example, the coming of age novel, or Bildungsroman, often puts a protagonist in an environment where they must struggle against odds to find out who they, themselves, truly are. These quests for self-identification often come by means of travel: Lewis Carrol’s Alice falls through a rabbit hole and must discover herself in the absurd world of Wonderland; C.S. Lewis’s Lucy and her siblings walk through a wardrobe and must discover truth in a world unlike their own; Philip Pullman’s Lyra Belaqua and Will Parry cut their way into parallel universes in a quest to discover their own sexual and psychological identities.
In his essay, “An Eye for an I: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Questions of Identity,” David Rudd uses Freudian theory to examine the way symbols and devices in the world of Coraline help the titular character discover her own place in the world. This essay seeks to achieve similar goals, but with different materials. Whereas Rudd examine symbols and the ways in which Gaiman’s writing reflects Coraline’s self-identification process, this essay will examine the way Coraline—as a signifié—is made whole by the signifiers in the world around her and the world that reflects her own. Structurally, the essay will examine the “real world,” then elements of the “other world,” and finally examine the way elements of the story exist in the liminal space of the two worlds.
The work of characterization in a novel is rarely achieved by listing a character’s physical and mental traits. Instead, the reader knows that the eight-year-old girl is an eight-year-old girl because she acts like one, is treated like one, or is identified as one by elements in the story (such as other characters, or by the character themselves). Gaiman’s Coraline uses an interesting mechanism to give his characters identity: the empty flat. The big old house in which Coraline lives is shared with her neighbors: Miss Spink and Miss Forcible live below Coraline “with a number of ageing Highland terriers who had names like Hamish and Andrew and Jock” (Gaiman 3); a “crazy old man with a big mustache” (4)—we later learn he is named “Mr. Bobo”—lives above Coraline with his mouse circus. Coraline and her parents have just moved into an empty flat in the center of the house that sits parallel to a (supposedly) empty flat on the other side. Coraline finds that the passages between her flat and the neighboring, empty flat have been bricked-up, and it is inaccessible to her when her mother unlocks the door for her.
For Coraline, this world is one in which she is ignored. As Rudd notes in his discussion, “Coraline’s boredom and loneliness are beautifully captured when she represents her state on paper for her mother. She writes the word “mist” thus…[with] the “I,” significantly dropped out…. Coraline is clearly the lonely “I” which, punning on the word above, is not missed (i.e. she is overlooked)” (Rudd 160). Coraline’s loneliness is shown in the way she acts around her parents: she frequently attempts to be involved in her parents’ daily lives, but she is rejected each time: her mother suggests she “read a book…watch a video. Play with your toys. Go and pester Miss Spink or Miss Forcible, or the crazy man upstairs” (Gaiman 6) and her father gives her pen and paper and sends her off to “count all the doors and windows. List everything blue. Mount an expedition to discover the hot water tank. And leave me alone to work” (7). When Coraline’s parents are kidnapped, their plea for her to help them is literally backwards (57), because of the mirror, but would also seem backward because it is the parents who should be protecting the child, not vice-versa. In Coraline’s eyes, her parents ignore her and want nothing to do with her.
Her neighbors aren’t much better (not that they have any responsibility to be better than her parents). Miss Spink and Forcible, and Mr. Bobo all repeatedly call the young girl “Caroline,” despite Coraline’s corrections. Even though they entertain her, Miss Spink and Forcible ultimately ignore Coraline’s problems: on page 19, “Coraline wondered if they’d forgotten she was there” and on page 50, they ignore Coraline when she tells them that her parents have gone missing. Even though Coraline is very interested in his project, Mr. Bobo won’t show his mouse circus to Coraline because they aren’t playing their instruments correctly (4).
In the early stages of the novel, and up until the point where she returns to her own world to stay, the world for Coraline is one of isolation and neglect. The world is only this way for Coraline, however, because she has not yet come into an understanding of who she is. As Rudd demonstrates in his “mist” example, Coraline is either “refusing to be contained by the mist (insisting on her independence)” or she wants “to be a part of it, having the mist descend and embrace, or envelop her” (Rudd 160). Coraline reveals her craving for individualization in her desire for the Day-Glo green gloves that her mother refuses to buy for her (Gaiman 23) and yet still seeks the company and approval of her parents and neighbors. Coraline fashions herself as an “explorer” and spends plenty of time outside discovering her new home, and inside cataloguing doors, windows, and blue things. Coraline’s actions and desires show, rather than tell, that she is in search of herself.
