Poe, Coraline, and Autumn Atmosphere

I’ve been thinking about The Fall of the House of Usher and Coraline this week. I’m almost finished re-watching Netflix’s Usher, and I had planned to sit down tonight with Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart and The Gold Bug—but honestly, I didn’t have the focus for it.

Instead, I turned to the first chapter of Coraline (the novel) and found myself thinking about how it pairs with the film’s opening credit sequence. A film/book pairing here could be really fun to explore—there’s so much overlap in tone, imagery, and atmosphere.

For tonight’s activity, I pulled together five significant passages from Coraline’s opening chapter, plus sets of figurative language and guiding questions to help unpack them in close reading.

There was also a well. On the first day Coraline’s family moved in, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible made a point of telling Coraline how dangerous the well was, and they warned her to be sure she kept away from it. So Coraline set off to explore for it, so that she knew where it was, to keep away from it properly. (2-3)

I love this passage and the parallel moments in the film - because wells make me think of fairytales and myths – wishing wells! Also, from Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore... or was it The Wind Up Bird Chronicle? I remember someone being at the bottom of the well... The symbol of a well comes up a lot. I also just enjoy the tone, "to keep away from it properly" (3). Playful, endearing. Accepting/understanding of a child's viewpoint.

Coraline went over the window and watched the rain come down. It wasn’t the kind of rain you could go out in–it was the other kind, the kind that threw itself down from the sky and splashed where it landed. It was rain that meant business, and currently its business was turning the garden into a muddy, wet soup. (4)

I love this imagery. It's simultaneously playful, the imagery capturing Coraline's desire to adventure. It also conjures the imagery of Angel Vargas in The House on Mango Street, in the vignette, "There Was an Old Woman Who Had So Many Children She Didn't Know What to Do." While that imagery is tragic, there is also a wistful adoration for a child's innocence, in a way. Guiding questions ask students to think about personification, imagery, mood, and tone, and challenge them to answer

How do authors use figurative language to illustrate the personality and perspective of a character?

And then this passage... while this theme is clearly present in the movie, having this kind of foreshadowing stated upfront made me appreciate the elegance, care, and level of detail incorporated in the film adaptation of the book.

She turned on the television… Eventually, she found something to watch: it was the last half of a natural history program about something called protective coloration. She watched animals, birds, and insects which disguised themselves as leaves or twigs or other animals to escape from things that could hurt them. (5)

Protective coloration, camouflage. We see this in the Other Mother's attempts to camouflage her true nature in order to lure Coraline, as she has lured other children, into her trap. Coraline also learns to don her own kind of protective coloration in order to defeat and escape The Other Mother - though it's less obviously "protective coloration," and more embracing her fear and becoming very, very brave to outsmart The Other Mother in her own world and games.

If you want to dig in to passages from chapter one, you can make a copy of the close reading activity when you're logged in:

Want to pre-view Coraline without committing to the full film in class? Consider trying my Coraline Pre-Viewing Activity 🙃.