When Coraline Jones finds herself trapped in the alternate realm created by her sinister other mother, she is very scared indeed. As the world the other mother has created twists, shifts, and grows more and more horrific by the hour, Coraline’s fear mounts—but so, too, does her belief that what she most needs to do is be brave, even if she doesn’t feel particularly courageous in the face of the other mother’s arsenal of terrors. As Coraline wrestles with her fear time and time again in order to save herself, her parents, and the three lost children the other mother has imprisoned for centuries, Neil Gaiman argues that true bravery is not an absence of fear, but rather one’s capacity for persisting onward in the face of their fears.
Though Coraline is, at the beginning of the novel, described as “small for her age,” new in town, and often misunderstood by the adults around her, there is no doubt that she is an exceptionally brave little girl. For example, when she hears an unsettling noise outside her bedroom door on one of her first nights in her family’s new house, she doesn’t cower under the covers or run to her parents’ room for comfort—she gets up, follows the noise down the hall, and investigates it herself, prepared to face the unknown. When Coraline’s neighbors Miss Spink and Miss Forcible read her tea leaves and suggest that Coraline is in danger, Coraline feels a bit excited by the prospect of running into trouble. In these early anecdotes, Gaiman establishes Coraline as an intrepid explorer who has a very high threshold for fear. Curiosity rules Coraline’s world, and even as she encounters more and more unsettling things on her journey, she is able to maintain a calm exterior, think rationally, and persevere. As the novel unfolds, however, Gaiman will show that being impervious or even just resistant to fear is not the mark of bravery—bravery is something much deeper.
When Coraline finds herself in the other mother’s world, she’s entranced at first, but very quickly grows unsettled by the other mother and other father’s strange behavior and their shared desire for Coraline to replace her eyes with black buttons and stay with them forever. Though Coraline is frightened, she maintains her cool and gets out as quickly as she can. Back in her own world, however, she discovers that her parents are missing, and realizes that she must return to the other mother’s world to find them. With this, Gaiman begins to unravel the novel’s central theory: that true bravery is not just enduring scares or frights, but rather facing those things voluntarily and head-on, sometimes multiple times—even when the easier thing would be to steer clear of one’s fears. When Coraline returns to the other mother’s world with her unlikely companion—an occasionally-talking black cat—by her side, she recounts an anecdote about herself and her father being chased by wasps one afternoon. As they ran, her father dropped his glasses and had to return to the site of the attack to retrieve them: “It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again […] when he was really scared. That was brave. […] When you’re scared but you still do it anyway, that’s brave.” In this brief passage, Gaiman articulates his central theory about fear and bravery. Fear, he suggests, doesn’t negate bravery—rather, fear creates more room for bravery, and even makes bravery more meaningful. Doing the right thing isn’t necessarily brave in and of itself: true bravery, rather, comes from acknowledging one’s fear of a person, a thing, or a situation and facing it down anyway.
At the end of the novel, as Coraline prepares to start a new school year, she falls asleep the night before the first day of the term feeling safe and sound. She has a renewed sense of her own bravery and knows that nothing she could encounter at school will scare her anymore. Coraline has been on quite a journey, but it’s not just that her time in the other mother’s realm has prepared her to face scary images or brave dark places. Coraline’s journey has taught her that even when she’s scared, she’s still capable of steering her own destiny and doing the right thing. It’s not that nothing will ever scare, frighten, or deter her now that she’s been through a terrifying experience—it’s that she has the power now to know that she can take on her own fears and uncertainties and conquer them, even if she doesn’t feel brave in the moment. As Coraline has reoriented her perception of what constitutes true bravery, Gaiman does the same for his readers.
Coraline plumbs the depths of the meaning of bravery. Bravery, in Gaiman’s view, is not just withstanding, surviving, or attempting to eradicate one’s fear—it’s walking into dark and scary flats, reasoning with ugly monsters, and plotting against powerful enemies even when fear is present. As Coraline, time and time again, plunges herself headlong into terrifying situations, frustrating puzzles, and twisted games, she comes to understand that to be brave is to admit to one’s fears, accept that they’re a necessary part of life, and stare them down anyway.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Fear and Bravery ThemeTracker
Fear and Bravery Quotes in Coraline
[Coraline] dreamed of black shapes that slid from place to place, avoiding the light, until they were all gathered together under the moon. Little black shapes with little red eyes and sharp yellow teeth.
They started to sing,
We are small but we are many
We are many we are small
We were here before you rose
We will be here when you fall.