Because she has not achieved a stage of self-realization, though, she is ignorant to the fact that she is not as alone as she believes herself to be. While it is true that her parents are busy with work, Coraline doesn’t actually seem to know what it is they do: she knows that “both her parents worked, doing things on computers,” (7) but there is no indication of what kind of computer work it is that they do. Coraline’s mother buys school clothes for Coraline that she does not like, but they could very likely be based on the uniform of her new school. When her parents ask for help in the mirror, they aren’t just asking her to do something that reverses their parental role with their child—they are trusting her to be capable of saving them.
Coraline’s ignorance extends to her neighbors, as well. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible both warn her of the danger facing the child, but she ignores the warnings in her tea leaves and wonders “who they thought they were talking to” (20). Additionally, even though Miss Spink and Forcible give Coraline a tool that could help her in the “other” world—the stone with a hole in the middle—she fails to recognize its value until she has run out of other options. Coraline shows prejudice against Mr. Bobo and his mouse circus by calling him a “crazy old man,” and she doesn’t even recognize that he has a name until she has already returned from the “other” house for the final time (155).
In her own world—her “real” world—Coraline is incomplete. She is parole without the langue; she is the signifié without the ability provided by the signifiant to understand the world. In her developmental stages, as described, Coraline understands herself as a person would understand a word that is completely foreign to them: the word is clearly there, and surely it means something, but without the signifiant—without the other half of its dual nature—it can mean nothing yet.
Coraline and the Other Residents
When Coraline crosses through the threshold into the “other” house, Coraline finds herself in a world not unlike her own. “The carpet beneath her feet was the same carpet they had in her flat. The wallpaper was the same wallpaper they had. The picture hanging in the wall was the same that they had hanging in their hallway at home. She knew where she was: she was in her own home. She hadn’t left” (Gaiman 27). Coraline learns, of course, that this other house is not the same as her own. The concept of “other”—here, a house—appears in many science fiction stories as the “alternate universe” or “parallel reality.” This “other” house exists beside her own and seems the same, but it is widely different.
The “other” residents are physically different because they all have buttons in the place of their eyes, but the more extreme differences that Coraline recognizes is in their personalities. Her “other” mother is attentive (overly so), her “other” father can cook food that easily rivals her real father’s food. The “other” Spink and Forcible are young and aerobic. The other Mr. Bobo doesn’t seem as fun-crazy as the real one—also, he plays with rats that sing menacing songs, instead of mice that play instruments. These other residents are interesting to Coraline in a way that the real residents are not—and they get her name right, every time. The “other” residents are all opposites of their “real” selves, and for Coraline, this seems appealing.
In a linguistic sense, however, these residents are no different from their “real world” counterparts. They all still represent a single half of a whole. It is merely because Coraline met the “real” beings first that she recognizes these new ones as different. That being said, the signifié is actually Coraline’s concept of the “real” character, and the signifiant develops with Coraline’s experience of the other. Because Coraline meets both versions of the characters in the house, she is able to use experience to create a fully understood idea of who they are.
At this stage of Coraline’s coming-of-age, a linguistic interpretation would identify “youthful ignorance” as the signifié and “experience” as the signifiant. By learning more, Coraline can imagine Miss Spink and Forcible as being the actresses that they remember being. Experience lets Coraline realize that, while training a mouse circus is certainly interesting, there may be something secretly frightening about a man who locks himself away and speaks to vermin. Coraline learns to respect her father’s attempt to cook for her, even if it isn’t good, and she appreciates her mother even more when she is replaced by the dangerous and terrifying “other mother.”
Coraline and the Beldam
Coraline’s relationship with this “other mother” however, is particularly interesting, because she inhabits two very specific roles. Her first role, as the “other mother,” is the same as the other “other” characters: she, like the others, serves as a Jungian “shadow” reflection for the “real world” counterparts. This shadow role is not necessarily dangerous, because it serves to promote Coraline’s growth—by dealing with the “other mother,” Coraline develops a closer attachment and appreciation for her own parent.
The other mother’s other role, however, is truly dangerous and terrifying. In the role of the “beldam[i]” (as she is named in the 2009 film adaptation of Coraline), the other mother has the power to create and manipulate elements of the “other” world, as well as the power to capture the souls of the innocent. While the ability to create is one that is held by mothers—and even their ability to create life requires the assistance of male influence—the ability to capture the souls and memories of children is not a typical motherly trait.
