The Other Mother: Neil Gaiman's Postfeminist Fairytales

Abstract

Instead, Coraline's father makes recipes that she detests, and neither of the parents pay Coraline the attention she craves.\n The mask that belongs to the mother and that bad Helena had stolen in order to destroy the world fuses with Helena's own face as a narrative resolution in a circular construction of gendered identity wherein the daughter takes up the (self-same) place of her mother Conclusion Real power, agency, authority, and autonomy are all embodied in Coraline and Helena's evil other mothers, mothers that must be recognized and then usurped by a return to a real mother-namely, to a woman who, in Lacanian terms, masquarades as empowered and who is shown to hold any feminist position only at the expense of her daughter. Feminine bonds threaten the Western worship of individualism and "freedom" for girls, sexual maturation is always taken up in relation to the phallus, and it is the failures of materialist feminist mothers that are their most valuable asset.2 More broadly, Gaiman's recipes for postfeminist power appear as unwholesome as frozen pizza in the final feminist analysis of mothers.

The literary landscapes that Neil Gaiman offers his reader in Coraline (2002) and The Mirror Mask (2006) are, like most narratives in the genre of fantasy, fraught with anxiety, riddled with disturbing psychological dilemmas, and infused with fears and dangers that threaten the security of the knowable self. That fantasies manifest the possibility to speak "uncanny" fears about otherness is well recognized and acknowledged in current criticism of Gaiman's fiction (Schweitzer). Like many other literary works of fantasy, both traditional and contemporary, Gaiman deploys the trope of the evil, powerful "other" mother as a vehicle through which the protagonists resolve questions of identity, one's (gendered) place in the world, and the kinds of interpersonal relationships that are culturally sanctioned. That said, in these two stories for child readers there are additional dangers to be encountered: the fear of the all-powerful maternal jostles with exemplars of the postfeminist mother whose power is so limited as to make it safe.

Postfeminism itself is fraught with dangers because, as Angela McRobbie explains, "while simultaneously appearing to be engaging in a well-informed and even well intended response to feminism," it is "an active process in which feminist gains from the 70s and 80s come to be undermined" (255). Indeed, Gaiman's texts present a journey toward normative and consolidated feminine and heterosexual identities that rely on demonizing women. The too-powerful (phallic) mother's dominance must be overthrown, and, as the happy resolution attests, it is only through a psychoanalytic journey that represses the fantasy of feminine power and agency that the "normative" position for Gaiman's female protagonists are attained. As a result, the fantasies presented in Coraline and The Mirror Mask are emblematic of the ways in which psychoanalysis has remained far more trenchant in Western thinking than feminist bids to activism.

With respect to this feminist discourse in Gaiman's stories, the negative maternal threat dreamed by girl protagonists in the form of their "Other Mothers" is weighed against the material feminism modelled by the mothers who inhabit the "real" worlds of the narratives. Material feminism-the politics that attempt to overturn male dominance through attention to improving women's material conditions (such as the responsibility for domestic duties)-is mapped in the realist beginnings of both stories in which the protagonists describe their mother's role in family life. These mothers share household and career responsibilities with the fathers of their daughters, are not subjugated by an overriding devotion to child rearing at the expense of their own happiness, and thus seem to embody the era of apparent choice and empowerment. But, it is because these mothers make such choices and embrace this empowered status that their relationships with their daughters are haunted by the specter of a too-powerful (phallic) mother who is the source of fear and anxiety for both the girl protagonists.

What appears to be a feminist agenda in these texts, then, is also a fantasy. Material feminism slips seamlessly into postfeminism, the effects of which are exposed in these novels in the form of the postfeminist truism that women have apparently achieved equality but that this has not made them, or their daughters, happy (Faludi, Braithwaite). Thus, the "cure" for the dissatisfaction that comes with "empowerment" is written through the protagonists' Oedipal journey. The masculinist tradition of psychoanalytic theory that regulates familial and specifically maternal relationships with an insistent surveillance of the Oedipal triangle is, in Gaiman's novels, offered as an antidote to the ills of feminisms. which apparently mobilize entirely the wrong desires in women and girls.

That said, before we address the books directly and with reference to the psychoanalytical anxieties that drive them, it seems important to assert that we find Gaiman's narratives superb in many ways. They play rich and seductive games in a literary landscape that is so often muted in accordance with publishing requirements in children's literature and the marketing agendas that position this lucrative genre in capitalist economies. Gaiman's defiance of conventions is worthy of celebration, but it is therefore equally worthy of critique. The devil in the detail is not one that should be banished but rather one that needs some sessions with analysts in order to map the processes by which positive change can come about in future iterations of stories as culture moves (hopefully) forward. Children's literature criticism is well placed to occupy this role. Arguably, such narrow-eyed assessments as this article is likely to be accused of are essential to the politics that underscore the task at hand. In the neoliberal present in which the arts and humanities are annexed to the creative economy, we cannot afford to simply value-add with accolades, nor can we diminish possibilities for reading with bad press. Our tasks must confront these limited binaries in order to speak with confidence about the integral role that texts for children play in the construction of culture and conscious/unconscious gendered identity formation.

Gaiman's work is of particular relevance as the object of study, not only because it is so contemporary but also because he has been much celebrated for offering scope in children's literature. His critical acclaim is noted on his Web site, which lists the following awards and honours: "Neil Gaiman is the winner of 3 Hugos, 2 Nebulas, 1 World Fantasy Award, 4 Bram Stoker Awards, 6 Locus Awards, 2 British SF Awards, 1 British Fantasy Award, 3 Geffens, 1 International Horror Guild Award, and 1 Mythopoeic" (http://www.neilgaiman.com). It is on this note of recognition that we launch into our readings of these novels as the starting point for positioning them as profoundly interesting reflections, and perhaps mechanisms, of cultural change or stasis, as the diversity of the cases may be.