The mist hung like blindness around the house. She walked slowly to the stairs up to her family’s flat, and then stopped and looked around.
In the mist, it was a ghost-world. In danger? thought Coraline to herself. It sounded exciting. It didn’t sound like a bad thing. Not really.
Coraline went back upstairs, her fist closed tightly around her new stone.
“Coraline?” the woman said. “Is that you?”
And then she turned around. Her eyes were big black buttons.
“Lunchtime, Coraline,” said the woman.
“Who are you?” asked Coraline.
“I’m your other mother,” said the woman. “Go and tell your other father that lunch is ready,” She opened the door of the oven. Suddenly Coraline realized how hungry she was. It smelled wonderful.
[Coraline’s] other parents stood in the kitchen doorway as she walked down the corridor, smiling identical smiles, and waving slowly. “Have a nice time outside,” said her other mother.
“We’ll just wait here for you to come back,” said her other father.
When Coraline got to the front door, she turned back and looked at them. They were still watching her, and waving, and smiling.
“If you want to stay,” said her other father, “there’s only one little thing we’ll have to do, so you can stay here for ever and always.”
They went into the kitchen. On a china plate on the kitchen table was a spool of black cotton, and a long silver needle, and, beside them, two large black buttons.
“I don’t think so,” said Coraline.
“Oh, but we want you to,” said her other mother. “We want you to stay. And it’s just a little thing.”
“And he said that wasn’t brave of him, doing that, just standing there and being stung,” said Coraline to the cat. “It wasn’t brave because he wasn’t scared: it was the only thing he could do. But going back again to get his glasses, when he knew the wasps were there, when he was really scared. That was brave.”
“Why does she want me?” Coraline asked the cat. “Why does she want me to stay here with her?”
“She wants something to love, I think,” said the cat. “Something that isn’t her. She might want something to eat as well. It’s hard to tell with creatures like that.”
The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. “There are those,” it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, “who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one—after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to escape?”
And then [Coraline’s] hand touched something that felt for all the world like somebody’s cheek and lips, small and cold; and a voice whispered in her ear, “Hush! And shush! Say nothing, for the beldam might be listening!”
Coraline said nothing.
She felt a cold hand touch her face, fingers running over it like the gentle beat of a moth’s wings.
Another voice, hesitant and so faint Coraline wondered if she were imagining it, said, “Art thou—art thou alive?”
“Yes,” whispered Coraline.
“Poor child,” said the first voice.
“I think I like this game. But what kind of game shall it be? A riddle game? A test of knowledge or of skill?”
“An exploring game,” suggested Coraline. “A finding-things game.”
“And what is it you think you should be finding in this hide-and-go-seek game, Coraline Jones?”
Coraline hesitated. Then, “My parents,” said Coraline. “And the souls of the children behind the mirror.”
Outside, the world had become a formless, swirling mist with no shapes or shadows behind it, while the house itself seemed to have twisted and stretched. […]
The other mother was waiting for [Coraline], standing on the grass with her arms folded. Her black button eyes were expressionless, but her lips were pressed tightly together in a cold fury.
Coraline nodded. It was true: the other mother loved her. But she loved Coraline as a miser loves money, or a dragon loves its gold. In the other mother’s button eyes, Coraline knew that she was a possession, nothing more. A tolerated pet, whose behavior was no longer amusing.
Coraline sighed. “You really don’t understand, do you?” she said. “I don’t want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn’t mean anything. What then?”
“I don’t understand,” said the whispery voice.
“Of course you don’t understand,” she said, raising the stone with the hole in it to her eye. “You’re just a bad copy she made of the crazy old man upstairs.”
“Not even that anymore,” said the dead, whispery voice.
“Help me, please,” she said. “All of you.”
The other people in the corridor—three children, two adults—were somehow too insubstantial to touch the door. But their hands closed about hers, as she pulled on the big iron door handle, and suddenly she felt strong.
“Never let up, Miss! Hold strong! Hold strong!” whispered a voice in her mind.
“Pull, girl, pull!” whispered another.
And then a voice that sounded like her mother’s—her own mother, her real, wonderful, maddening, infuriating, glorious mother—just said, “Well done, Coraline,” and that was enough.
Normally, on the night before the first day of term, Coraline was apprehensive and nervous. But, she realized, there was nothing left about school that could scare her anymore.
[Coraline] fancied she could hear sweet music on the night air: the kind of music that can only be played on the tiniest silver trombones and trumpets and bassoons, on piccolos and tubas so delicate and small that their keys could only be pressed by the tiny pink fingers of white mice.