Because she fulfills this otherworldly, non-mother role, the beldam must be a different type of sign. In this other world, the beldam is like a god. She has created the world and fills it with things for her own desire, and yet despite her ability to create, she does not have complete control of the actions of her creations; she cannot affect free will. When Coraline encounters the beldam, she is encountering a psyche-half of a god-type character (the other half of which, according to a Judeo-Christian understanding of the celestial, can never be known).
The beldam creates a world that is everything a person could want, without reservation. This world lacks necessity and responsibility, however. In the beldam’s world, Coraline can have anything she wants, and she can do anything she wants. The price of staying in this world is high, though; as the beldam says, “Mirrors…are never to be trusted” (77). The children who choose to stay in this world have willingly chosen to never return to their real world. In doing so, they give up their signifié and corporeal bodies. With their bodies, they lose their memories as well and—in essence—become nothing but vague warnings for the next child. Something keeps Coraline from making the same mistake as the children before her, though: “I have no plans to love you,” she tells the beldam. “No matter what. You can’t make me love you” (77). Coraline not only manages to return to her own world, but she saves the souls of the three lost children, and her parents, as well. So what exactly is it that gives Coraline the strength to survive her ordeal?
Coraline and the Cat
The answer to that question, it seems, can be found stalking around the grounds, and walking between worlds: the cat. Coraline has no double in the “other” world, a fact which she, herself, recognizes: “Was there an other Coraline? No, she realized, there wasn’t. There was just her” (69). Coraline, because she has not yet achieved an adult self of realization, is able to travel between the worlds. The children must’ve also been able to make the journey, but somehow they were not able to make it back. The black cat that Coraline finds on the grounds of the real world follows her into the “other world,” though, so how is it that the cat can travel, too? Other animals have their “other world” counterparts: the mice have rat counterparts and even the terriers have their thespian doubles, so why not this cat?
In her 2004 lecture, “Cheek by Jowl: Animals in Children’s Literature,” writer and critic Ursula K. Le Guin examines the roles that animals play in young adult novels. Section VII, “Fables and Psychic Fragments” is an examination of stories like Coraline in which humans take a central role and animals take the form of support. In Le Guin’s discussion, she talks about the cats in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy: “The two cats in the story, who have a minor but important role, do what cats have often done in myth and fable: they cross between worlds” (Le Guin 101). World crossing cats aren’t the only similarity between Gaiman and Pullman’s work, however. The daemons in His Dark Materials, according to Le Guin, are somehow connected to a person’s maturity: “Until you reach puberty your daemon may take any animal shape at any moment; with your sexual maturity your daemon settles into a permanent form, always of the other gender” (101). For Coraline, the cat serves much the same purpose as Pullman’s daemons. “They are fragments or images of the human psyche given animal shape” (Le Guin 102).
Coraline’s cat does not change shape, but it is unmistakably similar in function to Pullman’s daemons. When the cat speaks for the first time, its voice sounds “like the voice at the back of Coraline’s head, the voice she thought words in, but a man’s voice, not a girl’s” (Gaiman 35). The cat offers advice to Coraline as a form of reflection, and even when it’s not talking, Coraline is still able to derive meaning from him. The cat has no name and tells Coraline, “now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are” (37). This implies that the cat needs no name because he already knows who he is. The cat represents a form of self-awareness that Coraline desperately needs, and without it she would never have been able to escape from the beldam’s world.
If the cat is Coraline’s key to self-awareness, and indeed serves the role of Coraline’s shadow, her signifiant, then she literally embraces her identity before encountering the beldam: “She went back to the cat, bent down, and picked it up. The cat did not resist. It simply trembled. She supported its bottom with one hand, rested its front legs on her shoulders. The cat was heavy but not too heavy to carry” (125). Coraline carries the weight of her identity and impending adulthood—a weight which is “not too heavy”—and confronts the beldam. Coraline then literally throws her identity—the cat—right into the face of the beldam (131) before escaping back to reality with the souls of the lost children, and the lives of her parents who remember nothing.