Coraline tells the tale of Coraline, a prepubescent girl who has moved to a new house and is bored in the hiatus of school holidays, but it also tells tales about her mother, who does not cook. Instead, Coraline's father makes "recipes" that she detests, and neither of the parents pay Coraline the attention she craves. Coraline consequently enters a fantasy-scape in which she encounters an all-powerful and sadistic other mother, but one, nonetheless, who plays the traditional mothering role admirably. She cooks the food Coraline loves, provides toys and clothing, and wants to play with her daughter rather than prioritize a career. This other mother has also invented a powerless father as one of her minions. He is merely one of the many ruses the other mother constructs in her bids to trick Coraline into giving over her soul so as to trap a daughter in the limbo of an eternal childhood, for no other purpose (that the novel explains) than the pleasure she takes in the subjugation of children.

The novel enacts a range of mirror-like reversals between these two worlds, and the mirror becomes a magic trope in which Coraline's real parents are trapped and behind which she is briefly incarcerated. In this respect, the novel is more Lacanian in its psychoanalytic bent than it is Freudian; the "other" mother is a mirror inversion of the Lacanian m/other who is foundational to a child's individuation, and, as phallic mother, she threatens Coraline's very existence. By providing "all" for Coraline, she traps Coraline in a pre-Oedipal state where she is not allowed to desire because all her needs are met. Until Coraline can escape the fantasy of the Lacanian "real," she cannot grow up and understand cultural laws that allow her to properly function in a (nuclear, heterosexual) family. While the Lacanian imagery of mirrors and otherness frame this analysis, the novel is fraught with Freudian symbolism. Reading through these two strands of psychoanalytic parlance, then, it becomes clear that Coraline's ability to accept her own gendered and sexed position allows her to see the "proper" cultural position for girls as predicated on her recognition that power and female is not only a threatening combination but one that will never make a girl happy.

Following the tradition of mirrored reversals in Coraline, The Mirror Mask enacts a similar set of inversions, not only in its construction of a parallel universe in which mothers rule the world but also on a production scale. The story was originally a movie, and the picture book, referred to as an "original novella" on the back cover, emerged as a marketing add-on (in contradistinction to the typical book-to-film model, such as the Harry Potter series, the Narnia Chronicles, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and other iconic children's texts). Our focus is on the book version, in which the protagonist, Helena, also enters her fantasized mother-scape after resenting her real mother. The mother-daughter spat that begins the narrative climaxes with Helena's Electracomplex wish that her mother was dead, a moment of adolescent cruelty that unintentionally precedes her mother's collapse and hospitalization with an implied life-threatening brain tumour. Helena feels guiltily responsible for this outcome and, like Coraline, the narrative then moves into an unconscious fantasy landscape.

Helena's anxious fantasy involves a war against the Black Queen, who represents a controlling mother; however, Helena's war is also against her evil Other-self, the Black Queen's daughter who smokes cigarettes, "snogs" boys, eats chips, chooses her own clothes, and fights with her dad. This bad-Helena is an archetype of contemporary assumptions about teenagers, and she is apparently going to "destroy the world." Good-Helena must reject that bad-self, and she must also use the mirror mask to save the passively comatose good White Queen of the (hospital-like) white palace, an emblem of the real mother that she (ambivalently) loves. While the White Queen is a sleeping beauty (and thus a mother without the power to reign in Helena's adolescent desires and behaviours), the Black Queen attempts to entrap good-Helena and make her into a "passive and pathetic princess" by dressing her up to look beautiful and teaching her etiquette. The parable here is essentially the same story as told in Coraline; bad mothers want to infantalize their daughters. The Black Queen wants Helena to remain in a child-like and presexual state, trapped in the maternal sphere that she has created and controls.

By comparison, the good-mother/White Queen is driving Helena toward a boyfriend in the fantasy-scape, a character aptly named Valentine. Valentine is faceless and thus works more as a symbol of Helena's desire for a future heteronormative relationship, one that is only achievable through escaping her bad mother and entering a new phase of maturity, "real life", in which she must take control of (or repress) the antisocial or threatening aspects of her fantasies. This entails Helena's experience being mediated through Valentine, whose name, midway through the novella, shifts to the plural "Valentines." This pluralization is not so much Helena's desire for many Valentines but her acceptance of the importance of the masculine as sexual category, since her journey is interdependent on him; she is eventually saved by his phallic tower. The Freudian phallic symbolism in this story is balanced with the Lacanian edict that the unconscious is structured like a language; Helena's psychic journey is replete with libraries and books that direct the action, and the manifold power of illustrations serve as symbolic logics.

Coraline and Helena adhere to standard psychological and psychoanalytic imperatives for development that are often sold to implied child readers as a desired maturity in children's literature. In both narratives the girls need to destroy the power of the malevolent mother whose agenda is to encase daughters in an eternal childhood bond that, these stories tell readers, is destructive and dangerous. While feminist psychoanalytic theory, as argued by Irigaray in This Sex Which Is Not One, celebrates the pre-Oedipal connections between mothers and their children, and sees girl children as available subjects for maintaining these bonds of equivalent (rather than antithetical) sexuality, Gaiman's fantasies ensure that such ideas have no truck and that such bonds are in fact evil in their otherness to normal heterosexual maturations. In order to map this genealogic trajectory through the pre- and postadolescent girl protagonists, we will first address the psychosexual move toward gender differentiation in the child figure of Coraline and then assess the sexual anxieties evinced by adolescent Helena. Despite their different names, these are perhaps the same girl at different ages of sexual development.

