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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...