Conclusions
After Coraline escapes, the rest of the pieces fall into place. Coraline learns Mr. Bobo’s name, she returns the stone to Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, and yet, there is still something amiss. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible seem to have difficulty reading Coraline’s tea leaves: “Oh dear. No, I have no idea what that signifies. It looks almost like a hand” (Gaiman 151, my italics). Because Miss Spink and Miss Forcible do not share Coraline’s experience, they cannot fully identify the meaning of the sign in the cup—they have the signifié, but lack the signifiant in this situation. Coraline’s experience allows her to combine the two parts and understand the sign, here, though, and so she is able to defeat the beldam’s hand. This final episode shows that, no matter how much experience a person has (such as the aged Spink and Forcible), there are always things one can never fully grasp (like the hand). Coraline was able to understand signs by looking at their completed form, and in doing so achieved a fuller sense of who she was, herself. Coraline succeeds where the other children could not because she embraces who she is, and in doing so, Coraline proves the importance of self-identification, but also warns that the process of self-identification is never truly done.
De Saussure, Ferdinand. Writings in General Linguistics. ED. Simon Bouqyet and Rudolf Engler. Trans. Carol Sanders and Matthew Pires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.
Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2002. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Cheek By Jowl: Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters. Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2009. (pg 43-108). Print.
Rudd, David. “An Eye For An I: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline And Questions Of Identity.” Children’s Literature in Education 39.3 (2008): 159-168. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.
[i] I use the term “beldam” here in the hope that another name for the character can eliminate the confusion between the “other mother” as a mother-shadow, and the “other mother” as a representation of some unknown god-like force. “Beldam” comes from an archaic term meaning “witch” or “hag,” and may have connection to John Keats’s ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” The children souls in the film adaptation refer to the other mother as such.
In the early 1900s, Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure delivered lectures to his students at the University of Geneva. In his General Linguistics course, de Saussure focused on language (langage) as a system of signs and ideas. De Saussure theorized that langage could be broken down into two main ideas; the first component of langage—the langue—refers to the abstract or theoretical form of a language, while the second component—the parole—identifies the way that the abstract is used in practice. This theoretical-versus-practical binary carries down into the linguist’s identification of a single linguistic unit: the signe or “sign.” The sign is a double entity made up of the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié).
De Saussure’s langage and the concept of the sign both reflect a notion of duality: without one half, the other half cannot exist. These dual halves oppose and reflect each other and yet, must coexist so that the product—in de Saussure’s case, linguistic communication—can also exist. In his own theoretical ways, Carl Jung identified a similar binary in the human psyche: the shadow, or “shadow aspect.” This shadow serves to complete a person’s identity: the shadow inhabits and consists of the darkness of Man—his animalism, his anger, his fear—without which no individual is complete. In Saussurian terms, the individual body is the signifié—a body serving the purpose of a concept. Without a shadow serving the role of the signifiant, however, the material body is incomplete and meaningless.
The struggle for meaning is a recurring trope in behavioral psychology, and so these ideas of self-identification can often be found in fields that reflect psychological understanding. In the field of young adult literature, for example, the coming of age novel, or Bildungsroman, often puts a protagonist in an environment where they must struggle against odds to find out who they, themselves, truly are. These quests for self-identification often come by means of travel: Lewis Carrol’s Alice falls through a rabbit hole and must discover herself in the absurd world of Wonderland; C.S. Lewis’s Lucy and her siblings walk through a wardrobe and must discover truth in a world unlike their own; Philip Pullman’s Lyra Belaqua and Will Parry cut their way into parallel universes in a quest to discover their own sexual and psychological identities.
In his essay, “An Eye for an I: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Questions of Identity,” David Rudd uses Freudian theory to examine the way symbols and devices in the world of Coraline help the titular character discover her own place in the world. This essay seeks to achieve similar goals, but with different materials. Whereas Rudd examine symbols and the ways in which Gaiman’s writing reflects Coraline’s self-identification process, this essay will examine the way Coraline—as a signifié—is made whole by the signifiers in the world around her and the world that reflects her own. Structurally, the essay will examine the “real world,” then elements of the “other world,” and finally examine the way elements of the story exist in the liminal space of the two worlds.
Coraline and the Residents of the House
The work of characterization in a novel is rarely achieved by listing a character’s physical and mental traits. Instead, the reader knows that the eight-year-old girl is an eight-year-old girl because she acts like one, is treated like one, or is identified as one by elements in the story (such as other characters, or by the character themselves). Gaiman’s Coraline uses an interesting mechanism to give his characters identity: the empty flat. The big old house in which Coraline lives is shared with her neighbors: Miss Spink and Miss Forcible live below Coraline “with a number of ageing Highland terriers who had names like Hamish and Andrew and Jock” (Gaiman 3); a “crazy old man with a big mustache” (4)—we later learn he is named “Mr. Bobo”—lives above Coraline with his mouse circus. Coraline and her parents have just moved into an empty flat in the center of the house that sits parallel to a (supposedly) empty flat on the other side. Coraline finds that the passages between her flat and the neighboring, empty flat have been bricked-up, and it is inaccessible to her when her mother unlocks the door for her.