Corollaries and Coraline

Like all good little girl protagonists in children's literature, Coraline learns some appropriate lessons; she finds an inner strength and enough courage to combat evil, she selflessly helps other children who are in need, and, most importantly, she abandons her resentful feelings about her parents as being too preoccupied to entertain and provide for her in the manner to which she would like to become accustomed. She also accepts her parents' human limitations and learns to eat up all her dinner of her own volition (quite an advance toward a mature and polite acceptance of the efforts of others given that in the modern landscape of her real world she always has the option to microwave frozen chips and pizza for herself if she does not like the food she has been given). Implicit in these unquestionable, yet rather banal, lessons for child readers is that Coraline acknowledges her mother's empowered refusal to subjugate herself to the provision of Coraline's desires. Coraline's parents both work from home and share domestic duties so that while her father does the majority of the cooking (and when Coraline's mother cooks she heats packaged food that "never tasted of anything" [34]), her mother takes Coraline shopping for her school clothes so as to even out the domestic roles.

This feminist balance in labor distribution as seemingly emblematic of equality is, however, undercut by Coraline's emotionally invested memories of the significant moments her parents have occupied in her upbringing thus far. She recalls her father's entirely self-sacrificing decision to stand and be stung by wasps in order to give Coraline time to run away, and in the final chapter he picks her up and carries her, reminding Coraline of how much she loved him doing this when she was smaller. Coraline's recollection of her mother is markedly more barbed. When she falls and hurts her knee in the narrative present, she muses that "It was as bad as the summer her mother had taken the training wheels off [her] bicycle" (148). While she reflects that the pain was useful in learning something, when she returns to the real world at the narrative's end her real mother shows little sympathy; she first notices Coraline's dirty pajama bottoms and then simply comments on her wounded knee. In response, Coraline tends to herself with ointment in the bathroom (168). While there is nothing wrong with this depiction of the mother's lackadaisical approach to mothering in itself, compared the more positive depiction of the father it is perhaps unsurprising that while Coraline hugs her mother tightly when shaken awake by her in the real world, she actively seeks out her father and the kiss she bestows on him is made more pointed by her verbalization of love in telling him she misses him (169). Her father seems to be the better mother of these two parents in what amounts to rather dubious feminist logic.

Nevertheless, in terms of the agendas of materialist feminism asserted in our introduction, this advance in the presentation of motherhood encodes within itself an optimistic induction of children into social shifts toward new family dynamics in the twenty-first century. Coraline's narrative journey also indicates that her moment of greatest success requires that she wrest power away from the other mother, whose evil is manifest in her failure to embrace material feminism and her refusal to relinquish her power in the familial context. The novel links the other mother with all the stereotypical traditions of femininity and maternity; she cooks, wishes to play a game called "happy families," loves and disciplines Coraline (for her own good), and thus demonstrates a pervasive commitment to her parenting/mothering practices. This old-school, maternal feminine stereotype is depicted here as evil and must be decommissioned in order for Coraline to accept and love her postfeminist mother. But-and the "but" is loaded with psychosexual dynamics that will drive our reading-Coraline rids herself of the evil mother by performing the highly traditionalist female role of presiding over a tea party. All of the potential advances (yet ones, nonetheless, that make Coraline unhappy) made by Coraline's real mother seem lost in this climactic moment of the narrative given that Coraline's freedom is dependent on her ability to perform as the charming hostess of old. While this is a ruse, and the reader is told that Coraline has outgrown playing tea parties, it is nonetheless her ability to perform appropriate femininity that saves the day for Coraline.

The postfeminist bent of the narrative whereby "feminism is taken into account to suggest that equality is achieved" and thus is "no longer needed" (McRobbie 255) is not without its tensions. Traditional mothering is criticized, and yet a more contemporary alternative where the labor is shared also appears equally undesirable. However, these tensions manifest themselves even more deeply because the Lacanian mapping of gender differentiation that the story enacts invites a close analysis of the production of gendered identities that material feminism resists (but that postfeminist criticism calls for). Like Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis at its most patriarchal points, the "phallic" mother must be destroyed so that the subject can individuate and take up a position in culture. This inevitably leads to an acceptance of patriarchy, something that in Coraline's other world is absent; she must try to escape a world dominated by a woman and where feminine power is equivalent to destruction and stasis and is. in itself, terrifying. To this end, Coraline's parents must be sexually differentiated, and she learns these gendered rules of engagement through their real-world and fantasy-world characterizations in combination.

In the real-world landscape of the narrative, Coraline's father embodies the symbolic law of the father via his commitment to following written recipes as ruling instructions and his suggestion that Coraline entertain herself by counting, categorizing, and making lists of real world objects. Her mother, by contrast, suggests that Coraline draw. Instead, Coraline writes the word MIST on the blank page, but the "I" has fallen out of the word:

M S T

I

Coraline's sense of "I"-dentity is also mist-ified, particularly because in the real world, people continually get her name wrong by confusing Coraline with the common (and therefore unindividuated) name Caroline. The "I" must be aligned with the rules of symbolic culture, and so Coraline must resolve a sense of self through mirrors and mothers in the Imaginary phase. Finding the "I" of identity also (and inevitably, according to psychoanalysis) involves accepting gendered difference.

