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Peter Pan And Coraline: Gender’S Impact On Mapping Psychoanalysis Onto Physical Spaces, Theresa Bailie

2015 Undergraduate Awards

In this essay I show the complications that arise when psychoanalytical theory is imposed onto a child’s secondary world. In both J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline the child’s unconscious desires are displayed in the way the child either dominates over or is threatened by the physical space he or she is in. As a boy who will never have to grow up, Peter dominates over both Hook’s masculine threat of patriarchal authority and the crocodile’s feminine threat of consumption. As a girl who will grow into a woman Coraline has to learn to both defy the …