For Coraline, this world is one in which she is ignored. As Rudd notes in his discussion, “Coraline’s boredom and loneliness are beautifully captured when she represents her state on paper for her mother. She writes the word “mist” thus…[with] the “I,” significantly dropped out…. Coraline is clearly the lonely “I” which, punning on the word above, is not missed (i.e. she is overlooked)” (Rudd 160). Coraline’s loneliness is shown in the way she acts around her parents: she frequently attempts to be involved in her parents’ daily lives, but she is rejected each time: her mother suggests she “read a book…watch a video. Play with your toys. Go and pester Miss Spink or Miss Forcible, or the crazy man upstairs” (Gaiman 6) and her father gives her pen and paper and sends her off to “count all the doors and windows. List everything blue. Mount an expedition to discover the hot water tank. And leave me alone to work” (7). When Coraline’s parents are kidnapped, their plea for her to help them is literally backwards (57), because of the mirror, but would also seem backward because it is the parents who should be protecting the child, not vice-versa. In Coraline’s eyes, her parents ignore her and want nothing to do with her.
Her neighbors aren’t much better (not that they have any responsibility to be better than her parents). Miss Spink and Forcible, and Mr. Bobo all repeatedly call the young girl “Caroline,” despite Coraline’s corrections. Even though they entertain her, Miss Spink and Forcible ultimately ignore Coraline’s problems: on page 19, “Coraline wondered if they’d forgotten she was there” and on page 50, they ignore Coraline when she tells them that her parents have gone missing. Even though Coraline is very interested in his project, Mr. Bobo won’t show his mouse circus to Coraline because they aren’t playing their instruments correctly (4).
In the early stages of the novel, and up until the point where she returns to her own world to stay, the world for Coraline is one of isolation and neglect. The world is only this way for Coraline, however, because she has not yet come into an understanding of who she is. As Rudd demonstrates in his “mist” example, Coraline is either “refusing to be contained by the mist (insisting on her independence)” or she wants “to be a part of it, having the mist descend and embrace, or envelop her” (Rudd 160). Coraline reveals her craving for individualization in her desire for the Day-Glo green gloves that her mother refuses to buy for her (Gaiman 23) and yet still seeks the company and approval of her parents and neighbors. Coraline fashions herself as an “explorer” and spends plenty of time outside discovering her new home, and inside cataloguing doors, windows, and blue things. Coraline’s actions and desires show, rather than tell, that she is in search of herself.
Because she has not achieved a stage of self-realization, though, she is ignorant to the fact that she is not as alone as she believes herself to be. While it is true that her parents are busy with work, Coraline doesn’t actually seem to know what it is they do: she knows that “both her parents worked, doing things on computers,” (7) but there is no indication of what kind of computer work it is that they do. Coraline’s mother buys school clothes for Coraline that she does not like, but they could very likely be based on the uniform of her new school. When her parents ask for help in the mirror, they aren’t just asking her to do something that reverses their parental role with their child—they are trusting her to be capable of saving them.
Coraline’s ignorance extends to her neighbors, as well. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible both warn her of the danger facing the child, but she ignores the warnings in her tea leaves and wonders “who they thought they were talking to” (20). Additionally, even though Miss Spink and Forcible give Coraline a tool that could help her in the “other” world—the stone with a hole in the middle—she fails to recognize its value until she has run out of other options. Coraline shows prejudice against Mr. Bobo and his mouse circus by calling him a “crazy old man,” and she doesn’t even recognize that he has a name until she has already returned from the “other” house for the final time (155).
In her own world—her “real” world—Coraline is incomplete. She is parole without the langue; she is the signifié without the ability provided by the signifiant to understand the world. In her developmental stages, as described, Coraline understands herself as a person would understand a word that is completely foreign to them: the word is clearly there, and surely it means something, but without the signifiant—without the other half of its dual nature—it can mean nothing yet.