In her first encounter with the mirror, Coraline does not see herself; instead, she sees her parents (63) in a moment that amounts to the child being forced to negotiate the Lacanian Imaginary wherein she is only just beginning to differentiate self/other. Indeed, this is the first moment of Coraline's alienation that sets in motion her Oedipal journey, a moment whereby language is still unclear, as evidenced in her mother's plea written on the mirror surface "SU PLEH" (63). In her second key moment with the mirror, the other mother locks Coraline in the dark space behind the glass until Coraline is "ready to become a loving daughter" (95). Here Coraline meets ghost children who are unable to tell her their sexual identity. She asks one of the children "Are you a girl . . . Or a boy?" The child's answer is illuminating beyond the historical positioning of the character:

"When I was small I wore skirts and my hair was long and curled," it said, doubtfully. "But now that you ask, it does seem to me that one day they took my skirts and gave me britches and cut my hair." (99)

At which point another of the children chimes in, "Tain't something we give a mind to" (100).

Coraline, however, must "give a mind" to gender because her movement through the Imaginary requires her to embrace not only her identity as individuated from her parents (by recognizing herself in the mirror without them) but also her ability to differentiate gender roles. Lacan uses the following anecdote to explain this significance:

A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. "Look," says the brother, "We're at Ladies!" "Idiot!" replies his sister, "Can't you see we're at Gentlemen." (115)

Perhaps the most telling example of Coraline's induction into this binary gendered logic is heralded by the two magical objects that aid and motivate her quest in highly sexually symbolic ways. It is almost too obvious to point out her two powerful talismans, the stone with a hole through it and the key that (penetrates and) opens the lock between the imagined and real worlds are genital in form and function. Their representational logic is more interesting to interrogate. Looking through the hole in the stone allows Coraline to see the souls of others-it connects her to a human community in ways that feminist analysis would applaud-while the key is emblematic of freedom and power in the tradition of phallic symbolism. Although these objects are abandoned at the closure of the narrative when Coraline returns the stone and the key is forever lost (repressed) in an abandoned well (along with the controlling hand of the other mother that pursues the power embodied by the key), giving up those objects does not necessarily mean that their symbolism is debunked. It is just as likely that their meanings are at this point so ingrained in Coraline's psychosexual make-up that she now no longer needs to physically hold them as external manifestations of gender.

In addition to recognizing sexual difference, crucial in Lacan's train journey anecdote is that the children are fixated by the opposite gender in line with the requirements for heteronormativity. As the girl child indicates in her dialogue with her brother in Lacan's story, she does (will) not focus on arriving at "Ladies," and to do so would be idiotic. Gaiman tells the same story of a myopic view of gender positioning and sexual attraction through the spinster characters Miss Spinks and Miss Forcible. These elderly ladies live together in the present, in the same building as Coraline's family; they are obsessed with what they have lost in the past-not only their acting careers but their hopes for heterosexual union. Miss Spinks says conspiratorially to Coraline, "They used to send flowers to my dressing room. They did" (17). Coraline demonstrates her sexual innocence in response, asking "who did?" which elicits the loud (italicized) whisper, "Men," from the experienced older woman. Two pages later Coraline recognizes the smell of flowers in her mother's private room (her study) (19), but she does not yet understand the significance of this knowledge.

Coraline comes to gendered understanding via not only the overt psychosexual narratives that require a separation between the (other) mother and daughter as necessary for development but equally via an extended narrative condemnation of female-female bonds as depicted by these spinster women. While the Misses Spinks and Forcible help Coraline by warning her of unnamed future dangers when they interpret her tea leaves, and then give her the feminized stone with the hole as protection, Coraline's broader narrative explicates the horrific results of privileging female-female relationships in a world that must eventually be abandoned in order to accept the symbolic law of the father. As actresses, Miss Spinks and Miss Forcible chose careers rather than families and are shown not as happily independent but rather as paying the price for following their dreams, unable to be satisfied, and thus always regressing by constantly reliving their heady days as theatre performers. This relationship itself is set up as competitive when Miss Spinks tells Coraline "Miss Forcible talks about her Ophelia, but it was my Portia they came to see. When we trod the boards" (23). Living in their past as public spectacles (both then and now in front of Coraline), the couple becomes caught in this performance in the other world, which overtly suggests sexual regression and overturns any nods to feminism the novel might overtly make.

Further, their dreams, or fantasies, illustrate that the female bond that has endured is only possible because the women never successfully Oedipalized. Thus, it is when Coraline sees Misses Spinks and Forcible in the other world that her own Oedipal repression of desire for the feminine begins the process of sexual normalization for her. In her exploration of other-land, she enters the theatre where these women perform (the theatre of the unconscious necessarily signifies Oedipus, the play that is the foundation of psychoanalysis). The Freudian symbolism is overt in this encounter as Coraline parts soft cloth (of the labia and the unconscious) to enter the theatre (45-46): Coraline begins her adventure by metaphorically playing out her desire for a same-sex experience, a desire that she must transcend at the end of her journey. Miss Spink and Miss Forcible perform endlessly on stage but only to canine spectators, a situation that mocks their real world lack of male partnerships, which is underscored by their collection of dogs that have male "names like Hamish and Andrew and Jock" (3). What Coraline sees in the other theatre both bores and frightens her. She is unimpressed by the program and so does not stay for the duration of the show, but she is first called up as a volunteer so that the blindfolded Miss Forcible can throw a knife that bursts the balloon placed just above Coraline's head while she "held her breath and squeezed her fingers into two tight fists" (50). Miss Forcible's knife as potential phallus is thus reduced to a mere party trick, one that does no harm to Coraline. It does, however, threaten Coraline's (heterosexual) safety in ways that make her physically tense.

