Female Identity Formation and Agency in Coraline (2002) and “The New Mother” (1882)

초록

This article examines how female identity formation and agency are negotiated in Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002) and Lucy Lane Clifford’s “The New Mother” (1882) through the figure of the Gothic maternal double. While both texts stage a child’s confrontation with an uncanny maternal substitute, their treatment of boundaries, desire, and resistance reflects sharply different cultural constructions of girlhood. Clifford’s story reflects Victorian cultural anxieties, presenting its protagonists as powerless girls whose curiosity and “naughtiness” lead to permanent loss of their mother and home. Their passivity casts childhood femininity as passive and bound by discipline. In contrast, Gaiman’s Coraline revises this Gothic maternal plot by giving the child protagonist mobility and agency. Coraline resists the temptations of the “other” mother, asserts her independence, and restores the family unit, reflecting modern ideas about children as capable of self-mastery and agency. In tracing the trajectory from Clifford’s Victorian moralism to Gaiman’s modern reworking, this article demonstrates how children’s Gothic literature reveals shifting cultural anxieties about female development and autonomy. Ultimately, both texts suggest that the Gothic mother must be abjected for the child’s development to proceed, revealing a persistent unease with female power.

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