![]() Though Coraline is frightened, she maintains her cool and gets out as quickly as she can. 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. ![]() 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. 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. ![]() In these early anecdotes, Gaiman establishes Coraline as an intrepid explorer who has a very high threshold for fear. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. When Coraline Jones finds herself trapped in the alternate realm created by her sinister other mother, she is very scared indeed.
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