Later in the narrative Coraline has to renegotiate this theatrical space when she returns in order to find the souls of the children that the other mother has encased in glass marbles and hidden in her world. Having been the site of the first phase of Coraline's heteronormative lesson, Misses Spinks and Forcible's theatre is now "decomposing" and "rotten" (117); this site of the desire for the feminine that Coraline must reject is now shown to be a most unhealthy place. The horror is reinforced when Coraline discovers a sac; on the wall and

inside the sack was something that looked like a person, but a person with two heads, with twice as many arms and legs as it should have. The creature in the sac looked horribly unformed and unfinished, as if two Plasticine people had been warmed and rolled together, squashed and pressed into one thing. (118)

Two women melded this closely could be read as a positive representation of female connection, and indeed love. However, this intimacy is here described as horribly repulsive. Further, as a moment encased in a broader narrative trajectory, wherein a young girl is negotiating her sexual identity, it can be read as a warning about the regressive and mutant forms that emerge from female-female desire. The imagery of the embryonic state of two women too close together is shown as both unnatural and underdeveloped, but the imagery extends this to a state that is dangerous and to be feared.

The central image is evocative of a two-headed unborn spider in a sack, an image that links directly back to Coraline's fear of her desire for the feminine, which is established early in the narrative when she sees the other mother's hand: "She hoped it wasn't a spider. Spiders made Coraline intensely uncomfortable" (17-18). As a Freudian symbol of the phallic mother-that is, the mother that is not yet m/other-the spider is a warning of what might ensue if feminine bonds are not transcended in favor of deferral to the (patriarchal) laws of culture (Abraham). Coraline has to overcome her fear but not her revulsion when she pushes "her hand into the sticky, clinging whiteness" of the sack to steal the marble from the "creature," effectively stealing the clitoris and taking with her the women's access to physical (female, regressive) sexual stimulation. Indeed, as Freud notes, clitoral stimulation must be relegated to the past of immaturity for a girl in favor of vaginal satisfaction, which is the more passive but healthy and mature position (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis). As we have indicated, the relationship between the women is represented as a continual replay of the past, a performance with no satisfaction. In the continual reiteration of an infantile past, one that is pre-Oedipal (not heterosexual) and thus devoid of desire, the Misses Spink and Forcible offer a warning to Coraline of what might happen if she fails to follow the correct heterosexual trajectory for women by refusing to repress her desire for the feminine. Indeed, even Misses Spink and Forcible warn Coraline of the dangers ahead when they read her tea leaves in the real world; it is arguably because they have realized the error of their ways that their real world selves give Coraline a fairy stone (with the hole in it), which is instrumental in Coraline's escape from the other world. Metaphorically, Coraline acknowledges that the feminine role is to accept one's own castration.

In order to complete her journey Coraline must now face the father phallus. The other mother knowingly gives Coraline the key (pulled from her mouth, still moist with bodily fluids) needed to open the flat in which her other father has been imprisoned in the basement. Coraline knows this help is likely to be a "trick" (129), but her determination to enter the empty flat regardless indicates the necessity of facing the demon within. As Coraline enters this flat she finds a "dead spider the size of a small cat" (130), which may be the remains of the creature that produced the sack encasing the spinsters in the previous encounter in the theatre. The cat size of the spider is not just frighteningly large; the significance of this metaphorical slippage will become apparent as our reading progresses.

The imagery of this next stage in Coraline's heroic achievement of difficult tasks is as compelling as it is repulsive. The abject carpet, "the colour of old milk" (129), and the vaginal "acrid tang like sour vinegar" all bespeak bodily fluids that precede and accompany Coraline on her journey down the dark passage to the basement. Her father is now entirely the real world symbol of the phallus as penis, "pale and swollen like a grub" with "no features on its face" and "puffed and swollen like risen bread dough" (132). That Coraline strokes and forgives this "white and huge and swollen" and "monstrous" (133) thing that speaks to her with a "wet, urgent voice" (134) and seems "to be getting bigger, now, and more awake" (135), with only "one eye . . . facing her" before it "lunges across the cellar"(135) "fast as a serpent"(137), is a psychoanalytic tour de force, or, indeed, a smutty farce of comic proportions. While she manages to escape this encounter, thus evading penetration, it is important to remember that the other father is merely an invention of the other mother. Thus, the phallus as master signifier is never a real threat to Coraline, except when it is associated with the phallic mother (including the spider the size of a cat previously mentioned).

The more accurate embodiment of both individuated identity and phallic power in the narrative, one that is considerably more acceptable than a phallic mother, is in fact an unnamed cat who shifts between the imaginary and symbolic (real-world) planes of the narrative as an emblem of the holistic ego. Moreover, he is both individuation and the law of the father par excellence. Gaiman's prose is careful to ungender the cat as "it" in almost every scene that it appears, such that readers need to carefully peruse the text in order to make apparent what is otherwise clear-that he is male. When the cat first speaks, the narratorial voice is focalized through Coraline, who thinks: "Its voice sounded 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" (41). In this way the cat works as a paternal metaphor that saves Coraline from the phallic mother, allowing separation and thus individuation through coming to know language-"words." The cat's contained ego is then demonstrated by the fact the he needs no name to know himself. He explains to Coraline the journey through the Lacanian psychic landscape-wherein prior to the mirror stage the child has no integrated sense of self but experiences itself as fragments and not yet an "I"-when he says to her "you people are spread all over the place. Cats, on the other hand, keep ourselves together" (42). Coraline accurately reads him as "self-centered"(43), but that she chooses to embrace him and uses him to increase her power at the end of the narrative is more telling still.