Coraline and the Other Residents
When Coraline crosses through the threshold into the “other” house, Coraline finds herself in a world not unlike her own. “The carpet beneath her feet was the same carpet they had in her flat. The wallpaper was the same wallpaper they had. The picture hanging in the wall was the same that they had hanging in their hallway at home. She knew where she was: she was in her own home. She hadn’t left” (Gaiman 27). Coraline learns, of course, that this other house is not the same as her own. The concept of “other”—here, a house—appears in many science fiction stories as the “alternate universe” or “parallel reality.” This “other” house exists beside her own and seems the same, but it is widely different.
The “other” residents are physically different because they all have buttons in the place of their eyes, but the more extreme differences that Coraline recognizes is in their personalities. Her “other” mother is attentive (overly so), her “other” father can cook food that easily rivals her real father’s food. The “other” Spink and Forcible are young and aerobic. The other Mr. Bobo doesn’t seem as fun-crazy as the real one—also, he plays with rats that sing menacing songs, instead of mice that play instruments. These other residents are interesting to Coraline in a way that the real residents are not—and they get her name right, every time. The “other” residents are all opposites of their “real” selves, and for Coraline, this seems appealing.
In a linguistic sense, however, these residents are no different from their “real world” counterparts. They all still represent a single half of a whole. It is merely because Coraline met the “real” beings first that she recognizes these new ones as different. That being said, the signifié is actually Coraline’s concept of the “real” character, and the signifiant develops with Coraline’s experience of the other. Because Coraline meets both versions of the characters in the house, she is able to use experience to create a fully understood idea of who they are.
At this stage of Coraline’s coming-of-age, a linguistic interpretation would identify “youthful ignorance” as the signifié and “experience” as the signifiant. By learning more, Coraline can imagine Miss Spink and Forcible as being the actresses that they remember being. Experience lets Coraline realize that, while training a mouse circus is certainly interesting, there may be something secretly frightening about a man who locks himself away and speaks to vermin. Coraline learns to respect her father’s attempt to cook for her, even if it isn’t good, and she appreciates her mother even more when she is replaced by the dangerous and terrifying “other mother.”
Coraline and the Beldam
Coraline’s relationship with this “other mother” however, is particularly interesting, because she inhabits two very specific roles. Her first role, as the “other mother,” is the same as the other “other” characters: she, like the others, serves as a Jungian “shadow” reflection for the “real world” counterparts. This shadow role is not necessarily dangerous, because it serves to promote Coraline’s growth—by dealing with the “other mother,” Coraline develops a closer attachment and appreciation for her own parent.
The other mother’s other role, however, is truly dangerous and terrifying. In the role of the “beldam[i]” (as she is named in the 2009 film adaptation of Coraline), the other mother has the power to create and manipulate elements of the “other” world, as well as the power to capture the souls of the innocent. While the ability to create is one that is held by mothers—and even their ability to create life requires the assistance of male influence—the ability to capture the souls and memories of children is not a typical motherly trait.
Because she fulfills this otherworldly, non-mother role, the beldam must be a different type of sign. In this other world, the beldam is like a god. She has created the world and fills it with things for her own desire, and yet despite her ability to create, she does not have complete control of the actions of her creations; she cannot affect free will. When Coraline encounters the beldam, she is encountering a psyche-half of a god-type character (the other half of which, according to a Judeo-Christian understanding of the celestial, can never be known).
The beldam creates a world that is everything a person could want, without reservation. This world lacks necessity and responsibility, however. In the beldam’s world, Coraline can have anything she wants, and she can do anything she wants. The price of staying in this world is high, though; as the beldam says, “Mirrors…are never to be trusted” (77). The children who choose to stay in this world have willingly chosen to never return to their real world. In doing so, they give up their signifié and corporeal bodies. With their bodies, they lose their memories as well and—in essence—become nothing but vague warnings for the next child. Something keeps Coraline from making the same mistake as the children before her, though: “I have no plans to love you,” she tells the beldam. “No matter what. You can’t make me love you” (77). Coraline not only manages to return to her own world, but she saves the souls of the three lost children, and her parents, as well. So what exactly is it that gives Coraline the strength to survive her ordeal?
Coraline and the Cat
The answer to that question, it seems, can be found stalking around the grounds, and walking between worlds: the cat. Coraline has no double in the “other” world, a fact which she, herself, recognizes: “Was there an other Coraline? No, she realized, there wasn’t. There was just her” (69). Coraline, because she has not yet achieved an adult self of realization, is able to travel between the worlds. The children must’ve also been able to make the journey, but somehow they were not able to make it back. The black cat that Coraline finds on the grounds of the real world follows her into the “other world,” though, so how is it that the cat can travel, too? Other animals have their “other world” counterparts: the mice have rat counterparts and even the terriers have their thespian doubles, so why not this cat?
