The Liminal Mirror: The Impact of Mirror Images and Reflections on Identity in <i>The Bloody Chamber</i> and <i>Coraline</i>

In Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber (1979) and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline (2002), mirrors play a large role in the development of the female protagonist’s identity. Tracing the motif of physical mirrors and mirrored realities in these texts offers a deeper understanding of each protagonist’s coming of age and coming to terms with her own identity. Though Angela Carter’s short stories are for an adult audience, they are remakes of fairy tales, which are often viewed as children’s literature, or at least literature about the child. Though the appropriate reading age for Coraline is debatable, it can tentatively be categorized as children’s or young adult’s literature. Both of these texts have darker, more Gothic undertones than what one expects from “children’s literature,” and both of these texts follow a young girl on her path of sexual awakening and self-discovery. These female protagonists have an interaction—or multiple interactions—with a mirror that changes them in some way, guiding their concepts of self-perception, self-deception, and acting as a liminal space in which their transitions into new identities take place. I will demonstrate how, in the texts discussed in this thesis, the mirror offers a unique space of liminality in which reflection and identification occur despite its offering of a skewed perception of reality, a flipped depiction of displayed images.