The cat is the perfect weapon that Coraline uses to escape the clutches (bar a remnant disembodied hand) of the other mother. Just prior to his moment of glory, the narrative genders him explicitly. During his conversation with Coraline about the ways in which the other mother will not keep her word or "play fair," the narrative says of the cat, "He raised his head. 'Hullo . . . did you see that?'"(150), alerting Coraline to the fact the other mother's world is dissipating while at the same time having a specific gender inscribed to his personage. Now that he is overtly gendered (as Coraline is about to become), his status as a weapon against the other mother has some disturbing similarities with the penile imagery of the other father. Like the grub father, it is while being touched by Coraline that he "stir[s] uncomfortably" (157), and when Coraline launches him at the other mother so they can make their escape, he comes into his own: "Fur on end, it [the cat] looked half again as big as it was in real life." This timely erection allows Coraline, her parents, and the souls of the other mother's victims freedom from maternal oppression.

The imagery of the passage back to the real (but not the Lacanian Real) world of Coraline's existence might read like a journey of sexual regression back to the womb: the wall felt "warm and yielding . . . and [was] covered in a fine downy fur. It moved, as if it were taking a breath," and as she moves further along the (vaginal) passage, the wall becomes "hot and wet, as if she had put her hand in somebody's mouth" (163). Keeping in mind Freud's theories on feminine sexuality as only mature when it becomes vaginal, however, this imagery is entirely in keeping with Coraline's heteronormative progression. Having mastered this journey through this (vaginal) passage, Coraline arrives in the real (Symbolic) world and can curl "cat-like" secure in the knowledge of her now holistic identity. It makes sense that the characters in the real world now all get Coraline's unusual name right, reversing their previous and mirror-like vowel switch that caused them to confuse her with Caroline(s).

But Coraline is still haunted by remnant fears of the other mother's possible return, which is signalled by the spider-like right hand scuttling around and threatening to take the key-phallus from around Coraline's neck. Coraline has learned where the phallus needs to go and so it is unsurprising that her plans to rid herself of the other mother involves "grunting and sweating with the effort, revealing a deep round . . . hole" that smells of "damp and dark" and is "slippery" (185). The crudity of our paraphrasing aside, the well also clearly functions as the space for repressing desires for power. Coraline knows neither she nor her mother can have the phallus/the key, and the other mother's metonymic hand disappears forever in the well over which Coraline had laid her little girls domestic tea party. In throwing the key down the hole-giving up the phallic symbol and thus ridding herself of the phallic mother-Coraline now experiences a w/holeness that allows her own recognition of gendered sexuality and provides her with an acceptance of her parents in the other world.

Mastering Misogyny through Helena's Masked and Mirrored identity

The Campbell Family Circus is also a profoundly Oedipal family triad; as Helena describes them, "there's only my dad, Morris Campbell, my mum, Joanne, and me." Continuing the tradition of the postfeminist portrayals of women, mum is "the brains behind the outfit" and does the banking, tax, and contracts; and while dad's "got his head in the air. Mum has her feet on the ground." But dad is also "the ringleader," and in case the "behind every great man" logic was lost on readers, it is reiterated through Aunt Nan, who appears to be dad's sister given her circus background. Helena describes her in fairytale terms:

Once upon a time Aunt Nan used to be a magician's glamorous assistant (she says they do all the hard work while the magicians stand there and look pleased with themselves), but now she watches telly all day, goes and gossips with the other ladies in the block of flats, and loses things. (n.p.)1

Nan's spinster status is like the Misses Spinks and Forcible in Coraline-a negative representation of a once desirable/desired, but now tragically meaningless, existence. Helena and her father move in with Aunt Nan while Joanne is in the hospital, and Nan's impoverished existence is metonymically represented through the block of flats she lives in (in lieu of any pictorial representation of Aunt Nan herself). The degradation that age(ing) inflicts on glamour is embodied by the photographic image of the flats that were once "the height of modernity" but that now look like a "prison, only less inviting." Having not invited someone, or having had her invitations rejected, Aunt Nan's loss of possible heterosexual unions represents what Helena must seek-physical attractiveness-or else she too will be threatened by this unfulfilled imprisonment.

The fantasy adventure consequently revolves around (and resolves on) getting the charm that has been lost by the white queen (the good, passive mother). The white queen is, as Helena recognizes, her real-world mother, who was once "a great beauty." This is significant on a number of levels. First, when Helena arrives in her fantasy world her beau-to-be asks, "What's wrong with your face?" to which Helena muses to herself with telling capitalization of a title: "I may not be a Great Beauty, but I've got all the bits." She then realizes that what she seeks in the other world is not the charm but, as the female giant in the other world tells her, "charm" itself. The female giant says: "Charm is . . . the Mirror . . . Mask . . ."

Helena meets these giants on her quest through the other world in an encounter that represents the moment of gender differentiation as a mirrored reversal of Helena's real world perception of her parents. While she says that in reality her father has his head in the clouds and her mother has her feet on the ground, in the other world the two giants (emblematic of parents and thus heterosexual coupling) are entangled at a point of equilibrium whereby the female giant is floating away and is anchored by the male giant, who is being drawn to the earth. The evil unleashed by the controlling black mother severs the two, and it is at this moment that the charm loses its delineating and objectifying "the." Charm is located in the mirror mask, the visual surface of the beautified female face presented to men so that women can be categorized as greater or lesser beauties. While gender differentiation offered a conclusion for the pre-adolescent Coraline, for the burgeoning sexuality Helena is seeking, this event occupies a middle ground in a larger Oedipal journey.