In her 2004 lecture, “Cheek by Jowl: Animals in Children’s Literature,” writer and critic Ursula K. Le Guin examines the roles that animals play in young adult novels. Section VII, “Fables and Psychic Fragments” is an examination of stories like Coraline in which humans take a central role and animals take the form of support. In Le Guin’s discussion, she talks about the cats in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy: “The two cats in the story, who have a minor but important role, do what cats have often done in myth and fable: they cross between worlds” (Le Guin 101). World crossing cats aren’t the only similarity between Gaiman and Pullman’s work, however. The daemons in His Dark Materials, according to Le Guin, are somehow connected to a person’s maturity: “Until you reach puberty your daemon may take any animal shape at any moment; with your sexual maturity your daemon settles into a permanent form, always of the other gender” (101). For Coraline, the cat serves much the same purpose as Pullman’s daemons. “They are fragments or images of the human psyche given animal shape” (Le Guin 102).
Coraline’s cat does not change shape, but it is unmistakably similar in function to Pullman’s daemons. When the cat speaks for the first time, its voice sounds “like the voice at the back of Coraline’s head, the voice she thought words in, but a man’s voice, not a girl’s” (Gaiman 35). The cat offers advice to Coraline as a form of reflection, and even when it’s not talking, Coraline is still able to derive meaning from him. The cat has no name and tells Coraline, “now, you people have names. That’s because you don’t know who you are” (37). This implies that the cat needs no name because he already knows who he is. The cat represents a form of self-awareness that Coraline desperately needs, and without it she would never have been able to escape from the beldam’s world.
If the cat is Coraline’s key to self-awareness, and indeed serves the role of Coraline’s shadow, her signifiant, then she literally embraces her identity before encountering the beldam: “She went back to the cat, bent down, and picked it up. The cat did not resist. It simply trembled. She supported its bottom with one hand, rested its front legs on her shoulders. The cat was heavy but not too heavy to carry” (125). Coraline carries the weight of her identity and impending adulthood—a weight which is “not too heavy”—and confronts the beldam. Coraline then literally throws her identity—the cat—right into the face of the beldam (131) before escaping back to reality with the souls of the lost children, and the lives of her parents who remember nothing.
Conclusions
After Coraline escapes, the rest of the pieces fall into place. Coraline learns Mr. Bobo’s name, she returns the stone to Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, and yet, there is still something amiss. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible seem to have difficulty reading Coraline’s tea leaves: “Oh dear. No, I have no idea what that signifies. It looks almost like a hand” (Gaiman 151, my italics). Because Miss Spink and Miss Forcible do not share Coraline’s experience, they cannot fully identify the meaning of the sign in the cup—they have the signifié, but lack the signifiant in this situation. Coraline’s experience allows her to combine the two parts and understand the sign, here, though, and so she is able to defeat the beldam’s hand. This final episode shows that, no matter how much experience a person has (such as the aged Spink and Forcible), there are always things one can never fully grasp (like the hand). Coraline was able to understand signs by looking at their completed form, and in doing so achieved a fuller sense of who she was, herself. Coraline succeeds where the other children could not because she embraces who she is, and in doing so, Coraline proves the importance of self-identification, but also warns that the process of self-identification is never truly done.
Works Cited
De Saussure, Ferdinand. Writings in General Linguistics. ED. Simon Bouqyet and Rudolf Engler. Trans. Carol Sanders and Matthew Pires. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.
Gaiman, Neil. Coraline. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2002. Print.
Le Guin, Ursula K. Cheek By Jowl: Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters. Seattle: Aqueduct Press, 2009. (pg 43-108). Print.
Rudd, David. “An Eye For An I: Neil Gaiman’s Coraline And Questions Of Identity.” Children’s Literature in Education 39.3 (2008): 159-168. Academic Search Complete. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.
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[i] I use the term “beldam” here in the hope that another name for the character can eliminate the confusion between the “other mother” as a mother-shadow, and the “other mother” as a representation of some unknown god-like force. “Beldam” comes from an archaic term meaning “witch” or “hag,” and may have connection to John Keats’s ballad, “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” The children souls in the film adaptation refer to the other mother as such.
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