ABSTRACT
To mark the cinematic release of Neil Gaiman's award-winning novel Coraline, a sinister abecedary sprinkled its eerie alphabet cards across the Web. Despite Coraline's effusive protestations, all her new adult acquaintances persist in calling her Caroline, and Coraline's own mother neither hears nor cares to listen to Coraline telling her that she doesn't need any new hairclips that school year. Coraline's traversal through the passage is a transgression of a passage that is, in more senses than one, forbidden, "wrong", and off-limits. A halcyon escapist fantasy for Carroll becomes the phantastic reality of children and women writers, as well as of Gaiman's Coraline. As Coraline's literalized detention in and among the looking glass monstrosities makes her well aware, she and her anti-Alice kin are not inevitably bound to recite the Alice mythos. Coraline's puppet show with dolls Jemima and Pinky, moreover, makes a compelling echo of Rebecca Sharp's dolls, Miss Jemima and Miss Pinkerton, in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair.