We could hardly argue, however, that this novella fits with the material feminism described in our introduction if female acquisition of beauty and etiquette were promoted on the narrative surface. Instead, the story seems to overtly undermine the oppressive logics conflating the value of women with "glamour" or "beauty" because it is the black (bad) mother who wants Helena to present a surface feminine physical ideal, and the reader is clearly positioned to see this as undesirable. The black mother's ideal feminine identity for her daughter is as a "pathetic" and "passive" princess replete with make-up and dresses who remains contained and castrated in her castle-an antiquated fairytale trajectory for girls that the text rejects. The rejection is made doubly clear because were Helena to adopt this identity, and be adopted by the black mother, her future could be forecasted as frighteningly similar to Aunt Nan's. Locked in her "castle," Helena includes in her narrative that Aunt Nan has lost her teeth. In Freudian terms, Nan is therefore castrated. Although Helena finds Nan's teeth for her in the fridge, they are false teeth (and frigidly cold). Thus, any claim to feminine power or authority is impossible for Aunt Nan, and for Helena as well if her course is not steered in an alternative trajectory toward heteronormative desire.

According to Freudian Oedipal negotiations, Helena must separate from her mother and desire her father but then accept a male substitute for him in the form of a nonincestual lover. Indeed, and in line with pervasive psychoanalytic and cultural narratives of "mother blaming," it is the white mothers (both good and real) who direct Helena to this boyfriend figure in v/Valentine, who is in fact a faceless iteration of her father. Further, the fantasy journey to the other world is instigated by her mother's (Joanne's) failure to intervene in Helena and her father's desire for each other. The logic might seem obtuse to begin with, but upon closer inspection of the quite overtly perverse genital symbols in the narrative, it will become apparent.

If we begin with real world bananas (ahem), we can peel back the first layer of the psychosexual subtexts. In the real world of the Campbell family circus before the fantasy adventure begins, Helen and her father juggle bananas together in the show as an adult/child duo. Morris insists that their performance originates from "the darkest Peru," emblematic of "the dark continent"-the phrase Freud used to describe the sexual life of adult women in The Question of Lay Analysis-and deliberately infantilizes and masculinizes Helena when he says, "Hey Bambino. You want to juggle the bananas?" The mother's role in this performance (repeated in every show without error) is to put an end to any confusion about Helena's gender and about her relationship as a (juggling) partner with her father. To do this Joanne must become the monstrous gorilla (in a suit big enough to fit the circus strong man) to chase these two infractious Oedipal lovers off the stage and then (rightfully) take hold of the banana(s) herself. However, in the event that precedes the fantasy quest, Joanne fails to come on stage to stop the play because she has collapsed and is subsequently taken to the hospital. Helena had wished her mother dead Electra-style, but now she is dogged by guilt. Worse still, while Joanne is incarcerated in the hospital she can no longer police the father/daughter male/female essential divides (and it is pertinent to keep in mind Aunt Nan's prison as the space of incarceration for those who transgress the laws of heterosexuality, including the incest taboo). In response to this lack of Electral prohibition embodied by the mother, Helena must navigate this psychosexual horror herself in the fantasy world. The first thing she does is find a Valentine (as an appropriately nonincestual figure and one who was dreamed up by her good mother) to be her new juggling partner.

It is no surprise, then, that Valentine is exactly like Helena's father. Not only is he a juggler like Morris, but he also wears a "flappy coat" as a signature fashion item. At the narrative close, when Helena awakes in the "real world" with the knowledge that her mother will be alright after her operation, her father then wraps her in his long coat. Now that the policing maternal factor has been restored in reality, the slippage between Valentine and the father (who calls Helena "love" in this critical scene) is no longer located in the fantasy world in which Helena must discipline herself. In her fantasy she had achieved this through the construction of "police" beetles that drag her back to the mother's castle as soon as Valentine mentions the word romance.

Valentine is not only a substitute for Morris in being a juggler in a flappy coat; he is also, like Morris, needing a partner to keep the show on the road and in dire need of money (which is why he betrays Helena when he gives her to the black queen in exchange for an economic reward). But more importantly for Helena's psychosexual development, he must accompany Helena on her journey to a coded recognition of genital pleasure. The symbolism in The Mirror Mask is as telling as we found it to be in Coraline in this regard. Valentine expresses his excitement about their quest together, but imperative to him is the size of the reward, the contract for which, Helena promises, will be negotiated after the charm is found. In seeking her charm, Helena must find her clitoris, which turns out to be the dome in the center of a pool (not much of a stretch of the metaphoric imagination) that is filled with key holes for which Helena and Valentine have a key. However, once the dome/clitoris is discovered, Helena's other sexual self (the one who snogs boys even though Helena thinks they are "dodgy") reaches out to take it. But the dome proves too slippery for Helena to control; she falls into "the Dark Lands" (presumably somewhere in the vicinity of the Darkest Peru), at which point Valentine offers to help by being a "dark unnoticeable slippery thing." For this Helena feels "ever so grateful, and a bit guilty," but mostly "really grateful."

Of course, Valentine must operate the key alone once Helena has been conveniently removed from this locale by the black queen's minions in yet another policing of desires. While Helena is trapped in the maternal pre-Oedipal world of the black mother, Valentine unlocks the key to the dome. This is also the key to Helena's identity beyond the superficial mask of beauty and accoutrements that she has been forced to adopt by the black mother. Valentine tells her that "he knows [she is] is still in there" and juggles with her until she rediscovers herself, a point at which she says "I was more me than ever." Mirroring the real-word relationship between Helena and her father, it is the juggling act that brings Helena and Valentine together. Valentine then presents Helena with what the key had unlocked in the dome: a letter that delivers the truth about "bad" Helena and her intention to leave her father and thus transgress the Oedipal narrative. This information also enables (good) Helena to find the mirror mask and thus her real self (and her charm). Good thing Valentine was prepared to take the time to seek the right hole in which to insert the key in the confusing multiple holes of the fluid-surrounded dome.

