Coraline (2002)
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Quiz Four
You will have 20 minutes to write a short essay response to this prompt. You may use your copy of Coraline and any notes that you took during the movie. I would suggest that you draw up a quick outline first and then write your response.
Discuss the primary differences between Neil Gaiman’s novel Coraline and Henry Selick’s film version in terms of characters and plot.
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How comfortable would you be sharing Coraline with young readers?
What could go wrong?
What would be fun about it?
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What was Neil Gaiman thinking?
What was his impetus for writing a book like Coraline?
“More then ten years ago I started to write a children’s book. It was for my daughter, Holly, who was five years old. I wanted it to have a girl as a heroine, and I wanted it to be refreshingly creepy…. It was a story, I learned when people began to read it, that children experienced as an adventure, but which gave adults nightmares. It's the strangest book I've written, it took the longest time to write, and it's the book I'm proudest of.”
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Makin' up a song about
Coraline
She's a peach, she's a doll, she's a pal of mine
She's as cute as a button
In the eyes of everyone who ever laid their eyes on Coraline
When she comes around exploring
Mom and I will never, ever make it boring
Our eyes will be on Coraline
The Gothic and Coraline
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Definition of The Gothic
The Gothic novel’s ” principal aim was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery, cruelty, and a variety of horrors. The term ‘gothic’ has also been extended to denote a type of fiction which lacks the medieval setting but develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom or terror, represents events which are uncanny, or macabre, or melodramatically violent, and often deals with aberrant psychological states” (Abrams, A
Glossary of Literary Terms 117-118).
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Gothic Elements: Setting
Old houses with trap doors, secret passage ways, strange sounds, mysterious doors.
The macabre setting is meant to produce feelings of psychological dread.
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Gothic Elements: Atmosphere
Everything in a gothic text is shrouded in mystery.
Authors create a sense of the uncanny (things being off a little; a bit askew), of suspense, of intrigue, of creepiness.
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Gothic Elements: Female
Characters in Distress
The tradition of “the damsel in distress” permeates Gothic fiction; yet, Gaiman plays with this idea: his heroine is in distress, but she rescues herself.
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Gothic Elements: The
Doppelgänger
German word meaning
“double goer,” referring to the supernatural presence of oneself. Often, the
Doppelgänger brings with it associations of evil.
Gothic literature will often dwell upon “a hidden or double reality beneath the surface of what at first appears to be a single narrative”
(Sedgwick 12).
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Gothic Elements: The Supernatural
Gothic literature focuses on the fact that as much as we may try to suppress the uncanny, the grotesque, or the strange, these things are truly a part of human existence, and we need to acknowledge this fact.
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Famous Precursors
Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto: A
Gothick Story (1764)
Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
(1794)
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern
Prometheus (1818)
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Gothic Children’s Literature
Scary, creepy, and ubiquitious
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Gothic Elements
Not really the exception…more like the rule.
Looking for Clues in the Models of Childhood
Model Summary
The Romantic Child
The Sinful Child
The Working Child
The child “as superior to adults in some ways and as aligned with nature, beauty or spirituality.”
The child as inherently evil and in need of control and/or correction.
The child as competent and resilient.
The Sacred Child
The Child as Radically Other The idea that childhood is a distinctive and separate time from childhood.
The Developing Child
The child as “precious and fragile” and in need of protection
The idea that childhood is on a continuum with adulthood.
The Child as Miniature Adult The child is just an adult in miniature, capable of possessing an adult view of the world.
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The Different Ending
Wybie Lovat
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