Conceptualizing the Embodied Cognition of Uncertainty in Two Terrifying Tales: Lucy Lane Clifford's "The New Mother" and Neil Gaiman's Coraline

Abstract

Abstract: A comparative analysis of Neil Gaiman's dark fantasy novella Coraline and its source of inspiration, Lucy Clifford's Victorian cautionary tale "The New Mother," explores how the ominous dread related to the monstrous mother figure and the abjectification of the self are transformed into a "funcanny" experience in the postmodern rewriting. By relying on methodologies of corporeal narratology and cognitive poetics I study the embodied cognition of uncertainty during the child protagonists' psychic/physical confrontation with the unheimlich and the je ne sais quoi as forms of undecidability. The analysis maps linguistic attempts at formulating cognitive dissonance, tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, and subconscious thoughts. While Clifford uses narrative gaps to offer a metaimaginative insight into the catastrophic consequences of interpretive failures resulting from the misunderstanding of verbal and corporeal signs of disorientation, Gaiman's mind-reading instances of "psychonarration" reveal the troubled child's mental coping mechanisms, to celebrate infantile curiosity and fantasy in terms of gifts of empowerment, resilience, and empathy.