The Mother with the Button Eyes: An Exploration of the Story Construct of the ‘Other-Mother’

Abstract

Neil Gaiman's (2002) children's novel, 'Coraline', which has recently been made into a stop motion movie, introduces its readers to a truly frightening figure: the Other-mother. This Other-mother comes out of a long tradition of stories in which the villain is a mother (or grandmother) figure, starting with the evil stepmothers so prevalent in fairy tales, and continuing in recent books such as Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' series in which the protagonist's mother is a major villain for most of the story. Gaiman drew this character partially from an obscure 19th century story by Lucy Clifford called 'The New Mother', in which a pair of naughty children lose their kind, loving mother, who is replaced by a monstrous one with glass eyes and a wooden tail. In this paper I will examine the parallels between Clifford's 'New Mother' and Gaiman's 'OtherGmother'. I also consider briefly another example of this nightmare mother in 'Ginny' in order to explain the pervasive and persistent presence of this figure in children's stories.