Wry cynicism aside, this adventure is as much Valentine's journey into appropriate masculine subjectivity as it is Helena's Oedipal fantasy. The phallus in The Mirror Mask is the blindingly obvious "enormous tower" replete with "doorknobs" that belongs to Valentine but that he seems to have trouble controlling given his adolescent status. He does manage to get it under control, or at least have it "come when called" so that it can serve its purpose in saving the day for these two lovers by whisking them away from the evil mother. But Valentine saves them only by using Helena's charm-the mirror mask that has become her face. Having arrived, the tower becomes "inviting," and Helena and Valentine are quite literally swept away in it. This is Valentine's own "quest," which endows him with substantial rewards; he acquires both fiscal and sexual control.

Only slightly deviating from traditional fairytale narratives of one true love, Helena's own reward is becoming aware that there are many possible "valentines." The text implies, however, that she will wait for the "one"; she continues to search for his face in the real world, imagining that she sees him and maintaining a sense of anticipation that he will reappear in her future. The reader is positioned to weigh Helena's heteronormative success against Aunt Nan's gossiping with women in the "uninviting" prison/flat because at this point Helena uses the mirror mask not to save her mother but to become her mother; she effectively re-identifies with her mother and thus proves her successful psycho-sexual progression into normative femininity through reiterating what her mother tells her: Good Helena says to Bad Helena what Joanne had said to real world Helena: "You couldn't handle real life." The mask that belongs to the mother and that bad Helena had stolen in order to destroy the world fuses with Helena's own face as a narrative resolution in a circular construction of gendered identity wherein the daughter takes up the (self-same) place of her mother

Conclusion

Real power, agency, authority, and autonomy are all embodied in Coraline and Helena's evil "other" mothers, mothers that must be recognized and then usurped by a return to a "real" mother-namely, to a woman who, in Lacanian terms, "masquarades" as empowered and who is shown to hold any feminist position only at the expense of her daughter. As Coraline becomes Helena through her sexuality, and as "other" mothers become m/others, the primary indicator of the girls' psychosexual success is rendered as not only the ability to recognize sexual difference but to centralize the place of the masculine in normative maturation. When Coraline actively seeks out her father in the closure of the novel and capitulates to eating his recipe, and when Helena is rewarded for defeating the Other Mother (the Black Queen) with a final photograph of Helena and her father hugging in the real world, the sexual politics encoded in these girls' fantasies become overt. Feminine bonds threaten the Western worship of individualism and "freedom" for girls, sexual maturation is always taken up in relation to the phallus, and it is the failures of materialist feminist mothers that are their most valuable asset.2

More broadly, Gaiman's recipes for postfeminist power appear as unwholesome as frozen pizza in the final feminist analysis of mothers. Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, would have little difficulty in mapping his famous assessment of the child's ambivalence to mothering-played out in the split between the fairy godmother and the wicked stepmother-to Coraline and The Mirror Mask and the feminist critiques of his work still hold. Like his equally discredited theory that autistic children are the result of "refrigerator mothers" (The Empty Fortress), culturally sanctioned mother-blaming requires trenchant analysis. However, our reading here faces a quandary in that, like Gaiman, we have relied heavily on psychoanalytic theories to read girls and their parents in these multilevel narrative worlds. Our approach begs questions about how far any earlier or currently fashionable brands of feminism have been able to raise themselves from Freud's couch. If children's literature and children's literature analysis remain beholden to the master discourses of psychoanalysis, the stories we are all telling may be caught in the repeated and unsatisfactory performances embodied by Misses Spinks and Forcible, or will remain imprisoned in outmoded and grim circumstances like Aunt Nan. As three women scholars collaborating, we are deliberately embracing feminist practice, but the extent to which we are also collaborating with the fathers of psychoanalysis suggests that our own work might be equally in need of microwaving in order to make it palatable.

Footnote

Notes

1. The Mirror Mask is unpaginated.

2. Given that we have so closely read these two postfeminist fairytales as exemplars of current quandaries for feminism, a moment of historical reflection seems in order so as to contextualize this new code for bad mothers in children's literature. While they share the evil intents and sexual jealousies/anxieties of wicked stepmothers like those in Cinderella and Snow White, that Gaiman's other mothers arise as punishment for dissatisfied or disaffected (rather than innocent and dutiful) girl protagonists means the stories have significant confluence with Lucy Clifford's 1882 fairy tale, The New Mother. As Anna Krugovoy Silver has argued, sexual tension inflects this tale because the two girl children at its center desperately desire to see the "dancing" man and woman in the gypsy girl's pear drum. They covet sexual knowledge, but to access it the girls must persistently disobey their mother. Each time they are "naughty" in service of this end, she threatens them with leaving and being replaced by the New Mother. This switch happens in due course, and the New Mother with her wooden tail and glass eyes arrives as punishment in a morality tale about little girls who must learn to behave properly. While the sexual themes of Clifford's and Gaiman's stories are correlated, the moralities they propose are alternative. Coraline and Helena must adopt their sexual identities, while Clifford's little girls, Blue-eye and Turkey, are punished for seeking the self-same knowledge. While a flippant mention of raunch culture for children is likely taking the postfeminist sociocultural location of Gaiman's novels too far, embracing female sexuality (in the service of patriarchy) codifies the historical shift that brings us to contemporary stories.

References

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