Recently I finished reading Neil Gaiman’s children’s horror novel, Coraline. I remember seeing the movie as a child, and suffice it to say, it left me petrified. I’ve watched many horror movies since, but it’s undeniable: that stop-motion horror flick still gives me the creeps. Personally, I found the movie far scarier than the book, however I believe the book more clearly sheds a light on what makes the Other Mother so unnerving. There’s this one passage in particular that stuck with me:

She [the other mother] said, “You know that I love you.”

And, despite herself, 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.

Neil Gaiman, Coraline

The Other Mother does love Coraline, it’s true; but that love is perverted, it’s possessive, and it has no regard for her as a person. It’s not simply that what she wants will hurt Coraline: she wants to keep her.

The Greeks had a number of words to describe love. The word commonly used to describe familial love (thus, the love between mother and daughter) is storge (στοργή). It’s true that the word can have a broader meaning beyond “the love between family members,” but ultimately what storge stems from a desire to compassionately care for one another; but in Coraline, the Other Mother’s love is more like philautia (φιλαυτία), which is self-love. Consider the following exchange:

“Why does she want me?” Coraline asked the cat. …

“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.”

Neil Gaiman, Coraline

It’s unclear what exactly the Other Mother’s desires are exactly, but what is perfectly clear is that her love for Coraline is self-interested: it proceeds from a desire to fulfil some appetite, not compassion. All this to say, what’s so scary about the Other Mother is that she is twisted out of shape: her love is real, but it’s distorted like all evil things.

Coraline’s Predicament

Does pure evil even exist? I would argue that it doesn’t: what evil is done for the sake of evil itself? Aristotle, I believe, rightly pointed out that:

[E]very practical pursuit or undertaking seems to aim at some good: hence it has been well said that the Good is That at which all things aim.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

This proposition seems sensible enough; and if it is true, then what Maximos the Confessor has to say about evil would seem to follow:

Evil neither was, nor is, nor ever will be an existing entity having its own proper nature… But so that I might speak as if encompassing it in a definition, evil is nothing other than a deficiency of the activity of innate natural powers with respect to their proper goal.

Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture

That is, we don’t encounter pure evil, as it were, because there’s no such thing: there are only deformities of things as they ought to be according to their own proper form (viz., their own nature). The Other Mother is no exception: her evil is a corruption of true love.

Coraline’s predicament is a choice, ultimately, between the world she wants—the world the Other Mother seduces her with—and the world she lives in. What makes her predicament so terrifying is the fact that it is very much the same that we all have. We can choose between the the way the world is or should be (since our world itself is corrupted through sin), and the way we’d like the world to be. Of course, for their own narcissistic purposes, there are evil spirits to offer us consolation when we act against the natural order of things, but that consolation doesn’t last. Like any form of relationship, what is it that happens when someone wants to take it one step further than you are comfortable with, whether by living in sin or having buttons sewn into your eyes? Slowly, then, the illusion begins to break apart.

In the book, there is always a sense that something is wrong with the Other World. Coraline knows this, but goes along with it for a time, as we all do. Luckily, however, she manages to spot the lie eventually, and through the experience attains a satisfaction with her life that she would not have done otherwise. Reading the story in this way, there is a clear parallel between the choice we must all face throughout our lives: that is, the choice between the way we’d like things to be, and the way things are as God has ordained them. Like Coraline, we must hope, and pray, for the wisdom to choose wisely between the two.